Education, Faculty of
Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Segall, Avner
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
University of British Columbia
Although preservice teacher education comprises only a small part of student teachers' socialization into the teaching profession, it nevertheless has an important impact of student teachers imagination through an educative world it renders both possible and the intelligible. Anchored in a secondary social studies methods course at the University of British Columbia, and following six of its student teacher participants through their university- and practicum-based experiences, this year-long ethnographic study explores the production of knowledge and knowing in presevice teacher education. As such, it examines how particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are made possible as well as on what they, in turn, make possible for prospective social studies teachers learning to teach. Exploring how teachers' ways of being are dependent, in part, on student teachers' ways of becoming, this study examines what happens to student teachers during their preservice education and, as a result, what they make happen because of what happens to them. Examining the complex relationship between the knowledge student teachers are given and the knowledge they themselves produce, this dissertation considers not only what student teachers choose to say and do but also what structures their choices. Disturbing the practice of teacher education by examining how discourses use and are used and what, in the process, gets covered over, silenced, and ignored, this dissertation attempts to extend the traditional exploration of how prospective social studies student teachers learn to manage ideas and theories in the teacher education classrooms to the examination of how the use of ideas and theories in those very classrooms manages those who attempt to engage them. Organized as a multivocal text in which the running narrative is interrupted and interrogated by the researcher's own reflexive comments about the impossibilities of knowing and those of the participants about the study and its textualization, this dissertation focuses on the problematics and possibilities in the process of learning to teach, highlighting and publicly engaging them in order to bring more of what we do in university-based teacher education classrooms into the fold of the discussion both about and in teacher education
24993595 bytes
application/pdf
DISTURBING PRACTICE: READING A N D WRITING (SOCIAL STUDIES) TEACHER EDUCATION AS TEXT By A V N E R SEGALL B. A., Tel Aviv University, 1985 B. Ed., University of British Columbia, 1993 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF T H E REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in T H E FACULTY OF G R A D U A T E STUDIES (The Centre for the Study of Curriculum and Instruction, Faculty of Education) We accept thi^hesis as coJjf/n^ ming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA July 1999 © Avner Segall, 1999 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the head of my department or by his or her representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of <Cu The University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada DE-6 (2/88) A b s t r a c t Although preservice teacher education comprises only a small part of student teachers' socialization into the teaching profession, it nevertheless has an important impact of student teachers imagination through an educative world it renders both possible and the intelligible. Anchored in a secondary social studies methods course at the University of British Columbia, and following six of its student teacher participants through their university- and practicum-based experiences, this year-long ethnographic study explores the production of knowledge and knowing in presevice teacher education. As such, it examines how particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are made possible as well as on what they, in turn, make possible for prospective social studies teachers learning to teach. Exploring how teachers' ways of being are dependent, in part, on student teachers' ways of becoming, this study examines what happens to student teachers during their preservice education and, as a result, what they make happen because of what happens to them. Examining the complex relationship between the knowledge student teachers are given and the knowledge they themselves produce, this dissertation considers not only what student teachers choose to say and do but also what structures their choices. Disturbing the practice of teacher education by examining how discourses use and are used and what, in the process, gets covered over, silenced, and ignored, this dissertation attempts to extend the traditional exploration of how prospective social studies student teachers learn to manage ideas and theories in the teacher education classrooms to the examination of how the use of ideas and theories in those very classrooms manages those who attempt to engage them. Organized as a multivocal text in which the running narrative is interrupted and interrogated by the researcher's own reflexive comments about the impossibilities of knowing and those of the participants about the study and its textualization, this dissertation focuses on the problematics and possibilities in the process of learning to teach, highlighting and publicly engaging them in order to bring more of what we do in university-based teacher education classrooms into the fold of the discussion both about and in teacher education. i i T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s Abstract ii Acknowledgements v PART 1 Introduction 1 Chapter I A Review of the Literature 15 Chapter II Methodology 40 Chapter III Locating the study: The context 101 PART 2 Chapter IV Planning, Management, and Organization as the Organizing Discourse of Experience 122 Chapter V The Pedagogy of the Question and the Pedagogy of the Answer: Or, the Double Exposure of the Pedagogy of the Question 164 Chapter VI The Discourse and Practice of History: Critical History and the Educational Imagination 202 Chapter VT1 Gender and Multiculturalism in Social Studies Education: Additives, Sedatives, or Pedagogical Alternatives? 244 PART 3 Chapter VTJI Revisiting Methodology 284 Chapter LX Revisiting Teacher Education: Becoming Students of Our Own Education 293 Chapter X Conclusion 305 References 308 iii Appendix A Consent Forms 342 Appendix B Course Outline 346 Appendix C Unit Plan Assignment 349 Appendix D Final Exam 350 Appendix E SCETForm 351 Appendix F Third Text (Gargabe Can) 353 iv A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s Underlying this dissertation are the contributions of many who, through conversations, reading, and learning have helped shape and guide this study. Those whose theories I invoke and whose words I quote directly are, hopefully, appropriately and adequately recognized in the references. I thank them for their ideas which I build upon to advance my own. The input of others, however, has been more direct. Without them, this project would not have been possible. I would first like to thank the six student teachers informing this study—Jocelyn, Mary, Casey, Jack, Charles, and Ron—to whom I am indebted for sharing their experiences of learning to teach, for allowing me to use their stories, and for critically engaging my telling of those stories. Special thanks are extended to Peter Seixas. First, for skillfully guiding me through this study in his capacity as a dissertation advisor. But I would mostly like to thank him as an educator—a courageous one—for inviting a critical study into his own social studies methods course, knowing from the outset the kind of "difficult" questions I would pose and the lenses through which I would go about answering them; both, no doubt, had the potential to render his own teaching vulnerable. I commend him for practicing what he preaches and for believing in the importance of this study as a critical conversation about practice, even when the subject of critique was his own practice. I would also like to thank the other members of my dissertation committee— Gaalen Erickson, Jean Barman, and Gaby Minnes-Brandes—for their continuous guidance, for raising important questions, for their patience, and particularly for their careful and helpful reading of the various drafts of this (long) dissertation. Other friends and colleagues have contributed significantly to my work. John Willinsky has been a constant source of support and inspiration. I thank him for his sober "reality checks" and humourous blend of encouragement and criticism which always push me to go deeper, further, and in new directions. I would also like to thank my colleagues Brenda Trofanenko and Lisa Kortweg for reading earlier drafts of this dissertation and particularly for encouraging me to pursue my convictions in spite of their potential (and too often, real) political consequences. I am grateful to Airini (no last name) for helping me think-through the formatting of the dissertation and to Josefina Rosado and Ricardo Trujeque for showing me how to do it. v Other individuals whose support I would like to recognize are Dean Nancy Sheehan who facilitated and supported my pre-service teacher education (without which this study would not have been conceived) and, Charles Ungerleider, Associate Dean for Teacher Education, who facilitated my visitations to Greater Vancouver public schools during the practicum phase of this study. I would also like to recognize the contribution of my Master's committee members—Ian Wright, John Willinsky, and Charles Ungerleider—who were instrumental in allowing me to pursue a self-invented program of study which led directly to this doctoral work. I would also like to convey my gratitude to Walt Werner, not only for the two courses I took from him as a student which allowed me to begin articulating the thoughts and ideas which led to this study, but also for our many long therapeutic conversations which have kept my educative hopes alive. I am also indebted to the University of British Columbia and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for supporting this work with two University Graduate Fellowships and a Doctoral Fellowship, respectively. Last, but definitely not least, I would like to thank my partner of thirteen years, Ricki Goldman-Segall. Her ideas, I am certain, are everywhere in this dissertation, to the degree that I am unaware where mine begin and hers end. I thank her for encouraging me to refocus my academic interests on social studies teacher education; the journey has no doubt been exciting. I would like to convey my thanks and appreciation for her patience, support, and understanding, even if (and when) my commitment to this study did very little to endear me in the eyes of any partner. I am truly appreciative of her continuous trust and friendship. vi Disturbing practice: Reading and writing (social studies) teacher education as text. P A R T l [T]o write "postmodern" is to write paradoxically aware of one's complicity in that which one critiques. Such a movement of reflexivity and historicity at once inscribes and subverts. Provisionality and undecidability, partisanship and overt politics, replace poses of objectivity and disinterestedness. (Hutcheon, 1989, p. 74. cf. Lather, 1991a, p. 10) I n t r o d u c t i o n To more fully understand how we think and act in the world—and the ways in which one determines the other—we not only need to know where we currently are in the larger system of things but also how we got to be where we are and who we became in the process of arriving. Informing us as much about the journey as they do about its destination, endings, therefore, are often opportune places to begin. At the end of the last class of his final course in preservice teacher education, I asked Ron—one of the six student teacher participants in the study informing this dissertation—what he intended to do on the first week-end following graduation. "I'll just go and sit somewhere," he said, "and try to unlearn everything that I've been doing. Not forget—for that is simply to deny, but rather sit and reflect on it all and ask myself: 'Where am I now?' 'What have I given up?' "What have I gained?' And 'what do I want to do with it and about it all?'" (Interview #6, July 19,1997). Indeed, what did Ron learn in his teacher education program and what is it that he now finds necessary to unlearn? What makes a recent graduate student teacher want to unlearn that which he has just spent an entire year learning? And as Ron asked of himself that day: what did he gain and what did he give up in the process of becoming a teacher? Having concluded my study with that interview, however, Ron's thoughts that week-end, as he found his "somewhere" to sit, unlearn, and reflect, remain his own. Instead, what you will find bound between the covers of this dissertation are my own observations and reflections, as researcher, about Ron's teacher education program. Attempting to answer some of the questions raised by Ron, my narrative 1 incorporates the thoughts he and five of his colleagues participating in this year-long ethnographic study about learning to teach, chose to share with me. Anchored in a secondary social studies methods course at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and following six of its student teacher participants through their university- and practicum-based experiences, this study—as process and product—is inherently about the production of knowledge and knowing in (and about) preservice teacher education. As such, it examines how, through content and pedagogy, particular versions and visions of education, teaching, and learning are both made possible and what they, in turn, make possible for student teachers learning to teach. Put otherwise, and borrowing from Britzman & Pitt (1996), my research examines how knowledge in teacher education is made, and in the process, what "it 'wants,' what it 'forgets,' and what it 'costs'" (p. 119). In its broad sense, the term "teacher education" comprises both the pre- and in-service education of teachers. This dissertation, however, uses the term more narrowly. Unless otherwise specified, the term teacher education in this dissertation most often refers to the university-based portion of pre-service education. Although data was collected in university courses as well as during the practicum, my focus is on the former, with the latter providing context for the impact of the former on the process of student teachers learning to teach. While this study is grounded in a variety of personal body experiences in education and bodies of literature about education (the former I address at the bottom of this introduction, the latter in the following chapter), it was particularly inspired by, and in many ways follows, borrows from, builds upon, and extends two previous critical ethnographic studies of preservice teacher education: Mark Ginsburg's (1988) Contradictions in teacher education and society which analyzed how student teachers' teacher-identities are constructed, in part, through the contradictory messages presented in the explicit and implicit curriculum of the teacher education program at the University of Houston; and Deborah Britzman's (1991a) Practice makes practice which focused on the contradictory realities and cultural myths of teacher education and how they shape, and are shaped by, student teachers' knowledge about (and in) education. Although my study engages a different area of, and different issues in, teacher education than those examined by Ginsburg and Britzman, what I share with them, as an ethnographer, is the desire to explore not only how student teachers are encouraged to engage ideas and theories in teacher education classrooms but also, and more importantly perhaps, how the ideas and theories in those very classroom manage the student teachers who attempt 2 to engage them. That is, my interest, like theirs, is to discover how teachers' ways of being are dependent, in part, on student teachers' ways of becoming as they go through and are constructed by the apparatus of teacher education. To be sure, the university portion of preservice teacher education comprises only a small part of novice teachers' understanding of, preparation for, and socialization into the teaching profession (Feiman-Nemser, 1983). Years of primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling have already provided them a multitude of experiential images of what it means to teach and be taught (Bullough, 1989; Calderhead & Robson, 1991; Hollingsworth, 1989; Britzman, 1991a; Ginsburg, 1988; Adler, 1991b; Liston & Zeichner, 1991). In that sense, as Shor (1986) points out, "all of schooling is actually 'teacher education'" (p. 416). Teacher education, however, extends the boundaries of schooling. Students' life experiences outside of the education system—at home, through the media and other socializing institutions— "exert a great deal of influence on their dispositions toward the teaching role and toward schooling" (Feiman-Nemser, 1983. cf. Zeichner & Liston, 1987, p. 41). Yet, although teacher preparation might not introduce student teachers to the idea of teaching nor hold a monopoly on what they believe teaching entails, it still significantly impacts their understandings of, and dispositions toward the profession, as well as the transformations they make of those understandings and dispositions into action. And while the jury, as Wilson, Konopak, & Readence (1994) state, is still out as to what kind of impact preservice teacher education has—some argue it significantly changes student teachers' perspectives (i.e., Adler, 1984; Yon & Passe, 1993), others that it does not (i.e., Palonsky & Jacobson, 1989; Feiman-Nemser, 1990; Ross, 1987; Zeichner & Gore, 1990; Tabachnick & Zeichner, 1984; Melnick & Zeichner, 1997; Bennett, 1996; Britzman, 1986, 1991a, 1991b; Goodman, 1988a; Richardson, 1996)—an impact it nevertheless has. Whether by changing, validating, or affirming what prospective teachers already believe about teaching and learning, schooling, and the role of the teacher, teacher education is always active in organizing, facilitating, and promoting particular visions and versions of what it means, and what one must undergo in order to "successfully" become a teacher. "The body of knowledge that is the curriculum and the body experience of being schooled," claims Lewis (1993), "are not separable from each other in the process of education" (p. 186). This applies equally to the process of teacher education. Extending Giroux & McLaren's (1986, p. 228) discussion of education to teacher education, one could similarly state that schools of education do not merely teach student teachers about teaching but, also, in part, produce student teachers' 3 subjectivities and experiences. Teacher education, however, does more than that; it doesn't only help construct prospective teachers' possibilities but also their impossibilities. As is the case with any social environment, the rules of discourse in teacher education and the discursive practices that go along with them, Cherryholmes (1988) points out, ultimately "govern what is said and what remains unsaid" (p. 34). Indeed, the language and practice of teacher education, as any and all languages and practices, "create value, bestow meaning, and constitute (in the sense of imposing form upon) the subjects and objects that emerge in the process of inquiry"' (Shapiro, 1985-1996, p. 192. cf. Richardson, 1995, p. 199.) Identifying the educative world—what exists and what does not (Erickson, 1991, p. 8), teacher education, as a pedagogical environment, establishes "the limits of the sayable and the doable (Frow, 1986, p. 78. cf. McLaren, 1991, p. 237). Embedded in the discourses made available to them, student teachers learn, though don't always agree and accept, what (and how) to do and say and what (and how) not to. They may—and, as this study will show, in fact, do—carry this learning with them into their professional lives as teachers. Through its explicit, implicit, and null (Eisner, 1985) curriculum (I address these further in Part II), a teacher education program, a social studies methods course, any course, overtly, covertly, and by omission, imposes a particular vision of educational purpose (Kincheloe 1993, p. 12). It does so by what it elevates to be considered as knowledge, by the ways it chooses to represent that knowledge, and by the knowledge it chooses to ignore. Via specific action, non-action, and interaction, teacher education, to use Southgate's (1996) discussion of history, "outlines the parameters within which construction can take place." By placing "constraints on what at any time is considered possible, it bounds [student teachers'] very thoughts, perceptions, interpretations and experiences" (p. 70). As Popkewitz (1987) points out, one's choice of materials, activities, and teaching strategies transmits certain values and interests expressed in the way each is given definition, body, and experience and, thus, "impose[s] ways of giving shape and organization to consciousness" (p. 340). The activities in which student teachers are engaged while in teacher education, "the questions and problems they examine, the ways in which answers are sought and validated, and what counts as an answer and on what basis" (Doyle, 1986. cf. McDiarmid, et al., 1989, p. 196), all send powerful messages to students as to the desirable construct, conduct, and practice of education. 4 Assumptions, values, and underlying interests, thus, Beyer & Zeichner (1987) explain, "infuse and are infused into each moment student-teachers spend and every action that unfolds within their university-setting experience" (p. 313). Hence, we come to appreciate that the curriculum of teacher education "is more than just an introduction of students to particular [content] and teaching methodologies; it also serves as an introduction to a particular way of life" (Giroux & McLaren, 1986, p. 228). As such, teacher education is fore and foremost an agent of, and an arena for, socialization. Socializing environments, according to Postman & Weingartner (1969), "build the attitudes we are enticed to assume, the sensitivities we are encouraged to develop and the things we learn to see and feel and value. We learn them," they add, "because our environment is organized in such a way that it permits or encourages or insists that we learn them" (p. 17). Socialization, however, is never a one way process whereby attitudes, values, skills, and modes of conduct are simply transmitted from one group to another. As Ginsburg (1988) explains, while "student teachers may be shaped and molded by the program . . . they are (and using Oleson & Whittaker, 1968, p. 208) 'not passive recipients of messages from their accorded agents of socialization.' Rather they are "persons engaged in choice making" (pp. 6-7). Though prospective teachers are, no doubt, agents of choice, the focus of this dissertation is to illustrate that their choices are, nevertheless, implicated in, and determined by a context which makes them possible. Thus, and with an eye to examine the institutional effects of teacher education, I follow the lead of Britzman (1991a) who, as a researcher, was not simply interested in what happened to her student teacher participants during their preservice education but also in "what they make happen because of what happens to them" (p. 56). Cherryholmes (1988) makes a similar point—one which is particularly relevant to the educational ethnographer—by emphasizing the need to consider "not only what [student teachers] choose to say and do . . . but also what structures those choices" (p. 14). Following their lead, the purpose of this study, as well, is to examine the complex relationship between the knowledge student teachers are given and the knowledge they themselves produce. To explore this relationship in a manner advocated by Britzman & Cherryholmes, this study, as its subtitle promises, reads and writes the teacher education program at UBC, and the social studies methods course in particular, as texts. (In the process, the use of the term "disturbing"—both-as verb and adjective— in the study's title will also gain meaning). The word text has traditionally been used to distinguish written words from other forms of communication (Graddol, 5 1994, p. 40). Over the last two decades, however, with the advent of postmodernism and post/structuralism, the notion of "text" has expanded to include "any aspect of reality that contains encoded meaning" (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1996, p. 184). Moving from the physical to the semiotic materiality of the text and regarding texts "not as 'things' but as meaning," Lemke (1995) explains, a text becomes "every sort of object, event, or action in so far as it is endowed with a significance and a symbolic value" (pp. 9,15). With that in mind, "the classroom itself becomes a text as well as the verbal interaction going on within it; even the actors in the situation—the teacher, the pupils, the managers—are, as well as being characters in the text, texts themselves" (Stables, 1996, p. 8). "The great virtue of the extension of the notion of text beyond things written on paper or carved into stone," claims Geertz (1983), is that it focuses attention on how the inscription of action is brought about, what its vehicles are and how they work , and on what the f ixat ion of meaning f rom the f low of events . . . impl ies for sociological interpretation. To see social institutions . . . as in some sense 'readable' is to alter our whole sense of what such interpretation is. (p. 31) The promise of new sociological interpretations, however, as Geertz would surely agree, does not derive from simply identifying something as a text but from the theories and understandings which go along with that identification. Those theories and understandings require some elaboration for they underlie both the epistemology and methodology of this study. Broadly speaking, they emphasize that the meaning of a text, which derives from its very construction as one, does not precede its reading. Rather, all three—meaning, construction (writing), and reading—infuse and are infused, construct and are constructed, by the other. That is, while we speak of an educational (any) event as a text, its text-like materiality does not exist prior to its interaction with a reader. A text, thus, is the creation of the reader; it is not an already-encoded reality waiting to be deciphered. Young (1981) makes that point by describing the difference between two terms—'work' and 'text.' "Whereas a work is a finished object," most often "enclosed within the covers of a book," writes Young, "a text (and here he uses Barthes, 1981, p. 39) 'is a methodological field . . . experienced only in an activity of production.'" (p. 31). This has several implications pertaining to my double role as reader and writer of the UBC Teacher Education Program. First, this means there is no one way for researchers to do their reading. Different theories, lenses, and perspectives, Hammersley (1992, p. 25) offers, produce different accounts of the same phenomenon. Two researchers in the same classroom at the same time, add Flinders 6 & Eisner (1994), "will usually attend to different aspects of its social life or interpret similar events from different points of view" (p. 349). The writing you will encounter in this dissertation is, thus, the result of a particular reading, one that would undoubtedly differ widely from that offered by any other researcher. Second, and beyond the idea now widely accepted that different researchers read differently, it also implies that there is no one, single, authorized text of any phenomenon—and in my case, the UBC Teacher Education Program—from which to start one's (different) reading; no agreed-upon version upon which to base one's investigation. Hence, I speak of reading the teacher education program or the social studies methods course as texts rather than reading the text of either. This differentiation—not simply semantic in nature—is significant. For stating, as I have, that there is no one official text of this teacher education to be read, does not preclude the existence of an official text with which to do one's reading. This latter text, however, is created by the reader (myself) who both, and at the same time, determines what constitutes this official text and then reads with, into, and against that text. The author of the official text is therefore the reader who, through the act of reading, becomes its author. If that is the case, there were as many official texts of this teacher education program as there were readers participating in this study—student teachers, instructor, researcher—each constructing their own text and making different interpretations of it. The text I refer to as the subject of my reading in the remainder of this dissertation, is thus a combination of what I chose to read of and into this teacher education program; a version I not only constructed but, simultaneously, also subjected to my critical reading (see, i.e., Derrida, 1976; Young, 1981; Britzman, 1995; Denzin, 1995b). The reading of the UBC Teacher Education Program with which you are presented is not only constructed, it is also done so from a particular constructing position. As a critical ethnographer, I recognize I am not a neutral, objective observer "standing outside and above the text" (Bruner, 1993). Rather, I, as any critical ethnographer, am a passionate, overtly positioned and explicitly judgmental fieldworker, obliterating the customary distinction between the researcher and that being researched (van Maanen, 1995, pp. 9-10). As such, "the false division between the personal and the ethnographic self, [which] rests on the assumption that it is possible to write a text that does not bear the traces of its author," claim Lincoln & Denzin (1994), is "of course . . . impossible." "All texts," and mine is no exception, they add, "are personal statements" (p. 578; see also Smyth & Shacklock, 1998, p. 1). 7 Indeed, the theories, assumptions, interests, values, language, and life experiences I bring to my work, Flinders & Eisner (1994) suggest, "play an active role in guiding both the expressive and interpretative dimensions of inquiry. Inevitably, what researchers attend to and the questions they ask are a reflection of what they take to be important" (p. 350). Research is therefore "never without a point of view or a sense of a mission" (Giddings, 1984, p. 5. cf. Banks, 1995, p. 13) "All scholars," adds McWilliam (1995), "'perform' knowing. We position ourselves in relation to scholarship, striking poses through our utterances, bodies and writing that indicate to others what it means to know" (p. 1). And while we "never know all of the reasons for our actions and interactions (Ellsworth, 1989)," Ropers-Huilman (1997) reminds us, "it is our obligation as witnesses . . . to talk of the reasons and selves that we believe to have affected our research" (p. 11), to hold open for assessment the practices, perspectives, positions, and understandings which generate our claim to knowledge (Simon, 1992, p. 16), and provide reasons why, as Lemke (1995) adds, "we see the system as we do" (p. 20; see also Smyth & Shacklock, 1998). The theories, assumptions, and perspectives I bring to this research are based on my experiences in education and the theories I have derived from (and often against) that education. Thus, in the same way that I set out to study how student teachers become a product of their education, I recognize that I, too, am a product of my own upbringing and education. I am a Jewish white male in his early forties. Living in Canada for the last ten years, I was born and raised in Israel, where I was not only educated but also educated others for three years as a secondary social studies teacher. But not having a teaching certificate, I was required to enroll in a teacher education program in order to be eligible to teach in Canada. Consequently, in 1992, I entered the Secondary UBC Teacher Education Program—the same program I am now exploring as a researcher. Coming from Israel, where education (and culture in general) is, more often than not, based on active participation, contestation, doubt, dispute, and dissent, where students, in general, continuously voice their opinions, even if, perhaps because, theirs differ with those presented in the classroom by others, I was struck by a learning environment I encountered in the teacher education program in Canada (and in much of my graduate work thereafter) which was characterized primarily by serenity, agreement, politeness, civility, and courtesy. All , no doubt, are beneficial attributes to learning. They do, however, carry a price tag, especially when compliance, conformity, and consensus—as process and product—are elevated to a desired goal. While prospective teachers may be encouraged to ask questions about content or pedagogy in their teacher 8 education courses, they are rarely encouraged to ask similar questions of those teacher education courses. Or, they are actively discouraged when realizing the "politics" of continuing to (not) do so. Education that is premised upon, embedded in, and that promotes the mechanisms of a priori agreement about the process and culture of learning, Tyler (1991) explains, teaches—indirectly, accidentally, and unbeknown to itself—the terror of CONSENSUS. [It] both presupposes and makes as its goal the creation of a consensual community of discourse which is . . . CONstituted by the . . . the technology of agreement in judgments. CON-sensus is the technology of representation . . . that says 'this is what is because we say so.' The great end of all consensus is to bring discourse to an end in the silence of agreement, in the elimination of difference, and the reduction of all opposing voices to a single, disembodied voice that having spoken in the authority of the all falls silent, (p. 82) Believing, as I do, that "the terrain upon which education is conducted [should] become an intellectual battlefield [metaphorically, that is] rather than a consensual swamp" (Alvarado & Ferguson, 1983, p. 30.),- it seemed surprising to me not only that the critical questions I, as a student teacher, asked of my own teacher education program were not answered, but that they were often not even considered questions worthy of an answer in the context of learning to teach. In many ways, therefore, this dissertation is my opportunity to revisit those questions, this time, however, from a position which allowed me not only to ask those questions but also ensure they were actually addressed. In other words, while this dissertation is about the UBC Teacher Education Program of the 1996-1997 calendar year, it is as much about the one in which I participated, as a student teacher, a few years earlier. While the impetus for this study was perhaps instigated by my own teacher education, the questions that guide it are also the consequence of my academic grounding in media and history/social studies education, critical pedagogy/cultural studies. Following my graduation from the UBC Teacher Education Program I began a masters program which focused on media education. Using the work of cultural studies scholars such as Stuart Hall, John Fiske, Len Masterman, David Buckingham, David Lusted, David Hartley, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and Elizabeth Ellsworth (all cited in the reference section), to mention only a few, I examined issues of representation in popular media texts and the role of the popular in/as pedagogical environments. A year or so into my program, however, and quite accidentally, I came across an article in the American Educational Research Journal written by Peter Seixas—the instructor of the social studies methods course in which this doctoral study was conducted. One specific sentence in that article stood out for me. Building upon Lowenthal's (1985) distinction between the past and history, it 9 stated, quite simply and as a matter of fact, that history and the past are not one and the same; that "history is a discourse about the past, a story constructed fo make meaning for us in the present" (Seixas, 1993a, p. 307). So straightforward, so obvious, yet something I, having studied and taught history, had never seriously considered before. While as a master's student I was examining popular media texts as representations of a "real," my other self—the history teacher—still saw history objectively telling the past "as it was. " What struck me most, perhaps, having read that article, was not the revelation that history is a construction but, rather, my own inability to see it as such, in spite of what I was learning otherwise and elsewhere. Using one set of parameters to examine media texts and quite a different one to examine historical texts is, of course, not unique; it takes place day in and day out in schools. Students may be encouraged to look critically at a film about the French Revolution, examine its perspectives, biases, and historical interpretation, and at the same time ignore those very aspects inherent in the textbook they use as the basis for the film's evaluation, let alone those of the teacher who frames, shapes, and monitors their experiences with—and, thus, in—history. Bringing issues of textuality, representation, and mediation into the discussion in social studies and incorporating them in social studies education was thus the focus of my doctoral studies. My specific interest in social studies teacher education grew out of an article written by Sam Wineburg (1991) in the American Educational Research Journal. In it, Wineburg compares the differences in how high school students and historians read a set of six documents about the outbreak of the American Revolution. While for historians, Wineburg claims, texts became speech acts which must be actively read, for students—comprising the best and brightest in their cohort—reading was primarily about gathering information, with texts serving as bearers of information. To encourage students to explore not only what texts say but what they do, Wineburg calls upon teachers to promote readings that move beyond the literal and inferred text and engage the text's subtext. That, according to Wineburg, requires teachers to show students that subtexts exist and then take what they—teachers—know in order to create and foster readings that engender new understandings among students. It is what was absent in Wineburg's article as much as what was in it that directed me toward this particular study. While Wineburg powerfully explains how textbooks position readers to generate the uncritical readings they currently produce, he does little to examine the broader role and context of schooling and the culture of teaching and learning in that production. Teachers, according to 10 Wineburg, must take and use what they already know in order to foster students' critical readings. But what is it that teachers already know? And how are they being prepared to know? What role do the context and culture of teacher preparation play in producing teachers who not only are able to foster such readings among students but who also know how, value, and are inclined to do so themselves? After all, reading the subtexts of historical texts is not an isolated endeavor. It is embedded in and dependent upon a variety of other educational and pedagogical texts, subtexts, and contexts, as well as on the values they carry, the expectations they convey, and the dispositions they promote. Thus, while Wineburg was surprised that the best high school students read uncritically, the question that must be asked is what constitutes "best" (students and readings) in the current culture of education—both in schools and in faculties of education. Do we count among our "best" students and/or student teachers those who produce critical, questioning, and oppositional readings or those who reproduce and paraphrase what teachers/instructors and textbooks /course readings already consider as fact? Do we reward students/prospective teachers who challenge or those who comply with the authorial invitations, instructions, and intentions of the authors of texts and those of the educative environment in which they are read? If, as Wineburg suggests, the onus for fostering students' critical readings is upon teachers, what kind of critical readers are they? Indeed, how, if at all, do the practices of teacher education position them to read critically and value the criticality of/in reading? How and what is it that preservice teacher education positions student teacher to read and not read while learning to teach? What do prospective teachers carry with them from their own experiences as student teachers when they become teachers of others? Thus, and returning to a question I have already raised earlier: What do the practices of teacher education make possible for student teachers learning to teach and what do they, in turn, make happen because of what happened to them in that context? Examining the complex relationship between the knowledge student teachers are given and the knowledge they themselves produce is not only the focus of this study but also its organizing principle. Rather than attempting to provide a comprehensive text, one that ventures to tell all there is to tell about the UBC Teacher Education Program, I have chosen to focus on a small number of aspects, built around issues, which seemed most appropriate according to the data generated by my particular reading of this program. Moving from an examination of the UBC Teacher Education Program as a whole, to the specifics of the social studies methods course, and back again, the second—and main—part of this dissertation is divided 11 into four chapters (Chapters IV-VII), all concerned with the production of knowledge, knowing, and identity in teacher education. Following Part 1 of this dissertation which locates the study and introduces its methodology, is Chapter IV—the first of the four chapters in Part 2, deals with the impact of the discourse of organization, planning, and management on prospective teachers' educational imagination. Specifically, it examines how student teachers' understanding of teaching, and of "good" teaching in particular, are constructed through the primary practice of lesson- and unit-planning and what, in the process, that practice makes both possible and impossible for students learning to teach. The discourse and practice of critical thinking and the relationship between the pedagogy of the question and the pedagogy of the answer are the focus of Chapter V. In it, I examine how critical thinking and questioning, while continuously embedded in the discourse of teacher education, even in the pedagogies prospective teachers are encouraged to advance in their own teaching, are inherently absent from student teachers' experiences as students. Questioning the consequences of that separation in/for prospective teachers' practice, this chapter examines what, when, and how critical thinking and questioning mean in teacher education and how those ascribed meanings direct student teachers' understandings into practice. The third chapter in Part 2—Chapter VI—examines the relationship between the discourse and practice of history education in the social studies methods course. It explores the epistemological and pedagogical opportunities it both opened and closed in the imagination of those learning to teach, focusing particularly on how (or whether) a critical discourse in history in the initial phases of that course was translated into pedagogical opportunities for a critical study of history. The last chapter in Part 2 — Chapter VII—continues to examine the relationship between discourse and practice in history, this time, however, with a particular focus on issues pertaining to gender and multiculturalism. That is, in what ways were the understandings promoted in this teacher education program about difference transformed—both in the program itself and consequently in student teachers' understanding—into a pedagogy of difference. While the issues addressed in each of these chapters may seem to be different, disparate, disconnected, perhaps inconsistent with each other, they do come together in a variety of ways. First, they all speak to the production of knowledge, knowing, and identity in preservice teacher education. Second, they all examine the relationship between theory and practice, content and pedagogy in teacher education. Such an examination is conducted at two levels: that which takes place 12 within the university-based part of the program in and of itself, and that in which the former impacts what occurs later in schools. Third, and a result of the second, all chapters in Part of 2 this dissertation, and regardless of their topic, share a focus on what discursive practices in teacher education make possible and what student teachers—both as students and, then, as teachers—make possible because of them. Uniting the different chapters of this dissertation, however, is not only a shared focus on the production of knowledge, knowing, and identity in preservice teacher education but also a common approach to the investigation of those issues. The purpose of focusing on the issues represented in each of those chapters is not only description, explanation, or even analysis but, rather, critique. Critique, Zavarzadeh & Morton (1994) emphasize, "should not be confused with criticism" (p. 62). Contrary to criticism, argues Biriotti (1993), critique "is never only against; it is always also for something . . . else" (p. 15). While criticism tends to close the discussion as a verdict is handed down, critique attempts to open it up. Criticism, Barthes (1981) explains, seeks "to discover the meaning of the work, a meaning which is more or less hidden." Critique [though he speaks of it as textual analysis] on the other hand, "impugns the idea of a final signified. The work does not stop, does not close. It is henceforth less a question of explaining or even describing, than of entering into the play of the signifiers" (p. 43). To critique, then, Britzman (1991a) offers, does not mean to destroy or devalue what took place in this teacher education program or in the social studies methods course. Instead, it "attempts the delicate and discursive work of rearticulating the tensions between and within words and practices, or constraints and possibilities, as it questions the consequences of the taken-for-granted Disclaimer: The particular issues I chose to engage emerged in the course of analysis and were only "'correct' in the sense that [they] provide[d] . . . the best focus [at the time]" (Harvey, 1990, p. 29. cf. Smyth & Shacklock, 1998, p. 4). Still, choosing to organize this dissertation around those specific issues and along those particular lines is not in any way coincidental or natural. As any other (choice made by a researcher, it is political in nature; it focuses on some aspects of this teacher education program and advances particular ways of coming to know it while muting and ignoring others. In that sense, choices inform readers about the researcher as much as about what that researcher has to tell about those issues. As I have already mentioned, this is not intended to be a tell-all text. Nor, it should be stated, is its purpose to speak for anyone other than myself. While, as a researcher, I spoke with my participants and through the incorporation of those voices will now be speaking through them, so to speak, I make no claims to be representing their experiences or to be speaking for them (McLaren & Giarelli, 1995). The claims to knowledge embedded in this dissertation and those advanced by it are ultimately my own. . 13 knowledge shaping responses to everyday life and the meanings fashioned from them" (p. 13). The purpose of critique in this study, then, is to engage in a critical conversation with (and thus analysis of) the situation; to highlight the politics of knowledge and knowing embedded in any kind and quality of teaching; to re-discover that which we believe we have already discovered, to unlearn that which we already learned, in order to learn further. As a procedure by which traditions of/as practice are approached for what they yield and for what they inhibit (Johnson, 1996, p. 75), this critique of preservice teacher education is not intended to provide solutions for the imperfections, deficiencies, dichotomies, or contradictions it finds but, rather, to highlight and publicly engage them in order to bring more of what we do (and how what we do, by definition, creates the "what we don't do") in teacher education into the fold of the discussion; a discussion not only about but also in teacher education. Two avenues are taken in this dissertation in order to facilitate such a discussion: The first, enhanced by the reflexive mode of inquiry of this study, facilitates discussions in which participants examine for themselves the tensions between and within the words and practices of their own preservice teacher education program. The second, resulting from the particular construction of this study's narrative, facilitates a meta-discussion within this study by incorporating participants' comments about my analysis and interpretations of their words and actions within the world of preservice teacher education. As such, critique—as a form of qualitative and reflexive mquiry on the part of both the researcher and the researched—becomes a method for engaging the complexities of teaching, the implications of educative choices made, and how such choices position those being educated to know in particular ways. 14 CHAPTER I A r e v i e w o f the l i t e r a tu re Reviews of the literature, as their title implies, are intended to locate a study in a particular body (or bodies) of scholarship in order to contextualize and give reason and meaning for its conduct. Attempting to do so with this study, however, poses a problem. As I will illustrate, and in spite of the scholarship I have mentioned thus far, the existence of critical research conducted simultaneously both in and about the university portion of preservice teacher education (and a social studies methods course in particular) is minimal. And while the paucity of such literature might be a good indication that such research is necessary, it makes any attempt to locate it problematic. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, to explore the need for a qualitative study which is not simply about teacher education but is also, and simultaneously, located in it, and second, to locate the communities of inquiry and discourses which direct and guide this study and give body and meaning to its course and findings. The need for a study about the practice of teacher education In spite of the ever-growing body of knowledge on teacher education—short- and long-term research projects (most prominently, in my view, those originating in the last decade and a half from the "houses" of Wisconsin, Madison, and Michigan State) resulting in books, journals, and conferences, even two generations of handbooks of research in teacher education—little is still known about what actually takes place within university teacher education classrooms. That is, about the day-to-day practices of teacher education/educators, the pedagogical environments provided, and the experiences they render both possible and intelligible. The absence of such research might be regarded as strange when one considers that it is the very kind of research teacher educators advocate—indeed conduct—in schools and about student/practicing teachers. While public (and less so private) schools have, for a long time, been the subject of critical investigation by external researchers, teacher education programs—and for that matter faculties of (and faculty in) education in general—have maintained the extraterritorial status of their classrooms, leaving them free from such investigation. That is, while action research and self-study projects are increasingly taking place in teacher education, the nature of the examination and its conduct are, more often than not, determined 15 by the researcher/practitioner who is the researched. It is the self investigating and reporting the actions of the (same) self (Adler, 1993, p. 40). Contrary to primary and secondary classrooms whose doors have been opened to external researchers (many of them, teacher educators), university classrooms have, to a large degree, remained under lock and key; what goes on within their walls has remained outside the discourse of educational research. Teacher educators, as educational researchers, investigate others; they are not, by and large, the subject of (external) investigation themselves (besides internal evaluations for purposes of tenure and promotion). Despite extensive empirical research on teaching, claim Feiman-Nemser (1983), Zeichner (1986), and Adler (1993), little is known about the role of teacher education programs in learning to teach. Yet as the debates about teacher education reform encourage teacher educators to examine, re-think, and change existing program policies, structures, and practices, more critical and penetrating studies of teacher education are necessary. Feiman-Nemser (1983) makes that point regarding the relationship between change and the conditions it is to change. She states that "It is impossible to understand the impact of preservice preparation without knowing more about what it is like" (p. 156. cf. Gibson, 1995, p. 38). In order to know more about a variety of aspects in the process of learning to teach and to better understand, as a result, what it is we hope to maintain and what we find necessary to change, and why, Feiman-Nemser (1990) calls for further research on teacher education that will generate "descriptions of the experience of teacher education in individual settings [and thus] explore the impact of a particular program and learning opportunities on teachers' ideas and practices" (cf. Gibson, ibid., p. 38). A similar call was generated earlier, by Sarason, Davidson, and Blatt (1986), who also advocated further investigation into what actually occurs in teacher education settings in order to better understand the influence they have on learning to teach. Lanier & Little (1986) concur and emphasize that such investigations should include descriptive and analytical inquiry into the curriculum of teacher education and the thinking and learning of preservice teachers which take place in them. Methods courses occupy a central place in preservice teacher education. Usually counting for about 40 percent of credit hours required for graduation and certification, methods courses, claim Barone, et al. (1996), "focus on teaching and learning of subject matter and on conveying tools for thoughtful, effective, and purposeful classroom practice in that subject-matter area" (p. 1116). A variety of long-term qualitative studies, some particularly in the teaching of secondary social studies, have examined the influence of methods courses on prospective teachers' 16 beliefs about social studies and on their teaching of social studies (Adler, 1984; Bennett & Spalding, 1992; Goodman & Adler, 1985; Goodman & Fish, 1997; Wilson, Konopak, & Readence, 1994; Gibson, 1995; O'Brien, 1997. Similar studies have been conducted in elementary social studies: i.e., Palonsky & Jacobson, 1989; Schug, 1989; Thornton & Wegner, 1990). While many of these researchers conducted intense long-term qualitative studies with prospective teachers which began during initial teacher education and continued well into their teaching, most rely on recall about the methods course—through research conducted either at the time of the methods course but outside of it, or long after it ended (Carter, 1990). Further, almost all of those studies explore the influence of the methods course (at times the entire teacher education program) on the transformations prospective teachers make into, and its impact during, teaching. Few (i.e., Goodman & Fish, 1997; Gibson, 1995) examine the internal politics of knowledge and knowing within teacher education/methods courses in and of themselves and their implications for the education of prospective teachers. Studies conducted by members of the Stanford 'Knowledge Growth in Teaching Project' (i.e., Grossman, Wilson, & Shulman, 1989; Gudmundsdottir & Shulman, 1987; Wilson & Wineburg, 1988, 1993; Wineburg & Wilson, 1988) provide an important glimpse into novice social studies teachers' content knowledge and its transformations into pedagogical knowledge through what Shulman (1986, 1987) calls pedagogical content knowledge. Yet, as Armento (1996) points out, even in studies such as these "where the teacher education program is clearly 'an intervention'" in novice teachers' ability to provide for such transformations, "very little attention is given to possible influences of the program on teacher . . . knowledge" (p. 489). Almost two decades ago, Ochoa contended that "no data exists concerning the nature of social studies methods courses" (1981, p. 159. cf. Gibson, 1995, p. 38). Surprisingly, her judgment is just as valid today as it was then (Carter, 1990; Banks & Parker, 1990; Adler, 1991a; Armento, 1996). Although secondary social studies teachers are required to take a social studies methods course, Banks & Parker (1990) claim that "the lack of attention devoted to the study of social studies . . . teacher education . . . is conspicuous" (p. 674). "[Tjhere are few empirical data," they add, "about the content of these courses or about their effects on teacher behavior in the classroom" (p. 676; see also Adler, 1991a, p. 210). "Although there are perhaps hundreds of social studies teacher preparation programs [in the US]," Armento (1996) adds, "relatively little research describes, assesses, or critiques these programs 17 or provides a critical examination of the teaching-learning interactions taking place in the methods classes" (p. 498; see also Adler, 1993, p. 39). The research which does currently exist about social studies education could be divided, according to Adler, into two categories. The first, taking a more general perspective, discusses what social studies education ought to be and ought to accomplish while providing few answers to questions about the process and impact of preservice and or/in-service training (Adler, 1991a. cf. Zevin, 1990, p. 257). The second, which does focus on the social studies methods course, tends to be provided by practitioners who report, mostly uncritically, on their own classroom experiences and efforts—descriptions most often "not situated within the broad context of theory [and] research" (Adler, 1993, pp. 40—41). In both cases, according to Adler, insufficient attention has been paid to the intricacies and complexities in the process of initial teacher education (1991a. cf. Armento, 1996, p. 486). Consequently, writes Armento (1996) in her chapter about social studies teacher education in the second edition of the Handbook of research in teacher education, very little is known about the goals, nature, and form of social studies teacher preparation. More research, she adds, is needed on what is happening within social studies teacher education and on how and for what social studies teachers are being prepared: "What is taught? by whom? in what manner? toward what goals?" "What is learned by prospective social studies teachers?" (p. 488). Furthermore, and with a particular focus on the social studies methods course, asks Armento: "What exactly do secondary social studies teachers 'get' in their methods classes?" "How are knowledge, skills, and dispositions presented in the class? What modeling of thought processes occur? How is the social studies curriculum represented to and with prospective teachers? How do prospective teachers process the program? What restructuring of their ideas and knowledge occurs?" (p. 499). Researchers, claims Armento, ought to remember "that the teacher preparation program itself is a 'treatment,' not merely the invisible context within which prospective teachers build ideas, knowledge, and skills." Yet, she adds, explanations by researchers for problems faced by prospective teachers or for their simplistic beliefs and inadequate knowledge are often grounded in attributions to the culture of schools or to the personal biographies of the prospective teachers. That is, researchers tend to ignore the fact that their subjects are actively involved in a teacher preparation program that might, could, or should have an effect on the prospective teachers' beliefs or content knowledge. Are social studies teacher educat ion programs not in f luencing beliefs, knowledge, and commitment to teaching social studies? If not, w h y not? If so, what factors are critical to the professional development process? (p. 498) 18 Exploring teacher education programs "as 'treatments,' examining their effects, and critically assessing the construction and delivery of teacher preparation programs," Armento contends, "would bring a needed level of openness to the field" (ibid.). "Descriptive studies and intensive case studies on social studies teacher preparation programs, on the social studies methods class," she adds, "would help to address the gaps in current knowledge and bring to light a deeper, richer understanding of the nature and quality of current social studies teacher preparation programs" (p. 488). With that perspective in mind, Armento welcomes the first signs of interpretive and critical analysis, employed in research in social studies education, including literary criticism and ethnography (See also Cherry holmes, 1991).1 Yet, in order for in-depth, qualitative, and critical studies (or any other, for that matter) to be conducted in social studies teacher education, Armento concludes, more social studies teacher educators need to believe that research on their own practice [but conducted by others] is not only important to generate much needed knowledge in the field but that it is also, and simultaneously, an integral part of teacher educators' own professional growth (p. 498). Locating the study within communities of discourse Any discussion about learning to teach will be grounded, either implicitly or explicitly, in a view, an understanding of what teaching is, of what it should become (Borko, 1989, p. 69). "Clearly," writes Doyle (1990), "there are competing understandings of teaching and the teacher education process" (p. 4). The differences among these perspectives, he adds, have significant implications for how we come to conceive the purpose and process of initial teacher education as well as for what research should be conducted in and about the field, how it should be conducted, for what purposes, and to what ends. Attempting to engage its subject-matter of teacher education, this dissertation, as any other, borrows from and is grounded in a variety of perspectives, in what I, using a poststructural stance, refer to as discourses, based in specific discursive communities. The discourses I choose give this study its particular lens with which (and through which) to read and write the pedagogical world of initial teacher education. Drawing upon postmodernism and poststructuralism, the discourses I summon to study and to communicate my study to others could best be defined as "critical." Critical discourses use critique as a conceptual and strategic tool to challenge the innocence of existing knowledge and knowing, produced, within limited and limiting institutional and disciplinary 19 boundaries, erected, maintained, and patrolled within particular relations of power, authority, and privilege. As such, states Kretovics (1985), the purpose of critical discourses is to highlight the "insufficiencies and imperfections within so-called finished systems of thought" and, thus (and here he uses Held, 1980) "reveal incompleteness where completeness is claimed . . . [and embrace] that which is in terms of that which is not, and that which is real in terms of potentialities not yet realized" (p. 177. cf. Kretovics, 1985, p. 56). Some of the discourses I invoke and use in this dissertation include critical ethnography, critical history, and critical multiculturalism. These discourses are, to a large degree, and as required, addressed and elaborated separately in specific chapters to which they are germane (chapters II, VI, and VII, respectively) and it is therefore not my intention, at this point, to discuss them further. Rather, I focus here on two specific communities of discourse—cultural studies and critical pedagogy—which give rise to the structure, syntax, and process of this study. (Separating Providing a "conceptual order to our perceptions, points of view, investments, and desires (Britzman, 1991a, p. 57), discourses are the organizing structures which make the world intelligible and possible. They (re)present and are (re)present(ed) in the ways in which the world is perceived, shaped by, and acted upon, through the various meaning-making resources of one's communi ty— the "grammar and lexicon of language, the conventions of gesture and depiction, the symbolic and functional values of action" (Lemke, 1995, p. 19). As such, Jenkins (1995) points out, there are no "historical or geographical or scientific or l i terary [or educational or any other ] discourse(s) just out there, just growing wild . . . [rather, they ] are cul tura l , cu l t ivated, fabricated and thus ultimately arbitrary ways of carving up what comes to constitute their 'field'" (p. 15). "Systematically form[ing] the objects about which they speak," claims Foucault (1972), discourses are "the maker[s] of the world, not its mirror" (p. 49. cf. Luke, 1995, p. 8). "The world," adds Tyler (1987), "is what we say it is and what we speak of is the world" (p. 171). Ordering and sustaining preferred forms and norms of thinking and being (Leistyna, et a l . , 1996, p. 336) , discourses are always and simultaneously both repressive and creative as they mask and il luminate, affirm and challenge, restrict and enable particular knowledge and knowing about the world, specific ways of being in, and interacting wi th , that world. Yet, by producing some truths, discourses ultimately inhibit the creation of others, and, by inhibi t ing a l ternat ives, tend to reproduce themselves. 2 Through that regulative function, Jackson Lears (1985) points out, discourses play a powerful role as they serve to "mark the boundaries of permissible discourse [and] discourage the clarification of . . . alternatives" (pp. 569-70. cf. Giroux, 1988a, p. 191) these two discourses from the above-mentioned three is obviously problematic since they all incorporate and are incorporated in the other, infuse and are infused by the other). This focus is in no way intended to provide a comprehensive or exhaustive account of either but, rather, to explain—epistemologically and ideologically as well 20 as strategically and pragmatically—why and how both of these discursive communities are (and are made to be) useful for the purpose of this particular study. In so doing, I hope to provide a better understanding of the theoretical positions that motivated my research, gave it direction, and determined the kind of readings, descriptions, and explanations I ultimately provide. Attempting, as I do, to inquire how the discourses and practices in the university-based element of preservice teacher education, to borrow from Giroux (1985, p. 22), develop forms of pedagogical practice through and by the construction and legitimation of student teachers' experience, cultural studies and critical pedagogy—as areas of study and as methodologies to study—become useful frameworks. Both share an interest in examining the critical relationship among culture, knowledge, power, discourse, subject-, and identity-formation. They do so by reasserting the importance of, and by providing a framework with which to engage, the mechanisms that "regulate and order how [student teachers] think, act, and live" (Giroux, 1994a, p. 279). Both, Giroux adds, are less concerned with mainstream educational discourse's preoccupation "with issues of certification [standardization] and testing" than they are "with how knowledge, texts, cultural products [and practices] are produced, circulated, and used" (ibid., p. 280), as well as with what they produce, circulate, and use in that process. Cultural studies and critical pedagogy, as I explain below, are not one and the same. They draw upon similar theoretical perspectives—i.e., postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism—and share a common interest in exploring the nature, process, and effects of cultural practices, discourses, and texts on the negotiation of subject-positions and identity. Yet the difference in their venue of inquiry—critical pedagogy, primarily in and about institutional education, cultural studies, primarily outside of it—has resulted in each generating a different body of knowledge. The emphasis once given to pedagogy in the early days of British Cultural Studies (i.e., by Richard Hogart and Raymond Williams), laments Giroux (1994a), has been abandoned by current cultural studies scholars. The latter, Giroux argues, "demonstrate little interest in the critical theories of schooling and pedagogy" and refuse "either to take schooling seriously as a site of struggle, . . . to probe how traditional pedagogy produces particular social histories, or how it constructs student identities through a range of subject positions" (pp. 279, 282). Yet, while the current interests of cultural studies might not include schooling as a pedagogical practice, cultural studies is inherently interested in the exercise and practice of 21 pedagogy. As Giroux, himself—perhaps the best and most recognized example of scholarly border-crossing to combine the two fields of study—claims, "[t]he importance of pedagogy to the context and content of cultural studies lies in the relevance it has for illuminating how knowledge and social identities are produced" (1994a, p. 284). In that sense, while cultural studies might not directly engage education as an important pedagogical site in the way that critical pedagogy does, both cultural studies and critical pedagogy share a common approach grounded by a broad sense of a critical theory of pedagogy. I thus turn to examine in more detail how each provides a basis for this study. Cultural studies Cultural studies, write Nelson, Treichler, and Grossberg (1992) in their introduction to the first and perhaps still most significant volume on this new and emerging field, is "a diverse and often contentious enterprise, encompassing different positions and trajectories in specific contexts, addressing many questions, [and] drawing nourishment from multiple roots" (p. 3). "A veritable rag-bag of ideas, methods, and concerns from literary criticism, sociology, history, media studies, [postcolonial theory, anthropology], adds Sparks (1996), "are lumped together under the convenient label of cultural studies" (p. 14). Not only is it impossible to define cultural studies with any degree of precision, he adds, one can neither "point to a unified [subject-matter], theory, or methodology which are characteristic to it or of it" (p. 14; see also Blundell, Shepherd, & Taylor, 1993, p. 3). While cultural studies may not have a fixed definition, an easily identified subject-area, or a unified theory and methodology, what unites much of the work in this area, and where it becomes particularly useful to my own study, is its inter-, perhaps anti—disciplinary approach which focuses on the relationship between and among power, authority, and knowledge, textuality and representation, discourse and identity formation (Giroux, 1994a, p. 280). Cutting across traditional disciplinary and institutional boundaries, cultural studies constructively de-stabilizes discursive practices and disciplinary boundaries in order to investigate "the degree to which what is privileged . . . may be historically and conventionally prescribed" (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 140). "Indict[ing] the interests embedded in the questions not asked within academic disciplines and programs," cultural studies inquires into "how the present absences and structured silences that govern teaching, scholarship, and administration . . . deny the link between knowledge and 22 power . . . and refuse to acknowledge the particular way of life that dominant academic discourse helps to produce and legitimate" (Giroux, et al., 1996). Thus, cultural studies is concerned with investigating, describing, and intervening in the ways 'texts' and 'discourses' (i.e. cultural practices) are produced within, inserted into, and operate in the everyday experiences of people and (and in) social formations (Grossberg, 1996, p. 180). Seeing texts as cultural and pedagogical practices, cultural studies is not as much concerned with what texts mean but in how they come to have meaning (Giroux, 1996, p. 44). Its aim, thus, is not to study a text for itself but, as Johnson (1996) points out, "to decentre 'the text' as an object of study. 'The text' is no longer studied for its own sake, nor even for the social effects it may be thought to produce, but rather for the subjective or cultural forms which it realises and makes available" (p. 97). Examining not only how (why, and to what effect) texts are produced, disseminated, and negotiated, but focusing also on the contexts that make that process both possible and meaningful, cultural studies does more than read texts in context; it reads them against their context. In other words, and to use a phrase coined by Habermas, cultural studies reads texts "against their grain" in order to show the text as it cannot show itself, "to manifest those conditions of its making . . . about which it is necessarily silent" (Eagleton, 1983. cf. Cherryholmes, 1988, pp. 159-160). To explore the text's pedagogical invitations for meaning and how meaning is constructed with, through, and against them, a cultural studies approach moves beyond the 'What is true?' question traditionally posed to readers of text. Instead, cultural studies seeks to investigate what constitutes 'truth' (and for whom) in specific contexts and continuously keeps asking: how is this particular truth being ruled, governed, and maintained? (Minh-Ha,1990.cf. Giroux, 1994b, p. 48). Cultural studies, as Mohanty (1986) advocates, and as I use it for this study of preservice teacher education, seeks "to suspend the taken-for-granted process of . . . continuity, to question the self-evidence of meaning by invoking the radical—but determining—alterities that disrupt our . . . discourse of knowledge" (p. 155 cf. Fish, 1994, p. 233). By disrupting the current organization of knowledge within the disciplines and by creating procedures by which traditions, discourses, and practices are analyzed for how they function to include or exclude certain meanings, produce or prevent particular ways of being, behaving, and imagining (Giroux, 1996, pp. 48-49), cultural studies, Rooney (1996) suggests, can become "a direct threat to the entire 'hidden curriculum' of the disciplines" (p. 217). 23 "Cultural studies raises two fundamental issues about knowledge: How are its objects constructed? [and] Can we distinguish method from object if we hold theory construction and object construction to be aspects of the same process? Thus cultural studies takes itself as its object even as it interrogates the social construction of objects. This procedure constitutes, of course, a way of seeing in which the process of investigation is part of the object of knowledge and itself becomes an object" (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 143). Inquiry is then situated and the researcher, the "modest witness" of a "good enough" science in the making (Haraway, 1997), science which Lather (1999) calls "a cultural practice and a practice of culture, something to think with rather than a mastery project" (p. 1). Too often, writes Giroux (1996), cultural studies is either charged by educators as being 'too theoretical' or ignored by them on account of the criticism it has leveled against education for privileging some at the expense of others (p. 43). Yet, as Giroux explains, cultural studies raises important questions which offer possibilities and opportunities for both educators and researchers to rethink the nature of educational theory and practice (p. 44). By questioning traditions of 'things as they are' and by opening "knowledge up to new questions, spoken from elsewhere" (Grossberg, 1994, p. 19), cultural studies brings cultural practices—and in my particular case, those of preservice teacher education— to the point where they, to use Chambers' poetics, "are shaken apart, and the[ir] habitual meaning . . . [is] exposed and sacrificed as custom and the prescribed is unsettled by an unsuspected shift into the elsewhere of the possible" (1996, p. 50). Critical pedagogy The political nature of education While there are different versions of what constitutes critical pedagogy (Giroux, 1994a, p. 283; see also Gore, 1992), critical pedagogy could best be described as that which "emerges when critical theory encounters education" (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997, p. 24). Growing out of the work of Brazilian educator Paolo Freire, the The charge of being victims of "trend" or "fashion" ( . . . ) is leveled at cultural studies scholars as an omnibus characterization about its "theory" (too French), its topics (too popular), its style (too glitzy), its jargon (too hybrid), its politics (too pbstcolonial), its constituency (too multicultural). All this is usually accompanied by charges, both implicit and explicit, that the whole business of cultural studies is somehow not really scholarly, not truly disciplined, not about "real" research, and not about genuine knowledge. (Appadurai, 1996, p. 30). 24 Frankfurt School, and neo-Marxist criticism, and, more recently, incorporating aspects of postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, deconstruction, and postcolonial theory (McLaren, 1997, p. 1), critical pedagogy views schools, their organization and the knowledge they promote "as socially constructed, hierarchically organized, and unequally distributed . . . so as to legitimate the political and cultural interests of specific groups" over others (Kretovics, 1985, p. 51). Critical pedagogy, thus, problematizes education by examining its implication in the political, social, economic, and cultural struggles over meaning and power relations that have rendered a particular world—both inside and outside of formal education—intelligible, imaginable, and possible. As such, critical pedagogy provides "modes of critical analysis with which the ideological interest which structure current notions of educational theory and practice can be unraveled" (Kretovics, 1985, p. 53). "For traditional educational theorists," proclaims Weiler (1988), "schools have been seen as the means of rationally distributing individuals in what is conceived as a basically just society" (p. 4 cf. Dutton & Grant, 1991, p. 39). Critical pedagogy poses a counter discourse to this "positivistic, ahistorical, de-politicized discourse . . . all too readily visible in most colleges of education" (McLaren, 1997, p. 1). It does so by focusing, among other things, on "the politics of representation, discourse analysis, and the construction of student subjectivity" (McLaren & Giroux, 1995, p. 29) and "the relationship among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the institutional structures of the school, and the social and material relations of the wider community" (McLaren, 1997, p. 1). Viewed within the frame of critical pedagogy, "any system of education is a political way of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourses, along with the power and knowledge they carry" (Sholle & Denski, 1994, p. 21; McLaren & Giroux, 1995, p. 37). No longer are schools, pedagogy, or the curriculum seen as neutral, objective, and innocent domains abstracted from the world of political purpose. Rather, and by their very nature, argue critical pedagogists, schools, pedagogy, and the curriculum inherently represent some theory and serve certain social, cultural, and political ends by favoring the knowledge, ideologies, histories, stories, and ways of knowing of some groups over others (Dutton & Grant, 1991, p. 39). By raising questions about the production, dissemination, and consumption of representations of the world, claims Masterman (1993), critical pedagogy establishes "the importance of a politics of representation" (p. 9). "By refuting the objectivity of knowledge and asserting the partiality of all forms of pedagogical authority," Giroux 25 (1994a) maintains, "critical pedagogy initiates an inquiry into the relationship between the form and content of various pedagogical sites and the authority they legitimate in securing particular cultural practices" and subject positions (p. 284). Eschewing mainstream schooling for "supporting the transmission and reproduction of what Paolo Freire term[ed] 'the culture of silence'" (McLaren & Giroux, 1995, p. 32) which produces 'domesticated' students who tolerate and celebrate the (unequal) status quo (Shor, 1992, p. 21), critical pedagogy believes that critique and contestation are "important and integral to a responsible study of society and to a healthy social order" (Cherryholmes, 1996, p. 75). "By critically inquiring into the exercise and effects of power that structure society," Cherryholmes adds, "teachers and students can understand more fully who they are as members of society, how things got that way, and become increasingly aware of the existence of alternatives" (p. 78). From the perspective of critical pedagogy, education—as a means of empowerment and for social transformation—entails more than giving students or teachers the tools to take up a place in an already constructed system of labour. Instead, it means providing the means by which they can rethink their relationships to the world and develop abilities as critical citizens, working toward a more just and equitable democracy (Sholle & Denski, 1994, p. 31). Exposing the "tacit ideologies and assumptions in the conventions and everyday practices of education" (Kincheloe 1993, p. 30) and "calling into question the authoritative discourses and the recipe knowledge that work to sustain the obvious" (Britzman, 1991b, p. 62), critical pedagogy encourages those participating in the educative process to pose a range of questions—political in nature—typically ignored by traditional educational discourse: Who is advantaged and who is disadvantaged by the current ideology of schooling? What (and whose) knowledge and ways of knowing are considered of most worth? Whose views are represented in the curriculum, who is marginalized and excluded, how and for what purposes? What is not being taught in schools, and why? What political messages are concealed in the processes of teaching, tracking, and testing? How should teacher education be conducted to better serve democratic ends? (Palonsky, 1993, p. 16). Critical pedagogy and teacher education In mainstream schools of education, Kincheloe (1993, p. 12) points out, questions about the nature and purpose of schooling and school knowledge, of schools as social organizations, of the relationship between school and society, between power and teaching, are infrequently asked. Rarely, adds McLaren (1988) do teacher 26 education programs "provide students with an opportunity to analyze the ideological assumptions and underlying interests that structure the way teaching is taught (p. 42; see also Kincheloe, 1993; Britzman, 1986, 1991a; Giroux, 1988b; Giroux & McLaren, 1986, 1987; Greene, 1986a; Smyth, 1989; Arends, 1991; Zeichner, 1983). Consequently, Beyer (1987) has found, "being a student teacher" usually means acquiring "knowledge and learning how to use it in a context that does not include criticism and has little patience with analysis" (p. 22. cf. Werner, 1991, pp. 9-10). Rather than question the principles underlying classroom methods, techniques, and theories," claim Aronowitz & Giroux (1985, p. 151), teacher education tends to take a narrow instrumentalist approach which emphasizes the "how to, " the "what works, " and the mastering of the "best" teaching methods. This, state Britzman et al. (1997), reduces learning to teach "to a problem of [finding] a correct technique" (p. 16). As it presently stands, claims Zeichner (1983), teaching practices and methods are all too often linked to a menu of learning models which are to be employed in the context of particular stipulated conditions—conditions in which questions of culture and power are either completely annulled or else shunted to the margins of pedagogical concern in favor of questions having to do with learning strategies and behavioral outcomes. Within this model of teacher training, performance at a prespecified level of mastery is assumed to be the most valid measure of teacher competence . . . The desire to have teachers critically reflect upon the purposes and consequences . . . [of education] are not central concerns, (cf. Giroux & McLaren, 1987, p. 273) This approach, Giroux & McLaren (1987) suggest, introduces student teachers to schooling "as a set of rules and regulative practices which have been laundered of ambiguity,... free of all vestiges of contestation, struggle and cultural politics . . . an ontologically secured or metaphysically guaranteed neutral terrain" (p. 273). However, even as critical pedagogy emphasizes education as a cultural politics of representation, it does not ignore the need to focus on student teachers' acquisition of technical competence and the mastering of methodology. Where critical pedagogy parts from more traditional approaches to teacher education is that it does not reduce itself to an exclusive engagement with the latter. That is, while engaging student teachers' perspectives about, or ability to teach, a critical approach to teacher education also includes, as I have in this study, an examination of the conditions which either support or constrain the construction and execution of student teachers' perspectives about/within teaching (Ullrich, 1992, p. 361). This helps prospective teachers critically "reflect on the origins, purposes, and consequences of their actions, as well as on the material and ideological constraints 27 and encouragements embedded in the classroom, school, and societal contexts in which they work" (Zeichner & Liston, 1987. p. 1. cf. Ullrich, ibid., pp. 361-362.). As such, critical pedagogy challenges the tendency of many preservice teacher education programs to re-produce the system by creating teachers who become "spectators who receive the directives of their superiors" (Britzman, 1991a, p. 48), or what Giroux calls '"clerks of the empire' who are relegated to efficiency and productivity for implementing externally predetermined knowledge" (McLaren, 1988, p. 42). Instead of seeing the primary purpose of colleges of education "as service institutions . . . mandated to provide the requisite technical expertise to carry out whatever pedagogical functions are deemed necessary by the various school communities," teacher education, Giroux & McLaren (1986) argue, should "encourage their students to take seriously the imperatives of social critique and social change" (p. 223). Their call is echoed by Greene (1986b) who emphasizes the need for teacher educators to create a sense of agency in teachers through which they can "become challengers, when they [can] take initiatives, and through which schools become places fundamentally committed to asking questions" (p. 73). In this pedagogical environment, to borrow from Yonemura (1986), student teachers are discouraged from taking educational practice for granted, as inescapable reality. Instead, they are asked to bring those practices to centre stage to be critically examined and demystified—for what they yield, for what they conceal. Thus, the project of 'doing' teacher education based on cultural politics, according to Giroux & McLaren consists of linking critical social theory to a set of stipulated practices through which it becomes possible to dismantle and critically examine preferred and officially sanctioned educational discourses and traditions, many of which have fallen prey to an instrumental rationality that either limits or ignores the possibility of creating alternative teaching practices capable of re-configuring the syntax of dominant educational and/as political, social, and cultural systems of intelligibility and representation. (1986, p. 229; McLaren & Giroux, 1995, p. 38) Although critical pedagogy provides this study both a language of critique of traditional teacher education and a language of possibility to engage it otherwise, what drove my particular study is not only what is present in the discourse of critical pedagogy but also what is absent from it. I point to two absences in particular. The first, pertains to the relationship between the venue and locus—the where and what—of critique. While critical pedagogy itself provides a poignant critique of current practices of preservice teacher education, the language of possibility much of that literature hopes to generate within teacher education 28 students by that critique is directed primarily toward the culture of schooling, teaching, and learning in schools, not toward teacher education itself. In other words, while the venue for such a critique is teacher education, the locus of critique is the education student teachers will find in schools in the future, not the one they themselves are currently receiving in the process of learning to teach. (Work cited by Britzman, Ginsburg, and Goodman as well as that by Zeichner and his colleagues at U. Wisconsin, Madison, are exceptions to that rule). How, I question, are prospective teachers to move from a language of critique (in teacher education) to a language of possibility (in schools) if the two are disconnected in the process of learning to teach, if rethinking the essence of teacher education itself is precluded from the discourse of critique advocated within it? Indeed, can one assume that even a critical approach to teacher education will produce future critical educators if they are not encouraged, provided opportunities to critique the very institutions that encourage them to critique others? A second absence in the literature in critical pedagogy, and in the context of the literature I have addressed earlier, is that while the literature in critical pedagogy provides no shortage of critical analysis of teacher education, much of that analysis has tended to be "theoretical." By that I do not mean to reduce its importance and relevance or imply that theory and practice are not one and the same. Rather, the analysis about teacher education provided in the literature in critical pedagogy has not been grounded in qualitative descriptions of actual practice in teacher education. As Ginsburg (1988) points out, the claims made by critical pedagogy about preservice teacher education have not, in general, been associated with, or accompanied by, what Geertz defines as '"thick descriptions' of the web of meaning and action involved in the process of becoming a teacher" (p. 3; see also Kanpol, 1998, p. 191). C l a r i f i c a t i o n o f t e rms/s t ra teg ies Pedagogy In discussing the contributions of cultural studies and critical pedagogy to this study I have, on several occasions, invoked the term pedagogy. Specifically, I have claimed that both cultural studies and critical pedagogy are interested in a critical theory of pedagogy. I would like to explain what that means and how that notion of pedagogy is used to inform this study about preservice teacher education. 29 Much of the discourse about pedagogy in the literature in teacher education during the last decade has been part of the discussion about pedagogical content knowledge, a term introduced into the lexicon of teacher education by Lee Shulman during his Presidential Address at the 1985 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Chicago. In that address, Shulman not only called for the inclusion of both knowledge of general pedagogy and knowledge of subject matter per se as equal, yet, at the time, separately engaged components of learning to teach but, also, and more importantly, advocated the inherent relationship between the two. Since its introduction, pedagogical content knowledge—which Shulman (1987) defines as lying at the intersection of content and pedagogy, in the transformation of content into forms that are pedagogically powerful (p. 15)—has become "common currency" in the research literature on teaching and teacher education. As such, it is often cited, much used, yet seldom is it, its understanding of pedagogy, or the relationship between content and pedagogy it assumes, questioned or critically engaged. Recent thinking in research on teaching and teacher education, claim Wilson & McDiarmid (1996), suggests that content and pedagogy are intimately connected (p. 304). And while we have tended to separate subject matter from discussions of pedagogy, they add, we should not only keep them integrated but also carefully examine their relationship (p. 305). Much of the research which both generated the recent discussion of pedagogy in teacher education and provided a lens through which to explore it, was conducted by Shulman and his colleagues in the 'Knowledge Growth in Teaching Project' at Stanford University and thereafter (i.e., Grossman & Richert, 1988; Gudmundsdottir & Shulman, 1987; Wilson, Shulman, & Richert, 1987; Wilson & Wineburg, 1988; Wineburg & Wilson, 1988). Engaging the role of pedagogy in the educative process, this body of research focused primarily on how teachers go about selecting the best metaphors, examples, and explanations, the most appropriate methods and techniques, and the most suited curricular materials through which to engage students with content of a subject-area in order to better "represent the discipline appropriately" (McDiarmid, Ball, & Anderson, 1989, p. 194). While contributing to our understanding of how knowledge of content facilitates the emergence of the "best" pedagogy to convey particular concepts and/or content to students, what these studies examined, more often than not, is which pedagogy works, rather than when (and thus how) pedagogy works, or how and when content and pedagogy already always interact with/on/against the other to educate. 30 The concept of pedagogy underlying the discussion in this dissertation departs from the one used in the research mentioned above. Based on the model provided by Bernstein (1996) and drawing upon the literature in critical pedagogy, the concept of pedagogy used here includes (or is included in) any message—action, structure, or text—that organizes some one's experience as well as someone to experience by positioning those it engages to know of, and be in, the world in particular ways. While the studies of the Stanford Group maintained that knowledge of content and pedagogy are inherently related, what emerges from their research is more the carrying out of one on the other. There is an apparent division of labour between the two whereby subject-matter texts give content, teachers provide pedagogy; content floats free of, pre-exists agency and representation, pedagogy is the representation of otherwise non-representational (that is, non-pedagogical) content. In this version, pedagogy appears to be no more than an aggregation—what Shulman (1986) refers to as an 'armamentarium'—of methods, strategies, and techniques (analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations, and demonstrations) "for representing what is already assumed as fact" (Popkewitz, 1993, p. 290). Engaged that way, claim Giroux & Simon (1988), pedagogy is "but an afterthought reduced to the status of the technical and the instrumental" (p. 11). Such an approach to teaching, Popkewitz (1993) points out, is functional and technically defined; it reduces pedagogy to judging the appropriateness of activities and materials and providing examples, analogies, and metaphors that "fit" the content of the discipline. "Once content is identified, the instructional problem is to develop effective strategies by which to inscribe that content on . . . students" (p. 290). Viewed from a critical perspective, pedagogy is more than methods or techniques of instruction. Broadly engaged, according to Bernstein (1996), pedagogy is an interaction "through which cultural reproduction-production take place" (p. 17). As such, state Giroux & Simon (1988), Pedagogy refers to a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within and among particular sets of social relations. ... it attempts to influence the occurrence and qualities of experiences. When one practices pedagogy one acts with the intent of creating experiences that will organize and disorganize a variety of understandings of our natural and social world in particular ways. (p. 12) While not diminishing pedagogy's concern with 'what's to be done?' in the realities of classrooms, pedagogy defined that way, claim Giroux & Simon (ibid.), is something more than "the integration of curriculum content, classroom strategies 31 and techniques, a time and space for the practice of those strategies and techniques, and evaluation purposes and methods." Rather, they stress that pedagogy "organizes a view of, and specifies particular versions of what knowledge is of most worth, in what direction we should desire, what it means to know something, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and the world" (p. 12). In asking "Why is pedagogy important?" Lusted (1986), in an often quoted answer, points out that as a concept, [pedagogy] draws attention to the process through which knowledge is produced. Pedagogy addresses the 'how' questions involved not only in the transmission or reproduction of knowledge but also in its production. Indeed, it enables us to question the validity of separating these activities so easily by asking under what conditions and through what means we 'come to know'. How one teaches is therefore of central interest but, through the prism of pedagogy, it becomes inseparable from what is being taught and, crucially, how one learns. In this perspective, to bring the issue of pedagogy in from the cold and onto the central stage of cultural production is to open up for questioning areas of enquiry generally repressed by conventional assumptions. . . about theory production and teaching, and about the nature of knowledge and learning, (p. 85) Content, according to Shulman (1986), is the domain of subject-area specialists, pedagogy is the domain of teachers. Teachers, using a variety of techniques or methods, transforms content per-se into content for teaching. Challenging that separation, McEwan & Bull (1991) claim that "all content has a pedagogical dimension" and "all subject-matter knowledge is pedagogical" (p. 318). Therefore, they add, there is no such thing as pure scholarship, devoid of pedagogy. The scholar is no scholar who does not engage an audience for the purpose of edifying its members science, or any other form of scholarship for that matter, is an inherently pedagogic affair.... ideas are themselves intrinsically pedagogic. . . . Explanations are not only of something; they are also always for someone, (pp. 331-332; see also McWilliam & Taylor, 1996, p. vii) Consequently, add McEwan & Bull (ibid.), scholars need to be concerned with the comprehensibility and teachability of their assertions and ensure their 'representations' "find a meaningful place in others' webs of belief." In other words, they claim, "the justification of scholarly knowledge is inherently a pedagogical task" (p. 324). "Scholarship and teaching, therefore," McEwan & Bull conclude, are connected through their unity of purpose - the common aim of the communication of ideas - not divided by any formal differences.. . . [and] scholarship is no less pedagogic in its aims than teaching. Subject matter is always an expression of a desire to communicate ideas to others, (p. 331) 32 But the pedagogical dimensions of content go deeper, for it is not only the what of content—the concepts and facts—teachers encounter while studying their subject-matter; it is also how concepts and facts are organized and structured within the discipline that determines meaning. Content knowledge, according to Shulman (1986), should go "beyond knowledge of the facts or concepts of a domain" and, following Schwab [1964], must include understanding of the substantive and syntactic structures of the discipline (p. 9). Substantive structures comprise the various frameworks or paradigms that affect how the field is organized and how inquiry is to be conducted. Syntactic structures include the canons of evidence and proof used by members of the disciplinary community to guide inquiry in the field and evaluate knowledge claims (Grossman, 1990, pp. 6-7; see also Grossman, Wilson, & Shulman, 1989, p. 29). While the role of substantive and syntactic structures is not, explicitly, to teach, they nevertheless structure what content is to be taught and how content, and the process of learning content, is and should be engaged. As such, substantive and syntactic structures are pedagogical. As they structure a discipline, they simultaneously discipline inquiry to particular issues in particular ways. In other words, similar to the pedagogical act performed by teachers, substantive and syntactic structures influence how and what knowledge is produced by authorizing some experiences and ways of experiencing the discipline rather than others; experiences that organize and disorganize students' understandings not only of what they know but also of what it means to know something in a discipline. Another component of content whose pedagogical aspects are, by and large, unexamined in the prevailing notion of pedagogical content knowledge are curriculum texts brought into the classroom to convey content. The consequence of exploring curriculum texts as content per se, separate from pedagogy, is to view them "not as a medium for codes and signs that signal whose knowledge is legitimate and whose voice may be heard [and how and when] but as a neutral conduit through which unproblematized meaning may pass" (Goodman, 1986, pp. 28-30 cf. Kincheloe, 1993, p. 43). Although the framing of the pedagogical act in that case is less visible, as Bernstein (1996, p. 28) puts it, than the apparent teacher standing in the front of the classroom, texts, nevertheless, don't cease their pedagogical functions. Without claiming that texts have one singular authorized meaning or that authors ultimately control meaning-making through textual devices or authorial invitations, what a text utters and how it utters, so Hall (1986) claims, "influences the links that can be made between it and its readers" (cf. Fiske, 1989, p. 33 146) and thus positions readers to engage the text, and specific elements within the text rather than others, in particular ways. Consequently, what a teacher says and does or what and how a text utters are both invitations to inquiry. And although students may (and do) make their own meanings of either invitation, often producing different, even oppositional meanings and ways of coming to make meaning, such invitations, nevertheless, direct students to specific explorations. As pedagogical devices, texts, as do teachers, regulate the relationship between the possible, the potential, and the actual in the educative process. In that sense, therefore, there is little difference between a teacher's pedagogy and a text's pedagogy. Texts, as teachers, are pedagogical both in what and in how they do and do not tell about a world they engage. Thus, texts as pedagogical devices and the pedagogical practices teachers use along-side them present particular versions of the discipline, of reality, truth, and of what (and how) it means to know something. As such, they are important creators and mediators of knowledge and knowing (Masterman, 1993, p. 11). Using language and symbol, icon and image, signal and sound, they produce "representations of the . . . world, images, descriptions, explanations and frames for understanding how the world is and why it works as it is said and shown to work" (Hall, 1981, cf. Alvarado, et al., 1987, p. 200). Educational texts act pedagogically not simply by telling readers some thing or even by telling it to them in particular ways; they also position readers to read them from particular positions rather than others. This is what Kress (1989), as Luke (1995) points out, refers to as reading positions which are both physical and social (See Masterman, 1985; Ellsworth, 1990). Through a range of textual devices, Luke adds, texts construct and position an ideal reader. They "tell the reader, how, when, and where to read." "Stipulat[ing] a selective version of the world," texts "position some readers as inside and outside of, visible and invisible in that world" (p. 18). As creators of a 'real,' subject-area texts open some worlds for teachers and students while shutting down others, avail some opportunities for inquiry while eliminating others. To explore the pedagogical in that light, means that the instructional or pedagogical act does not begin with teachers in classrooms, nor does the 'content act' end at the desk of the subject-area scholar. Both produce pedagogical content knowledge, that is, knowledge (content) that is always pedagogical and pedagogies which are always content-full. The "inner logic of pedagogic practice," claims Bernstein (1990), "is provided by a set of rules and the nature of these rules acts selectively on the content of any 34 pedagogic practice" (p. 63). "How these rules position interactions, discourse and contexts reveals the code, the interests the code serves, those whose interests are not so served, the form challenges take, and by whom" (Bernstein, 1996, p. 186). To expose the code that confers meaning, teacher educators and those who conduct research in the field have to examine how knowledge is organized to experience and the organizing dialogue of experience (Giroux, 1996, p. 45). Such an approach is contrary to the current disassociation of pedagogy from its inevitable implication in knowledge, politics, power, discourse, and culture (ibid., p. 43), the subsequent preoccupation with the "hows to" of pedagogy, and the reduction of pedagogy to methods/techniques of teaching/instruction. Instead, and as Jennifer Gore (1993) suggests, teacher educators and researchers need to be more reflexive "about both the pedagogies argued for and the pedagogies of arguments made" (p. 127). Discourse analysis/reading positions Having explored the pedagogical aspects of texts and, as I have in the introduction to this dissertation, the text-like properties of pedagogical practices, I wish to explain the use I make of discourse analysis as a strategy to read and read into the UBC Teacher Education Program as a discursive text. In the last two decades, write Gee & Green (1998), the study of discourse— otherwise referred to as discourse analysis—has become an important perspective "to examine ways in which knowledge is socially constructed in classrooms and other educational settings" (p. 119). Studying discursive activity within such settings, they add, provides an understanding of "how knowledge constructed in classrooms (and other educational settings) shapes, and is shaped by, the discursive activity and social practices of [its] members," as well as how patterns of practice simultaneously support and constrain access to particular knowledge and knowing (ibid.). Addressing discourse as structures for, and ways of, reading, writing, and being in the world—that of teacher education or any other—allows for an examination of the conditions and means through which prospective teachers come to know. Exploring how an educative world is storied—produced, packaged, disseminated, and mediated—as much as who stories it and for what (and whose) purposes, therefore becomes inseparable from (though never identical to) the kinds of reading, writing, and being student-teachers produce. Deconstructing the texts of teacher education (and teacher education itself as text), one is thus able to examine what Lather (1992b) identifies as "the lack of innocence in any discourse by looking 35 at the textual staging of knowledge," and the effects of language on giving meaning to experience (p. 120). Such a process, Knoblauch & Brannon (1993) maintain, allows one to recognize the degree to which language practices articulate, objectify, and rationalize reality, as well as the extent to which 'naming the world' determines its meaning (p. 23). Combining discourse analysis with ethnography, as I do in this study, claim Gee & Green (1998), allows researchers "to examine how educational processes and practices are constructed . . . how students take up, resist, or fail to learn . . . through these processes and practices; and how discourse processes and practices shape what counts as knowing, doing, and being within and across events" (pp. 119-120). Integrating discourse analysis and ethnography provides a conceptual approach for analyzing: first, what students "need to know, produce, predict, interpret, and evaluate in a given setting . . . [in order] to participate appropriately (Heath, 1982) and, through that participation, learn," and second, "how discourse shapes both what is available to be learned and what is, in fact, learned (Gee & Green, 1998, p. 126). The concept of discourse, however, varies across approaches to discourse analysis. Differences depend, among other things, on whether discourse is used in its narrow or broad definition. Discourse (with a capital 'D'), explain Lankshear, Gee, Knobel, & Searle (1997), refers to social practices which amount to 'ways of being in the wor ld ' (e.g. being a teacher, being Catholic, . . . being a feminist, etc.) . . . discourse (wi th a lower-case'd') refers to the language (saying, listening, reading, wr i t ing, viewing) components of a Discourse. There is no (and cannot conceivably be) Discourse w i thou t discourse, and vice versa. They simultaneously form and inform each other, (p. 45) For the purpose of analysis, then, Lankshear, et al. add, Specific texts can be approached both as discrete moves wi th in some language game or other w i th in a Discourse, and as participating in the 'logic' of the Discourse as a whole. To read a text critically in the narrower sense . . . wou ld be to read it as a discrete move in a language game and, having thus analysed it, to respond to it evaluatively. To read crit ically in the wider sense wou ld be to respond to a particular text as an embodiment of a larger discursive logic. . . . To make a critical move in a language game [would then] involve addressing the Discourse in the process of addressing its discourse, (pp. 46-47) The distinction Lankshear et al. make (see also Gee, 1990; Luke, 1995) is particularly useful to clarify the kind of discourse analysis applied in this dissertation. For the discourse analysis used here is not primarily the broad type (capital 'D') initiated by Foucault, one which explores large-scale ideological formations over time. Nor does 36 it take the form of a sociolinguistic micro-analysis applied, in detail, to small segments of transcript (lower-case d). Rather, and in the latter manner described by Lankshear et al., I use transcripts (segments of discourse) from teacher education in order to examine, and as part of the examination of, the Discourse of teacher education. The object of analyzing texts—as manifestations of discourse—is, thus, not to find meaning or value within the segment of discourse itself, or simply examine the apparent in the texts—that which offers itself for interpretation—but, rather, by connecting it to its Discourse, to examine the modalities, processes, and consequences of its production (Giroux & McLaren, 1987, p. 288; see also De Man, 1982, p. 7). Such a process, to use Knoblauch & Brannon's (1993) discussion of deconstruction, reopens signification by reading texts beyond the boundaries they imagine they have set for themselves in the pursuit of their own interests. It proceeds obliquely, at the margins of those texts, at points of beginning or closure, at places of disturbance or resistance where unreconciled or barely suppressed meanings strain the effect of coherence. I t reveals the secret jests lurk ing w i th in even the most earnest or reverent assertions, impl ic i t ly celebrating the exuberance of language, its i r reduc ib ly—and incor r ig ib ly— f igura t ive disposit ion. It makes the critical agent aware of the foundations of discursive practices, the manner of their emergence, the modes of their action, the possibilities and impossibilit ies of utterance that they define, the character and dispersion of their objects and relationships, the nature of the documents that they produce, but above all the play of language that both constitutes and deconstructs . . . the practices themselves, (p. 168) Unmasking the meaning of the text, as Kofman (1993, using Nietzsche), explains, "is not about removing from a text a cloak that veils the truth, but rather showing the clothing which an apparent 'nakedness' conceals" (p. 92. cf. Lather, 1997, p. 5). Textual analysis, therefore, is "concerned with understanding how a text means, not with what a text means" (Birch, 1989, p. 21). As Macherey (1978) offers, analysis "does not remain within its object, paraphrasing what has already been said; analysis confronts the silences, the denials and the resistance in the object—not that compliant implied discourse which offers itself to discovery" (p. 150. cf. Birch, ibid., p. 17). As an act of reading and writing, ethnography, too, Sultana (1995) argues, "attains its radical promise when, rather than dancing to the music it hears, it listens intently to that silence, making it speak volumes" (p. 119). Ethnographers, Fiske (1990) explains, have "to work not only with the data obtained, but also with absences. Semiotics," he adds, "tells us that what is absent from a text is as significant as what is present" (p. 96). For the critical ethnographer, then, Sultana maintains, the '"what is not' is infinitely more important that the 'what is,. . . accord[ing] silences, 37 gaps, and absences a special and prestigious place" (p. 114). In the context of my own study, this means the silences of the teacher education program I am examining had not only to be identified but also measured and spoken against its utterances. That is, this study examines how the enacted overt curriculum of teacher education both constructs its covert and null curricula and, at the same time, does its best to conceal their existence and its own implication in bringing them to life. Meaning making-reading or writing—is never innocent; it is always local, ideological and political. And yet, exploring a text's silences, gaps, and absences seems to make the ideological and the political ever.more apparent. For omissions in a text are made to be so only through their commission by a particular reader; they need to be identified—in a sense, created—and activated in order to make them speak, a prerogative already provided that which is already made available there for discovery by its author. In other words, while a critical reading of what is present in a text requires its deconstruction, engaging what is absent in that text requires construction. And although all meaning making is inherently creative, the former works with or against that which is offered, the other invents that which is withheld. It is this creative act of invention and construction which brings the ideological and the political—both in the text and its reading—to the surface. Absences and silences, however, are not only part of my, or any other, critical ethnographic reading of a text; they are also a recognized aspect of writing the text we have been reading. Every attempt at ethnographic work, Tyler (1986) points out, "will always be incomplete, insufficient, lacking in some way" (p. 136). As researchers, "we contextualize events in a social system, within a web of meaning, and provide a namable causation. We transform them into meaningful patterns, and in so doing, we exclude other patters, meanings, or causes" (Fine, 1993, p. 290). Any ethnographic account can therefore never tell all there is to tell about its object (Sultana, 1995, p. 114). For, as Marcus (1986) explains, "the object of study always exceeds its analytic circumscription . . . there remains the surplus of difference beyond, and perhaps because of, our circumscription" (p. 567). The commissions and omissions within my own writing, and how those were constructed within and because of my particular mode of investigation, are addressed in the next chapter of this dissertation— the Methodology Chapter. Notes 1. Armento (1991), Stanley (1991, 1992), Thornton (1994), Longstreet (1990), Banks (1995), and Cherryholmes, among others, claims Seixas (1997), "have called for the incorporation into social 38 studies research of the issues and insights raised by new epistemological movements, many of which are exemplif ied in the field of 'cultural studies'" (p. 31). 2. Another way of exploring the phenomenon of reproduction w o u l d be through the process of autopoiesis—a term f rom the natural sciences—which refers to a system's self-referencing or self-reproduction (Hammerberg, 1999; Heyning, 1999). 39 C H A P T E R II M e t h o d o l o g y [As researchers] we often do not know what we are seeing, how much we are missing, what we are not understanding or even how to locate those lacks. Fatal contingencies, deceitful language, the self-deceptions of a consciousness that does not know what it acts toward; it is the experience of consciousness in its very limits that I inscribe here. (Lather, 1999, p. 4) Critical research must be undertaken in such a way as to narrate its o w n contingency, its own situatedness in power/knowledge relations. Critical researchers attempt to become aware of the controll ing cultural mode of their research and the ways, often varied and unwi t t ing, in which their research subjects and their relationship to them become artifacts of the epistemes that shape the direction of their research by f ixing the conceptual w o r l d in a particular way and by silencing particular discourses f rom a range of possibilities. (McLaren & Lankshear, 1993, pp. 382-383) In the last two decades, emerging theories in qualitative research—influenced by postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism—have drawn attention to the complexities in the process through which research is conducted (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b). In light of these theories, research can no longer be regarded an unproblematic, objective, value-free process where data is neutrally and naturally collected, interpreted, and textualized by disinterested researchers. Rather, research methodology has become a problematized and contested terrain depicting a double crisis of representation and legitimation (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994a p. 2; Altheide & Johnson, 1994, p. 485; Lather, 1991a; Moore, 1993, p. 191). Engaging issues of power, language, positionality, and voice, the emerging literature in qualitative research allows one to examine under what conditions and through what means researchers "come to know." How one researches—reads and writes the world—becomes inseparable from what is being researched and the knowledge being produced. Making that connection between the "what" and the "how" explicit in my own research and highlighting the ways in which one derives from, is imbedded in, and generates the other in the production of knowledge and knowing attempts to move the focus of this chapter beyond method and reconcile it with its own name: Methodology. Method, as Lather (1992a, using Harding, 1987, p. 2) explains, "refers to techniques for gathering empirical evidence; methodology is the theory of knowledge and the interpretive framework that guides a particular research project" (p. 87). Denying such a connection and focusing on research techniques in 40 abstraction from the kind and quality of participation and data generated by them reduces methodology to mere method; produces a discourse of method devoid of methodology, a narration of one's technology in isolation of its pedagogy. Further, implicating the "how" with the "what" is not simply intended to illustrate the choices I made in order to study or even to explain why those particular choices were made. Rather, and in accordance with the very focus of this entire dissertation, my intention is also to show how the choices we make (and those made for us) position us, our participants, our readers to engage the world we describe in particular ways rather than others. Exploring methodology while engaging in it brings anxiety to the surface; it highlights its problematics and discontinuities instead of hiding them behind or within the neatness of a clean and tidy narrative. While I intend to show (or is it I feel I am required to show?) how a specific methodological paradigm chosen for this study best enhanced its possibilities of becoming what I hoped it would be, methodology, as Polkinghorne (1983) states, "does not give truth; it [only] corrects guesses" (p. 249. cf. Lather, 1986, p. 259). Truth lies in exposing the detours of method to accommodate our guesses, in showing the limitations of its possibilities and the possibilities in its limitations. For every decision opens one door and closes another. But to proceed, we nevertheless must make choices, we must enter. How reflexive or messy can a dissertation be and still be considered dissertation-like enough to please a dissertation committee, a dissertation-approving institution, an internal and external dissertation examiner? How disruptive can its content be of a system that ultimately must grant it its recognition, its right of passage? The simple answer is: not very much, at least not as much as I would have liked. But the other simple answer is: very much, as much as I wanted. The boxed-in interludes within this text in the form of reflexive or additive breathers (Lather & Smithies, 1995; Lather, 1997, p. 1) are both an example as well as the resolution of that contradiction. For they came into being as a result of a process of negotiation, not, as one would expect, with my committee members—for they were very much open to any of my suggestions—but with myself, as researcher, as author, as doctoral student. To that extent, the negotiation was among the imaginable, the possible, and the allowable, not as absolute factors of truth but as they had been constituted in my own mind through years of institutionalized schooling with regard to what may be considered an acceptable norm of academic discourse and what is considered to be within its boundaries, what must be boxed-in outside it? Thus to claim that what was determined as in or out of the "official" narrative depended on my own editorial decisions, would provide only half the story. To get the other half one must ask: what gave me the impression I should put some thing in one place, the other, elsewhere? But even that does not provide a complete answer since my explanations would already be predicated on preconceived notions of what is considered "official", what is not, and what institutional and disciplinary regulatory measures are both explicitly and implicitly implemented or alluded to in order to ensure such a division is constructed, patrolled, and maintained. 41 Focusing on how versions and visions advocated, presented, and practiced in a social studies methods course and the teacher education program in which it is embedded position prospective teachers to engage social studies (any) education as students and teachers, ultimately determined the location, duration, and methodology of this particular study. The nature of the issues under investigation, the multilayerd complexity of the environments in which I wished to conduct that investigation, the kind and quality of data I hoped to collect, the level and degree of interaction and disclosure I hoped to engender, and the descriptions, understandings, conceptualizations, and theories I hoped to generate and convey, all lent themselves, if not required, the use of qualitative rather than quantitative methods. E t h n o g r a p h y Among the different qualitative research paradigms, this study could best be defined as ethnography. I use this term cautiously, however. Although I believe the study was an ethnography and used ethnographic methods and sensibilities, it did not necessarily produce an ethnography, at least not in its traditional form—a comprehensive narrative about a particular culture in specific place in time. I therefore use "ethnography" as it is often found in the British literature—as an umbrella term for a variety of general qualitative research methods which are ethnographic in essence. Why ethnography? I chose to subscribe to, and identify, my study within the methodological parameters of ethnography not only for the methods of inquiry it permits or the quality of data and analysis those methods can generate, but also for the possibilities opened up by current and critical understandings within ethnography. (Clifford, 1986, 1988, 1992; Tyler, 1986, 1987; Lather, 1986, 1991a, 1991b, 1992a, 1997; Britzman, 1995) for a theoretically interrogated methodology (Denzin, 1995a) which reflexively subverts ethnography against itself and calls into question the very possibility of inquiry even as one attempts to inquire; a methodology that "strikes the epistemological paradox of knowing through not knowing, knowing both too little and to much in its refusal of mimetic models of representation and the nostalgic desire for immediacy and transparency of reference" (Lather, 1997, p. 1). 42 On the other hand, I could equally claim these qualities and perspectives were not what brought me to ethnography but what brought ethnography to me. That is, those attributes and possibilities—the very dispositions which made ethnography attractive to me—were ones I was always and already seeking in and for my study. In other words, ethnography may have simply provided a match, a well-established and legitimate methodology to hang on to and call my own; a recognized home, a comfort zone in which to hang my already tailored hat; a place from which to operate without having to explain and legitimize what I already knew I wanted to do, regardless. As ethnographers do, I was nevertheless interested in exploring the UBC Teacher Education Program, and the social studies methods course in particular, as social interactions, examining the ways in which their contexts open possibilities for and impose constraints on interaction. Ethnographers, according to Spindler & Spindler (1987), "are interested in the meaning that social actors in context assign to their own behavior and that of others" (p. 18). To that effect, ethnography seemed to offer a way in which to collect and analyze "primarily unstructured data that... have not been coded at the point of data collection in terms of a closed set of analytic categories;" data "that involves explicit interpretation of the meanings and functions of human actions" (Atkinson & Hammersley, 1994, p. 248). Further, focusing its investigation "on a small number of cases, perhaps just one in detail" (ibid.), ethnography encourages an in-depth study where researchers are called to explore participants' "thoughts and meanings, feelings, beliefs, and actions as they occur in the 'natural' context" of the research (Schumacher & McMillan, 1993, p. 407). According to Atkinson & Hammersley (1994, p. 248), ethnography is best suited to explore the nature of a particular social phenomenon rather than set out to test a hypothesis about it. Seeking to generate descriptions and theories rather than prove theories, the parameters of ethnography, thus, seemed most appropriate for my study. Going into this research with only "hunches," intuitive directions for inquiry—what Malinowsky (1922) termed "foreshadowed questions"— ethnography's rigorous yet flexible structure which is open to negotiation and re-negotiation should (and as) my research evolves (Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995), allowed me the freedom to re-fbcus my research and adjust research strategies as I began interim data analysis (Lancy, 1993, p. 236). However, as a critical ethnographer I was looking to move from traditional ethnographic practices of "having participants articulate what they know" to "having them theoriz[e] about what they know" (Lather, 1986, p. 264). Similarly, I was 43 looking not only to observe, record, and interpret what Schumacher & McMillan (1993) identified as participants' "thoughts and meanings, feelings, beliefs, and actions as they occur in the 'natural' context of the research" (p. 407. my emphasis). Instead, I wanted to also activate those very same aspects in students so they could deconstruct and re-think the very research context itself and critically and reflectively question the environment (and what is it in the environment) that generates those particular thoughts, meanings, feeling, beliefs, and actions (see Anderson & Irvine, 1993, pp. 85-86). A critical ethnographer, therefore, does not stop at observation, recording and analysis of occurrences in the "natural" context of the research, but moves its participants to investigate the very idea of "naturalness" in that environment, thus adding praxis to the goals of the ethnographic endeavour. Praxis according to Lather (1986) occurs when research helps participants critically understand their situations and through such critical understandings begin to change the situation (p. 263; see also Freire, 1973, pp. 60-61; Ginsburg, 1988, p. 202). To arrive at that, however, researchers themselves must first understand their own situations, theorize and reflexively interpret their own ethnographic practices and contexts. A reflexive perspective of that nature came about in ethnography in the mid-1980s. Building upon a poststructural discourse circulating in the field of literary theory and rhetorical critiques such as those developed of history by Hayden White (1973, 1978), and on already-existing postcolonial critiques within anthropology about ethnography as, and its implications with, Empire (Marcus, 1994, p. 564), scholars such as James Clifford, George Marcus, Stephen Tyler, and Michael Fischer, among others, re-focused the discussion within ethnography. Emphasizing language and discourse as the only "tools of the trade," they shifted the debate from that generated by Clifford Geertz about The interpretation of cultures (1973) and by ethnographers exploring the "messiness" of ethnography as method, and repositioned it to focus on ethnography as 'product' (Agar, 1995, p. 112; see also Cintron, 1993, p. 374). Such a shift, Clifford (1986) explains, drew attention "not to the interpretation of cultural 'texts' but to their relations of production" (p. 13). Moving from the ethno to the graphy of ethnography (Fiske, 1991, p. 330; Britzman, 1995, p. 229) and problematizing the relationship between practice and discourse from one preceding the other to both being inherently implicated with the other, ethnography was no longer considered the mirror of its world but its maker (Tyler, 1987, p. 171). With writing no longer innocent, natural, or neutral, the authority of the ethnographer and that of the traditional, realist ethnographic text 44 with its claims to "transparency of representation and immediacy of experience" (Clifford, 1986, p. 2) have increasingly come under attack (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994b, p. 10; Denzin & Lincoln, 1995, p. 354). As "the concept of 'disinterested knowledge' implodes, collapses inward" (Lather, 1992a, p. 91), the "fly-on-the-wall model [of] ethnography without ethnographer" (Fine, 1993, p. 282) had to be abandoned. Instead, the postmodern, poststructural ethnographer relinquishes (or is relinquished of) both the need and ability to remain "within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, parting his fingernails." Qoyce, 1947, p. 48. cf. Greene, 1994, p. 207). Seeing both research and researcher as inherently subjective and always politically implicated, the critical ethnographer views him/herself standing, as inscriber, at the centre of text. It is no longer "a luxury, a privileged understanding done in one's pleasure," Lee & Ackerman (1994) point out, for ethnographers to call into question "notions of totality, of certainty, truth and neutral technique" (cf. Denzin & Lincoln, 1995, p. 354). Through such practices, claims Lather, we "learn to attend to the politics of what we do and do not do . . . and (citing Hartsock, 1987), "to 'read out' the epistemologies in our various practices" (p. 206. cf. Lather, 1991a, p. 13). Following the "rejection of the idea of language as a medium expressing or representing what pre-exists" (Greene, 1994, p. 208), "the ethnographic promise of a holistic account is betrayed," according to Britzman (1995) "by the slippage born from the partiality of language—of what cannot be said precisely because of what is said, and of the possible difference within what is said, what is intended, what is signified, what is repressed, what is taken, and what remains" (p. 230; see also Biriotti, 1993, p. 5). Rather than reducing writing to method, "keeping good field notes, making accurate maps, 'writing up' results (Clifford, 1986, p. 2), critical ethnographers have come to appreciate how "language obscures reality and reflects it only by distorting it" (Tyler, 1991, p 90). By constructing and distorting, by constructing by distorting, language leaks. "As language leaks," claims Biriotti (1993), "so texts go beyond the lines of the map" (p. 12). And when the entire "ground upon which ethnography is built turns out to be a contested and fictive geography" (Britzman, 1995, p. 230), "the map is [no longer] the territory" (Tyler, 1991, p. 90). Yet, while all ethnographers can perhaps do is provide what Clifford (1986) called '"partial truths'—committed and incomplete" (p. 7), this does not mean ethnography should be rendered obsolete or that ethnographers can no longer speak 45 about the world. While "eschew[ing] the questionable narrative of scientific objectivity," Richardson (1994) points out, postmodern ethnographers may "still have plenty to say as situated speakers . . . about the world as they perceive it" (p. 518). Postmodernism and all that it carries, she adds, still allows them "to know 'something' without claiming to know everything" (p. 517; see also Lather, 1999). As I move to explain my "something," while calling into question my own ethnographic cartography, investigating my own problematic map-making, I wish to explain the geography of this research, the contours of the territory in which it was conducted, and the terrain from which I make my own limited claims to knowledge. Research overview The research described in this dissertation comprises five phases and took place over a two-year period, from the beginning of September 1996 to the end of December 1998. The first three phases (September 1996-July 1997) were conducted in "the field"-comprising a university and a practicum setting—for the purpose of data collection. The last two phases (August 1997-December 1998) comprised "post" field work for the purpose of data analysis and/as writing. The first phase of this research took place in and around a 13-week social studies methods course (SSED 312) at the University of British Columbia, Canada. The course convened for two hours, 3 times a week, September 4 to November 29, 1996 (with a two-week break at the end of October for a two-week observational practicum). This phase incorporated the largest and most significant component of this research project. With the purpose of examining how what takes place in the methods course both enables and restricts some versions of knowledge and knowing of and in social studies education, data collection combined: a) observation, field-note taking, and audio-taping of all sessions of the methods course; b) three "official" one-on-one in-depth interviews with six student-teachers participating in the methods course and two interviews (one face-to-face and one through e-mail) with the course instructor; c) examination of all documents, resources, and readings pertaining to the course, as well as all texts (assignments and final exam) written by members of the sub-sample group. The second phase of the research was carried out in six Greater Vancouver public secondary schools while student-teachers were on their long practicum (February-May, 1997). The purpose of this phase was to explore how what student-teachers engaged in the methods course, and in the teacher education program in 46 general, helped determine (both in the positive and negative sense) what and how student-teachers think about, imagine, and carry out social studies education while on, and within the constraints of, their practicum. (It was not, as I have already indicated, to explore the practicum in and of itself as a site of learning to teach.) Two interviews with each of the six student-teachers were conducted following visits to their classrooms. (The purpose of those visits was not to evaluate their teaching but to contextualize their references during the above mentioned interviews). To learn more of what student-teachers were working for, with, and against during the practicum, one-hour interviews regarding expectations of student-teachers and for social studies education were conducted with (almost) all sponsor teachers involved.1 The third phase of the research took place in July 1997, as student-teachers returned to UBC from the practicum in order to complete an 18-credit summer session prior to graduation and certification. The purpose of this phase, which included one final interview with each of the six student-teachers, was to consolidate my research by allowing participants a somewhat more detached space to reflect upon the methods course and the practicum, as well as make connections between them and the teacher education program in general.2 The fourth phase of this research, which focused on data analysis, interpretation and, subsequently, writing, took place from the conclusion of "field work" (July 1997) to the binding of these pages (May 1999). It comprised transcription of audio-recordings (close to 130 hours of tape), examination of documents, continuous visits and re-visits with my data, theme-building, categorization, and textual maneuvers in order to put all the above into (what I hoped would become) a coherent text. The fifth phase of this research, which took place simultaneously with phase four, was devoted to member-checking and member-editing of the text, as well as to obtaining participants' responses to, and comments upon this text, now incorporated in the Second text of this dissertation (I explain the purpose of this Second Text further down). Inter Text: What I have described thus far is what Britzman (1995) calls the "straight version of ethnography 101" (p. 230). Here is version # 2—the one Britzman (ibid.) calls "unruly"— pertaining to t h e relationship between data collection and interpretation, between practice and theory: Referring, as I have thus far, to the collection of data and its interpretation as distinct and separate phases of research—whereby one precedes the other, I may have complied with what is expected of me in a 47 d i s s e r t a t i o n bu t , in do ing so, I have not been t r u e to m y o w n bel iefs u n d e r l y i n g m u c h o f th is research p ro jec t , t o m y o w n e x p e c t a t i o n s o f par t i c ipan ts t h r o u g h o u t th is s tudy, and to my o w n unders tand ings of how k n o w l e d g e is p r o d u c e d , or of how r e s e a r c h — b e it in h i s t o r y o r in e d u c a t i o n — i s conducted . And whi le it wil l p robab ly be wise to s tay w i th in the " p r o v e n , " the " t r ied , " and the "discipl ined" in fear of g rav i ta t ing toward t h e " b l a c k h o l e " o f p e r p e t u a l s e l f - r e f l e x i v i t y , p a r t i c i p a t i n g in t h e n o r m a l i z a t i o n of such pract ices whi le s imp ly w i n k i n g a t t h e o r y — b r i e f l y acknowledg ing its ex is tence, yet never ful ly c o m m i t t i n g myse l f to i t — r u n s t h e r isk of p roduc ing a me thodo logy chap te r t h a t is fu l l o f m e t h o d but d e v o i d o f m e t h o d o l o g y . Is it e th ica l (o r feas ib le ) f o r me to reduce m e t h o d o l o g y to m e t h o d in a d isser ta t ion tha t a rgues no t only aga ins t the reduc t ion of pedagogy to method but also against t he equat ion of me thod with pedagogy. Geer tz ( 1 9 8 8 ) discusses t w o sides of the e t h n o g r a p h i c en te rp r i se . 'Be ing T h e r e ' — t i m e spent in the f ie ld w h e n e t h n o g r a p h e r s p roduce the ' W r i t t e n A t ' and 'Being H e r e ' — t i m e spent back in t h e a c a d e m y w h e n e t h n o g r a p h e r s p r o d u c e t h e ' W r i t t e n A b o u t ' ( p p . 1 4 3 - 1 4 4 , 1 4 8 . cf. C o n q u e r g o o d , 1 9 9 1 , p. 1 9 2 ; C in t ron, 1993, p. 3 7 5 ) . A tk inson ( 1 9 9 0 ) refers t o t i m e spent in the f ield and t ime spent back in t h e academy as 'wr i t i ng d o w n ' and 'wr i t ing up' respect ively, where in the 'wr i t ing d o w n ' serves as data fo r 'wr i t ing up' (p. 61 ) . Whi le such a division is found in mos t of the l i terature abou t e thnograph ic methodo logy and one which m a n y e thnographers m igh t descr ibe as representa t ive of the i r work , the separa t ion be tween the 'Here' and T h e r e ' , between the Wri t ing At (or down) and the Wr i t ing About (or up ) , obscures the complex i ty of the research process as a mul t i -d i rec t iona l ra ther t h a n a un i -d i rec t iona l process w i th data col lect ion ( the f ie ld) its beg inn ing and in te rp re ta t ion o f data ( the academy) its end . For w h e t h e r Here o r There , w r i t i n g — b o t h as data col lect ion and i n t e r p r e t a t i o n — i s a lways about. I t is never innocent , d is in terested, or theory- less ; never s imp ly 'wr i t ing d o w n ' . To b o r r o w f r o m one of Geer tz ' s more recen t t i t l e s , w r i t i n g a b o u t is no t s o m e t h i n g e thnographers do After the fact ( 1 9 9 5 ) , i t 's inherent ly embedded in i t . I n fac t , as Geertz h imsel f ment ions whi le exp la in ing t h e book 's t i t le , we are in the era of "af ter the fact" wherein wr i t ing is the fact . I n t e r p r e t a t i o n , w h e t h e r in the wr i t i ng of h i s to ry o r in t h e do ing of e t h n o g r a p h y , is no t a v e n e e r added to da ta a f t e r i ts c o l l e c t i o n ; it is e m b e d d e d in the a lways a l ready theore t i ca l l y -d r i ven in te rp re t i ve process of col lect ing ( w h a t counts as data? How does data count? W h a t does i t account for? Which data should I record, which should I ignore?) . As researchers, we do not e n t e r the " f ie ld" as tabula rasa. Our research (da ta col lect ion and /as i n t e r p r e t a t i o n ) is c r e a t e d , i n f o r m e d , and c o n t i n u o u s l y m e d i a t e d by ou r theo r ies o f and in the w o r l d . I n d e e d , we read and wr i t e ou r e thnograph ic wor ld w i th t h e m , against t h e m , and th rough t h e m . As Fiske ( 1 9 9 1 ) expla ins: [E]very stage of the ethnographic enterprise is theoretically driven. The production of the "reality" that is the object of the study is theoretically driven, the identification and rejection of data and their ranking in a hierarchy of significance and all instances of theory in practice. Invest igat ion, description, putting-into-discourse, and interpretation are inseparable for they are all interl inked stages in the discursive process. There is no non-48 interpretive stage of investigation, for the choice of the object of investigation is an interpretive act. (p. 334) Interpretation, of course, does not only influence the kind of data we choose to collect in the field; interpretation creates data even when (what we traditionally call) "field work" is over. That is, interpretation does not only infiltrate and direct the collection of data "There"; it generate new data "Here." In other words, data-generation does not end when ethnographers return from the field to the academe. If, as I do, we subscribe to the idea that fieldwork is writing (Richardson, 1994), then writing must also be considered fieldwork. And in the process of writing we don't only interpret the data we have; through writing we generate new data. As ethnographers import words to create worlds, the mere act of importation, of moving words from one context to another, provides potential for their manipulation and control (Barthes, 1985, pp. 3-6). "The 'original' voices of individuals in the field setting and the intentions behind those voices," writes Denzin (1995a), "can never be recovered. There are no original voices, for every . . . transcription is a re-telling, a new telling of a previously heard, now newly heard voice" (p. 14). "Each attempt at repetition," he adds, "creates a new experience." Every transcription is a new inscription, (p. 10; see also Scheurich, 1995) Choices ethnographers make pertaining to the editing, sprucing, and other forms of manipulating data, decisions they make regarding where to include such data, how to include it, or how to frame it, are all decisions which give data a different life, a new meaning. And as they give new meaning to each chunk of data they include, they give the data they do include new meaning by the data they exclude. In the process, "old" data loses its original meaning (is there ever an original meaning?) and "new" data is born. Data, therefore is continuously generated as long as the last character describing the research and its findings has been typed (see Smyth &Shacklock, 1998). But the complexities of data creation go even further. If we subscribe, as I do, to the idea that meaning does not reside in a text but rather in the negotiation between reader and text, and if we believe, as I do, that different readers make different meanings of the very same text—in fact, as Birch (1989) points out, that "each time a [new] reader reads the text, a new text is created" (p. 21), then the creation of "data" continues long after the dissertation is signed and bound; it continues as long as someone is willing to actively read it. Choice of site/location: Explaining their research, writes Marcus (1986), critical ethnographers must not leave unattended the situating of their study. Rather, they must explain how it relates to the broader aims of the study and provide answers to the question: Why are you studying this group in this locale rather than any another? (p. 172). Choosing to locate my study in a teacher education social studies course may 49 be evident from the topic of this research. However, the decision to locate it within the UBC Teacher Education Program and in the particular social studies methods course taught by Peter, my own advisor, is not and thus needs further elaboration. Being a graduate student at UBC and having Peter Seixas already "packaged" in a double role of advisor and instructor (two for the price of one!) would probably make convenience the first reason to spring to any one's mind; yet it was the furthest from mine. While knowing some of the "players" (the staff and faculty in the Teacher Education Office and in the Department of Curriculum Studies) might have facilitated my access to research and may have enhanced those players' commitment to it, these advantages were overwhelmingly outweighed by the complexities and numerous possible disadvantages and inconveniences inherent in critically researching (and writing critically about) one's own faculty, one's own advisor. (I discuss these issues more fully in a sub-section entitled: power relations). Why this teacher education program? A very limited range of opportunities exist to conduct this kind of study anywhere other than UBC, without having to relocate outside the Vancouver Metropolitan Area—a move I was not ready to make at that time. Simon Fraser is the "other" university in Greater Vancouver. While there were no apparent reasons not to conduct research there, I believed the teacher education program at UBC could provide opportunities for research that, in my particular case, Simon Fraser could not. Having graduated from the (very much unchanged) UBC Teacher Education Program (majoring in social studies) only three years prior to the beginning of the study, I hoped my familiarity with its general philosophy, expectations, foci, content, procedures, structures, and sub-culture would not only enable me to better understand what student-teachers experience in the program, but would also assist in knowing what to ask (and to ask better questions) about the relationship between the methods course and the teacher education program in general. Ethnographic observations, claim Spindler & Spindler (1987), should be contextualized "both in the immediate setting in which behavior is observed and in further contexts beyond that context, as relevant" (p. 18). Since data-collection beyond one-on-one interviews with participants during the university-based phase of my research (phase #1) was conducted exclusively within the social studies methods course (a good design attribute in a study which has the methods course as its main focus), being unfamiliar with the SFU teacher education program and therefore not being unable 50 to tap into and contextualize what participants said about it would have made it more difficult to understand what happens beyond the walls of the methods course and how what happens beyond those walls both explicitly and implicitly influences, frames, and regulates what happens inside them. Familiarity with the UBC context could, however, result in a tendency to not question my own taken-for-granted presumptions, understandings, expectations, and readings of participants' thoughts and actions within that context (Ely et al., 1991, p. 124). It could create a certain "blindness" to aspects I might have more critically explored otherwise and elsewhere. Yet, I believed that familiarity in this case would enhance rather than limit my knowledge of what to be critical about and where to direct those "difficult" questions pertaining to spaces in which, by research design, I was not able to be. Why a methods course? The UBC Teacher Education Program offers three courses in secondary social studies education: SSED 312—Curriculum and Instruction, Social Studies, Secondary; SSED 317: Current Topics in Secondary Social Studies Education, and; SSED 324: Curriculum and Instruction in Canadian Studies. Choosing to conduct my study in SSED 312 provided specific benefits. First, of the three courses, SSED 312 is the only one which directly engages the relationship between content and pedagogy and explicitly deals with issues of social studies pedagogy. This was an important consideration for a study focusing on those very issues. Second, SSED 312 is the only mandatory course for all students wishing to teach secondary social studies (whether as a single-, or double-teaching concentration. SSED 324, on the other hand, is an elective, and SSED 317 is a requirement only for those with a single social studies concentration. As I wanted my sub-sample group to include students with a second teaching concentration outside of social studies (see explanation in "selection of participants"), this, too, became a consideration for preferring SSED 312 as the site for my study. Third, SSED 312 takes place at the beginning of the program while SSED 324 is only offered toward its completion. Choosing SSED 324 would have prevented me from connecting my study to the practicum which takes place prior to SSED 324. Fourth, SSED 312 is a double credit course (six weekly instructional hours rather than three in both other courses). This enabled me to double interaction and data-collection opportunities. Fifth, SSED 312 met three times a week (SSED 317 only one a week) and met for an entire semester (where as SSED 324 is a three-week course). Conducting research in SSED 312 thus provided a more regular and 51 continuous interaction with student-teachers over a longer period of time. Last (and probably not least), while I took all three social studies education courses mentioned above in my own teacher education, SSED 312 (taught, at the time, by someone other than Peter) was by far the most invigorating. It challenged my previous understanding of social studies education and stimulated me to think otherwise. As I was looking for a course that might engage the participants in my study similarly (even though I know courses never replicate themselves), my tendencies naturally gravitated toward this social studies education course rather than another . Why this methods course? Three sections of SSED 312 were offered in the Fall of 1996: two by Peter, the third by one of his graduate students. Common sense would have (and should have) directed my study toward the one section not taught by my own adviser. Nevertheless, I chose the "uncommon," the "non-sertsical." Several reasons led to that decision in spite of the inherent problematics embedded in a graduate student researching his own advisor (the problematics of that aspect are discussed in the next section): 1) My interest in studying how what teacher educators choose to do and not do structure possibilities for student-teachers' action and inaction in and beyond the university classroom meant that, to some degree, issues pertaining to the design of course curricula become a "curriculum" to be examined in this study. It was Peter who conceptualized the theme of the course (social studies as reading and writing texts), designed its curriculum, and selected its reading. Further, my focus was not only on the curriculum selected for this course but also on what pedagogy such a curriculum makes available and possible? How did pedagogy thought about and used in the course enable particular content to come to light? So while locating my research in the graduate student's classroom (the other section of the methods course) might have enabled me to look at issues pertaining to the course curriculum and to pedagogy (equally but separately), engaging the relationship between content and pedagogy the way I have thus far described, could best be done in the classroom taught by the course designer—someone who can respond to issues of its design—not simply its implementor. 52 2) Part of the focus of this dissertation is about the possibilities opened up for social studies teacher education and subsequently for social studies education in schools by current understandings in historiography and intellectual history (see Chapter VI). I was introduced to much of that literature while taking Peter's graduate course, Problems in historical understanding, a few months prior to this study. And while Peter might not have always shared my more radical views of what that literature might mean for social studies education, I was nevertheless confident some aspects of that literature would be infused into his section of the methods course. 3) From this study's conception, both Peter and I realized it would be a "critical" study (that is, a critical critique). The kind of "difficult" questions I ask in this dissertation were already familiar to Peter. They are similar to those I asked (and was encouraged and made comfortable to ask) in (and of) Peter's own graduate course. I highlight this point since Peter's approach to critique (in history and its teaching) and his openness to critique (of his own teaching) were important factors for choosing him both as advisor and subject for this study. We both share the view that critique is positive and educative in essence. And while studying someone with other tendencies toward critique might have made my research easier (and my methodology chapter much shorter), I was apprehensive that critique might be taken as criticism. That, I believed would have compromised my initial intention for this dissertation not becoming a "J'accuse!" but rather a conversational piece highlighting the unresolved and, to some degree, unresolvable dilemmas of educational practices and, at the same time, exploring what allows us to reach different conclusions about practice, differently.3 Combining these three aspects—being able to discuss the thinking behind the content and pedagogy applied in this course; connecting it to current understandings in history as possibilities for history education, and; the instructor's interest in critique—all made the kind of research I was hoping for both possible and real. Gaining access Following the required ethical review process to conduct research with "human subjects," initial permission to engage research with student-teachers was obtained from the Teacher Education Office at UBC—the administrative unit in-charge of, and responsible for, the teacher education program. Permission to collect data in the methods course was obtained directly from the course instructor and students. After 53 a short presentation at the end of the first class, in which I described my study to course participants, students were presented with two different consent forms (See Appendix A). The first form, subsequently signed by all 37 class participants, requested consent to visit, observe, take notes, and audio-tape class sessions. The second consent form was designed to recruit student-teachers for the in-depth, sub-sample group. This additional form (signed by 10 students) was required to: a) conduct one-on-one interviews; b) access student-teachers' written assignments, and; c) visit their classrooms and observe their teaching during the practicum. Introducing my research to students in the first class of the methods course and asking their permission to observe classes seemed natural and unproblematic at the time. But reflecting upon it, after the fact, I came to realize there was more than initially met my eye. Although I made every attempt while presenting the study to ensure students understand I was requesting their permission for a study rather than imposing one upon them, I now realize it was probably an "offer" students, particularly at that time, had little ability to refuse. What input, other than agreement and compliance, I now understand, could I have expected from a group of eager student teachers on the first day of their teacher education program? How feasible was it to expect anything else of students who had only moments ago walked into a classroom, who had barely introduced themselves to each other, and who had yet to forge alliances with any of their colleagues or establish themselves as members of a community? Could they have responded otherwise to a request that was allowed for, introduced and backed by their instructor, the person who, in many ways, represented the power of the institution, of the discipline, of the profession they were soon to be part of? Was there really a way for students, in those particular circumstances, to honestly exercise their democratic prerogative and actually say "NO"? There is little one can do to alter that, especially if one needs unanimous consent for a study in a three-month course, and not lose precious time to allow students a position from which they could say "NO". The question remains whether (and to what degree) researchers, whose research is dependent on such consent, use that as a strategy to ensure participants don't have the opportunity to actually say that "No"? Further, one might ask, as Street (1998) does, "How informed is informed consent?" (p. 150). When we invite participants to take part in a study, claims Street, "we are ethically bound to acquaint them with all the potential issues that their involvement might entail. This assumes in [researchers] a capacity of foresight which requires a reliable crystal ball" (ibid.). But as Street explains, in critical research such as my own, "the outcome is never predictable. The outcome will be redefined as the emergent issues are addressed. If we are unsure of where our research activities will take us how can we provide informed consent to those we travel the research journey with?" (ibid.) 54 Gaining access to schools in which student-teachers in this study were to conduct their practicum was facilitated by the Teacher Education Office at UBC. The Associate Dean of the Teacher Education sent preliminary letters explaining my research and requesting general consent from the six principals and ten sponsor teachers (four of the six student-teachers had more than one sponsor teacher). Following a favourable responses from all, I entered the picture and forwarded my own letters of introduction and consent forms. In addition to permission to visit their classrooms, sponsor teachers were also asked to participate in a (no more that) one-hour one-on-one interview in order to explore their expectations of student-teachers during the practicum. Only two sponsor-teachers, both sponsoring the same student-teacher (Jocelyn), declined to be interviewed. Data collection Data collection (and I use this term reductively) techniques included: a) ethnographic observations, field-note taking, and audio-taping during the methods course; b) tape-recorded, one-on-one, in-depth interviews with each of the six student-teachers, their sponsor teachers, and the course instructor; c) analysis of all documents, resources, and readings pertaining to or used in the social studies methods course as well as all assignments written during the course by the six student-teacher participants. Documents collected during the practicum comprised those student-teachers elected to provide (lesson plans or resources used in or for teaching); d) a variety of less formal exchanges such as face-to-face, e-mail, or telephone conversations (with participants' permission, some of these were audio-taped) initiated by me or by the participants. This emergent construct which Weinstein & Weinstein (1991) refer to as a bricolage —"a pieced-together, close-knit set of practices that provide solutions to a problem in a concrete situation" (p. 161. cf. Denzin & Lincoln, 1994, p. 2)—allowed me to both look at the site as a whole and at the relationships within the different elements that comprise that whole (Janesick, 1994, p. 212). It also served as a form of triangulation, "reflecting an attempt to secure an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon in question" (Denzin & Lincoln, 1994a, p. 2) and allowed for both thick ethnographic descriptions (Geertz, 1973) and dense conceptualizations for generating theories (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). 55 Data-collection in the methods course Field-notes were taken throughout the duration of the methods course. Audio-taping classroom interactions began on the fourth class (Sept. 11, 1996) after all participants had returned their signed consent forms. Using a tape-recorder proved to be invaluable for three main reasons. First, going into this study with "hunches" rather than with fully articulated and specific research questions made it difficult, at the start, to determine what data might eventually become significant at its end. Having full transcriptions of all classroom interactions enabled me to make such "editorial" decision when I was ready to do so, rather than under the pressure of events taking place in front of my eyes, as they occurred. Indeed, chunks of data I thought were insignificant at the start turned out to be very significant as my research shifted, changed, evolved, as new data added to, contradicted, corroborated, or shed new and different light on old data, continuously shifting its significance for and position in my research. Second, knowing that this piece of technology was going to take verbatim care of classroom exchanges allowed me to focus on broader aspects entailed in conducting an ethnography. Rather than fiercely transcribing classroom talk, I was freed to explore the broader issues such as context, non-verbal discourse, the meta-, and sub-discourse, making connections between what was said and what was done, exploring how things were said rather than merely on what was said. Third, in a methods course where much of students' work was conducted in small groups, having the tape recorder allowed me to place it with one group while taking notes with another. This not only increased my data collection abilities but, more importantly, allowed me to compare how things were handled in different groups at the same time. Interviews Six in-depth one-on-one interviews were conducted with student teacher participants. Most of them took place face-to-face. Some, however, due to temporary geographical obstacles toward the end of the study, were conducted over the phone. Three of the six interviews were conducted during the methods course (one at the beginning, one in the middle, and one after the final exam), two during the practicum (the first in the middle, the second toward its end), and one interview at the completion of their entire teacher education program while they were back at UBC. Interviews served three principal means of gathering information: 1) to access respondents' personal knowledge otherwise not available to the researcher in a large group environment; 2) to test and suggest hypotheses or as an explanatory device to 56 help identify themes and relationships; 3) to be used in conjunction with other methods to follow-up unexpected results, validate other methods, or deepen the understanding of particular actions, processes taken by individuals (Cohen & Manion, 1994, p. 273). In particular, these one-on-one interviews were opportunities for students to reflect on what went on in the methods course; to make connections between the methods course and the teacher education program in general; to articulate their thoughts and understandings about the culture of teaching and learning, about the need for and the role of social studies education, about their wants, expectations, and aspirations as well as those put upon them both as students and teachers, about the structures and conditions of schooling, about the goals of, and their own goals for, education.4 In-depth interviews—some lasting more than two hours—were important in engaging students' thinking about some of the above issues in-and-of-themselves rather than simply as a follow up to classroom events. That is, since my research intended to explore both the utterances and silences in the methods course and in students' thinking about it, these interviewed served to bring those silences into the open, expose, and deconstruct them for what they say, for what they attempt to conceal. Interviews were also important in connecting the world of the methods course to that outside of it. For example, my purpose in learning about how the teacher education program in general (or other courses in particular) connected to, built upon, differed from, or contradicted what was taking place in the methods course was not to document what took place in these courses (this was beyond the scope of my research) but rather to explore the residue it left, the impact it had on student-teachers' understanding of teaching, learning, and social studies. It was student-teachers' thinking about and connections made between those courses and the methods course that I was able to engage during these in-depth interviews. The same approach was taken regarding student-teachers' teaching during the practicum. The purpose of my visits to their classrooms was to familiarize myself with their environment, to better understand what they say during our in-depth interviews which followed, to contextualize their own thinking about their teaching, about what enables or constrains their particular versions and visions of social studies education. To do so, interviews were very loosely structured. While I always came into each interview with a prepared list of questions, those questions were often abandoned as conversation evolved. I often opened interviews by asking students what was on their minds and took it form there, at times going in unexpected 57 directions, at other times periodically inserting my pre-determined questions as (and if) those became relevant to the conversation students themselves initiated. I found this kind of exchange—what Holstein & Gubrium (1995) call The active interview —to be most effective in accommodating my research goals as well as my own understanding of my role as researcher and the relationship with the researched. The traditional uni-directional model of interviews "as a one-way passage of knowledge from interviewee to interviewer" ( Limerick, et al., 1996, p. 456) did not correspond to what took place in those interviews. Rather, as Holstein & Gubrium (1995) point out, interviews were a form of collaborative interpretive practice involving respondent and interviewer as meaning makers rather than as askers and tellers.5 Anchored within the parameters of the research topic as well as my particular objectives and questions, this model of active interviewing rejects the image of respondents as "vessel[s] waiting to be tapped in favor of the notion that the subject's interpretive capabilities must be activated, stimulated, and cultivated" (p. 17). While not intentionally leading students to preferred responses but nevertheless leading them to respond, the active interview encourages respondents to enter into and shift positions in order to consider and explore predominant and alternate perspectives resulting in the production of a range and complexity of meanings. "Rather than searching for the best or the most authentic answer," claim Holstein & Gubrium (ibid.), "the aim is to systematically activate applicable ways of knowing—the possible answers—that respondents can reveal, as diverse and contradictory as they might be" (p. 37). In that sense, they add, the active interviewer "intentionally, concretedly, provokes responses by indicating—even suggesting— narrative positions, resources, orientations, and precedents for the respondent to engage in addressing the research questions under consideration" (p. 39). Reading documents Documents used for data collection comprised the course outline and readings (See Appendix B), all resources and documents brought into the methods course, all assignments (and final exam) written by students in the sub-sample group throughout the methods course. Beyond the methods course, document data collection included the faculty of education teaching evaluation form and all materials (lesson plans and resources) provided by student-teachers in the sub-sample group during their practicum (some related directly to the lessons I observed during my visits, others were examples of what they had done in the past or will be 58 doing in the future). As Hammersley & Atkinson (1983) suggest, documents were read not simply as a source of data but as social products, focusing on the "interpretive and interactional work that went into their production" (p. 137). Data Analysis Post-fieldwork data analysis procedures comprised four stages: a) transcription of all audio-taped data of classroom interaction and interviews (1500 typed pages: Palatino, point 12); b) reviewing transcribed data—becoming familiar with it, thinking about, with, and against it—resulting in the creation of themes or categories of analysis and interpretation (clusters of meaning); c) codification of data and selection of data according to established themes and categories; d) cross-category analysis and member-responses. While all phases of data analysis are significant to final meaning-making, the second stage—reviewing transcribed data—was perhaps the most significant. This phase of data analysis was the longest, most frustrating, and ultimately the most interesting. As Hammersley and Atkinson (1983) point out, this phase of the research is directed at a careful reading [and re-reading, and re-reading ...] of the data collected up to that point, i n order to gain a thorough familiarity w i th it. A t this stage the aim is to use data to think w i th . One looks to see whether any interesting patterns can be identif ied; whether anything stands out as surprising or puzzling; how the data relate to what one might have expected on the basis of common-sense knowledge [or experience], official accounts, or previous theory; and whether there are any apparent inconsistencies or contradictions among the views of different groups or individuals, or between people's expressed beliefs or attitudes and what they do. (p. 178) Although this "tidy" model is perhaps representative of data analysis procedures in this study, it is less representative of the actual procedure of data analysis. Two issues lie at the heart of the problematic. First, locating data analysis as a post-fieldwork activity, and second, the separation between data-analysis categories: 1) I used the term "post"-fieldwork analysis to highlight the notion that there is also pre-, and in-fieldwork analysis; that analysis does not begin when fieldwork is over but rather is embedded in every aspect of research. As Hammersley & Atkinson (1983) point out, "data analysis is not a distinct stage of the research. It begins in the pre-field work phase, in the formulation and clarification of research problems, and continues into the process of writing up" (p. 174). 2) Data analysis never actually took this (or any other) orderly form. Meaning-making was a messy process characterized by detours, re-tours and re-turns where what took place in one category continuously leaked into another, blurring the difference between them. The division of categories, their progression and apparent neatness in this model 59 conceal more than they reveal. The transcription of data or their interpretation, categorization, and analysis were not (and never are) independent, discrete, separate, successive aspects of research; each harmonized and disrupted the other as they took place concurrently. Choice of participants While designing this study, I had determined the sub-sample group would comprise six. There was nothing magical about that particular number, though I hoped six would ensure the continuation of the study should one or two student-teachers drop out for some reason. Further, I believed six would be a small enough sample to be manageable and, at the same time, large enough to incorporate as much of a diversity of gender, race, age, experience, and academic background as possible. While all course participants consented to my visiting the class on a regular basis and audio-taping its sessions (that is, they signed consent form #1), only 10 of the 37 students in the class volunteered to be part of the in-depth part of this study (that is, they signed consent form #2). Those ten students were all white, all between 25-30, and (from the interactions I had with them prior to making my decision) all seemed to be Canadian born and educated. English seemed to be their native (and probably only) tongue (though I did find out later that two not only spoke but taught Japanese). They all appeared to come from a middle-class background. All of the above characteristics were not unrepresentative of the large group either. There were only five visible minority students in this class of 37 (that is visible in my eyes, according to my definition of what constitutes visible difference). Throughout the three months of the methods course, only one student publicly referred to himself as First Nations; only one student (and once only) publicly identified herself as Jewish, only one as a Sikh. And although gender was almost balanced in the large group of students taking the Social studies methods course (20 males, 17 females), seven of the ten volunteers for my in-depth study (the sub-sample) were female, three were male. Wishing to explore how (or whether) gender plays in this study, I wanted to ensure a gender balance within the six-member sample group (I return to issues of gender in this study in my concluding chapter). That meant all three male volunteers would automatically be included. The possibility of including one of the seven female volunteers was eliminated since she had requested to do her practicum outside the Greater Vancouver region, which would have prevented her from participating in the school-based part of the research. Hoping to include a variety of academic backgrounds in order to explore their potential impact on how participants engage 60 social studies education within and after the methods course, the choice of three of the six remaining females was thus determined by their undergraduate and future teaching concentrations (beyond a background in history which was common to most of them). One of the male students already selected had a background in political science, another in anthropology, the third in human kinetics. To complement that, I chose one female with a background in English, another in geography, and the third in international relations. The last element determining my choice of participants included the observations I was able to make of the ten volunteers in the first four classes prior to the beginning of the one-on-one interviews. One of the issues I wanted to explore was how, when, and to what degree students challenge and are challenged by classroom interactions in the course. So while it was tempting to include more "outward" and "vocal" students, my exploration of the silences as well as the utterances in the course and knowing that utterances also come in the form of silences, I decided to deliberately include what I, at the time, thought were "quieter," more restrained students from the volunteering group.6 My role as researcher Schumacher & McMillan (1993), among others, claim ethnographers choose a role— observer, observer-participant, participant-observer, participant—depending on the levels of involvement and the degrees to which the researcher's presence affects the context under study. Atkinson & Hammersley (1994), on the other hand, blur those distinctions and state all ethnographers are participant-observers since one cannot study a social context without being part of it. This, they claim, derives from the fact that being a participant-observer is not "a particular research technique but a mode of being-in-the-world characteristic of researchers" (p. 249). While I subscribe to Atkinson & Hammersley's notion that participation is not a method but a way of being, the degree of participation is, to a large degree, a choice made by (or for) the ethnographer. Critical ethnographers, for example, do not simply participate through observation if they wish to enable praxis, but do so through action. By actively encouraging participants to critically re-examine the conditions in which and under which they come to make meaning of experience, critical ethnographers actively choose to critically engage both the whats and hows—the content and pedagogy—of research and (and in) its context. Although Peter and I had carefully discussed my research in numerous conversations and both agreed on its critical approach, it was only when I actually 61 7 began my research that I realized that what we had fleshed-out in all those conversations pertained to the content of my research—that is, what would be studied—in the methods course rather than to how it would be studied. To some degree, the differences between the level of participation advocated by the approaches mentioned above were illustrative of how Peter and I each saw my role in this study differently. For Peter, it seemed to me, it was one of removed observation and non-action. For me it was active participation and praxis. While not "critical" by definition, the model of research upon which I was basing my understanding of what ethnographers do was a study conducted in one of the doctoral seminars in which I was a participant (Geddis, 1997). There, the researcher was an active participant in the research context, actively participating in classroom interactions, always positioned to engage participants in meaning-making, not simply actively making meaning of what unfolded in front of him. Yet, being a guest in Peter's classroom, it was his rather than my understandings of what and how ethnographers should and should not do or be that ultimately took precedence. I use an example from the first class in this course to illustrate not only how our visions of research differed but also, and in accordance with the general focus of this dissertation, to highlight how Peter's actions positioned me, as they positioned students regarding social studies, to research in particular ways. While initially no specific directions were given by Peter as to how or where to behave as a researcher in his classroom, the ratio between how much "observation" and how much "participation" was expected of me soon became apparent. As students were taking their seats around the U-shaped desk arrangement at the beginning of the first class, I took one of the end seats and sat beside them. By doing that, I was hoping, at least in some minor way, to establish this study as one which inquires side-ways rather than down. I was mdicating I was part of the course, exploring its experiences as an insider, not an outsider; one who will be conducting research with, not on them (McLaren, 1990). But as Peter walked around the room that first class, repeatedly handing out the course outline and other materials to course participants, my desk was clearly and continuously by-passed. A similar situation took place at the beginning of the second class when Peter handed out blank name tags to students (but not to me). With each student having written his/her name and proudly displaying it, a name-game was played in which student after student, as they went around the room, repeated the names of all preceding students. When my turn arrived, however, Peter, who, through eye 62 recognition and name-calling was directing the game, hurried to mention the name of the student sitting closest to me, thereby excluding my participation. And while I'm sure Peter's intentions (in both instances) were noble and probably attempted to define my space with his (for he too did not participate in the game, only directed it) his actions nevertheless continued to build an invisible wall between me and the students where I was sitting on one side of it (with Peter, perhaps), they on the other. [STf (second Text). Peter: "In retrospect, I think that I wanted to limit your disruptions of the class—in part to serve my agenda as instructor, but also to protect you from the potential impatience of students . . . . You imply that I should have treated you more as another student in the course. Is that what you mean?" (July, 1998). Avner: At the time, the issue for me was not whether I was considered a student (which obviously I was not) but rather the degree to which I, as a non-student, was able to become part of the "group," to research from inside even while being, by definition, an outsider (August, 1998).] "What message was this sending students about me, about my research?" I thought. What was it telling me about my expected role as researcher in this classroom? Was I expected to become the silent, outside observer, the "fly-on-the-wall" ethnographer? Part of the answer came in a conversation Peter and I had following the first class in which I introduced myself and my research to students. Worried I might have revealed too much during that introduction, Peter suggested I withhold my agenda from them; that we both be careful not to reveal too much or be as transparent as we had been since that might "colour" my results. The message was one for disassociation from participants rather than active engagement with them. As a result, and trying to accommodate Peter's expectations of how and where I should be researching, I did find myself moving closer to the "wall." By the second class, I had situated my chair outside the U-shape area of students' desks. Sitting outside that formation/seeing their backs rather than faces and taking notes behind students desks, I was somehow no longer part of the "event." I had become an observer, indeed, I had become a "fly-on-the-wall ethnographer." Other than moving into the physical centre once every class to switch over the tape in my tape-recorder, I was pretty much part of the decor. And although I did move to sit with students whenever they worked in groups, and some (very few) times did activate their thinking by asking a question or directing their attention to or from something, my participation in those groups, beyond a physical presence, was also made problematic. In one particular class, the group I was sitting with had been bogged down for over 10 minutes trying to complete an assignment, yrt not able to do so due to a problem in its design. I suggested they 63 approach Peter. After much hesitation, one of the students eventually did. Peter immediately acknowledged the problem inherent in the design and ended the activity. And yet, referring to the fact that it was a member of this particular group who had questioned the activity, Peter also addressed the class and, in one of the only times he ever acknowledged my presence in any public way, asked, somewhat jokingly: "Is it a coincidence that Avner is sitting with that group?" (In-class transcripts, Oct. 11,1996). Yet, while Peter's understanding of my role as a researcher in the methods course might have limited my critical and active participation as to how and when to study, it is important to emphasize that he did nothing but encourage the critical and active aspects of what I was studying. Outside of the methods course, however, I was able to bring the what together with the how which, in my view, is the basis for critical ethnography. Researching outside the methods course I was now able to be critical not only about the content of my research but also about its pedagogy. Hiding my agenda from participants was not an ethically, politically, or methodologically viable option in a study that wishes to bring to light the hidden agenda of learning to teach. Encouraging students to explore the politics of silence and absence in what was said and make it speak, could I leave my own politics absent and mute? Having students interrogate the gaps and fissures between what was said and what was done within and outside the methods course, could I privilege my own research from such an examination? Asking students during interviews to critically read their own experiences in the methods course and in the practicum as texts, could I afford not to encourage them to read my own research as text? Not hiding my agenda, however, was not only the result of feeling my research should not be privileged, exempt from critical investigation. In some sense, the focus of my research did not leave me much choice. In order to bring absences in the curriculum of teacher education to light, to make the silences of social studies education speak, one cannot simply ask students to describe their experience; that is, to state what happened. To explore such issues one has to consider why things happened, what made them happen (or not happen), how they could have happened otherwise. These kinds of issues do not arise from thin air; they do not surface from initial responses. Instead, they require taking the necessary perspective to be explored; they often require a re-positioning in order to re-think what we normally consider natural, neutral, and taken for granted. They are, like any other question, embedded in politics. But unlike questions which attempt to conceal their 64 origin, these questions are not able (and do not wish) to hide behind the politics of neutrality. Not wishing to hide my research agenda did not mean I deliberately and blatantly told participants what it was. Implicitly, however, I, as any researcher, could not avoid doing so. "[Disclosure by the interviewer," warn Limerick, et. al., (1996), "may color the text in unknown ways" (p. 456). Perhaps. But this implies that non-disclosure does not color the text and/or that it colors the text in known ways. Research interactions are inherently unpredictable whether one does or does not disclose one's intentions. Further, meaning of (and meanings in) research interactions are socially and contextually activated and constructed. Who we are and anytliing we do (and do not do) as researchers colors our text. Our choice of research focus, of research context, of participants in order to engage that context all indicate our "agenda" and color our text. The language we use, the nature and sequence of questions and follow-up questions we ask and how we ask them, the tone in which we ask them and the non-verbal language which accompanies them, all invite specific data and a particular quality of data. So do our choice of location for interaction with participants, the time of day, the lighting, the decor, the noise level, the presence of others, the existence of particular distractions, the history of past interactions with a particular participant, and the list continues. Consequently, and returning to Limerick, et. al., while non-disclosure may color the text otherwise, color it, nevertheless, it will. Limerick, et. al.'s (1996) warning also implies that the text (of and as research interaction) has some original, natural, essential color of its own which the researcher strives to capture. But there are no essential, natural, colorless meanings untainted by the interaction between the researcher and the researched. In the eventuality that any of the factors mentioned above changes, so changes the text we inscribe. There is no getting at participants' "authentic" experience for there is no such thing. Nor is their description of experience unsituated in a particular context. What participants say to one researcher will differ from what they say to another. What participants say to the same researcher at one point will differ from what they say at another. There is no discrepancy among those tellings for there is no one telling of experience. We live multiple and multi-layered narratives simultaneously. What we choose to tell whom, and how we choose to do so is, again, dependent on a multitude of elements, some we are consciously aware of, others we are not, some we wish to and/or can articulate, others we don't and/ or cannot (see Scheurich, 1995). 65 With that understanding in mind, I was not simply looking for students' authentic (that is, initial) responses during our interviews. Rather my focus was to orchestrate an interrogation of participants' responses, to position them to re-think those responses and (and in connection to) the context from which they originated. While it was not my intention to direct students what to say, I wished to deliberately direct them to say, to re-think and re-articulate their environment and their understandings of it, differently. The unholy trinity: validity, reliability, and generalizability A "credible qualitative study," according to Janesick (1994, citing Patton, 1990), must address the question: "what techniques and methods were used to ensure the integrity, validity, and accuracy of the findings?" (p. 216). To respond, I discuss three other terms circulating in the literature in research methodology: generalizability, reliability, and validity. I do so, to a large degree, in a discourse not of my own. Hence, I say "discuss" rather than use these terms because while I conjure them, coming from a critical ethnographic research perspective they are as problematic as some of the terms found in Janesick's otherwise important question. For while all scholarly work is no doubt concerned with issues of credibility, integrity, validity, and accuracy, what do those terms entail in critical qualitative work? Credible according to whom? Can findings ever be "accurate" ? What does accuracy mean? Is there a "correct" interpretation of any phenomenon? (See, as Janesick, suggests, Wolcott, 1990 on the problematics of validity in a world of no single interpretation). As Scheurich (1996) claims, although postpositivist researchers have repeatedly declared conventional social science dead," have refuted its practices, and "have been quite willing to dump conventional science," many of them still "frame or justify their (usually qualitative) work within traditional (usually quantitative) truth standards" (pp. 50-51). So while I take the liberty to question the need for the "holy trinity" in this dissertation, the fact that I have to discuss the terms it comprises (even as I refute them) is illustrative, to build upon Scheurich, of the idea that while qualitative research has very much disassociated itself from quantitative practices, the discourse which it finds necessary to validate itself proves how little it has Semiotics, Fiske (Ethnosemiotics) points out, "tells us that what is absent from a text is as significant as what is present." For the ethnographer, however, adds Fiske, 'this poses a methodological problem. Should I have drawn my subjects' attention to it and thus 'called up1 a use of the discourse that they, for whatever reasons, had chosen to ignore or repress?" (P- 96) 66 actually moved away from quantitative discourse about truth. Within that discourse, nevertheless, I proceed. Aspects pertaining to the reliability (how well my research could be replicated) and generalizability (how well my research applies to other cases) should be addressed via an examination of whether my methodologies and research strategies are clear, coherent, and effective enough to obtain the appropriate data and explanations that could describe and theorize the issues and methods under consideration in both general and in-depth terms which readers can recognize as applicable and relevant to other—their own—contexts. Validity in qualitative research, Janesick (1994) states, "has to do with description and explanation, and whether or not a given explanation fits a given description. In other words, is the explanation credible?" (p. 216). However, for those interested in "questions of meaning and interpretation in individual cases," cases such as my study has produced, Janesick (ibid.) adds, tradit ional th ink ing about generalizability falls short. ... The whole history of case study research .... stands sol idly on its o w n merit. In fact, the value of the case study is its uniqueness; consequently, reliability in the traditional sense of replicability is pointless here, (p. 217) Thus, for the kind of study I have conducted, the issue is its uniqueness rather than its replicability or reliability. While any other researcher could study the UBC Teacher Education Program or the social studies methods course (or their equivalents), what is rendered significant in this study (as in any other) is not the ability to re-do it but what is revealed in the doing—the result of a particular coming together of a researcher, the researched, and the research context. Differences among how different researchers might describe and analyze a similar research environment are not necessarily the result of a failed measure of reliability. As Flinders and Eisner (1994) put it, "variation in what critics see and how they understand it is not a weakness but a strength, if those working in the field genuinely value a range of perspectives from which to view education" (p. 349). Where generalizability does come to play in qualitative research, however, is through extrapolation. The purpose of qualitative research is not to show how one particular study connects to other situations but rather to provide a thick enough description (Geertz, 1973), interpretation, analysis, and theory about it so that readers can make their own connections to other similar and non similar cases. "The value of such research," add Flinders & Eisner (1994), 67 lies in its capacity to produce a multi-tiered description. Put crudely, by describing in some depth what once happened, it sensitises the reader to many possibilities of what might happen under future similar (though never identical) circumstances. Arguably, it therefore has in practice exactly the same effect as supposedly more highly predictive research: reading i t has an effect on an individual practitioner in education who responds, and thus behaves, differently as a result in certain situations, (pp. 349-350) To address issues of validity in this study, I use Lather's (1986) model which includes four aspects of validity: triangulation, construct validity, face validity, and catalytic validity. The first aspect of validity according to Lather is triangulation. Triangulation is important to establish "data-trustworthiness" and must include "multiple data sources, methods, and theoretical schemes" (p. 270). I have already discussed the different theoretical schemes employed (or deployed) throughout this study both in this and the previous chapter. I will therefore proceed to discuss data sources and methods. Triangulation of data, Hammersley & Atkinson (1983) explain, "involves the comparison of data relating to the same phenomenon but deriving from different phases of the field work, different points in the temporal cycles occurring in the setting, or, as in [member checking], the accounts of different participants (including the ethnographer) involved in the setting" (p. 198). "What is involved in triangulation," they add, "is not the combination of different kinds of data per se, but rather an attempt to relate different sorts of data in such a way as to counteract various possible threats to the validity of [one's] analysis" (p. 179). In this study, data was therefore triangulated by: a) applying a variety of methods (i.e., direct ethnographic observations, field note-taking, audio-recording, in-depth interviewing, document analysis) for a long period of time (11 months); b) converging data gathered by different methods; c) comparing observations and responses between and among participants; d) comparing data from different phases of the research; e) comparing my findings with other research published in the area; f) conducting an extensive member-checking, member editing, and member-commenting procedures as interpretations and concluding theories emerged into a text (Ely et al., 1991, p. 97. Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995, pp. 230-232; Flinders & Eisner, 1994, p. 354). The second aspect in Lather's model is construct validity. Construct validity—defined by Hammersley & Atkinson (1983) as "the validity of lines of inference running between data and concepts" (p. 184)—engages how or whether empirical work operates 68 wi th in a conscious context of theory-building. Where are the weak points of the theoretical t radi t ion we are operating wi th in? Are we extending theory? Revising it? Testing it? Corroborating it? Determining that constructs are actually occurring, rather than they are merely inventions of the researcher's perspective, requires a self-critical attitude toward how one's own preconceptions affect the research. (Lather, 1986, p. 271) Attempting to respond to Lather's questions in the context of this research would inevitably deal with concepts (constructs) such as education, teaching, pedagogy, content, gender, multiculturalism, history, critical thinking, etc. (all of which I will discuss further on);Defining whether my discussion of these issues in this study has extended theory, revised, tested, or corroborated it, is complex and problematic. While a declaration stating that all—that is, extending, revising, testing, and corroborating of theories—have been somehow and somewhere done in this study may be sufficient for a chapter on methodology, a test of its validity can only be conducted by engaging its content. As for the notion of reflexivity on the part of the researcher in order to indicate how his/her own preconceptions affect the research, what I have stated in the introduction to this dissertation, what I have revealed thus far, and what I will reveal as this dissertation unfolds, all pertain to the kind of self-critical attitude for which Lather calls. But as is the case in illustrating how one deals with theory, reflexivity cannot be illustrated in abstraction from the issues about which one becomes reflexive. It needs to be engaged throughout and as it arises within the study. Further, reflexivity, by definition, calls for an interplay between indicators (constructs) and the conceptualization of analytic categories. As Hammersley & Atkinson (1983) explain, one of the problems construct validity takes in ethnography is that there is an interplay between f inding indicators and conceptualizing the analytic categories. This derives f rom the inductive, reflexive character of ethnography where the process of analysis involves the simultaneous development of constructs and indicators to produce a 'fit' between the two. It is only when the analysis is wr i t ten up that the relationship between concept and indicator becomes an asymmetrical one, w i th the latter serving as evidence that the claims made by means of the concept are valid, (p. 185) Nevertheless, while the reflexive nature of ethnography might make "proving" construct validity problematic, self-reflexivity (which Lather advocates) is an important factor in determining the relationship between research and theory whereby researchers, as I have, use theory not in order to impose or direct research but rather to dialectically engage with and within the research context in order to question the role of theory in the construction both of what we study and how we study what we study. 69 The third aspect of validity according to Lather is face validity. Face validity is tied directly to construct validity. In the broad sense, face validity pertains to the question whether a study presents a "description sufficiently 'thick' to provide a compelling image of what was observed? To use a legal metaphor, is there a preponderance of evidence?" (Flinders & Eisner, 1994, p. 354). Or, as Kidder (1982) describes, "[r]esearch with face validity provides a 'click of recognition' and a 'yes, of course' instead of 'yes, but' experience" (p. 56. cf. Lather, 1986, p. 271). "Face validity," claims Lather (1986), "is operationalized by recycling description, emerging analysis, and conclusions back through at least a sub-sample of respondents [member checking]." And, using Reason & Rowan, (1981, p. 248), Lather adds, '"Good research .... goes back to the subjects with the tentative results, and refines them in light of the subjects' reactions'" (p. 271). Within that categorization, my study could, with all modesty, be considered even better than good. While I recycled my texts to all six student-teacher participants as well as to Peter, this study has gone two steps further. First, and in accordance with the notion that translation of participants' voice (from oral, conversational to formal print) requires more than mere transcription in order to occupy a quality (though never a position of authority) equal to that of the voice of the ethnographer, I encouraged participants to edit their own voices in my text to their liking, in a fashion they wish to be represented (obviously without unsaying what they previously said). The second characteristic comes in the context of my desire to provide a polemic text which invigorates discussion rather than a univocal text which stifles conversation through the appearance of consensus. Instead of following Reason & Rowen's (1981) call to revise one's text in accordance with participants' comments (although I did do that to some degree), I chose to leave my text predominantly "as is" and locate participants' comments in a separate and somewhat autonomous space beside it [what I call the Second Text (indicated within the First Text by ST!)]. Rather than devour their comments into my text—thereby leaving no traces of their contestations, objections, additions, or comments, I selected to let them speak in their own words about my words about them, to pose an opposition to my own interpretations about the context we shared. This, I hoped, would have given participants a voice somewhat less subservient to my own than if I had chosen to inscribe their comments in my own words (although it inevitably always is). Second, I hoped it would not only open my own text to a interrogation and critique but would also keep that interrogation visible for other readers rather than hide that critique by incorporating it into the final text, thereby leaving little evidence of its 70 existence. In somewhat of a circular configuration, therefore, my description of their words and actions is circumscribed by their words about my words and actions about their words and actions. (I problematize the emancipatory aspects of creating a polyvocal text in the sub-sections "power relations and textual maneuvers").7 The fourth aspect of validity according to Lather is catalytic validity. Catalytic validity "represents the degree to which the research process reorients, focuses, and energizes participants toward knowing [that is, understanding] reality in order to transform it, a process Freire (1973) term[ed] conscientization" (Lather, 1986, p. 272). This, Lather adds, flies directly in the face of the positivist demands for researcher-neutrality. The argument for catalytic val id i ty is premised not only wi th in a recognition of the reality-altering impact of the research process, but also in the desire to consciously channel this impact so that respondents gain self-understanding and, ult imately, self-determination through research participation, (ibid.) While the purposes of my research are perhaps more modest—both in outcome and tone—it nevertheless fully incorporates the underlying assumptions about the role of research laid out above. In accordance with (one of) Lather's (1986) definitions of praxis, I was seeking to increase participants' "awareness of the contradictions hidden or distorted by everyday understandings," and in so doing "direct attention to the possibilities for . . . transformation inherent in the present configuration of social [and professional] processes" ( p. 259). To what degree my research enabled participants to re-think experience in order to know reality differently is ultimately up to participants to decide. And while I leave much of what participants had to say about the catalytic aspects of this study to a discussion in the concluding chapter, the following might serve as some indication. Jack, one of the student teachers participating, in this study, claimed that through our conversations I'd realize that maybe I wasn't th inking about it [Peter's course] the way I wanted to and had taken things at face value and just accepted things. . . As soon as I wou ld sort of become accepting and set in what I wanted to think, I'd talk to you . . . and realize that I wasn't really that comfortable w i t h what I was saying and it forced me to re-analyze things. (Interview #6, July 30, 1997) Ron, another participant, stated the study allowed him to examine his own situation from elsewhere. "By seeing somebody or by interacting with somebody who is observing the course, in a sense, from the outside," he said, "it allows me to do the same thing. I can step into your shoes for a moment and think about the same 71 questions you're asking [in our interviews]" (Interview #3, December 7, 1996). Jocelyn, a third participant, claimed the kind of questions I asked in this study were important because often we don't do enough analyzing of what it is that we think and w h y i t is that we think the way that we think. [I begin asking myself] is it really me saying this or that or is it that I've read it and can we get to [know] where that knowledge came from. Yeah! It's important. It's important to wrestle w i t h all of those things because you learn more about knowledge, you learn more about learning and even more about the situation and [ult imately] more about yourself in doing that. (Interview #3, December 11,1996) [ S T f Peter: "Following your own methodology, the students are now accepting your teaching. In other words, what happens when Avner conducts research on your research, and finds in students' acceptance of your lessons merely uncritical acquiescence masked as "critical pedagogy?" (July 25, 1998). Avner: This is an important observation, not simply because you identify the fact that students comply with my questions—an issue I have already addressed as problematic and one I address in the concluding chapter—but because you point to the very problematics embedded in much of the literature in/about critical pedagogy. As my work illustrates, I go much of the way with critical pedagogy. Where our paths depart, is precisely at the juncture you point to—"having problematized the world, you should now come up with an understanding that resembles mine." Or, "problematize everything other than my own methods of critical pedagogy with which I want you to problematize others." Indeed critical pedagogy does seek immunity for itself in the process of desanctifying everything else. And while the reason for doing so is one that I believe in, I do find that problematic. Yet, some of it, no doubt, nevertheless leaks into my own work.] While such statements do give some idea of the catalytic aspect of the study, as a researcher engaging methodology, I ought to do more than provide testimonies. What becomes essential in a chapter such as this is to explain not only the effects of the study but also how the methodology applied in this research enabled those effects—that is, praxis—to take place. For research to become praxis-oriented, Lather claims, it cannot be research-neutral. This means that research is not only about participants, it is also for them; it should allow them to learn and/or do something about their own context they were less able to do before. As I have already explained while discussing my role as a researcher, invoking the silences in and of the research context, and making them speak by having students address them and converse with them, is already a political act which encourages students not only to think about their environment differently but also to think differently about their environment. In that sense, I never saw my role as simply recording the events of the methods course and having students articulate their thoughts about them. Attempting to find out how the program positioned them—what it enabled and what it disabled, and how?—meant probing not only students' beliefs, thoughts, and 72 actions within the research context but also about that context, in a dialectical conversation with their situation rather than simply reporting about it. In addition, by stating that praxis oriented research cannot be research-neutral, Lather does not imply that there are two kinds of research—one which is neutral and one which is not. No research is ever neutral; it is always positioned and positioning. The difference therefore between what Lather identifies as praxis-oriented and "not praxis-oriented" research is the degree to which neutrality is claimed by the researcher. It is the overt attempt by the critical researcher to expose rather than hide one's positionality and agenda that make the difference. The reasons for conducting the study, the perspectives I brought into it, and those which guided it have, to some degree, already been made explicit in the introduction to this dissertation. But making those available only to readers after the (research) fact is not sufficient for a critical ethnographer who must also ensure research participants are also knowledgeable about where the research is coming from and in which direction it desires. While Peter was made aware of that through my research proposal and in the numerous conversations we conducted before, during, and after my research in his classroom was over, my agenda, as I already mentioned, was never hidden from student teachers either. It became apparent both through my questions and by repeatedly asking participants to openly read (and read into) my own research. Further, encouraging participants to read my research and myself as researcher as text ensured that this research was not granted immunity from questioning and critique and in some ways limited the imposition of my "emancipatory" ideas as unquestionable and unquestioned practice. As the following two examples show, participants were not only able to read my "agenda" very early on but were also able to pin-point some of the issues I would be focusing on as well as on some of my conclusions. Jack: You're try ing to f ind out how we think about what we're being taught. I m ink you're going to come up w i t h students' inability to question what we're being taught in the program and to look beyond what's being given to us. I mean we're no different than students i n the h igh school i n that we're accepting what's been taught and we're giving i t back to the teacher and g iv ing them what they want. I mean we're only able to trunk about teaching social studies w i t h i n the realm of what Peter has given us. I mean I am sitting here and tell ing you how social studies is all about reading and wr i t ing texts and pr imary source documents and not about citizenship education because we didn' t focus on that. So I think you're going to see our inabi l i ty to see that and recognize that and you w i l l probably like to see the program change more to encourage student-teachers to question that, to give us those skills that when those singers came in on the last class, we should have recognized that r ight off. A n d , I mean, I th ink our undergraduate degrees hopeful ly wou ld have trained us to do that better as well . I mean I th ink I only had one class in m y whole undergraduate degree that really challenged us to do that wel l and that's when I took a course at UBC last year. So when you're asking us all these questions, you're sort of looking at 73 how we approach social studies and how that has changed in the last four months. It's funny, I mean this interview is sort of a testament that it really hasn't changed a lot, except for in a very specific way that Peter has I guess focused us on so when we're teaching history and social studies we're going to t ry and give them lots of different texts and lots of different perspectives and encourage the students to look at them and understand the different perspectives involved so they don't accept everything they read as literal proof .. although we mostly d id ... which is w h y [he begins to laugh] i t makes me think that we're probably not going to be very successful at it. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) Ron: I have a sense that you are interested the hidden curr iculum that's presented in the teacher education program and its effect on student-teachers and whether what we talk about and say we value actually ends up being practiced. (Interview #3, December 7,1996) Power relations Power is inherent in every aspect of this research. To confine a discussion of power to a specific section in a methodology chapter is therefore problematic. This is especially so in a dissertation which focuses on the power to author and authorize particular versions of social studies education as its topic of investigation. What this section discusses, therefore, are only the most obvious power relation inherent in the methodology of this research, issues which pertain directly to how this research unfolded (or did not unfold) in particular ways. I will divide the discussion of power relations in two. I will begin by discussing power relations pertaining to the different participants and their role in this study and then move on to discuss those underlying the making of this research into a text—a dissertation. Hierarchies of power—the participants Embedded in complex relations of power, this study, to borrow from Schrijvers (1991), could best be described as an endeavour of studying up, studying sideways, and studying down. On the surface, such a hierarchy seemed rather obvious. We have a university professor, a doctoral student, and members of this professor's social studies methods course which are being researched by the professor's doctoral student. But to conclude that these established hierarchies ultimately determined power relations within this study or who was being studied up or down would be somewhat simplistic. Due to the ever changing (often conflicting) dynamics of power underlying this research project—where the advisor (of the dissertation) becomes the advisee (of his own practice investigated in the dissertation); where the researcher is under the supervision of (one of) the researched; where student-teachers participating in this study shift positions from student to teacher and back 74 to student (each with their own dis/ positions of power and privilege); and where, as participants in research that attempts to study with them rather than on them, student-teachers ultimately hold the key to data collection (and its evaluation, as I will explain further down)—traditionally recognized lines within and between hierarchies were naturally blurred, often re-configured. This, of course does not mean that power was equalized or that issues of power did not influence the study and its results. What it does mean, however, is that power—both the power to question and the power to impose answers—worked dialectically, resulting in power relations becoming, in some small way, more flexible and ambiguous, often more difficult to point to and determine. There were, however, some obvious relations of power that cannot go unacknowledged even if, when, and as hierarchies were being blurred. The most obvious: I was researching a methods course taught by my own advisor; where Peter, as advisor, has the ultimate power to authorize a dissertation about his own practice as subject. This naturally raises questions as to my ability to freely critique and report my findings. It also raises questions as to the ability of my advisor to disengage his own (teaching) practice and provide guidance for a study that looks into that very practice. Other questions pertain to power relations in which student-teacher participants were embedded. First was the issue of student-teachers' willingness and ability to freely share information (and critique) about a course which is taught by an instructor who not only do they know is my advisor but one who will also be assigning them a grade in this course, one to whom they might want to return in order to do graduate work further down the road. For example, I ask Jack if he wants to be known to readers of this dissertation by his real name or whether he would like to remain anonymous by using a pseudonym. He says he's not yet sure (though we later decided to use pseudonyms for all students). Beyond not always feeling pleased with the way he responded to my questions and therefore inclined to remain anonymous, Jack also says: I don't know what direction my education career is going to take, I mean, w h o knows? But i f my comments are attributed to [he gives his ful l real name] and I do sort of come out of this smelling a bi t l ike a butt-head, I mean, I don't want for, say, Peter Seixas w h o is d o w n the road going to be the head of the department of curr iculum studies, to go: "I mean he was a great student when he was here and he's a decent teacher but d id you read Avner's dissertation? The guy's an idiot!!!" [we both laugh]. (Interview #4, March 13,1997) The second aspect regarding power relations in which students were embedded pertained to questions about the relations of power inherent in the very act of 75 researching the Other and the "problematic of accountability to stories that belong to others" (Lather 1997, p. 1). How (or if) such issues were resolved in this study, again, cannot be determined beyond what readers make of it through what unfolds in the remainder of this dissertation. What I can do at this point, however, is discuss how my research addressed these issues in its design and methodology. In order to address both the relationship between myself as researcher and Peter as advisor, on the one hand, and Peter's own two roles as advisor and participant on the other, every attempt was made to ensure that the topic under consideration, the kind of questions which were to generate data collection, the venues and the techniques for data collection, and the ways in which data was to be handled were discussed and agreed upon prior to the beginning of this research. Further, the tone of the research, its critical perspective, and the theories which underlie it were also put openly on the table. Having developed such an understanding as well as one regarding the roles played out in this study all prior to and through the consolidation of this study's proposal, the possibility of having to re-negotiate the study and/or power relations in its midst was therefore reduced. Yet, while arriving at such understandings in advance might reduce the probability of power conflicts while research is already in motion, what determines how power is established, maintained, and regulated is ultimately based on the personality of the various actors, their own understanding of power, and where and how it ought to play during research much more than on the division or understanding of labour involved. In the same way that we go into our research context with "hunches," so we go into our relationships with advisors and participants. As I have already addressed elsewhere, it was Peter's ability during the graduate course I took with him earlier to separate critique about teaching from critique of his teaching and critique of his teaching from criticism about him as a teacher which led me to believe he would also be able to separate his role as advisor from that of participant in this research. Indeed, throughout this study, there was not one time where Peter imposed a direction as advisor which would benefit the way he might be reflected as participant. Not once did he sway me from exploring an issue I wished to explore. On the contrary, he often suggested other avenues I might want to pursue in order to engage the course at levels I perhaps might have not thought of, levels which would have exposed his teaching to more scrutiny than what I might have originally intended. Such aspects could not be built into the design of the study; it is who one chooses as advisor and participant that make it happen. 76 One aspect I did not anticipate during the design but one which came as an afterthought was that Peter's double role didn't only afford him double power, it also posed a limitation to that power which, to some degree, enabled me more leverage as a researcher. Having Peter's commitment to this study as advisor necessarily meant it would be very difficult for him to relinquish his commitment to it as participant, to end the study at will as readily as other participants might have had they felt compromised or dissatisfied. To some degree, this privilege was taken away from Peter as soon as he agreed to act in the double-role of advisor and participant. As for the ability of participants to freely express their views about an instructor whom they knew was my advisor and who was assigning them grades, the verdict is not in. Although participants knew I did all I could to ensure their anonymity and withheld their names or any data from Peter until the course was over and all students' grades had been handed in, it is difficult to know the degree to which those issues influenced disclosure in one-on-one interviews during the methods course. (Similarly, it is difficult to establish how much participants, knowing my relationship with Peter, used our interviews as a safe way to indirectly speak to, or "get back" at, him knowing their comments will only reach him once they were no longer under the realms of his power). As for my own relations of power with student-teacher participants, this research took various steps which, while not elirnmating power, had the potential, in some ways, to reduce (though not drastically alter) my power over them as the researched: 1) My own research agenda was very much put out in the open and my own research open to investigation and critique by student teachers. This enhanced two things. First, knowing where I, as a researcher, was coming from as well as the direction in which I was navigating helped to demystify both my role as researcher and the research project itself, thus helping blur the distinction, and the power inherent in that distinction, between a researcher who is "in the know" and the researched who are not. Second, by sharing my own critical comments about issues under investigation (i.e., social studies education, the methods course, the UBC Teacher Education Program and teacher education in general, schooling, etc.), I was not asking students to share their critical comments with a silent, non-critical, and disinterested researcher but, rather, a researcher who, by critiquing, invites students to act similarly, even if critique is directed toward me or my own research. (The 77 degree to which that did and did not take place is taken up in the Conclusion). [STU Avner: As in the case of the ever too small blanket shared by two on a cold winter's night, attempting to "cover" one issue of power always reveals another. Thus, while my own "sharing" might have encouraged students to do the same, as Gaalen Erickson noted in his comments to the first draft of this dissertation, "parading" my own knowledge during interviews might be problematic because that very act raises another form of power. The power of experience and knowledge and language which most of the students, I now realize, could have felt intimidated by.] 2) To reduce power relations inherent in the geography of research whereby a researcher is physically located outside of the group and studies in (providing a better overview and a critical distance), I attempted (though failed, as I have already explained) to situate myself as an insider studying from within by physically locating myself within the circle of students rather than outside of it. 3) While interviews were intended for data collection, I tried to make them as conversational as possible. Thus, while I was still the researcher and they the researched, I was as much a giver as a receiver; where information was shared and exchanged rather than collected; where, as much as possible, both sides were equal participants in the conversation and equally served by it. To do so, I encouraged students, and often created spaces for them, to pose questions, to interview me, to lead the discussion where they desired rather than in the direction my own questions were leading. To afford student-teachers more control over interviewing procedures, I also made sure that students were the ones to nominate the day, time, and location of interviews. "This was largely due to feeling indebted to the interviewees and the wish to inconvenience them as little as possible" (Limerick, et al., 1996, p. 453). 4) When visiting student teachers' classrooms during the practicum I made it very clear, both before I came and in the discussions that followed, that I was not there to evaluate their teaching, thus not adding that as another aspect of power. What I was interested in, and what we discussed during the interviews, was their thinking about their teaching and how they felt they were positioned (by Peter's course, by their sponsor teachers, faculty advisors, culture of schooling, etc.) to teach in particular ways. 78 5) Steps were also taken with regard to how students' voice was textualized in and through this dissertation. It pertains specifically to an attempt to reduce (though not solve) the problematics in the difference in the discursive form through which data is collected and that in which it is presented. The former is oral, the latter—written. The two, as Denzin (1995b) explains, are inherently different and cannot easily fit into the other. Yet, while both are conjured into the same print document, the words of the ethnographer are produced in the written form for a print text, those of the participants given essentially in oral language through conversation. Further, although the ethnographer produces words in and for the appropriate medium and, as author, is privileged by the ability to re-write, edit, re-consider, change, spruce, and polish his/her words before they go out into the world, the participant, traditionally, is not. What he/she said "in the field" remains it its "primordial" state which, while making perfect sense in the oral discourse it was meant for, may sound very different (inferior, incomplete, incoherent, often incomprehensible, even infantile) in the written document to which it is incorporated. While some ethnographers claim such practices maintain the authenticity of the participants' meanings or meaning-making, what it often amounts to is an issue of power. To try and eliminate that (or at least reduce it), member checking became more than a process in which participants were asked to validate /refute my representations and interpretations. Instead, I asked participants to edit their own words (those I, as author, ultimately selected), to restructure them, change them and remake them, not in order to alter their meaning but to better represent what they wished to convey through oral speech in this new print format they are currently housed.8 Granted, none of the above obliterate any of the inherent power relations in this kind of study but they were (at least I hope they were) an attempt to recognize those issues and a way to begin engaging them. The last and perhaps most significant feature to reduce power relations in this dissertation pertains to students' ability to comment on my own text from outside of it, that is, to create an interrogating text about my own text. I address that aspect in more detail in the next section. Textual maneuvers The wor lds we study are created, in part, through the texts that we wr i te about them. These texts are always dialogical, the site where the voices of the other, alongside the voices of the author, come alive and interact w i th one another . Thus the voices that are seen, and heard (if 79 only imaginatively), in the text are themselves textual accomplishments. (Denzin, 1995b, p. - 314) "Ethnographic writing of any kind," van Maanen (1988) tells us "is a complex matter, dependent on an uncountable number of strategic choices and active constructions (e.g., what details to include or omit; how to summarize or present data; what voice to select; what quotations to use)" (p. 73). As such, textual presentations of research are political statements about power, knowledge, and voice. They are illustrations of power to know and to be known, of power to voice or silence; of what, how, and whose voice counts, of what knowledge and ways of knowing are of most worth. Moreover, as an intertextual practice, an ethnography is "a montage (a mise en scene), a meeting place" (Denzin, 1995a, p. 13) where a variety of voices are assembled together in a complex intertextual practice (Tyler, 1987, p. 90), each providing context for others (Denzin, 1995a, p. 15). Some of these voices are those of the ethnographer, others derive from interviews and conversations with participants, and still others come from the relevant literature. It is in the bringing together of those voices into one text, one context that the politics of textualization come to light. Incorporating a postmodern, poststructural epistemology to conjure (some of) the voices ethnographers encounter, much of the current experimental work in ethnography—both in thinking about and examples of—has attempted to move away from the monological, univocal, reflective text of the realist era toward polyphonic or "acoustic texts, with fractured, overlaid, multiple soundtracks" (Denzin, 1995a, p. 17); texts which are termed "messy" or "noisy" (Schwartz, 1993, p. 1). In messy texts, Marcus (1994) explains, "there is a sense of a whole, without evoking [Tyler, 1986] totality" (p. 567). They evoke 'openness' rather than closure, adds Marcus: first, by offering a multiple (or what Bakhtin called a parallax) of voices, several interpretations, varying stands within, not necessarily subservient to, the ethnographer's own interpretations and constructions of meaning, and; second, by signaling "uncertainty about how to draw text/analysis to a close" (p. 567), thereby inviting varied readings and multiple beginnings, middles, and endings as different readers are encouraged to read (and re-read) into our texts differently. Proposing this text as a conversational interaction between and among its participants, whereby my text is interrupted and interrogated by participants as well as by my own reflexive comments, I, too, have created an untidy multivocal text. The model I follow is that set by Lather & Smithies' (1995) in Troubling angels: Women living with HIV/AIDS . Discussing that book, Lather (1997) engages what it means to 80 incorporate a postmodern, poststructural epistemology into one's methodology. Attempting to reflect the impossibility of mapping an "untidy" world into a "tidy" text and in order not to present "a comfort text that maps easily into our usual ways of making sense and 'giving sense'" (Lather 1996, p. 529), Troubling Angels is organized "as a hypertextual, multilayered weaving of data, method, analysis, and the politics of interpretation" (Lather, 1997, p. 1), where Lather and her co-researcher, as authors, continuously both get out of the way and get in the way (p. 2). Splitting the page, the words of the participants are on the top and the researchers' narrative is on the bottom. "Interspersed among the interviews, are inter-texts which serve as "breathers" between the themes and emotions of the women's stories; a running subtext where the authors spin out their tales of doing the research; factoid boxes on various aspects of the disease; and a scattering of the women's writing in the form of poems, letters, speeches, and e-mails" (ibid., p. 1). While the boundaries and format of (as well as my financial resources for) a print dissertation do not allow the level of textual virtuosity Lather's work exemplifies, the theoretical and methodological understandings (as well as the problematics) that give reason and meaning to her work (see also Lather 1990,1991a, 1991b) and that of others, I believe, are very much incorporated into and underlie this research as well. Incorporating those theoretical and methodological understandings, this dissertation merges three texts and an Inter-Text. The First Text—the running text, which, following Britzman (1995, p. 230) I term the "straight version of ethnography 101"—is the traditional and somewhat unproblematized account of my research and its findings, narrated within the boundaries of "disciplined" doctoral ethnographic practices. The Inter-Text, most often in the form of "boxes" (what Lather & Smithies call "breathers") serve both as elaborations upon the main narrative—the First Text—as well as reflexive comments about it, using a theoretically interrogated methodology to reflect "back at its readers the problems of inquiry at the same time an inquiry is conducted" (Lather 1997, p. 1). The Second Text (STf) includes other participants' comments (and my comments about their comments) about my text, about my textual constructions of them as actors in my text, about their experience with, of, and in the text, about their readings of my research and my role as researcher as texts. The Third Text—what I also call the "garbage can"—only appears in the Appendix (Appendix F) and includes what my dissertation committee suggested I take out of this dissertation. I use this Third Text partially to answer some of the questions pertaining to Peter's ability to separate his role as advisor 81 from that of participant. Its intention is to serve as evidence to the degree I had (or did not have) to accommodate my writing to accommodate his wishes. I chose to leave this Third Text outside the "official" text but still within it so that readers can make their own judgments about what (or whether) I was compelled to leave out.9 Of those "other" texts, the Second Text—the one which includes participants' comments about my text, the one that interrogates my text—is perhaps the most significant in my eyes. It not only enables participants to comment about the culture under investigation but also about the process and product of that investigation. Inspired by the conversational interaction between Lewis & Simon (1996), an instructor and graduate student reflecting on the internal politics of knowledge of a shared graduate course at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), this Second Text gives participants a space to voice their rejections and evaluate my own words about them. Participants' comments in the Second Text are provided unedited and in full. Moreover, I chose to leave their comments intact and separate (that is, in other font and point) rather than incorporate them into my main narrative to maintain their ability to speak outside of the text about what is in it.10 This Second Text also gives Peter an opportunity to separate his role as advisor and participant. It gives him a space to reply to and comment on my dissertation from the perspective of the person who taught the course this dissertation is about. It gives him a space to answer some of my critique, to contextualize what I claim and to explain. It gives him an opportunity to clarify and elaborate upon the choices he made during the course not through how I viewed them or what I made of them but through his own eyes, from his own perspective. While the purpose of the entire dissertation is a conversation about teacher education, I see the role of the Second Text more as a conversation with my dissertation itself. Consequently, and despite the urge to respond, to cohere, to clarify, and justify my work, I tend to mostly stay out of the way of participants' comments and respond only when asked a direct question. A hypertextual construct where links could be made between the different texts thereby giving them each equal footing had to be abandoned for the linear demands of a print dissertation.11 Working within that mandate, and hoping to provide for both a juxtapository story-telling and some form of manageable and continued readability, I chose a contrived textual contortion that positions the Inter-Text and the Second Text as "creative interruptions" of the running (First) text. The Inter-Text is easily identified as it is, other than once, framed within "boxes," the Second Text is prefaced by the icon ST. Both appear in different font than that of the 82 running text. Although this formulation makes possible a dialectic of intersecting versions of reality(ies), the dialectical potential is admittedly muted by an apparent hierarchy. "Ethnography 101" is presented as the version of this study whereas all other narratives are allowed to perform are subversions of that 'real, never actually replacing it, taking centre stage. The idea behind a multilayered, polivocal text was not to equalize voices or retreat f rom the responsibility of authorship and authority. On the contrary, the purpose is very much to bring those issues to the surface, to question and engage the problematics of textuality, of authorship, and of authority. For in spite of the epistemological, methodological, and (some may argue through) textual maneuvers of polyvocal texts such as this one "to unmask and displace the unitary authority of the anthropologist as author" (Moore, 1993, p. 191), the ability of such texts to retreat from authorship and minimize the researcher's textual authority must be questioned. Rabinow (1986), for one, argues that such texts can be "just as staged and controlled" as the more traditional ones they come to replace. "The mode," Rabinow adds, "offers no tex tua l guarantees" (p. 246) . Other than the otherwise beneficial collaborative process between or among researcher and participants, Tyler (1986) claims, it is the researcher who in the end holds the final deciding editorial and publishing keys, not the participant (cf. van Maanen, 1988, p. 137). In any structure—whether single-, co-, or mult i-authored texts, some voices sound stronger than others (LeCompte, 1995, p. 101) and narrative devices, as tentative and open as they may be, ult imately structure and control (Mascia-Lee et al., 1989, p. 30). Co-authoring texts, Clifford (1983) claims, doesn't eradicate ethnographic authority, it only displaces it, "still confirming the final, virtuoso orchestration by a single author of all discourses in his or her text" (p. 139. cf. Rabinow, 1986, p. 246). Polyphony, Moore (1993) adds, does not "revise the standard anthropological notion of authorship, of what it is to author something; it . . . simply makes it plural" (p. 201). More importantly, however, the attempt of retreat from authorship, could, as Clifford (1983) points out, contribute to authority by "repress[ingj the inescapable fact of textualization" (p. 134). j "Doing violence to those w e seek to represent," claims Lather (1999), "comes with the territory. Misrepresentation is part of telling stories about people's lives, our own included. The issue is whether to skirt or to face head on such complicities" (p. 4). The degree to which I have skirted those issues in my study and the extent to which I have faced them "head on" will become more evident as I proceed. Chapter VIII— Revisiting methodology—returns to some of the claims I made in this methodology chapter and re-examines them in light of how my study unfolded. 83 I n t r o d u c i n g the p a r t i c i p a n t s Contrary to some ethnographies, this dissertation is not centered around case studies; it does not tell the "story" of each participant as a unique and separate case which, together, combine to tell the story of learning to teach. Instead, and as I have already explained in the introduction, it is organized around a discussion of issues, whereby participants' words are extensively woven into and provide the context for the discussion. While I believe the character of each participant and their understandings of education, teaching, and learning do become apparent through their words—those they choose and those they do not—some background, history and/as context are necessary to facilitate a reading that ties together what may otherwise seem disparate and decontextualized quotes, provided outside the body experience which made them possible. What is presented below weaves together students' own introductions (articulated during interviews) as well as my understandings of them as students, teachers, and participants. Several characteristics were shared by all of the six student teachers participating in this study. Jack, Charles, Mary, Jocelyn, Casey, and Ron were all white, middle-class, Canadian-born, and spoke English as their first language. All were clean-cut, well-behaved, polite, considerate, willing, dedicated, and enthusiastic. Other than Ron who was in his early thirties, everyone was in their mid to late twenties. The purpose of enrolling in a teacher education program for this group of students, it seemed, was directed more towards gaining professional competence, accreditation, and certification in an existing and knowable educative system than challenging and actively reforming it. Although issues of equity and social justice were very much at the centre of their thinking, those, most believed, could be well addressed within the current system of education—by tweaking and slightly modifying it—rather than by challenging its underlying core purposes, assumptions, structures, and conventions. [ST! Jocelyn: Challenge and reform seems to be your goals in this dissertation. But I'm not sure one can challenge and actually reform a system without first knowing the system. As learners of education—or as students learning to function as "the other half" (teacher)—I think we, or at least I (since I should not speak for everyone), first wanted to understand the system before I could begin to challenge it (November, 1998).] Naturally, each of the participants was his/her unique teacher. Yet, my visits to their classrooms during the practicum and the interviews which followed illustrated a variety of shared pedagogical approaches. All of the participants went 84 well beyond what Goodlad (1984) or Cuban (1984) describe as teaching governed by teacher-dominated lecture, textbook assignments, recitation lessons, and an avoidance of controversial issues. There was, however, as Goodlad (1984) reports, "a dichotomy between what student teachers say about and do with social studies" (see also, Wilson, Konopak & Readence, 1994, p. 364). For example, as Goodlad points, they claim 'that thinking skills are very important, but their tests [though not] their learning activities stress memorization" (cf. Zevin, 1990, p. 259). But, contrary to Kickbusch's (1987) study and others (i.e., Cochran-Smith, 1991; Cole & Knowles, 1993; Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1986; Lanier & Little, 1986; Zeichner, 1986,1992) they were aware of such differences and spoke of the gap between their ideals and the realities of student teaching. Yet, free to a large degree to employ university-, or personally-inspired innovations during the practicum there was, in fact, very often, little difference between how social studies was presented in the methods course and how it was approached and implemented by student teachers during the practicum (see Armento, 1996, p. 492, also for above references) [STf Jocelyn: In many ways, the problem of implementing "university- or personally-inspired innovations" was one of fear. Those who were in charge of your practicum report—sponsor teachers and faculty advisor—had first to be pleased, paycheckedout, if you will. What did they want? To what would they respond positively? In the end, they hold the strings to a glowing report, a satisfactory one, or a failure (November, 1998). Ron: While I very well may have been "free . . . to employ university-, or personally-inspired innovations during the practicum," I did not experience myself as very free. While my sponsor teachers repeatedly told me to try whatever I wanted, I was also aware of the tremendous risks involved in doing so. On the one hand, I was aware of my sponsors' desire that any experimentation I undertook should not set the class behind schedule or disrupt the order which he had worked to build. On the other hand, I was also aware that trying a personally-inspired innovation and then failing, carried with it the risk of appearing not to embody the qualities of an effective teacher in the eyes of my practicum supervisor, who had the power to decide whether I passed or failed the practicum (February, 1999).] Their teaching was mostly not the kind that promoted factual content transmission. More often than not, they presented knowledge as socially constructed and historically situated and focused on framing topics as controversial issues, making sure to bring in a variety of perspectives, interpretations, and texts. Together (and, in most cases, individually as well), participants infused teaching with primary and secondary sources such as: film, video, newspaper articles, novels, poetry, art (mainly reproductions of painting), 85 artifacts, posters, cartoons, advertisements, photographs, and, naturally, historical documents. The participants Those who knew Jack while he was growing up in a small town in northern Ontario would have been as surprised as he was when he entered preservice teacher education. As a kid, the now thoughtful, conscientious, and studious Gen-Xer who loves to argue anything and test reasoning to its limit, never really cared much for school. Easily getting bored when things didn't move along quickly enough, he "would start socializing and having fun"—seeking attention, as he puts it, "by goofing off." In grade ten, Jack was sent to a boarding school which turned out to be "the most positive experience of my entire life. And it's because of the quality of teachers I had there," he says, "that I want to be a teacher now." But boarding school was more than a good experience for Jack; it was a formative one as well. As Jack explains, There were a lot of rules and regulations, but I certainly had a good time and was able to express myself even wi th in the boundaries. I hated being told what to do in school. I remember this day I was in grade 9 gym class and at the beginning of class they made us sit i n r o w s — f i v e rows across, eight deep. A n d you had to sit in the same row everyday w i t h the same person who was the squad captain. I remember refusing to do that. I said we were not i n the army and we're not cattle and you can't make us do that. A n d then I d id it. I guess I was th rown out of class and that was the condition for my return. So I've always not l iked authority but at the same time I rely on it to keep myself in line. Otherwise I wouldn' t accomplish what I want for myself. Structure is good. Its important for kids. It worked for me. I t kept me busy. We were up at 7, we had breakfast between 7 and 7:45, we had chapel f rom 8 O'clock to roughly 8:30 and then we had classes that started at 8:40. You went through to 10. There was a break f rom 10:00 to 10:15, classes, lunch. After school you went to your sport unt i l dinner. A n d after dinner you had an time to study f rom 7:30 to 9:30 and then you had to go to bed by 11:00. A n d that was everyday. It became tiresome and you didn't like it but I think it taught me a lot about discipline and how to make my time productive. A n d I think that's important because people by nature are lazy. People w i l l choose to do nothing, especially kids, and they have to be taught against their nature, at least this is the way I was, and I had to be taught: that i f you're disciplined and you th ink the r ight way then you w i l l begin to reap the benefits of your discipline and be happier than i f you were a lazy slob. (Interview #1 September 13,1996) At boarding school, Jack tells me, "we were geared to look for careers where we would make money. They were prepping us to become important and powerful people. Lawyers, doctors, accountants, finance managers, and brokers, would come in their blue suits to talk to us about their careers. So I went to the University of Toronto with the mentality of making money." Jack wanted to become a lawyer. In preparation, he began studying international relations and history but eventually graduated in political science. Moving to Vancouver after completing his degree and 86 working in the Pensions Department of a large bank while taking the Canadian Securities course to become a broker, Jack suddenly realized that I d idn' t really care how much money I made. It was something m y mom had pushed me towards and the school and all my friends f rom Toronto whose respect I wanted. This sort of opened me up to what I wanted to do rather than what I need to do in order to make money and then I realized that I wou ld really like to teach. I really love to be w i t h kids. I realized that I could teach social studies which wou ld be teaching what I like to do and I could have a whole career around it. I also looked back at boarding school and thought that i f I can have an effect on some k id the way m y teachers had on me, then it wou ld be wor thwhi le and that I wou ld get more satisfaction f rom teaching than f rom anything else. And satisfaction is much more important than money, at least in my books. (Interview #1 September 13,1996) When I asked Jack why he volunteered to be part of this study12, he said: I thought it might be interesting and that it wou ld help me learn more about the program, about the class. But to tell you the truth, I thought there was a good chance I wouldn' t be selected. Yeah, I wanted to be a sport and I didn't want to not agree to be in it. I mean, i f I'm going to be a teacher I should volunteer for these things and be agreeable. But I guess that in the back of m y mind I was hoping I wouldn ' t be selected. A n d then I d id get selected and I thought: 'Well, hopefully, I w i l l learn something . . . and I d id , I think I've learned a lot. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) Jack was one of the more vocal students in the methods course, regularly asking questions and sharing comments. This was also the case in our interviews. Jack was a very "easy" subject. As you can tell from the above excerpts, he was not the reserved participant who needs probing to speak his mind. And although he often thought the answers he was giving were not as good as he wished (or not as good as what he thought other participants might have given), our conversations were always very engaging and tended to last much longer than the anticipated hour. A desire for perfection underlay Jack's practicum experience as well. Taking his responsibilities as a social studies teacher seriously, Jack believed there's more to social studies education than "let's bang out some content; here's a neat way of doing it; Oh, let's do a worksheet; O.K., they've got that information let's move on." For Jack, social studies was "bigger than that." But he also thought that what he wanted social studies to become—a critical engagement of public issues from multiple perspectives—was "much tougher and harder to do" (Conversation, November 6, 1996). How to transform the former into the latter within the realities of school was Jack's main focus and struggle throughout this study. Although he never got anything but very positive encouragement from his sponsor teachers and faculty advisor for his innovative approaches to social studies education, Jack never felt fully comfortable with what he was doing. Setting extremely high standards for himself, he always believed he could have been more prepared, chosen better 87 resources, or used different pedagogical approaches to better—that is, more actively, critically, and thoughtfully—engage his students. Jack currently teaches social studies and Physical Education in a private school in the Greater Vancouver area. He is also the school's rugby coach and was recently invited to play on the Canadian National Rugby Team. C h a r l e s was born in Vancouver but spent all of his school years in other areas of British Columbia as his family relocated often. They finally settled in Nanaimo, the second largest city on Vancouver Island, where Charles went to high school. Charles does not remember much of his high school years. What he does recall is always having "a comment [for everything]. I was bored so I talked a lot, disrupted everybody. I mean I was a good kid, but I had my 'moments'. . . . I was disruptive but not disrespectful." (Interview #4, March 7,1997). After high school Charles began studying commerce at a nearby community college. He never thought he'd become a teacher. But in his second year there, he realized "commerce wasn't really happening" for him. At the same time, he got the opportunity to coach a grade-eight boys' basketball team. Coaching that team was a Uirrung point for Charles: We were a horrible team. We only won about two games the entire season. But after we lost our last game, whi le I was wai t ing outside, all the players went to the locker room. I came in expecting to f ind a lot of sad faces but instead I got dunked. So I was standing there soaking wet and I felt really good because although we lost, they were all smiling. A n d I f igured: 'Hey, I must have done something right!' I feel comfortable around kids. It's we i rd because in front of m y peers I am always nervous but in front of kids it's totally different. [As a coach] I t ry and be fair and reasonable and I try and be their friend. But I also think there's a fine line between being a fr iend and being a leader, an instructor, a coach, a teacher type. A n d I guess I wa lk that line pretty wel l . I've had pretty good experiences coaching. I never had any kids w h o have not enjoyed m y coaching. I don't know what it is. I guess I just do i t r ight. I t ry to keep things fun and keep everyone involved. So [I thought to myself] I have coached sports all m y life and teaching is almost the same. (Interview #1, September 18,1996) The following year, Charles left Commerce and went into Physical Education. But knowing that in order to meet the requirements of a teacher education program—his desired destination, he needed an additional teaching focus to go along with it. Charles chose History. "I was always keen on history and it's an interesting field." Setting his eyes on the UBC Teacher Education Program, Charles decideed to return to Vancouver and finish his degree in Human Kinetics (Physical Education) at UBC. Four months after receiving that degree, Charles began his teacher education program with a double concentration—physical education and social studies. 88 Charles decided to put his name forward as a possible candidate for this study because I thought everyone would and I thought I'd be the last person to be chosen You obviously have something that you think is important and if I can help, I mean, if I have an hour to kil l . . . , I don't mind helping. ... I mean you obviously feel strongly that you want to take your time and come to every class and sit through all these labouring discussions we were having and tape-recorded everything and go home and listen to it again and again and type it all out. So why not help you out? (Interview #3, December 18,1996) Rather quiet and reserved, Charles rarely participated in the method course's large-class discussions. He was however somewhat more forthcoming in my conversations with him, though he was never a "big talker." Few issues could disturb his calm and when they did, he tended to respond with a witty, cynical, almost dry sense of humour. While he very much enjoyed the methods course, Charles often thought the course tended to be too theoretical and wanted to spend more time on the "basics"—constructing lessons and units for instruction, engaging the actual social studies high school curriculum. It was thus often difficult to move him beyond the "practical" in our conversations, not because he couldn't but, rather, because he did not want to. He did everything possible to resist discussing theory and its implication for practice. This, however, I soon discovered, was mostly a veneer. For when I persisted, a whole new Charles evolved whose responses were just as theoretical as those of others. Yet it always took a while to get there, sometimes with him "kicking and screaming" along the way. During the teacher education program, Charles also served as the trainer for one of the UBC sport teams. Traveling with the team across Canada and abroad during their playing season meant missing a few classes of the methods course as well as writing the final exam in Seoul, South Korea. Charles taught only one social studies class during his practicum (his other classes were all P.E.). This one grade 10 class, however, proved quite a challenge in and of itself. About half of the students in this class were recently-arrived immigrants whose English was at a level that did not allow them to read the textbook (or any other grade 10 level text) independently. Nor did they seem to feel comfortable, at that point, to participate actively in class discussions. Another quarter of the students were what school administrators had already determined as "students with learning disabilities (some of them, quite serious)."13 Attending to the needs of this very diverse classroom, Charles most often had to re-think the 89 curriculum, supplement it, and implement less than traditional methods to meaningfully engage all his students with the subject-matter. Following the completion of his B. Ed., Charles returned to Nanaimo. He now has a temporary part-time position as a Career and Personal Planning (CAPP) teacher in that district. M a r y , one of the only two participants born and raised in the greater Vancouver area, also remembers very little of her high school years. And what she does, conjures unfavourable images—both of school and of herself as a student. "I was hardly a student," says the witty, precocious, and very down to earth Mary who rarely minces her words. "When I was in senior high school I was there only for the required time—for the time I had to be there in order not to flunk the course. The rest of the time I was at the bar. I don't think I was the average student, that's for sure" (Interview #2, October 19,1996). After school, Mary worked as a secretary for several years but soon became dissatisfied. I was going to be the world's greatest secretary. But I soon realized that you have to have post secondary education to get anywhere in life. E-v-e-r-y-b-o-d-y around me who wasn't a general clerk had their degree and they all had more responsibilities than I did. If I wanted more responsibilities in the work place, I had to get better qualified. And if that meant going back to university to get a degree, then that's what I was going to do. (Interview #1, September 16,1996) In 1991 Mary enrolled in a community college where she studied history. Two years later, however, she relocated to a remote community in British Columbia and had to continue her studies through distant learning. At that point, Mary changed her study focus to geography. Mary's decision to go into teaching occurred in the second year of her undergraduate studies because, as she puts it: "I didn't want to be caught off-guard later on. I mean what was I going to do with a Bachelor of Arts? I wanted to prepare for the future so I planned to enroll in a teacher education program." But there was another reason pointing Mary in that direction: My mother is an elementary teacher so I have sort of an inside view of the pros and cons of teaching. There are a lot of benefits to teaching besides the obvious ones. I think one of the most important ones is helping young people by guiding them in making their own decisions. If my teachers had given me a stronger academic upbringing when I was in school; If I had a better education, I think I probably would have gone onto university right after school instead of doing the secretarial thing which was a complete waste of time as far as I am concerned, (ibid.) 90 Two weeks after she received her undergraduate degree, Mary began her teacher preparation at UBC. Beyond the challenges encountered by any student enrolled in this program, Mary also had to deal with a logistical one. While the university courses were held in Vancouver, and her practicum in a nearby suburb, Mary and her partner owned a home located in a community several hours away. Living with her parents in the city during the week but returning home on week-ends, Mary would regularly get up at 4:30 am on Monday mornings in order to catch a ferry which would take her to the mainland and then drive forty-five minutes to arrive in Vancouver in time for her 8:00 am classes. Every Friday afternoon she did the reverse. Although Mary had little time to spare for a study such as this, she chose to participate because, as she puts it, I th ink studies are important. I f you learn stuff, information, then it's a good thing. Everybody benefits sooner or later. You learn f rom the actions of the study participants and then you wri te about it and everybody who reads it learns as well. Avner: But there's a difference between participating in a study and believing there is something to learn f rom reading it. What made you want to actively participate? Mary: Wel l I f igured i t was no skin off my nose and I'm not one of those people w h o don't get involved. I f I see an accident I call the police and don't run in the opposite direction. (Interview #3, December 14,1996) Never hesitating to say what's on her mind, Mary often surprised the participants of the methods course with her sharp observations and her appended punch lines that brought to light the humour and irony in most every situation. As one of the three declared "geographers" in the course, though, she was somewhat anxious about having to teach a curriculum overwhelmingly dominated by history. Yet her practicum experience was overshadowed not by her unfamiliarity with history—in fact her sponsor teachers' comments in that regard were always positive and encouraging—but by a reorganization of the social studies department where she was doing her practicum, changes which required her not only to switch schools between her short and long practicum but also to be transferred from one sponsor teacher to another in the middle of her long practicum. Nevertheless, Mary took it all in stride and didn't allow it to stand in the way of continually providing her students with a critical and thoughtful learning environment. Mary's passion was anti-racist education which she continually infused 91 whenever it was relevant. Whenever I could throw some stuff in there about groups that were discriminated against or whenever there was a stereotype or a myth that could be debunked, especially about immigrants because I know there's a lot of racism in the school and if I can have any say in getting rid of that, then I will. (Interview #5, April, 24,1997). At the end of the teacher education program, Mary returned to the her community outside the Greater Vancouver region. She currently substitute-teaches in the three high schools in that district. Jocelyn was born in a small town nestled in the Rocky Mountains, in the south-east part of British Columbia. While she was always a good student and did well in school, Jocelyn remembers being "more interested in sports than in anything else," spending most of her free time in the gym. Her recollections of social studies in high school consist primarily of worksheet after worksheet, map after map. 'One more worksheet? Here we go! XYZ, ABC, done! Finished!' And you never have to think about it again. We didn't do anything but memorization. Most of the fun stuff—debates and discussions—were done in my English class. What we did in social studies was sit down and get out our atlases and count the number of provinces in Canada and locate their capital cities. In grade 11, however, she encountered a different social studies teacher. He was very much into what he was doing and very much into showing us why it is important and very much engaging us in conversations and challenging our thinking: 'Well if you don't think it's important, why?' 'What do you think is important?' He was really open and understanding and thought that anything could, with a particular focus, be brought to bear on what we were studying. It was the first time I actually enjoyed social studies and that's where my love for history started. (Interview #1, September 15,1996) Having graduated from high school, Jocelyn enrolled in a community college where she received a volleyball scholarship in the first year and a soccer scholarship in the second. She then transferred to UBC where she graduated with a double major in English and history. Wanting to become a teacher, according to Jocelyn, was not the result of a particular critical moment or turning point in her life. Rather, it was something she always saw as a natural progression of who she was as a person—someone who continuously loves to learn and share with others in their learning. From her previous experiences in coaching, tutoring, and teaching summer- and theatre-school, Jocelyn realized the kind of work she'll find most rewarding both personally and professionally would be one where she learns herself and then turns around and teaches and mentors others. 92 After receiving her degree, Jocelyn moved to Japan where she taught English as a Foreign Language for three years. Jocelyn's teaching experience in Japan taught her to appreciate the cultural nature of knowledge and knowing. For the first time, perhaps, Jocelyn could experience how her own education presented her with versions of the world rather than universally-accepted descriptions of it. When Jocelyn returned to UBC in order to begin her teaching certification, she was already a seasoned teacher. Jocelyn's reasons for choosing to be part of this study pertain to issues of voice as well as to her understanding of her own learning processes I thought it wou ld be a neat way to talk about and to voice some of the things that were going on in the classroom. A n d i f you were going to include students' voices, I wanted to be one of those voices. The way you described your research, I thought it wou ld give me a good forum, if I was having problems or i f there were things I wanted to discuss, i t wou ld be good to have somebody to discuss them wi th . So that, I thought, wou ld be a benefit for me. (Interview #3, December 11, 1996) Ensuring her voice gets heard was also Jocelyn's way of being in the methods course. She and Jack were perhaps the most outspoken students in the course, first to have their hands up, first to make a comment or ask one of the "hard" questions awaiting to be asked. Sharing my own interests with texts and textuality through her academic grounding in English (particularly in rhetoric), interviews with Jocelyn were always reflexive, where the interview itself became part of the investigation. These approaches transferred easily into Jocelyn's teaching. Stating that "language dictates how we see the world and affects what we think is possible" (Interview #3, December 14, 1996), Jocelyn could not see how one could divorce the study of language and rhetoric from inquiry in (and into) social studies. Her teaching was therefore a crafted example of a continuous exploration of the historically constructed nature of language and the inevitable language-base of history (or any discipline) and of historical (any) texts. Similarly, speaking about the need to examine the gendered, racialized, and class-based nature of the curriculum and the learning environment in which it is presented, Jocelyn not only opened her own teaching for investigation but also encouraged students to examine the relationship between those issues, the content they study, and identity formation. As she explains, it's important to understand that the materials we're studying i n Western society, i n a Western history class w i l l be different f rom what is being studied i n Japan. It's the same history, supposedly, it's the same chronological time, but different issues are discussed. It is important to understand that what we call history is our interpretation. A n d how do you even begin to 93 communicate that to students if you don't first of all talk about mult icultural ism, about different perspectives, different ways of looking at things. Gender can affect that, age can affect that, culture can affect that, society can affect that, class can affect that. You can't separate those things f rom content; they are the content. (Interview #3, December 14,1996) Jocelyn currently teaches Humanities, social studies, and Japanese in the same high school in which she did her practicum. In fact, she was the only graduate of the methods course who got a full-time position in a public school in the Greater Vancouver area. C a s e y , the other participant born and raised in Vancouver, was a good, hard-working student who liked school and did fairly well in it, though she definitely knew how to enjoy late adolescence to its fullest. While most of her social studies teachers "were very boring" and "didn't have their heart in it (one, a year away from retirement, still used the notes he had during his first year of teaching)," Casey remembers a grade-9 social studies teacher who made studying intriguing because he "enjoyed teaching and got the information across in an interesting way." When Casey began her undergraduate studies at UBC she focused on English. But a seven-month study-trip to Israel at the end of her first year at university, which included an intensive seminar on the Arab-Israeli conflict, redirected Casey's academic interests; she transferred from English to international relations. After completing her studies, Casey spent the next three years working full time as an insurance agent in her father's business. That, however, did not seem challenging enough nor did it pose the level of intellectual stimulation Casey was after. Casey had initially thought about becoming a teacher when she first started tutoring in high school. She enjoyed "explaining concepts that others found difficult and seeing the message get across. Teachers can have a good influence on others," she adds, "and there's a lot of satisfaction in a job where you can do that" (Interview #3, September, 12,1996). Deciding it was time to leave the nest and establish a career of her own, Casey enrolled in the teacher education at UBC. She decided to specialize in social studies because, as she puts it, "I feel very enthusiastic about social studies and I think that's one of the only school subjects where you can actually teach something" (ibid.). Casey explains: I f you look at the wor ld in the last 100 years and the amount of change that has happened in our society and the effects that i t has on people, I just think it's extraordinary. A n d I th ink it's important that people w h o are l iv ing i n this society have some idea of how it's changing and what's happening so they can hopeful ly function in it. In Canada we live in a democracy and I think it's important to participate through voting. I think it's important to be informed, to be able 94 to critically analyze the commercials and whatever you get bombarded with and to hopefully have the confidence not to believe everything that is put out at you but to question it and have some background knowledge so you can make informed decisions. (Interview #1, September, 12, 1996) Casey's decision to volunteer for this study was based on her desire to be helped by helping me out: I thought I would probably benefit from it and, at the same time, I thought that I would be helping you out. I also thought it would be interesting to see what kinds of questions you would be asking.... It didn't seem like a lot of time to me so I thought, 'What the heck!. I'll put my name in and if I get chosen, so be it'. (Interview #3, December 16,1996) The idea of critically reading and writing texts—the primary focus of the Social studies methods course—resonated well with Casey and was one with which she was particularly comfortable. Engaging texts critically was something Casey had been exposed and accustomed to at home where public issues were regularly discussed and the different approaches taken by the media in order to convey particular versions of those issues to readers were examined. While approaching texts not only for what they say but for how they say and for what they do was therefore nothing new to Casey as a learner, she was delighted to have such an approach also legitimated as a way and a tool for teaching. That was perhaps the most rewarding aspect for Casey in the entire teacher education program. Having found this new freedom through Peter's approach in the methods course, Casey's teaching during the practicum not only encouraged students to critically examine texts already present in her sponsor teacher's classroom but also broadened the (and their) definition of what might constitute a legitimate text in the social studies classroom. Incorporating, for example, a variety of popular culture texts—video, film, music, magazines—as part of the curriculum that needs to be read and written critically, Casey not only made the curriculum more relevant and immediate to students' lives but also had them otherwise (that is, critically) examine the texts they normally engage outside of, and see as separate from, the social studies classroom. Casey currently substitute-teaches in two school districts in the Greater Vancouver area but is actively seeking a full time position. Meanwhile, she still helps out regularly in her father's insurance business. Ron, who grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan, remembers himself as a good student and his recollections of school, of his teachers, and of social studies education are mostly positive. He especially remembers a grade-12 social studies 95 teacher who engaged students in role-playing and who connected the curriculum to students' own histories and those of the community at large. Following high school Ron enrolled in the University of Saskatchewan. His undergraduate degree is in anthropology and archeology though the last half of his studies comprised mostly history, philosophy, English, and literature courses. Coming from a family of educators—his grandfather, a headmaster in Wales, his mother, a secondary French teacher—Ron was destined to follow suit. Spending three years teaching English in Japan immediately after graduation, Ron returned to Canada and decided to enter the UBC Teacher Education Program. Having enjoyed being part of another study while taking his ESL certificate the previous year, Ron chose to participate in this one because, as he put it, "If someone is interested in me and in my opinions? Sure! I like talking about myself" (Interview #3, December 7, 1996). While he didn't speak much in the methods course, Ron was very reflective, open, and forthcoming during our interviews and used them as an opportunity to ask questions—mostly of himself and of the program—as much as to provide answers. Ron was no doubt the "philosopher" among the group. Commenting, for example, on the title of my research project at the time—"Subjecting the objective centre"—Ron opened our first interview by discussing the need to move away from "the subject/object dichotomy and begin speaking more in terms of meaning and experience." What such a dichotomy proposes, claims Ron is that there is an independent eye that is the subject and is aware of its o w n thoughts, but those thoughts are somehow disconnected f rom an objective outside w o r l d ... separating the body f rom whatever is around it and then worry ing about breaching that gap in a k ind of Hegelian sense. H o w do y o u interpret experience? What meaning do you attach to i t—exper iencing your own thoughts, you r o w n process, experiencing the meaning y o u attach to experience and participating i n shaping the wor ld as it also shapes you? (Interview #1, September 12,1996) While Ron seemed very much to be part of the "group" and shared many common characteristics with other participants, his responses during our interviews most often provided very unique and different perspectives. On the eve of their first (mostly observational) practicum, for example, I asked participants what their observation would focus on. While all other students mentioned classroom management techniques or methods of instruction, Ron was the only one who said he would be observing the students, wishing to find out "who these kids are and where they were coming from [in order to] know what I'll be working with or against (hopefully with) and get some sense of where I'm going to be fitting into this 96 picture" (Interview #2, October 19, 1996). Similarly, while most of the others saw the teacher education program as a place to receive answers as to how to become the best teachers they could, Ron, in a reflexive fashion, was more in the search of questions—those pertaining to his own understanding of the program and what it offered him as a prospective teacher: I take the approaches used in the [methods] course and apply them back to the course and to what I d id i n the course. A n d I k ind of question what are m y goals, what are m y ideals of education and do I practice them? Can I practice them? Have I seen them modeled in the program? Are they possible in the schools? So in a sense I'm left w i t h more questions than answers. (Interview #3, December 7,1996) Moving beyond social studies' traditional goals of "forging some kind of Canadian identity and assimilating students into it by providing an official history or an interpretation of our society," Ron focused on the need to look at society critically and bui ld a more just society by recognizing and redressing some of the injustices that are sti l l structurally there towards First Nations people, women, non-whites or non-Anglo people in Canada; to come up w i t h some solutions for some of the inequities of wealth and access to education, power and the like. (Interview #1, September 12,1996) Throughout the first semester, Ron kept asking himself: "Am I going to be the idealistic, interesting, exciting, and effective a teacher as I like to believe I am when faced with the demands of the IRP [Integrated Resource Package: the prescribed British Columbia curriculum document] and those of the school schedule and so on? How long is it going to last before I sort of throw up my hands and whip out the work sheets?" (Interview #3, December 7,1996). Faced with a sponsor teacher whose expectations were mainly "to get the material covered, keep the interest up, keep the pace up, keep them working, and stress punctuality and attendance," Ron, in what may be a perfect example of the "dumbing down" effect of teacher education, could hardly recognize himself in the teacher he was turning into. "It's kind of frustrating," he said, "to recognize the difference between what I had wanted and thought about in the university and then finding myself doing almost the opposite [in the practicum]." Much of his teaching, was incongruent w i t h what I wanted to do whi le I was in Peter's class. I haven't really felt able to teach independently of the textbook. I tend to fall back on the 'safe' and what is known and things I have experienced in m y own education. I think maybe that's part of m y frustrat ion in this practicum because I am aware of what I was talking about [dur ing the methods course] and what I was interested in on the "theoretical" side and then I f ind myself doing things in quite a different way here i n the classroom. I don't know. I f ind myself put t ing a lot of t ime and a lot of energy into planning out a lesson and t ry ing to manage the time effectively and t ry ing to keep the pace 97 going. I feel, k ind of a need to cover certain material. Somehow I've fallen into this idea that there is an X amount of material that has to be covered in an X amount of time and it's my job to get through all of that. (Interview #5, Apr i l 15,1997) While Ron often spoke of the need to address the injustices and inequities in society as a major responsibility of social studies education, he also mentioned that faced with the realities of the practicum, I t is like quite a risk to stop the class and say: "take a look at all the names I've just listed," in my grade 9 socials and ask, "how many women do you see?" "None," "Why is that?" and start th inking about that although I might very wel l do that now that I think about it. It might be an interesting po in t of discussion. But somehow that feels l ike I'm gett ing off topic, off track somehow, There's stil l a sense that by the end of my practicum, and I only have two week, I have to be at the end of chapter 19. A n d if I go off on this tangent, I'm going to lose time. (Interview #5, Apr i l 15,1997) Having graduated from the UBC Teacher Education Program, Ron found a temporary position teaching grade 7 and 8 ESL and Japanese classes in a private school in Vancouver. He is currently working as a substitute teacher for several school districts in and around the Greater Vancouver area. P e t e r S e i x a s , 1 4 an Associate Professor and the coordinator of secondary social studies education in the Faculty of Education at UBC, received his undergraduate degree in history from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. His Masters, from the university of British Columbia focused on the history of education. In 1988, Peter received his doctorate in history from the University of California, Los Angeles. Peter taught social studies in Vancouver schools for fifteen years before coming to UBC. Since joining the Faculty of Education, he has taught a variety of courses in the teacher education program (one of which is the secondary social studies methods course) as well as a graduate seminar entitled Problems in Historical Understanding. Exploring the notion that all knowledge of the past is problematic and political, this graduate course (referred to in the Methodology chapter) draws both upon recent historiographic disputes exposing the contested meanings of historical accounts and the growing research literature on historical understanding—that of school students and in popular culture— in order to formulate new directions for history curriculum and instruction. (More about Peter's teaching and his epistemological and pedagogical approaches to social studies (any) education is provided through students' comments about the methods course, presented below). 98 Notes 1. Two sponsor teachers, both sponsoring the same student-teacher, whi le permit t ing access to their classrooms to conduct this study, declined to be interviewed. 2. Whi le the last set of interviews w i th participants was not specified in the study's original design, as the focus of m y research evolved toward a larger emphasis on the teacher education program itself and less on the practicum, and w i t h the approval of all six part icipants, this last interview substituted for the third originally-scheduled interview dur ing the practicum. 3. A fourth reason for conducting this research in Peter's course rather than in the section taught by his graduate student was that Peter was planning to conduct his o w n research w i t h student teachers in her class and therefore believed it wou ld be too much for me to locate m y study there as wel l . 4. Interviews, as Denzin (1995b) explains, "slice up, fracture, and decontextualize personal narratives. Like photos, they provide only a partial glimpse of the story a person could tell about an event or experience" (p. 327). 5. "Clearly, the tradit ional model of the one-way passage of knowledge f r o m interviewee to interviewer d id not fit w i th these experiences." (Limerick, et. al., 1996, p. 456). In fact, "the very terms interviewer and interviewee are problematic [ in describing the interviewing process] in that they embody an assumed passive role of the subjects of the research" ( ibid., p. 449). Rather, as much as participants shared their views w i t h me, they often inquired as to m y thoughts about issues and events under considerations. In addit ion questions about m y research, education in general, the practicum, future career possibilities (theirs and mine), the process of doing a Ph. D and graduate studies in general, as wel l as about my background and life experiences, were all raised by the interviewees and woven as equal parts of the conversation. Further, each interview ended by asking participants what they thought I had neglected to ask, what else they wished to discuss, and invited them to critically reflect upon the interview and the degree to wh ich i t and the process itself was beneficial to them. 6. F inding "quiet" students in a group which has volunteered to share their v iews in interviews beyond the required time they needed to spend "wi th" social studies is somewhat contradictory. Obviously those really quiet ones who wou ld not share their v iews d i d not volunteer for the study. But I d id f ind that at least two of the participants, perhaps even three, whi le enjoying the opportunity to talk in the interviews, d id very little public talking in the course. Perhaps it was the uneasiness of speaking publicly that led them to this study, to the oppor tun i ty to reflect i n a smaller, safer semi-public sphere. 7. Another aspect of validity which fits in well w i th Lather's idea of face val id i ty is what Flinders & Eisner (1994) call consensual validity. "This form of validation is established by critics sharing their work w i t h others knowledgeable wi th in a given area" (p. 353). M y work was not only shared w i t h those w i th in the committee knowledgeable of the areas under study (that goes wi thout saying) but also w i t h a variety of other faculty members and doctoral students whose contributions (already recognized in the Acknowledgments) validated and challenged m y findings. 8. "Transcribed, or inscribed (embalmed) speech, the printed word , is alien talk. The trap of 'scription' [Barthes's term (1985, p. 3) for wr i t ten speech] is threefold. Everyday, natural talk is theatrical, inf lective, and rhetorical. Barthes (ibid., pp. 3-5) observes that "speech is fresh, innocent, immediately theatrical, always tact ica l . . . when we speak we 'expose' our thoughts as they are put into the words . . . we express aloud the inflections of our search . . . when we speak, we want our interlocutor to listen to us; we revive his (her) attention w i t h meaningless interpellations (of the 99 type of 'Hello') . . . unassuming as they are, these words and expressions are . . . discretely dramatic." These tactical, theatrical, rhetorical elements of talk are lost i n the transcribed conversation. The immediate innocence of speech and thought are erased in the transcribed text. The transcribed text changes the receiver of the message, as wel l as the subject and the other (Barthes, 1985, p. 5). The body, along w i t h the self-image and speaking repertoire of the speaker, are gone. The new text takes on a hierarchical order and logic. The "t iny liaisons speech uses to f i l l the silences (Barthes, 1985, p. 6) are absent. The printed text follows the laws of grammar that are repugnant to speech." Denzin, 1995b, p. 319. 9. As you can see, the Thi rd Text is non-existent, that is, there were no portions of this dissertation I was "asked" to take out either by Peter or any of the other committee members. I w o u l d like to mention, however, that informing my committee members about the existence and purpose of the Thi rd Text might have rendered it superfluous. As one of my committee members noted in one of our meetings, knowing it was there to testify on my behalf, "there was no way [he/she] was going to ask me to eliminate any part of m y dissertation. 10. Whi le all of the six participants used the opportunity to respond to the bulk of this dissertation given to them in the summer and fall of 1998, three claimed that although they were interested in responding to the last two chapters of this dissertation (given to them in early 1999), a variety of teaching obligations at the t ime w o u l d prevent them f rom adding their comments about those chapters to the Second Text. While I wou ld have l iked all of the participants to respond to all of m y dissertation, I myself was work ing w i th in a particular time frame which d id not al low me to provide participants the additional months they needed in order to respond. Further, I realize that having participants respond to m y text was not part of the init ial agreement to wh ich they signed at the outset of this study. In fact, I was quite surprise at the extent to wh ich participants D ID respond to this text, especially considering the fact that those responses were provided almost two years fo l lowing their teacher education program, whi le all of them were engaged in fu l l t ime teaching in some way or another. 11. While, UBC has, for some time, allowed hypertext or other mult imedia dissertations as a creative aside, the "formal" version of knowledge still had to be presented and bound in print. This practice has changed in the midst of wr i t ing this dissertation. Non-print dissertations are now accepted. 12. Whi le asking participants this question at the beginning of a study might have provided answers reflective of "real t ime" reasons, I chose to leave it for mid-study interviews since I believed that having established a relationship w i t h them over the first three months of the study might provide answers which go beyond what they thought might be appropriate to say in a first interview. Such a question can obviously only be asked once dur ing a study. In hindsight, the data provided below, at least f rom m y perspective as a researcher, justified that decision. 13. Since I had often taught all of the above mentioned students as a substitute ESL and Resource teacher, I could ful ly appreciate the difficulties facing Charles as he attempted to create a learning environment which was equally shared by all. 14. Introducing Peter in this section, together w i t h other participants, is not intended to imply that his status or role were on par w i t h those of the other participants. Whi le Peter was m y doctoral advisor, he was also the subject of this study. As such, and in this aspect of his double role, I chose to in t roduce h i m together w i t h al l other part icipants where part ic ipants are normal ly in t roduced—at the end of a methodology chapter. 100 CHAPTER III L o c a t i n g the s t udy : T h e contex t Although the study underlying this research was located in the UBC Teacher Education Program and, particularly, in the social studies methods course, as I have already discussed in the introduction, this dissertation is not specifically about either. Rather, it focuses on particular issues embedded within them and how those came together (or fell apart) to educate. Still, a provision of an overview of the UBC Teacher Education Program and the social studies methods course becomes necessary in order to contextualize those issues as they appear in the following chapters and keep them, and my descriptions and analyses of them, in perspective. The UBC Teacher Education Program/An overview The Secondary Teacher Education Program at the University of British Columbia is a twelve-month post-degree program (September-August) which is equivalent to two full academic years of courses and student teaching. It is comprised of two components—university-based course work and a school-based practicum—which take place over three semesters. The first and last semesters are devoted to courses provided at the university. Sandwiched between them is the second semester which takes place in public schools and provides the setting for student teachers' practicum.1 The first university-based component takes place from September to February and is interrupted by a two-week—mostly observational—practicum in mid October. During this part "prospective teachers are introduced to the theoretical bases of modern (sic) educational practice and to strategies and methods of teaching, both in general and in relation to the subject(s) they are preparing to teach" (UBC Calendar, 1995, p. 169). To accomplish that, student teachers are required to take the following compulsory courses: The Analysis of Education (EDST 314), focusing on gender equity, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and First Nations issues in education; Education during the Adolescent Years (EPSE 306), dealing with physical, social, cognitive, moral, and emotional growth of the adolescent learner; Development and Exceptionality in the Regular Classroom (EPSE 317), emphasizing the teacher's role in enabling an integrated learning environment for exceptional students; Communication Skills in Teaching Education (EDUC 316), where students study and practice interpersonal and communication skills required in the secondary 101 classroom; Principles of Teaching (EDUC 311) which pertains to issues relating to the role of the teacher, instructional planning, teaching strategies, classroom management, and assessment and evaluation; and, two methods courses relating to each student teacher's specific teaching concentration(s). Another course—School Organization in its Social Context (EDUC 420)—spills into the beginning of the second semester (immediately before the practicum). This course focuses on the organization and administration of the education system in British Columbia, including issues in governance, finance, and professional control, The second component of the teacher education program (the entire second semester following EDUC 420) is devoted to student teachers' three-month practicum, conducted in a variety of Greater Vancouver public schools.2 For the practicum, each student is assigned one or more sponsor teacher(s) and a faculty advisor (university supervisor) who evaluate the student teacher's teaching capabilities.3 Having completed their practicum, students return to UBC for the third and final component (May-August). This part is designed to put student teachers' "teaching competence in a more comprehensive framework of knowledge and understanding. An opportunity is provided for them to enhance their subject-matter and/or pedagogical competence" (UBC Calendar, 1995, p. 169). Students are required to enroll in the following courses: Learning, Measurement, and Teaching (EPSE 423), dealing with principles and practices of assessment; Language Across the Curriculum (LANE 426), where students analyze oral and written language from various curriculum areas and its implication for teaching and learning, and; one of four Educational Studies courses: Educational Anthropology (EDST 425), History of Education (EDST 426), Philosophy of Education (EDST 427), The Social Foundations of Education (EDST 428), or, Educational Sociology (EDST 429). Students need to take two more courses (6 credits) in order to fulfill the academic requirements of the program. Those usually comprise either an additional methods course (within the Faculty of Education) or a "content" course (outside of it), both normally pertaining to students' particular subject area specialization. Following the satisfactory completion of the program (both course work and student teaching) requirements, students are awarded a Bachelor of Education (Secondary) degree and are usually eligible for a British Columbia Professional Teaching Certification from the British Columbia College of Teachers, a requirement necessary to teach in the public school system in British Columbia. 102 The Social studies methods course/An overview The Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction Course (the methods course, as I tend to refer to it or, Peter's course, as students chose to name it) in which this study was conducted was one of the methods courses provided to student teachers in the first semester of the program. It was mandatory for all student teachers whose teaching concentration (either exclusively or in combination with another) was social studies. The course, which convened three times a week (Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays) for two academic hours a time, should, in general, according to the UBC Calendar, emphasize issues of curriculum and instruction in social studies—that is, curriculum organization and principles and methods of instruction applied to its teaching (1995, p. 393). With the idea of "shap[ing] the course to prepare students for teaching—[something] that's in my mind at every reflective moment in the course," according to Peter (Interview, September 11,1996), the particular emphasis of this course was determined as "Reading and writing texts." As Peter explains, "It is based on a conception of what it means to know, and to learn. If teaching is about helping students to know, and if we come to knowledge (learn), from reading texts and then writing our own, then learning to teach, is about becoming able to help others learn how to read and write texts." "Hopefully," Peter adds, such an approach "will enable us to explore [the following questions]: How do we know things? How do we teach [high school] students to ask questions about how they know things? How do we stimulate students to want to ask the kinds of questions which will get them to know more?" (Interview, September 11,1996). With that perspective in mind, and in order to give student teachers "the conceptual tools they need in order to view knowledge as problematic, as historically conditioned, socially constructed phenomenon" (Giroux, 1981, p. 155), the course was divided into four conceptual themes (units). The first was an introductory unit which included: a) problematizing and discussing the nature of social studies and the purposes for teaching it; b) critically examining the British Columbia Provincial Social Studies IRPs (Integrated Resource Package)—its overarching purposes, goals, objectives, and proposed approaches for instruction; c) an exploration of critical thinking and its role in teaching and learning; d) engaging how different texts (i.e., journal articles, textbooks) present knowledge to learners and the difficulties in fostering critical inquiry when relying on textbooks which present themselves as authorless and neutral, where history, devoid of agency and interpretation, becomes synonymous with the past "as it was." 103 The second theme of the course focused on reading historical texts. It began with students exploring four issues: "what is history?" "What is a fact?" and "What, if at all, is the difference between history and fiction, between a primary and secondary source?" Following Wineburg (1991, which I have already discussed in the Introduction), course participants examined the need to have students look at texts as human creations and activate their reading of subtexts; a reading that would enable them to explore what texts do and how authors say rather than simply focus, as social studies education tends to, on what they say. Using photographs as primary sources (historical texts), student teachers explored ways in which to encourage both a more interactive and thoughtful engagement with the past as well as a way to activate the kinds of reading and writing mentioned above (Holt, 1990). Students then moved to examine elements of historical thinking—significance, continuity and change, progress and decline, empathy (perspective-taking) and moral judgment, and agency—and explore how they play in history education (Seixas, 1996). The use of film as historical representation ("The Ballad of Crowfoot," Heritage Minutes) concluded the unit on history and provided a bridge to the next theme which focused on the media. In this unit, students examined and interacted with popular media texts and media professionals (a former editor of the Province, one of the two daily newspapers in the Greater Vancouver Area) as they explored the following questions: what are the media and how do they affect/influence/enable an (and specifically, students') understanding about the world? How do different media present the same world differently? How do the media help frame public/controversial issues (Werner & Nixon, 1990)? Landscapes and the built environment as texts were the focus of the fourth theme in this course. It included the educative possibilities embedded in environmental, economic, political, and social issues pertaining to urban development. Students collectively constructed a unit centered around the impact of converting a forested area around UBC into a residential complex that would answer both financial needs of the university as well as the growing demand for housing in Vancouver, the fastest growing city in Canada. The remainder of the course incorporated a variety of loose ends which did not fit elsewhere. It included an examination of: a) students' geopolitical understanding (Avery, et al. 1991); b) the role of fiction in the history classroom (Cushman, 1994; Bradford, 1992); c) the internet as a resource for teaching social studies; and, d) the role of interviewing for enriching social studies and connecting 104 the curriculum and world of the classroom to the community in which it is based (Sears, 1990). A particular emphasis was put throughout the course on using primary sources as tools for enhancing students' thoughtful, critical, and reflective inquiry into social studies issues as well as the organization of such inquiry into modules (lessons and units) of instruction around concepts, themes, or controversial public issues. Framing the frameworks What I have presented thus far are the frameworks underlying the UBC Teacher Education Program and the social studies methods course. Informative as those frameworks may be, they provide little as to how the courses (in the case of the general program) or the themes (in the case of the methods course) came together to educate. Nor do they say much about the pedagogy that tied (or did not tie) them together. To do so, I turn to students' evaluative comments about the program in general and about the methods course in particular. Students' comments about the methods course are particularly important because, while the remainder of this dissertation provides more of a critique of the course, students' comments in this section illuminate the course otherwise and from elsewhere. Yet students' reflections in this section are not in opposition to what they or I say in the remainder of this dissertation. Rather, they stand alongside them, provide a context for them, and offer a way in which to keep them in perspective. "What, thus far, are your impressions of the program?" is a variation of a question I repeatedly asked participants throughout this study. This may seem as innocent a question as a question may be (and that, indeed, was my intention). Yet, in a very demanding program where one course immediately follows another and students often feel overburdened with an endless list of readings and assignments, it is less than surprising that most of students' responses were critical rather than supportive of the program (This is also supported by other research: i.e., Cheney, 1987; Judge, 1982; Lortie, 1975. cf. Banks & Parker, 1990, p. 680). The abundance of critical comments may also be the simple result of (and particularly a response to) the fact that this study was perhaps the only space in which students teachers were actually asked such a question. Further, in a program that provides students with no centre or anchor to which they can safely return for continuous and consistent mentorship and reflection, a study such as mine—which is not only situated outside of the "official" program but also engaged the same students from the beginning of 105 the program to its end—naturally becomes a space where students are more comfortable to express their frustrations, aspirations, and commitments, which they were not able (or encouraged) to express elsewhere. Although, as ethnographers inevitably do, I will only present a selection of students' critiques (with the language of some requiring toning-down for the purpose of this "scholarly" presentation), the two positive comments I present about the program (which, in and of themselves, are primarily responses to such critique) are actually the only two provided by participants throughout this entire research project. Jack, for one, and speaking more about his frustration with his colleagues than about the program itself, offered this by the end of the third semester: "I'm pretty sick and tired... of all these student teachers complaining and talking about how terrible the program was because I don't think it was that bad. (Interview #6, July 30,1997). Ron, too claimed that for the most part I'm pretty positive about [the teacher education program]. I th ink it's a pretty good program though I know that some of my classmates express some reservations about it and felt that there were areas that could be improved. I mean, there's always room for improvement. For example, the time spent in the large lectures we had in the POT and Communications classes could have been better used in the smaller labs, doing more hands-on stuff. But on the whole I th ink it's quite a well- laid out and useful program. (Interview #3, December 10, 1996). [ST1 Ron: Perhaps I thought th is only because I couldn't imagine any better way of doing it. (February, 1999)] "The education program?" asked Charles as he repeats part of a question I posed to him, "a whole lot of work to keep you busy until you actually go out to the school and learn stuff" (Interview #3, December 18, 1996). While Charles' response focused on the relationship between the university and practicum settings in what he sees— perhaps has learned to see—as the insignificance of the former in comparison to the latter (an issue I address in more detail in Chapter IX of this dissertation), it is his encapsulation of the teacher education program as keeping students "busy" that was echoed by many others. Tying the workload in this program to its organization (or lack of), Mary claimed the different departments didn't know what the other departments were doing. The Ed Studies people didn't know what the Communications didn't know what the Social Studies didn't know what the POT people were doing. Nothing was connected, it seems. . . . I guess at one point they decided these are the things we should learn: the gender issue, the mult icul tural issues and how that can be incorporated and all that jazz, but I think that's where the talking stopped. There should have been a little bit more coordination. A n d the assignments? The work load was just outrageous. I didn't realize that UBC was going to be as much work as it is. They've got us doing so much stuff. I don't know what the objective to run us ragged is supposed to be: so that we go into our first year of teaching feeling like dogs? I don't know what k ind of objective that is. 106 They're obviously not th inking about us. It didn't have to be that heavy. It seems they were thinking in terms of the stuff they wanted to get done instead of the stuff we were able to handle. (Interview #3, December 14,1996) While Ron's comment above indicates his satisfaction with the layout of the program by the end of the first semester, he expressed somewhat different sentiments about its intensity by the program's end. Tying organizational structures and workload, and focusing on how the two come together to educate, Ron stated: I think a lot of the program is so t ightly and intensely packed that there's very litt le time to reflect on what you're learning and what you're doing. It just gets to be a matter of reading such and such a book and wr i t ing such and such a paper and then forgetting it and moving on to the next thing. [It's like] factory production; assembly line knowledge. (Interview #6, July 19,1997) There were two f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c things about this program, claimed Jocelyn: the Social studies methods course (Peter's course) and the English Methods Course. In both cases, she adds, the instructors had vision and showed an incredible in-depth understanding of, and passion for, what they were doing. Other than that, however, Jocelyn added, I found a lot of it a little bit frustrating, to be honest w i t h you. I had some pretty bad experiences, especially in both m y psychology classes that really made me think this [program] was a tuit ion-grabber as opposed to any learning environment at all. A n d I like to think that I can f ind learning in most any situation. A n d whi le I found there was learning that was going on, it was a negative k ind of learning—learning how not to do th ings—which sometimes in-and-of-itself is fine but I didn't expect so much of it, I didn't want that, I didn't need it. I k ind of already knew those were things I wouldn ' t be doing anyway. I didn't need to have that reiterated. I needed to be shown different ways of being successful at teaching as opposed to different ways of being unsuccessful in teaching. (Interview #3, December 11,1996) While the social studies methods course was one of the program's two highlights for Jocelyn in the first semester, it was perhaps the only overall positive experience for most of the others, at least during the program's first semester. Ron, for one, particularly liked the course because i t encourages us to really think and question and because nobody takes anything for granted. You say: "what is history?" and you get a debate. You say: "what is a fact?" and you get a debate. That's great! I know that some of my fellow students k ind of wish that we hadn't got that far into i t and say: "let's just get on w i t h it" k ind of thing, I really enjoy it and I th ink this is important to think about as teachers. I think one of the purposes of this class has been to get us th inking as people who are analyzing society around them and th inking of ways to encourage students to think about that as wel l , to bui ld a community of thinkers. (Interview #2, October 19, 1996) By focusing on such issues, Ron added, 107 Peter's course seemed to me the most in-tune with many of the ideas we were talking about in a lot of the other courses. While other courses tended to be very teacher-centered and where there was a difference between what we were talking about, and what we were thinking about, and what we were actually practicing on a day-to-day basis, in Peter's class there was a correlation: first, between what Peter said and what Peter did; second, in what other classes in the program talked about and what Peter did. (Interview #3, December 7,1996) The course made a concerted effort to "encourage us to take a different perspective on teaching—to encourage us to move away from the traditional read-out-of-the-textbook, memorize, do the questions at the end," claimed Jocelyn. "He's really tried to promote critical thinking and high order thinking and to show us that that's part of our job as social studies teachers" (Interview #2, October 20, 1996). Through that kind of a focus, added Casey, "Peter provided us ways with which we can present things to the students so that they're actually getting something out of it and critically analyzing things" rather than just "getting the information and regurgitating it back" to us (Interview #2, October 20, 1996). Interesting us, as teachers, "in looking for and at primary and secondary sources," offered Ron, "we became excited about the prospect of having kids, working in groups, actually being interested in a task and interested in a problem of history and arriving at some kind of analysis and solution of it rather than sitting in rows and desks and memorizing information" (Interview #3, December 7,1996). Charles chose to characterize Peter as "a good discussion leader," who "can provoke thought" and is "flexible with his planning. He seems to be pretty well organized. He has a sense of humor and gets along well with the students. I don't think there's anyone in that class who doesn't like him, which I think is important" (Interview #2, October 17,1996). But it wasn't only that students liked Peter but that they felt Peter liked them and respected their ideas. As Ron put it, "I think Peter enjoys us as students well not just as students. I really get a sense of being treated like his colleague and I've heard other people say that too. It's refreshing, you know. He's an excellent facilitator: he's good at moderating discussions and making sure that everybody has a turn to speak without being heavy-handed and forceful about it" (Interview #2, October 19, 1996). As Jocelyn stated, Peter "encourages a very good and very safe environment. Nothing is discouraged and nothing is wrong. You are not made to look silly. He always encourages you to say whatever it is and he always makes a point to show there was something good in it even if he doesn't agree with what you're saying" (Interview #1, September 15,1996). The enabling elements in Peter's flexibility mentioned by Charles were echoed by many of the other participants. Ron claimed that while Peter "is very 108 well organized and really seems to have an idea of what he wants to achieve, his flexibility allows us to get there in our own way, in our own processes" (Interview #2, October 19,1996). Mary appreciated "how Peter finds the opportunities to find a teaching moment that has nothing to do with where he was trying to go and says [to himself] 'Oh, that's an interesting question. Let's look at that.' He sort of throws the curriculum out the door and says: 'Let's look at that.'" (Interview #2, October 19, 1996). "While having an agenda," added Jocelyn, "when something great comes up he'll allow that to flourish. That's good because I think that's important for social studies [student teachers] to know that maybe you have an agenda that you need to get through but if something wonderful happens in your classroom and there's great intellectual energy you shouldn't squelch that but let it go, let it continue" (Interview #1, September 15,1996). The educative possibilities embedded in Peter's focus on discussion and group work as epistemological and pedagogical (rather than simply methodological) approaches caught students' attention. Mary believed class discussions made present a broader spectrum of perspectives. Everybody has an equal opportunity to put up their hand and speak their piece which gets the discussions going and opens up opportunities for seeing things f rom different points of view. . . There are so many different perspectives that I don't see, that people f rom other backgrounds see. How wou ld I know those other perspectives unless I heard them in class. Whereas other teachers might say: 'Well, no! We're getting sidetracked. You guys, come back!', Peter doesn't do that. So I r-e-a-l-l-y like those classes because I learn a lot f rom listening to other people's opinions. . . Lots of things have been mentioned i n class that hadn't even occurred to me. So I enjoy the class because of the class discussions. It's not a lecture format that I was used to for so many years. I hate lecture format. You can never wri te fast enough. We've already had seven classes and I only have three and a half pages of notes. That means there's a lot of class discussion and not too much lecture. Yet I think that all of Peter's points are coming across quite nicely. I think I'm learning everything I'm supposed to be learning. (Interview #1, September 1996, 1996; Interview #2, October 19,1996) Jocelyn also found the focus on group work beneficial. She appreciated the opportunity for "working together with other prospective teachers and getting their perspectives on different activities because we always work in groups and that's really good" (Interview #2, October 20,1996). "I really like how he gets us to discuss things in our group first, and then in a big class discussion," said Mary. That way everybody gets to speak their piece. A n d that's really valuable. You get to hear all the groups' perspectives and that's a learning experience. Whether you like their point of v iew or not, you learn f rom it in any case, right? So having us teach each other is, I think, valuable, because [before that] I wou ld have said: 'wel l , I don't want my students to teach each other. That's m y job as a teacher.' But no! I now understand that it's important (Interview #2, October 19,1996) 109 While Peter's course was no doubt a very positive learning experience for this group of student teachers, what interested me more, and particularly in the context of this study, was how such experiences positioned them not only as students but as teachers. That is, how were these positive experiences student teachers encountered as students to be translated into their teaching and, more importantly, I believe, into their thinking about teaching—a process that requires articulation and understanding which go beyond simply implementing what one has acquired elsewhere. Translation, however, is always problematic and transporting ideas from one context to another brings anxiety to the surface. Jack, for example, found his attempts to make such a transfer problematic, not only at the level of teaching but also at that of expectations of teaching and learning. I had much loftier expectations of teaching while I was in Peter's class [that is,] having students read things as texts and that everyday w i l l be a wonderful learning experience and you'd have them examining different sources or different texts and looking at it for biases and stuff. A n d I f ind that I 'm lucky if I can do that once in a while. I mean you spend a lot of time just teaching them things and they learn things and then we give them a quiz and they tell you what they learned. You spend a lot of time doing that [rather] than what we learned w i t h Peter. So in that sense m y expectations aren't the same. (Interview #4, March 13,1997) Confronted with the culture of teaching and learning in schools, many of the students reiterated versions of what Jack captured above. Yet in spite of it, I was surprised at how many of their experiences in the methods course made their way into their teaching and how students actually recognized and articulated the influence of those experiences on/in their teaching. [ST1 Ron: Yes, but how much of that was a reflection of the current culture of teaching and learning in schools? I found that a lot of my students were already familiar with cooperative learning models or critical challenges. Other social studies teachers had done all of that before. How much were we bringing with us from the methods course and how much were we simply finding ourselves at home in the already existing school culture? (February, 1999).] Reflecting on how the course had changed his idea of the role of a social studies teacher, Jack stated that "at the beginning [of the course] I thought the teacher more as the fountain of knowledge who knows everything, someone who stood up at the front of the class and dished out facts and told students what they needed to know" (Interview #2, October 20, 1996). "And now I try and look at it more in terms of the teacher guiding the students or presenting problems or cases or topics in an interesting and engaging way for the students to learn themselves" (Interview #3, December 17,1996). Charles demonstrated a similar process of transformation. 110 What I've been exposed to for many years were teachers lecturing in front of the class. So the picture I had in my mind of what I would be doing was based on what I had experienced before. But that has changed. [I now see myself] less as an instructor or a lecturer and more as a facilitator, especially w i th the group thing ... like you're not teaching them, you're guid ing them to learn, more for themselves than f rom y o u — giv ing them the opportunit ies to discover the knowledge on their own and w i t h their groups rather than just having me stand up there and yap for as long as I wanted to ... guided discovery. (Interview #2, October 17,1996) "Not necessarily expected just to convey facts and figures and build up a repertoire of knowledge that students can just spit back at me," claimed Jocelyn, "is good. It's relieving because I don't know if that does anybody any good at all" (Interview #2, October 20, 1996). No longer seeing herself as the fountain of knowledge, Jocelyn suggested that while she initially hoped the methods course would prepare me to be a social studies teacher, it didn't do that. But what i t d id do was prepare me for the fact that I 'm never going to reach that goal of: 'Now I've made it!' 'Now I am a social studies teacher.' I'm always going to be learning and changing and there w i l l always be the student in me. I w i l l never be just the teacher. More than that, I've now realized that I don't ever want to be just the teacher when in some way, I think that is what I [previously] wanted. I wanted to get to a place in which I can say: 'O.K. N o w I've done it. N o w I'm ready. N o w I understand and now I'm prepared.' I've now realized it's a constant, daily, on-going progression that I'll never get to the end of. A n d that's great! (Interview #3, December 11,1996). Ron, too, mentioned the methods course made him "a little more comfortable about the idea of being a teacher and not having to know everything." When I asked him what gave him that idea, he said it was the fact that we focus on questioning, that the most important th ing a teacher can be doing is asking good questions and then it's the students themselves that go and f ind the information. It's not a matter of us imparting our great storehouse of wisdom and knowledge. It's not even about informat ion but how to approach that information, how to question it, h o w to get i t , how to understand it once you do get it. (Interview #2, October 19,1996). What students took from the methods course didn't however pertain only to how they thought of themselves as social studies teachers but also to what they did (and thought about doing) as social studies teachers. Jocelyn illustrated that twice in the course of a conversation we conducted after I had observed two classes she taught during the practicum. She first addressed the fact that "Peter opened up the course to what it is that we're exactly doing as social studies teachers and what it means to be teaching social studies by including broad overall arching questions such as 'What is history?'." "I've tried in almost all of my lessons to integrate such questions: 'O.K. What are we doing here?' Without that focus in the course, I don't know that I would have had that focus in the social studies that I'm teaching" (Interview #4, 111 February 18,1997). Jocelyn's second example referred to how she used two excerpts from two different textbooks that describe a very different relationship between the Northwest Company and the Hudson's Bay Company—two trading companies operating in the service of Empire in the early days of the Canadian West. Engaging students with questions of historical interpretation and the constructed nature of knowledge was, according to her, directly related to the fact that the focus of the methods courses was "reading and wr i t ing texts. I thought that was a really neat way at getting at history. So because of that I chose to bring in two different texts and take a look at two different voices in comparison, not for the information itself but for the presentation of it, for the effect i t has on us as we attempt to interpret them and get at the past. Without the methods course, I don't know that I wou ld have done something like that. (Interview #4, February 18, 1997) [STfl Jocelyn: I believe that a lot of the learning which took place for me was from modeling. Given my background in sports, I think I learn first by observation, copying, and then, when I 'm comfortable, personalizing the knowledge. I learned how to play all my sports that way and so I approach many learning situations like that. The questions, the challenges come after I've tried it out as is first (November, 1998) 1. While Jocelyn attributed her approach to the kind of learning emphasized in the methods course, Casey pointed to the fact that the methods course had not as much offered her a new way of engaging history but rather affirmed and legitimated what she already knew as a student but did not feel was appropriate to do as a teacher. "I like to think that I've always questioned whether things are facts or not and not just take everything as given. But I don't think I would have done as much of it with my students if we hadn't explicitly discussed it in Peter's class" (Interview #5, April 18, 1997). "I think Peter's approach has made me look at things differently than I otherwise would have," added Casey. The example she gave was "looking at the text[book]. I've always been a kind of person that tries to question textbooks but I think [I do it] even more so now because [the course] helped me look at [those] things even closer. It certainly clarified that point or maybe it's helped me sort of consciously think it out" (Interview #2, October 20, 1996). "Had I not taken Peter's course," added Casey, I might have been more focused on just g iv ing students content, lecturing to them, not getting them to do as much of the work , not getting to think about what they're doing, not getting them to question the information, not getting them to question me or the textbook. I don't th ink I wou ld have questioned textbooks as much. I mean, I think I d id before but I'm not sure I wou ld have had students do it as wel l . (Interview #6, July 22,1997) The methods course according to Jack encouraged him, as a teacher, "to explore different texts and to frame things as problems or issues for students" (Interview #3, 112 December 17, 1996). Because of Peter's focus on reading and writing texts, claimed Mary, she spent a lot of time in her class looking at "how something is written, why it is written, who is it written for . . . yeah, that's a good teaching tool. And I did utilize that like when we were looking at different texts" (interview #5, April 24, 1997). For Charles, the most significant benefit of the methods course resulted "from working in groups and then combining all our group answers in a class discussion. I think that because we experienced that and understood how to do it and see the benefits of it [as students,] we are now be able to more effectively use it when we teach. It told us that we don't have to lecture and that there are other options to engage students in learning" (Interview #2, October 17,1996). Asking students what and how the course enabled also necessarily exposed what and how it did not. While all of what follows was intended by its iteratos as criticism, some in fact are more complimentary, in my view, than not. I will begin with the latter. While all of the study's participants enjoyed the class discussions, they also found them problematic (I address that issue more fully in Chapter VI). Attempting to negotiate their experiences as students in the course and reconcile them with those they believed they ought to receive as prospective teachers, Charles, for one, declared: "I think we get really analytical in our class. We spend a lot of time analyzing and discussing. I don't have a lot of notes from this class which, I don't know, I guess in a way bothers me" (Interview #2, October 17, 1996). What Charles wanted instead were "more teaching strategies type of stuff than we got, things like we had on the test: if you have a unit on Natives, or something, work on some ideas of how to present that. That kind of activity, I think, would have been a bit more productive, in my mind, than all those discussions or talking about texts" (Interview #3, December 18,1996). Mary, too, hoped class interactions would be more obviously correlated with the curriculum social studies teachers are expected to teach. I th ink they should be teaching us about the material we are expected to be teaching these kids. For example, I understand that we're supposed to be teaching European history and Brit ish history and stuff in social studies but I'm panicked because I haven't taken the French Revolution since I was in h igh school and I didn't take those history courses in university so I don't know h o w they expect me to teach it. I think there's a b-i-g i l lusion happening there w i t h the general public. They th ink our teachers know stuff [she bursts out laughing] and the joke's on them! I don't know anything. I know my geography and m y Canadian history and I know current events. But that's it. (Interview #2, October 19,1996). I want somebody to tell me: "this is what the kids need to know and these are ways you can teach them this. I mean Peter was so vague talking about pr imary and secondary sources and question sequences and I w o u l d have appreciated 113 more specifics: 'This is a lesson on this! This is how you teach it. This is what the kids need to know. These are the objectives!' Interview #4, Apr i l 9,1997) "The fear most commonly articulated by prospective teachers," claims Britzman (1986), "is that they will never know enough to teach. Behind this fear is the larger cultural expectation that teachers must be certain in their knowledge. Teachers are supposed to know the Answers" (p. 450). ' | In a somewhat similar manner, what troubled Jack was that theory was not made as practical as he believed it could have been We kept talking all the time about what we were supposed to do and what we should do and reading all these articles. I thought that was important but I think we should have gotten more practical. We should have had more assignments or opportunit ies to practice what we were talking about all the time. We only did the one primary source question sequence and we had to do i t again i n the exam. So there was really only one thing that we d id . A n d even when we pu t together the [geography] unit, he looked for general things that we had looked at all term but it wasn't enough of a practical experience. We just talked about what we were doing but we didn't really know i f what each of us was doing was really problematic or talk about the problems we could run into i f we tried to teach it. (Interview #3, December 17,1996). . . . Peter wanted us to do some pretty ambitious things and we came up w i th and talked about some neat stuff, for instance talking about the different texts and having students use them. But it's as i f we never bothered to learn the basics: how do you come up w i t h three lessons a week. H o w do you do that and keep them occupied and have them learn? (Interview #5, Apr i l 15,1997) And while judging the methods course in what could be best described as a state of pre- or in-practicum "panic" was shared, in various ways, by all participants at one point or another during this study, students also provided critiques of the course from elsewhere. Peter's continuing encouragement of students to centre instruction around primary and secondary sources which are external to the textbook was seen very favourable by all of the six participants. But as Jocelyn pointed out, distancing students from the resource they will ultimately use most, especially during the practicum, has its consequences. Because of Peter's approach, said Jocelyn, I don't l ike to use the text[book] so much and I don't feel like I have a very good repertoire of ideas on how to make the textfbook] interesting. I know how to br ing outside sources in but I don't know h o w to deal w i t h the textfbook] per-se and I have a real feeling [ f rom Peter] that there's a strong inclination not to use the textfbook]. Like Peter kept saying: 'No, you know, do this, do this. Make i t more interesting, make i t more applicable, critical challenges,1 k ind of thing that I almost feel like I'm doing something wrong if I use the textbook. So perhaps maybe a little more work on: 'O.K., given that you have no other resource because this [the textbook] is it!, what can you do w i t h it?!' I wou ld have like to see a little bit more of that, ( interview #4, February 18, 1997). 114 Speaking of the relationship between a course focused on, and entitled "reading and writing texts" and the practices of reading and writing texts in it, Jocelyn claimed that Peter didn ' t really ho ld us accountable to the things he wanted us to do, i n terms of the course readings. We really didn't get at them. He said he wanted to engage in social studies as reading and wr i t ing texts but he never said: 'Here are some readings you need to be doing. Look at these, devour these and discuss these and talk about these as a way of getting at social studies.' So we didn' t do much of that. Maybe one or two at the beginning classes but after that there were a lot of people who didn't even do the reading. (Interview #3, December 11,1996) [ST! Jack: My experience was that we spent much of our time in the methods course doing exactly that. Two years later, I can give many examples of texts we examined and the ways we discussed how we might use them to study social studies (i.e., The Ballad of Crowfoot, Tom Wayman's poem, old photographs, novels, old textbooks, etc.). Avner: Both Jocelyn and Jack are correct; their views are not mutually exclusive. What Jack is speaking of are texts brought into the classroom specifically to be devoured, analyzed, and discussed for the purpose of social studies teaching. Indeed a critical examination was given all of those texts whenever they were brought in. What Jocelyn is speaking about, on the other hand, are course readings, the theoretical or conceptual frameworks which guided what was then done in the classroom. Jocelyn points to the fact that while the texts Jack is referring to were critically engaged, course readings—other than the first one or two—were not.] The idea of reading and writing texts was also on Ron's mind when he discussed what he found problematic in the course. But contrary to Jocelyn, who wanted the approach of reading and writing texts to also be applied to the readings students were given in the course—thus connecting how students were positioned to teach with how they themselves were made to learn—Ron's focus was on what did and did not get textualized—that is, made into a text—within the Social studies methods course. "We've been talking about 'texts,'" stated Ron but we've been talking about them as things that are out there and removed f rom us in the classroom—whether temporarily or spatially. There has also been an emphasis on things that are wr i t ten or recorded in some format. What we haven't really looked at is textual iz ing or problematizing what's happening now wi th in this very classroom. We didn' t talk about the class. We didn't talk about what we were doing in the class as a text. A n d I was k ind of hoping at some point that maybe in this class we w i l l actually stop and think about what i t Is that we are actually doing right here and right now, w i t h Peter in front of us sitting in a horse-shoe and reflect on the nature of the program and so on. We didn't do that. Instead, i t was social studies as something that's out there, this "stuff" that's out there and that needs to be brought into the classroom. (Interview #3, December 7,1996) When I asked Ron during our concluding interview what recommendations he might have for Peter if he were to teach this course again the following year, Ron said: 115 Talk about gender. Talk about race and class. I mean, if you're going to be talking about social studies as reading and wr i t ing texts, talk about the classroom as text, talk about the text of what we're doing here and n o w — w h o wrote that text? Where does it come from? H o w do we wri te it, how do we construct it? How do we read it? I thought that was what we were going to do and we didn't , really. Text became stil l pretty much printed matter and I thought the idea of talking about text was to expand that not ion where a coffee cup is a text, sitt ing at a table talking into a tape-recorder is a k ind of a text or the way in which the classroom is organized. We didn't touch on that much. We didn't really do that at all. (Interview #6, July 19,1997) The imbalance between the positive and negative comments made by students about the methods course is by no means coincidental. Rather, it is indicative of, and to a large degree reflects students' overall satisfaction with a course which they saw as one of the highlights in a teacher education program most of them found to be less than desirable. Not only did the methods course fulfill many of their expectations pertaining to social studies education, it also seemed to embody what other instructors spoke of but rarely practiced. Thus, as different as the methods course seemed to be when compared to what else was offered in the program at that time, it seemed, paradoxically perhaps, to be the true representation of what this teacher education program aspired to yet never fully accomplished elsewhere. Yet, as an integral component of the UBC Teacher Education Program, the methods course was also very much implicated in it. And while the apparent differences between the approach taken in the methods course compared to other courses made it distinct in student teachers' eyes, a closer examination of its pedagogy illustrates, at times, how underlying themes, approaches, and assumptions guiding the methods course were, in fact, very much part of the problematic approach of the teacher education program in general which students pointed to in their earlier comments. That relationship and how it positioned students in the educative process of learning to teach will be explored in more detail in the following chapters. Notes 1. Admission into the program requires an undergraduate degree i n an area corresponding to a school subject (i.e., English, history, mathematics, biology, etc.) and a GPA which, in the last few years, according to the Admissions Office in the UBC Teacher Education Program, exceeded that required by UBC Faculties of Law and Medicine (though the latter have other criteria wh ich make their enrollment more competit ive and demanding). The year this study was conducted 405 student teachers were enrolled i n the secondary program. Two other programs exist w i th in the UBC Teacher Education Program: an elementary and a middle-school teacher education program (wi th an enrollment of 386 and 33 respectively, that year). While the elementary program, at that t ime, was completely separate f r o m the secondary program, students in the middle-school program often shared courses w i t h their secondary counterparts. 116 2. Practica settings are also provided by other, more remote school districts though only a very small number of students (upon request/consent) take up that opportunity. 3. Faculty advisors are normally assigned about 10 students in 4 or 5 different schools. Traveling among schools they usually observe each student teacher once a week. One of the six student teachers in m y sub-sample group was assigned to a STEP (Student Teacher Education Program) program where a faculty advisor, whi le stil l assigned a similar number of student teachers, is located in one school and therefore has the opportunity to observe students' teaching on a much more regular and frequent basis (identifying that student, even by pseudonym, is problematic if anonymity is to be maintained since his/her faculty advisor in that program is a member of my doctoral committee). 117 P A R T 2 Language necessarily makes certain choices for you. I t l imits the way you think and what you can think about or at least what you can express. . . . What is a text i f not part of a language game? What is society if not a discourse? (Ron, Interview #6, July 19,1997) Any system of education, Foucault (1972/1981) proposes, is a way of maintaining or modifying the appropriation of discourse, along with the power and knowledge they carry. Discourses, claim Luke and Gore (1992a), "define the classroom, the teacher and the student and are key to the production of subjectivity, identity and knowledge in pedagogical encounters" (p. 2; see also Phelan, 1994). Methodologically organizing knowledge and experience and repressing alternatives through their dominance, discourses construct possibilities for, and constraints on, the imaginable as they determine "what can and cannot be said, discussed or investigated within [them]" (Ankersmit, 1994, p. 97). The vocabulary and terminology of a discourse, adds Ankersmit, "express what is supposed to be essential in that which is under discussion" (ibid., pp. 97-98). And since "meanings flow back and forth from what is said to what is done," claims Cherryholmes (1988), "no firm, stable, clear, unequivocal distinction can be drawn between discourse and practice" (pp. 9,8). Concerned, as I am, not only with what discourses in this particular community of teacher education at UBC mean but, following Fish (1980), also with how they mean and ultimately, with what they do (and what and how they mean and 'do' differently to different people), the chapters in this section of the dissertation examine "how language functions to include or exclude certain meanings, secure or marginalize particular ways of behaving through the various ways in which it actively [and passively] produces and mediates the context and content" of (teacher) education (Giroux, 1996, pp. 48-49). To open "education and the language of experience" to its problematics, claims Britzman (1991a), "is to study its discourses and discursive practices in such a way as to reveal its commissions and omissions" (p. 17). For any discourse, Kretovics (1985) suggests, "is defined not only by what it says and the questions it raises, but, just as importantly, by that which it does not or cannot say and those questions it cannot pose or answer." My purpose then, as Giroux (1983) offers, is to analyze "the system of questions that command the answers given as well as the absence of those questions that exist beyond the possibility of such a framework" (p. 172. cf. Kretovics, 1985, p. 54). By reading and 118 reading into what is and is not said and done in teacher education classrooms, we can begin to challenge the underlying assumptions and values perpetuated by the discourses and practices which currently dominate the educational field. (Kretovics, ibid., p. 57). By examining, as Britzman (1991a) did, how the "cultural myths about teaching are discursively produced and lived, and how the [discursive practices] of learning to teach inscribe the subjectivities, voices, and practices of its subjects," I too, examine and theorize not only "what student teachers do but what it is that structures their investments, interpretations, and practices" (pp. 10-11) and how and "why certain practices dominate and persist over others" (p. 221). To do so, the influence of discourses and the discursive practices they produce have on student teachers' educational imagination are examined as two inherently interconnected fields—the epistemological and the ontological. As an epistemological field, I examine how specific discourses and their uses within the teacher education program position—that is, open and close specific avenues for—student-teachers to think (and, consequently, not think or unthink) about education, teaching, and learning in particular ways. As an ontological field, I explore how organizing "a way of thinking into a way of doing" and being by "actively shap[ing] the social practices of which they are constitutive' (McLaren & Lankshear, 1993, p. 381), discourses used in teacher education direct student-teachers to act in certain ways both at the university setting and (as a result, I will argue) while teaching in schools. With that perspective in mind, the second part of this dissertation is divided into four chapters, each dealing with a different aspect of the impact of discursive practices within teacher education. Yet, while the discussion in the following chapters is about discourse, it is important to make clear that it is also through discourse. That is, the very investigation of discourse is, and can only be, conveyed through discourse—a metadiscourse which, as a mode of criticism, Barthes (1972) points out, is ultimately, essentially, and in and of itself, a 'discourse upon discourse" (p. 258. cf. Young, 1981, p.6). A complex structure accommodating an often contested inter-departmental division of labour and territory, and comprising a variety of ideologies, perspectives, and approaches both in and to education inherent in the disciplinary and personal agendas of each individual instructor, the UBC Teacher Education Program, as any other, does not speak of or practice education in a harmonized, single, monovocal fashion. It is, rather, a fractured, discontinuous, and contradictory endeavour whereby a bricolage of discourses and practices "cross each other, are sometimes 119 juxtaposed with one another, but can just as well exclude or be unaware of each other" (Foucault, 1972/1981, p. 67). Contradictions, fractures, and dislocations, however, are not only inherent in any complex, multi-discursive educative environment but, when brought to the surface to be critically examined, provide the means to unravel the weave that binds them together. For the very authority with which teacher education presents its vision of education is achieved, to borrow from Cronon's (1992) discussion of history, from its ability to hide those "discontinuities, ellipses, and contradictory experiences that would [otherwise] undermine the intended meaning of its story" (p. 1349). The story of learning to teach, therefore, must be examined both within and against itself, exposing its ellipses, contradictions, and silences and how those are made to speak—either by presence or absence—within that story. For contradictions in discourse and/as practice in teacher education emanate not only from the discontinuities within the combined overt curriculum of learning to teach. Rather, and simultaneously, they are also part of the contradictions between the overt, covert, and null curricula of preservice education, between the declared goals of teacher education and its actual practices. As Ginsburg & Clift (1990) explain, the hidden curriculum does not necessarily mean that it is deliberately or explicitly hidden but rather that it is not part of the explicit curriculum (p. 450). The 'hidden' curriculum (and I use the term cautiously for reasons I will describe below) comprises the content of the implicit messages transmitted to students through the structures, social relations, policies, and practices of teacher education beyond those conveyed by the stated curriculum (Glatthorn & Coble, 1995, p. 29; Giroux & Penna, 1983, p. 102. cf. Ginsburg & Clift, 1990, p. 451), as well as through the contradictory messages of the overt curriculum itself and those emanating from the dichotomies between what is advocated and what is practiced. Distinguished from the explicit and implicit curricula is the 'null curriculum,' a term coined by Eisner (1985, p. 107) to address the nonrandom structured absences within a curriculum which work to silence and thus eliminate the existence of alternatives through their non-coincidental (perhaps deliberate) absence (Erickson, 1991, p. 8). While the pedagogical framing of the explicit, overt, and,official curriculum—made apparent by a teacher or text physically there for students—is more visible in the educative process than those of the hidden and null curriculum, the latter, as Bernstein (1996, p. 28) points out, never cease their pedagogical functions. In fact, claim Ginsburg & Clift (1990), they possibly communicate "a stronger and more persuasive set of ideas 120 about teaching, pedagogy, [and] curriculum" than the "publicly stated and intended goals of teacher education" which they accompany (p. 450). With this perspective in mind and within the parameters of this particular study, the second part of this dissertation engages the following questions: how do the multiple and contradictory discourses and practices of teacher education—each making different claims about the purpose and conduct of education, teaching, and learning—come together to educate? How do students (or do they?) make sense of them and the existence of discrepancies among them? How do these different discourses and practices and the interaction among them position prospective teachers to conceive of, think about, and act upon education—their own education as students and the education they are to provide their own students in the future? How do the discourses and practices provided prospective teachers influence their educational imagination and the pedagogical constructions they do and do not produce with and against them? 121 C H A P T E R I V P l a n n i n g , m a n a g e m e n t , a n d o r g a n i z a t i o n as the o r g a n i z i n g d i s c o u r s e o f expe r i ence What prospective teachers hear about teaching in learning to teach has direct implications for the kind of teaching they ultimately perceive as both desirable and possible. In the first and formative semester of the UBC Teacher Education Program, prior to the 12-week practicum, student-teachers were required to take seven compulsory courses: Educational Psychology (EPSE) 306—Education During the Adolescent Years; Educational Psychology (EPSE) 317—Development and Exceptionality in the Regular Classroom; Education (EDUC) 316—Communication Skills in Teaching; Educational Studies (EDST) 314—The Analysis of Education; Education (EDUC) 311—Principles of Teaching (POT); and two methods courses1 relating to student-teachers' content-area concentration(s).2 The multitude of given and possible discourses—found both among and within these different courses— competed for dominance not only through what (and how) they spoke of education, teaching, and learning but also through the spaces from which they were made to make their particular claims to knowledge; spaces which determined how (whether, or to what degree) such claims would be incorporated into—that is, become an integral part of—prospective teachers' discourse about and/as practice in education. How were students to sort out this array of discourses, each making different claims about education, teaching, and learning? How did the discourses appropriated in and among these different courses and the interaction between them position prospective teachers to conceive of, think about, and act upon education— their own education as students and the education they were to provide their students in the future? How did the images of education provided to prospective teachers influence their educational imagination and what pedagogical constructions did they produce with such images in mind? Or, to borrow from Britzman (1991a), how did student teachers "make sense of these competing conditions even as these competing conditions "condition" [their] subjectivity in contradictory ways" ? (p. 57). [ST1 Ron: Mostly, we ignore the contradictions. As in any sphere of life, it is only when contradictions are blatant enough to cause some kind of "cognitive dissonance" that we take notice (February, 1999).] 122 All of the above-mentioned courses, no-doubt, relate directly to teaching and, in combination, play an important role in highlighting both general and specific issues pertaining to the educative endeavour. Yet, through comments made by prospective teachers participating in this study, it soon became evident that, at least in their own thinking about teaching at the time, there was a very clear and established hierarchy among those courses; the litmus-test, by and large, determined by their applicability to teaching, to what a teacher needs to know in order to make instruction possible, sufficiently operational, viable, profitable, and, ultimately, according to their continuously evolving definition—"educational." The two Educational Psychology courses which focused on developmental characteristics of the "normal" and exceptional adolescent learner both inside and outside of the "regular" classroom, seemed, in the view of this group of students, very much peripheral to what they actually needed to know and, more importantly, do as teachers in classrooms. While adding important perspectives to the understanding of education or the learner, these two courses, were often seen as irrelevant to the actual act of teaching. They might be interesting and informative, students argued, but they are not essential. One can—indeed one does, they claimed—teach just as well without them. Labeling these courses (as they did their Communications Course) as "redundant," "boring," "irrelevant," and "a waste of time," participants could not come up with one example throughout the six interviews conducted with them as to how those three courses might be important or beneficial in informing them as a social studies teacher. [STf Ron: I may have said at the time that the Ed Psych courses seemed peripheral or irrelevant, but I think that I was reacting more to the way material was presented than the content.. Later on, in the Summer, I found my knowledge of Piaget and Kohlberg to be very valuable in the Philosophy of Education course. Also, upon reflection on my first year as a teacher, I wish I had learned more procedural knowledge in the Educational Psychology courses; how to deal with ADHD kids, how to recognize warning signs of abuse, learning about disabilities, depression, etc. But now, another question occurs to me: Given all of the fuss made over critical thinking not only in social studies but in all courses, why did none of us challenge the definitions of "normal," "exceptional," and "regular"? I think we were all paralyzed by the fear of "Oh God, what if I get one of THOSE in my classroom?" (February, 1999). Casey: Having taught for a while, I can now make a strong connection to the relevance of these two courses, especially in terms of "troubled teens" since I have seen quite a few extreme cases myself. At least these courses make one cognizant of the potential for problems with students. Sometimes as teachers, we tend 123 to focus on assignments and curriculum, critical thinking, etc., and forget the students and that to some of them, at a given moment, what we do focus on is the least of their concerns/This is important, and in some cases, I think students need to be given latitude. We should not forget the psychological turmoil that often goes along with being an adolescent (March, 1999).] Much higher on student-teachers' "relevancy list" was The Analysis of Education, an Educational Studies course focusing on gender equity, anti-racism, multiculturalism, and First Nations issues in education. Yet, while students recognized this course as extremely important and relevant to what a teacher needs to know, it seemed less so in relation to what a teacher actually needs to do (I address this dichotomy in more depth in Chapter VII). The courses prospective teachers found most significant and those they continuously referred to both positively and negatively while commenting about the teacher education program as a whole were Principles of Teaching (POT) and the methods courses, specifically, and not surprising in the context of this particular study, the social studies methods course (SSED 312). Principles of Teaching, as the UBC Calendar notes, introduces students to "principles and instructional procedures related to classroom management, instructional planning, and the assessment of learning as applicable across grade levels and subject matter fields" (UBC Calendar, 1995/96, p. 398). The social studies methods course, which I have already elaborated upon in Chapter III, tended as methods courses normally do, to focus on issues of curriculum and instruction in social studies, that is, curriculum organization and principles and methods of instruction applied to its teaching. These two courses, for better or for worse, seemed to be at the centre of the teacher education program for this group of students. In the views of these students, these courses were directly related to teaching, to what student-teachers should learn, to what teaching (and more importantly, as I will show, what "good" teaching) is fundamentally about. [STf Ron: Look at the title of these courses: Analysis of Education, Principles of Teaching, Methods courses. These titles suggest "doing something." To me, the title Principles of Teaching privileges this course because it suggests action. I think what needed to be questioned is the obsessive nature in which the entire course called Principles of Teaching centered around unit planning. One catch phrase I have heard lately talks about the need for "leaders" or "managers." Yes of course, every teacher should know how to organize learning, for what purposes and with which desired outcomes. And all I really wanted was a simple, basic model of how to do it—like learning a filing system. I think something like that should take maybe a week, at the most. All I do now, having 124 taught for a year, is to draw up a chart on a big piece of paper and fill in what I want to do, how I'm going to do it and how I'm going to evaluate what's been done. So I think the POT class was the biggest waste of time (February, 1999).] In purposefully presenting a somewhat undeveloped and undertheorized hierarchy, I wish to emphasize that I do not intend to use it as a statement about the significance—actual or potential—of each of the above-mentioned courses as contributors to student-teachers' understanding of the educative process. Nor does this hierarchy serve as an indication as to what I believe prospective teachers ought to learn in teacher education. I do however find the existence of this hierarchy and the messages it conveys useful in order to make two interrelated points. First, that such a hierarchy is by no means innocent or coincidental. Beyond their focus on the "practical," POT and the methods course find their way to the top of students' hierarchy due to the structure of the UBC Teacher Education Program (in the case of POT) and the disciplinary organization of knowledge and learning in schools (in the case of the methods course). As a course, POT gains its significance not only because it provides the foundations for teaching across subject areas—engaging issues such as the role of the teacher, planning, instructional strategies, classroom management, and assessment and evaluation; issues pertinent in and to all the other courses—but, also, due to the special role it plays as the liaison between the Teacher Education Office at UBC as student teachers (something like a home-room in schools). POT is where the associate dean of teacher education addresses prospective teachers; it is where they receive their sets of "official" documents from the ministry of education and other professional organizations; it is where they fulfill requirements by the library and other administrative structures in the program (insurance, etc.). As such, I would argue, what is done in POT often has significance beyond the boundaries of the course itself; in many ways it represents the program and serves as its mouth-piece. As for the methods course, the idea that content-area courses are more important than general courses which focus on the learner is structured upon the expectations about teaching with which prospective teachers come into the program (Britzman, 1991a); expectations which are based upon their own previous educational experiences whereby teachers teach content rather than learners, are defined by their subject-area, and are measured by their creative organizational skills to convey it, often in abstraction of the effects the discipline and its organization have on those who are made to engage it. Yet, the hierarchy presented above is not only the result of what prospective teachers brought with them into the 125 program; it was as much, though often implicitly, the effect of the teacher education program itself which not only chose not to interrogate the assumptions with which student-teachers came into the program but actually reinforced them. Such a reinforcement occurs when issues examined in courses such as the Analysis of Education or the two Educational Psychology courses, were, more often than not, given a merely "theoretical" status (with theoretical often equated with superfluous, unimportant, irrelevant) by their exclusion from the courses that seem to matter most—the "practical" courses—such Principles Of Teaching and the methods courses. The second reason I find it useful to focus on the hierarchy of courses created by participants in this study, and the one I will continue to pursue and develop in order to illustrate my first point, is that while this hierarchy may not be a statement about what I believe is important for students to learn, it does serve as a testimony to what, where, and how prospective teachers themselves thought was important in learning to teach. In order to examine, as I claim to do, how the discourses of teacher education position student teachers to engage education in particular ways, one must first identify which discourses student teachers listen to, which they value, and what they value in them. Identifying which courses were significant in prospective teachers' eyes, is a first step to knowing where to focus one's attention in a sea of collected data in order to explore how the program positioned them. Indicating that Principles of Teaching and the social studies methods course were at the heart of the program, the messages conveyed by those courses and the discourses engaged in them, one ought to assume, had the largest influence on the final images of teaching with which students leave the teacher education program; images they take with them into schools. Regarding these courses as more significant than others, what was said and done in them ultimately made a (more) lasting impression on students' conceptions of education, teaching, and learning. As their courses of choice—courses where they focused much of their attention and from which, according to them, they gained the most—the discourses in those courses carried more weight in their eyes as they conveyed messages about what it means to teach, how one should go about learning to teach, and what becomes significant in the process of preparing to teach. [ST1 Casey: I agree that Principles of Teaching and the social studies methods course were probably the most important courses for me. But I think part of that was a reflection of the relationship I forged with the instructors of those two courses. I got a lot out of those courses largely because I related well to both my instructors (March, 1999).] 126 I speak of discourses rather than discourse as I examine the grammar and lexicon of language, depiction, and action since there were undoubtedly several discourses and sub-discourses working simultaneously in both POT and the social studies methods course. Some, especially those in the social studies methods course, included discourses which focused on: the critical evaluation of knowledge, standpoint, and positioning in subject-area texts; identification of perspective and the exploration of issues in/of representation; the engagement of language as a performative act that constructs the world rather than represents it; and, the construction of meaningful instruction around controversial public issues that incorporate and relate to students' prior understandings, their own lives in their respective communities. While these and other discourses continuously and prominently circulated throughout the methods course, one of the most powerful discourses engaged in both Principles of Teaching and in the social studies methods course—perhaps the overarching and organizing meta-discourse through which the other discourses and sub-discourses were made available—was the discourse of organization, planning, and management. It is what Giroux & Simon (1988) refer to as the discourse of the "technical and the instrumental" (p. 11), or what Giroux & McLaren (1986) name as "instrumental rationality" (p. 229). Such a discourse— through language and/as action—focuses heavily on lesson- and unit-planning and incorporates terms such as rationale, goals, objectives, learning outcomes, assessment, and evaluation as the tools of the (teaching) trade, as the language of the 'real' and the 'possible.' It is this particular discourse that is the focus of this chapter. Exploring the impact of the discourse of organization, management, and technical rationality on student-teachers' educational imagination, this chapter examines how such a discourse positions them to explore education in specific ways and what, in the process of leaving out, forgetting, and silencing alternatives, is the image of teaching that ultimately emerges and prevails. [ST! Peter: You set up the argument in a way that a focus on planning and organization at the foundation of the course reduces the practice of pedagogy to the merely "technical and instrumental." This, I believe, is your central critique. This is convincing to me, only to the degree that there was little or no discussion of rationale or goals. If the goals of schooling—and social studies—were taken as given, and then we proceeded to outline technical means of achieving the given goals, that would be one thing. But the orientation of the course—as you acknowledge—was about consistency among goals, classroom practice, and assessment. This is about encouraging student teachers to be thoughtful about what they were trying to accomplish, how they were trying to accomplish it, and how they 127 assessed their success. Student teachers must have "tools" AND they must think deeply about the purpose for which they are using them. You acknowledge this later on" (July, 1998). Casey: I think some students did want to simplify the art of teaching—they expected to get the materials and resources, a way to present them, etc. without putting much thought into it. Because Peter put SO much thought and reflection into it, some students became frustrated (March, 1999).] To ground my discussion about the use of the technical discourse of planning, organization, and management and its impact on student-teachers' understanding of teaching, I choose an excerpt from a discussion in the social studies methods course which took place about a month into the program. Having already designed a mini-lesson based on a "concept" for their POT course and a question sequence about a primary source for the social studies methods course, student-teachers are, at the time of this discussion, in the midst of designing three unit plans: one for POT and two for their methods courses. The parameters for the unit plan required in the social studies methods course were introduced and discussed at the end of the previous class (See Appendix C). At the beginning of this particular class, and having heard some of the concerns raised by students in his earlier (morning) class about problems they were encountering in attempting to reconcile unit-planning requirements in the methods course with those given in POT, Peter opened the discussion by asking students in this class whether they, too, had similar concerns. While Peter had already raised the same kind of question prior to this class (both about discrepancies between courses and about possible problematics in particular events, methods, or instruction in the methods course itself), students were usually unresponsive, at best originating one or two uncommitted statements which rarely resulted in an engaged discussion. In an uncharacteristic fashion, however, this time, students responded enthusiastically, passionately, and en-mass. The sea of hands following each of Peter's questions and other students' comments resulted in a discussion which, while initially designed only for a short period of time (or so it seemed), ultimately took the lion's share of this particular class. Although this excerpt is longer than the traditional ethnographic "chunk," it serves to introduce and situate my discussion as well as to connect it to what followed after. Peter : . . . Do you have any concerns [similar to those raised in the morning class]? Jack: M y specific concern is that [what we are getting] f rom our POT instructor direct ly contradicts some of the stuff that you've taught us about units. (And I th ink it's a problem w i t h our POT instructor rather than w i th you). When we raise these conflicts w i t h her, the response is: "Well , that's unfortunate, but it has to be done my way." This puts us in a strange posit ion 128 because we're taking this methods class and we're assuming that we're being taught the best way to approach a social studies unit because this is your area of expertise. Yet, we're being told by someone whose expertise is not social studies that we can't do it that way in her class. Not only are we confused about everything in general, but it's even more complicated by that. Peter: H o w many of you are experiencing some direct conflict between this class and POT? [about three-quarters of the students raise their hand]. O.K. That's pretty major and I think we'd better sort that through. I'd l ike to hear a bit more about the nature of this discrepancy in expectations for what is put forward as good teaching Student #1: We're having big contradictions on the length of a lesson. In POT it's strict: you do not go over 70 minutes, and it's [usually] somewhere between 40-70 minutes. There are several people in here who might have gone over 70 minutes because of what we got in this class. We backed it up w i t h relevant things we w i l l be doing in that lesson but that was just not accepted [in POT]. Jack: Just to add to that, our units are not al lowed to be more than 6-8 lessons [class sighs: "Yeah!"] and every concept, issue, or theme we've talked about in this class are designed around month-based units, which seems reasonable to me. However, God forbid, if we ever handed that in as part of our unit in our POT class, we'd probably be failed on i t . . . . Jocelyn: Since there's no way I can fit my unit into 7 lessons, what I am doing is saying in m y unit plan that these 7 lessons are part of my unit. A n d if the POT teacher takes issue w i t h me, then [she says w i t h a sense of defiance] I'll go talk to her! Class [ in what seems a combination of respect and disbelief at Jocelyn's "unruly" approach]: Oooooohhhhhh!!! Peter: You can see that these kinds of questions: "How long is a lesson?" "How long is a unit?," these are not deep pedagogical issues. Student #2: But they appear to be for some people. I personally don't think it should be, but it is. Peter: What I'm try ing to say is that if your POT instructor says that the lessons turned in must not be longer than 70 minutes, and they have no flexibil i ty on this and are not w i l l i ng to bend on this, it seems to me that you produce 70 minute lessons for that class, and that's fine. This maybe the cause of some inconvenience for you in that you won't be able to turn in the same assignment here and there but it shouldn't be the source of confusion about what is a lesson or what is a unit. Some teachers have units that are always 10 lessons long, and that's fine. A n d i f someone insists you frame your uni t that way, then you' l l have to turn in something different there than you would here. But these are not underlying differences in what it means to teach. Student #1: It's more than inconveniences. I mean we get something f rom [POT] and something f rom here and then we have to go out into, say, the practicum and they're going to ask us: "What do you think?" A n d we're going to be going: "Well, we had so and so who said this, and then we had our other methodology instructor who said this," and then . . . Peter: But that's an answer to a question: "How long do you th ink a lesson should be?" [When you get into your school] you should be asking: "How long are classes in this school and do you consider a lesson something that is unif ied over two days or do you mean something that fits into that 60 minute block?" . . . But the problems raised [earlier] about how you were asked to use a "concept" [ in POT] seems more significant to me. Could somebody address that? . . . Student #3: Could we also know w h y it is important? 129 Student #4: Because that's what we are being marked on. Ron: I don't understand the point of separating a concept f rom a lesson plan and w h y we're expected to do this concept "thing" in our POT class, [ in POT student-teachers were taught they should bu i ld a lesson around a concept, that is, a concept should be seen as a beginning of a lesson or a source for a lesson, but never anything larger than a lesson] . . . . Jack : . . . we're being forced to break down concepts in social studies into something so small that it can be dealt w i t h completely—start to f in ish—wi th in a lesson, and a lesson being one class. Peter: I'm sorry. I can't help on that one. If you're going to have a concept that's useful for social studies, you'd probably want to move beyond . . . one lesson. . . . Not all lesson plans have to be organized around concepts. D id somebody tell you they do? Student #3: No. But it seems as if we've been doing an awful lot of them! Student #5:... We have three assignments on concepts in POT . . . [and] the way we are asked to use a concept there is so generic that I f ind it useless. It's just jumping through academic hoops. I don't see how it can be applicable [in teaching]. Student #6 I can't speak for everyone but I feel that I'm not getting enough practice at wr i t ing lesson plans. I've only done two in the month and a bit that I've been here and I have to go into the classroom in a week and a half [for the shor t—two-week—pract icum] and I don't even know how to wr i te a really good one. I think that it's something we should all be doing more of. But [instead] I 'm getting critical thinking in three of my classes. It's absolutely ridiculous! Peter: Do you still have a future assignment [in POT] that deals w i t h concepts? Jocelyn: No. We have themes now. A n d , again, we have to do our themes and get through them in 7 lessons. A n d that's not r ight either [class laughs]. (In-class transcript, October 9,1996) I chose to open with this particular excerpt because, even at the time of this discussion, it seemed a defining moment in my own research in that it illustrates, coherently, so many of the issues embedded in the predominancy of the discourse of planning and management within this teacher education program. What intrigued me in this discussion was the fact that it reveals as much as it conceals. That is, what transpired is as much a reflection of what did not. What seems to weave so well together, therefore, only unravels and falls apart as one examines more closely what this discussion represents and what is represented in and by it. [ST! Casey: To me this discussion, in some ways, is a reflection of life in general and our educational system in particular. As one goes through the system, one realizes that different teachers teach the same things differently, and as a student teacher who wishes to do well, one must adjust accordingly. For me, I just adjusted and in the long run realized that I would present and design my lesson plans in a way that is right for me. In some way this could be viewed as a positive as we were being exposed to different ways and 130 methods about planning. I guess the problem arises because marks are involved. And when those are involved, if one disagrees with the way in which the instructor expects planning to be presented, that can become a problem (March, 1999).] Learning how to plan lessons and units and engaging its derivative language of goals, objectives, learning outcomes, and assessment and evaluation procedures, are all, undoubtedly, important elements of learning to teach. How to organize learning, for what purposes, and with which desired outcomes, must be at the forefront of teachers' thinking, regardless of subject area or grade level. They are, and must surely remain, therefore, part and parcel of what every teacher ought to think about and know. What becomes evident very soon, however, is that the discussion excerpted above, is about much more (and much less) than how to plan a lesson or unit. In fact, the "big" questions always and already relevant to how one plans to teach—questions Peter repeatedly attempted to bring back into the discussion, are ignored by the discourse of planning and management invoked by students. The discourse students called into use is less about how to plan lessons or units than about lesson- and unit-planning itself. The difference between the two is that the former—used by Peter—brings out the "how" and "why" questions of teaching, and planning is only a means to engage such questions. The latter—used by some of the students—is about lesson- and unit-planning both as process and product, thus overlooking the questions raised by the former. Seen as ends for instruction rather than as means for thinking about instruction, the discourse of unit-planning no longer necessitates an exploration of epistemological and pedagogical questions embedded in those "how" and "why" questions. Instead, it substitutes them with (and in the process turns them into) questions of time management and organization. To be sure, the difference between these two approaches, these two discourses—one about teaching, the other about what could be narrowly defined as instruction—are ones created not because of the different characteristics of each of these activities but through the way one engages them and the discourse one uses as one goes about doing so. What emerges, especially within the context of what follows, and in spite of Peter's comments during the discussion, is that students in this teacher education program were not as much introduced to the discourse of planning and management as a vehicle to consider the "hows" and "whys" of teaching as they were inculcated into it in a way that the concepts, language, and terms of this discourse were no longer (and could no longer be used as) tools to critically think about teaching. Instead, they became the focus, the very essence and embodiment of teaching itself. [STI Jocelyn: I think I'd have to agree. 131 However, I wasn't at a stage to engage in this sort of discussion (that is, critically think about teaching) until I had some experience actually doing it! (November, 1998). Peter: (About planning as a tool): Student teachers, at this point are inexpert at using the tools. And there is confusion stemming from the nature of the instruction they are receiving (July, 1998).] In other words, what this excerpt illustrates, as I will show, is that what took place was no longer simply a discussion about unit plans but an example of what happens when such a discussion turns out to be an illustration of what it has already become: a discourse of planning in and of itself. In so becoming, it eliminates the possibility of other discourses about planning to teach from entering its domain. Consequently, while the idea of planning to teach must remain central to teacher education, one cannot (indeed, one must not) avoid asking: how? To what degree? And at what cost? The discussion excerpted above appears to center around what student teachers saw as unreasonable unit-planing demands put upon them in POT; demands which did not coincide with Peter's approach to unit-planning nor with the way in which the very issues to which student teachers objected were discussed in the social studies methods course. What students seem to be demonstrating is a dissatisfaction with, and a resistance to a discourse of planning and management in POT which has reduced the discussion about, and the requirement for, teaching to the length of a lesson and the number of lessons in a unit. But are they? And are Peter's comments, which attempt to divert students away from what seems to him an overly obsessive preoccupation with pedagogy as a "numbers game" toward the more significant pedagogical issues at the heart of unit-planning, all they imply? To answer these questions one must first examine the context of this discussion: what it built upon and how it was situated both within the program in general and among previous and consequent discussions in the methods course itself. The importance of discussing unit plans and discussing them in this particular way becomes apparent not only through the passion with which students engaged this discussion but also in the fact that it was the only occasion during the course when students deliberately "hijacked"—-both substantively and temporally— Peter's agenda for a class. Students in this class had not attempted anything like this before, nor after. Although offered a variety of opportunities to take a similar path at different times, about other issues, it was only for unit planning that they chose to break the pattern of silent compliance maintained until this very discussion. The mere fact that students chose to engage this issue rather than any other, and engage it in such a lengthy and heated discussion, demonstrates/in more than one way, that 132 the discussion was as much about the students themselves and their embroilment in the dominant discourse of planning and organization as it was about the specifics of unit planning in POT. [ST1 Peter: But their passion about this came directly from the fact that they were to be graded on the unit plans as a major assignment in both courses, not because it was 'about themselves' (July, 1998). Avner: Doesn't that tell us something about them? About the fact they broke the pattern of interaction in the methods course for the purpose of testing alone, not for anything else? Casey: I agree with Peter. I think Avner's last comment reflects the idea that student teachers are trying to do well but must constantly adjust to the numerous different styles of teaching—Peter's the POT instructor's, the sponsor teacher, the faculty advisor, etc.; it's a difficult balance to say the least! (March, 1999).] Discourses, Foucault (1979) points out, are not only the instruments and an effect of power, "but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy." While discourse transmits and reproduces power, adds Foucault, it "also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it" ( pp. 100-101. cf. Young, 1981, pp. 50-51). But immersed in the discourse of technical rationality, the ability (or desire) of students, at least in this case, to resist becomes instead an instrument of validation. And the fragility of the discourse, it seems, is exposed not in its epistemological and pedagogical inconsistencies with what teaching should become, but in its inconsistency with itself, in a manner that seeks strength and comfort within the discourse and in its coherence rather than subverting it as the beginning of an opposing strategy. For while students seem to disapprove of, ridicule, and mock the requirements put upon them in POT, it is those particular requirements—the length of a lesson or the number of lessons in a unit—they question rather than the idea of a program focusing on unit and lesson planning as the crucial factors in learning to teach. [ST1 Jocelyn: I think my particular frustration with this class was just this—no one seemed capable of seeing the irony of POT. POT was a well-organized, planned-by-unit course and yet seemed the least relevant course we took. From the beginning, I knew that I could teach—1 was never sure of my ability to select materials. Given a set of materials, I could organize it, dissect it,, and transmit it. But was the "it" worth it? I still struggle with that question in my daily teaching at the present (November, 1998).] As students resist the discourse in POT, their resistance is not in reference to the notion of planning as an overriding discourse but simply about the obscure requirements for planning in a particular dis/course (POT). What their critique ultimately shows, therefore, is that what they strive for and desire is more 133 7 conformity within the discourse of planning and management across courses, not an avenue to question the very concept of lesson- and unit-planning as the fundamental basis for, and the example of learning to teach. Indeed, I argue, students questioned the requirements in POT because unit-planning had become so important in their thinking about teaching, not because it was unimportant, questionable, and open to questioning. [STf Peter: You seem to be suggesting that students SHOULD question unit planning itself. Why? To what end?" (July, 1998). Charles: Unit planning was questioned in my mind, because it had overtaken what we were to teach. Especially in POT, the focus was on the exact science of unit-planning, not the flexibility of teaching we got in other courses—methods courses. We were engaged in mostly "busy work," thinking about format, instead of focusing on the teaching (September, 1998). Ron: I question the amount of time spent obsessing about planning—which seemed to me what POT was all about. Where was the part of the course where we got to ask "Why do we do education this way?" "SHOULD we be doing it this way?" I still ask this about assessment/evaluation—I don't know if I'll ever feel right about grading papers. Further, don't the words "principles" [in Principles of Teaching] imply the questions "what?" and "why?" Yet POT had almost nothing to do with these questions and a lot more to do with "how" (February, 1999).] Peter's recurring attempts both to explain to students that how they organize their classes needs to be subject only to the school context and their own teaching goals rather than to the arbitrary set of parameters determined at UBC and, at the same time, to move students away from the preoccupation with the length of a lesson or the number of lessons in a unit and re-focus the discussion on the conceptual issues underlying lesson and unit planning were, as evidenced by students' continual return to those issues, mainly unsuccessful. His lack of success, however, must be seen in the broader context of this teacher education program, a context the social studies methods course, in spite of Peter's comments during this discussion, had a major part in producing. For although Peter tries to have students engage the pedagogical in unit planning, his comments, while disputing the supposed importance and nature of the manifestations of the discourse of planning and management in POT, were actually made within that very discourse rather than from outside of it. Embedding so much planning-for-instruction and planning-as-instruction in his own course, what Peter advocates in this discussion or what was demanded in POT, were both essentially sub-discourses of a similar discourse—the overarching discourse of planning and management. Although very different in nature than the discourse about planning used in POT (at least as exemplified by 134 what students said in the above excerpt), the methods courses, too, focused on a discourse that ultimately, as different as it may have been, primarily enhanced the powerful messages sent in POT. [ST! Peter: The aspects of teaching that we can deal with in a university-based methods course are, indeed, thinking about the larger goals of teaching, and then helping students find productive ways of thinking about accomplishing those goals. We cannot go further, until they get to the school (July, 1998). Avner: I am not sure we can't. It depends on how we treat the educative experiences with which students already come into the program and those they experience in it. If indeed we treat what we do at the university-based part of teacher education as mere preparation—as theory to be gained and applied later and elsewhere—then you are correct and all we can do at UBC is have student teachers think about what will come later—that is, when they get into the schools. But if, as I advocate in the last chapter of this dissertation, we make teacher education itself a more writerly text where students critically interact with their own experiences as students learning to teach, there is much more we can do at the university-based part of teacher education. That implies enabling students to see the university part of their education as practical experience in teaching rather than pre-practice theory (August, 1998). Casey: I agree with Peter, to an extent, because much of the implementation of instruction comes from actually doing it. Therefore, much depends on the sponsor teacher, the school, the students, etc. One can only plan so much, but planning can not be in isolation from the three factors I mentioned above. Perhaps if this were spelled out more clearly to student teachers, there wouldn't be so much resistance to theory and thinking behind the lesson (March, 1999).] What I am referring to is that, while Peter approached lesson and unit planning in his course in a much more substantially conceptual manner than POT did (at least according to descriptions provided by students in the methods course), where the issues and concepts brought into the lesson or unit and the reasons for bringing them were of greater importance than the length of a lesson or the number of lessons in a unit (requirements made in POT), the very same language that elevated the importance of planning and the need to have clear goals and objectives and to ensure those are tied to assessment and evaluation, all fit well within the kind of discourse used in POT. So while what Peter says in this discussion raises questions as to what students are required to do in POT, it doesn't move students to engage the essence of that discourse critically. Coming from within the discourse he critiques, Peter, while questioning particular demands within the discourse in POT, nevertheless maintains the coherence of the discourse of planning and management 135 intact. I will explain. As I do so, I do not intend in any way to reduce the social studies methods course to its engagement with the discourse of planning and management. Rather, I wish to explore how the discourse of organization, planning, and management in the methods course, as different as it might have been from that used in POT and other courses in this program, nevertheless, and often unintentionally, worked to legitimate the latter even as it questioned them. To do so, and with comments already provided by participants about the methods course (see Chapter III) in mind, I wish to establish how the discourse of planning and management found its prominence within the methods course itself, even as it dealt primarily with issues beyond that discourse. The first class of the methods course began with students grappling with two questions: "What is social studies?" and "What is the (your) purpose for teaching it?" Given a few moments to think about these two important questions and write a response, students then moved to discuss them in small groups and finally reported back to class, with the various responses serving as the basis for an in-depth discussion. About mid-class, and following that discussion, Peter introduced students to three terms: rationale, goals, and objectives. The introduction of those terms, however, was done implicitly and in a roundabout way as Peter put on an overhead which outlined the rationale, goals, and objectives of the social studies methods course itself. Of the seven goals presented on the overhead, the first emphasized the need to "approach the social studies curriculum reflectively and critically." The sixth goal highlighted the need to "develop strategies for understanding students' understanding in social studies," and the seventh focused on the need to "anticipate some of the challenges of social studies teaching." The other four goals stated on the overhead were about setting goals and devising methods of, and units for instruction, and techniques for assessment and evaluation. In their order of appearance, these four goals emphasized the need to: "articulate goals for social studies teaching" (goal #2); "construct courses, units, and lessons which reflect your teaching goals" (goal #3); "be familiar with a variety of instructional methods and resources and be able to access additional resources" (goal #4), and; "design assessments which reflect your goals" (goal #5). (In class notes, September 4,1996). While these seven goals presented a comprehensive spectrum of what needs to be addressed in this (any) methods course, I remember sitting among the students in this first class as Peter explained the rationale, goals> and objectives of this course and wondering how those goals and the language in which they were presented 136 would inform students? What message were they sending student teachers on this first day of classes about the nature of teaching social studies, about the process of learning to teach it? Further, with what image of an engagement with social studies will they, as prospective teachers, be leaving following this class? Would it be that of a critical discussion about "What is social studies?" and the opportunity to examine what (and how) it is we teach it and for what and whose purposes? Or, would it be the message of an overhead charting the course of what their immediate future holds in this classroom? For while critical and interrogating discussions such as that held at the beginning of class are well within the goals set for this course (goals #1 and #7), critical perspectives seemed to be overshadowed by, subservient to, those emphasizing planning and management. Not only were the majority of the goals set out for this course about planning and management, even the remainder of the goals were presented to students in the very language of planning and management itself. The dominance of these latter goals and the language in which they were all presented left little doubt in my mind as to which group of goals would actually set the tone for the course; provide the manner and spirit of what needed to be mastered and achieved in order to become a social studies teacher and the kind of language to be used as student-teachers journey to attain their professional certification. Planning to instruct—devising lesson and unit plans and engaging the language of goals, objectives, and assessment, as I have already stated—is an inherent and natural component of any teacher education course, especially a methods course. The danger, however, is when such a discourse becomes the purpose, product, and ends of teacher education rather than the tools and means with which to begin thinking critically both with and about it (Kincheloe, 1998). There was little danger, however, or so it seemed, of that occurring in this particular methods course. Examining the course outline (see Appendix B) or its manifestation in what actually took place in the classroom would give little indication that planning to instruct was the only (or even the major) preoccupation of this methods course. Instead, we see a variety of very significant epistemological and pedagogical issues underlying the disciplines comprising the social studies and how one goes about teaching them, especially history—the largest component of the social studies curriculum and the academic disciplinary background of the course instructor and many of the students. Among those issues identified in the course outline, issues which preoccupied much of the interaction in class and students' readings in preparation for class, was: an examination of what is history? What is a fact? And 137 what, if at all, is the difference between primary and secondary sources, between history and story, fact and fiction?; the integration of critical thinking in learning; an analysis of what comprises (appropriate) historical understanding and the reading of historical texts; engaging landscape, maps (that lie), and the built environment as texts as one develops a sense of place; the role of the media in communicating a past and present and the impact of popular media texts on students' historical understanding. While this is by no means an exhaustive list of the topics and issues engaged in the methods course, it does provide a sense of what mattered most— both in the fact that these issues found a prominent location in the course outline, as well as in its translation into actual classroom interactions. Yet, even as those issues were the major focus of this methods course, the discourse of planning and management continued to underlay and overshadow much of what actually took place throughout the course, regardless of the topic under consideration, the issue at hand. This occurred due to three main reasons. First, the disproportionate preoccupation with the discourse of plarming and management at the outset of the course (with the presentation of the goals and objectives for the course serving as its first example) set a particular discourse in motion which, in many ways, defined not only the actual but also the potential in the methods course thereafter. Second, while many of the broader and more significant issues mentioned above were discussed critically, those discussions were often cut short in order to allow students to focus on learning-to-instruct the very issues under discussion. Not finding a space within the discourse of technical rationality into which they were now devoured, these critical discourses were often simply left behind as theoretical understandings not applicable to practice. Third, while many of the discussions in class and all of the course readings focused on what students, not surprisingly, defined as the "theoretical" issues pertaining to social studies education, the course assignments were almost exclusively about constructing lesson and unit plans. I will address each of these three reasons separately and specifically in order to demonstrate that, while discussions about planning to instruct in the social studies methods course might have incorporated a variety of epistemological and pedagogical aspects absent in much of the discourse of planning and management in POT, this discourse was nevertheless very much embedded in, part of, and in many ways became subservient to the broader discourse of organization, planning, and management used in POT and in other courses in this teacher education program. In other words, as different and as "theoretical" as the discourse of planning and management might 138 have been in the social studies methods course, its very existence ultimately contributed to the dominance of the discourse of planning and management throughout the UBC Teacher Education Program, legitimating its supremacy in the process of learning to teach. In this fashion, students devoted most of the second and third classes to the examination of the provincial social studies IRP (Integrated Resource Package, otherwise known as the Curriculum Guide). With the language of organization and management providing a prism for examination, each group of students explored a different section of the document. The first group looked at its rationale, another explored its goals and objectives. Other groups examined the prescribed learning outcomes stated in the IRP, suggested instructional strategies and learning resources in order to fulfill those learning outcomes, or assessed the strategies for assessment and evaluation advocated in the document. Having spent the entire second class and half of the third class dealing with issues pertaining to the planning and organization of instruction, both as topics of discussion and as a discourse for discussion about the IRP, Peter used the remainder of the third class to focus on instructional planning as he put up an overhead entitled "Planning to Instruct." It projected a chart comprising three horizontal columns: "course," "unit," and "lesson," respectively. On the vertical side were seven sub-categories: a) students' prior knowledge and beliefs; b) main idea (theme, problem, issue); c) rationale; d) goals for the course, objectives for the unit and lessons; e) activities; f) learning resources; g) assessment and evaluation strategies. Peter spent a while explaining and elaborating the different terms represented in the chart and their purpose in teaching. Before students left, Peter handed out an outline of an activity, "Scenes from the French Revolution," which he had used with his own grade 9 students several years earlier. In preparation for the following class, he asked students to think at home about the document in terms of the categories presented in the chart. As class convened the next day, Peter re-focused students' attention to the chart and said: The key things that I am interested in discussing right here are the goals and objectives . . . and some learning resources, and crucially, the assessment and evaluation strategies. A n d what I'd like to do is to see how the goals and objectives that you have thought through and the activities that are impl ied in this [document] and the assessment and evaluation strategies which you have thought of, how those f i t together I am particularly interested [ in] focus[ing] on the goals and objectives: how those mesh w i t h these activities that are out l ined here and what kinds of assessment and evaluation you think wou ld be appropriate for measuring whether you have been successful in those goals (In-class transcript, September 16,1996). 139 As students gathered back from their group activity to participate in a larger class forum, Peter made, what I found, a rather revealing comment: "If you can make goals and objectives which are linked to the activity [and] which can then be assessed in a reasonable way tied to those goals and objectives, then you can teach. That's the centre piece of this" (ibid. My emphasis). "This is only the third class," I found myself writing in my journal as class concluded that day, "and already so much time has been spent on rationales, goals, objectives, assessment, and evaluation—both as activities for students to engage in and as the discourse through which to engage them. If this is how we start them off in the teacher education program," I recall thinking, "what will we be getting in return? And what image of teaching is conveyed when the ability to construct goals and objectives and tie assessment directly to them becomes the litmus test, the measuring stick, as to whether one can teach?" (Research Journal, September, 13, 1996). The pattern of engaging significant issues in social studies education and framing them immediately thereafter within the discourse of planning and management as the ultimate, final, and concluding purpose for their engagement was a recurring pattern throughout the course. Dealing with primary sources, for example, led directly to an assignment in which student teachers created a lesson plan, centering around a question sequence in which high school students would engage that source. The geography section in the course (the geography "unit," as students referred to it)—one of the three major components of the course together with history and media—was also centered around plarining a unit for instruction. Using a proposed plan to convert some of the endowed forest land surrounding UBC into a residential area, students in this course agreed upon a set of goals for a unit focusing on urban development. Each group of students was then responsible for one of the lessons comprising that unit, including the articulation of objectives and assessment. Another of the issues channeled into the discourse of planning was critical thinking. Yet, while the discussion about primary sources, for one, did include an examination of the question "What is a primary source?", an examination which led to an interesting in-class debate about (and the questioning of whether there is) a difference between primary and secondary sources prior to the movement to create a lesson plan in which a primary source would be used, the movement from a discussion about critical thinking to its utilization in/as an instructional strategy for 140 (high school) students was much swifter. Since critical thinking and what took place in that transformation are the focus of the following chapter, I will not elaborate further at this point. Suffice it to say, that following an assigned reading about critical thinking and a warm endorsement of it by Peter, and as a discussion about critical thinking was in the process of being generated in class, Peter made the following statement: "In order to make this a real discussion we probably have to get down to a specific kind of thing that might go on in the social studies classroom." And as he handed each group of students a textbook so they would create a critical challenge that would encourage (high school) students to use critical thinking, he adds: "We've talked about [critical thinking] a bit, you've read about it a bit, now . . . [let's] see whether you can do it." Asking students to choose any passage or topic in the textbook and create an activity, a question sequence, a critical challenge that would require students to use critical thinking, Peter asks: "If you can pose that critical challenge . . . then what would your objectives be in setting that up for students: what kinds of activities would you have them engage in order to meet those objectives? And then, what kind of assessment would you have to measure whether they have met your objectives?" (in-class data, September, 13,1996). With a considerable emphasis given in POT (though not in the methods course) to correctly stating objectives given curricular goals or topics, class discussions there, as well as assignments, to borrow from Ginsburg's (1988) own evaluation of the Teacher Education Program at the University of Houston, "were devoted to 'competencies' in writing instructional objectives and preparing lesson plans, rather than on analyzing what knowledge or why certain knowledge should be included in [or excluded from] the curriculum" (p. 106). And when epistemological and pedagogical concerns are reduced to "questions having to do with learning strategies and behavioral outcomes," and "performance at a prespecified level of mastery is assumed to be the most valid measure of teacher competence," claims Zeichner (1983), "the desire to have teachers critically reflect upon the purposes and consequences of what they teach [and do] are no longer of central concern" (cf. Giroux & McLaren, 1986, p. 273). Both the activities of planning to instruct and the discourse used as they were carried out, provided, to borrow from Foucault (1977), "the definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge, and the fixing of norms for the elaboration of concepts and theories" (p. 199.) Their danger and effect, adds Young (1981), is "to make it virtually impossible to think outside them" (p. 48). For as prospective teachers engage the discourse of planning and management, they also learn, as 141 Scholes (1985) points out, "how to produce a specific kind of discourse . . . which requires [them] to be constituted as the subject of that discourse in a particular way and to speak through that discourse of a world made by the same controlling paradigm" (pp. 131-132. cf. Cherryholmes, 1988, p. 158). Embroiled so deeply in the discourse—activities and language—of planning and management, student teachers, McLaren & Lankshear (1993) point out, are no longer "merely located within the structure of language and the signifying system but, rather, are their effect (p. 385). As a result, offer Zavarzadeh & Morton (1994), it is "the 'language' that speaks the subject and not the subject that speaks the language" (p. 62). In that sense, discourse becomes what Gee (1987,1990) calls an 'identity kit' which "people adopt, behaving according to the social habits of a discourse pattern" surrounding them (Lemke, 1995, p. 12) whereby, to borrow from Butler (1987), "the subject is a consequence of certain rule-governed discourses that govern the intelligible invocation of identity." And where" there is only a taking up of the tools [of such an identity kit] where they lie, where the very 'taking up' is enabled by the tool lying there" (p. 145. cf. McLaren & Lankshear, 1993, pp. 385-386). "Sooner or later," claim Gee & Green (1998), "what is heard and actively understood will find its response in the . . . speech or behavior of the listened" (p. 130). Very much defined both by the tools and by the very act of picking up the tools awaiting for the picking, it was not surprising that by the second week of the program students had the discourse of technical rationality at the tips of their tongues. Objectives, goals, and assessment strategies were words students continuously invoked, not in order to engage a serious debate about teaching but as the embodiment of teaching itself, a way of speaking about teaching which no longer requires a critical engagement with its underpinnings, nor with its consequences. As I sat in while groups of students were working through the various tasks and assignments given by Peter—most often pertaining to the construction of an activity or part of a lesson or unit—I was struck not only by how much of the discussion revolved around students' attempts to resolve whether a particular point or statement they chose to incorporate in their activity was a goal or an objective but also how the preoccupation with such terms dominated students' engagement at the expense of other issues and questions. Often, these lengthy debates could only be settled by seeking the arbitration of another group so as to ensure the ultimate sin of confusing goals with objectives (and vice versa) was never committed. 142 Surprised with the degree to which students had become preoccupied with those terms so early on in the program, at how pervasive they had become in student teachers' discourse, and at how central they were in their thinking about teaching, I asked students during the third set of interviews: how, if at all, such terms become important and /or beneficial in learning to teach, and what, in the process, do they enable, what do they disable? Subverting my question and exposing its faulty supposition, Ron, for one, responded swiftly that "it's not an issue whether we think they are important; we are being told they are important" (Interview #3, December 7, 1996). The difference between what students are told to think and the thinking that is a consequence of such telling was not as discernible to other participants. While none fully embraced those terms or the discourse of planning and management of which they are part, Ron was the only one who not only rejected what the use of those terms enabled but also raised the issue of that which was being disabled: Both in the program and among ourselves, we talk all the time about goals and objectives and criteria [for assessment] and we're always worr ied about establishing the objectives and the criteria and also have our profs clearly lay out their criteria [for assignments] for us. But where have we actually talked about our own personal, philosophical goals and objectives—what we're t ry ing to achieve as teachers and for ourselves as persons, as people w h o have something to contribute to society? We haven't really. (Interview #3, December 7,1996) While Ron clearly objects to the overuse and the kind of use made by the invocation of goals and objectives in the program, it is interesting that even as he resists the impact of the discourse of planning and management, he uses the very terms he resists in order to illustrate that resistance. By critiquing one kind of goals emphasized in the program over another, the word "goals" become both an object of critique and an opening of possibilities. Even as he objects to that discourse, it seems, Ron must use it for it is the primary language of possibility he has received. As Tyler (1991) explains, one can only criticize a discourse from within it. "The discourse of critique is already and inextricably involved in what it criticizes." It is already, he adds, "committed to it, involved in it, and emasculated by its own desire to expose and correct, to prescribe and domesticate" (p. 91). Or, as Derrida has put it otherwise, "we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest" (1978, pp. 280-281. cf. Willinsky, 1998, p. 246). Others did not perceive the use and consequences of this discourse as problematically as Ron did. Unlike him, most explained the importance of, and the 143 benefits provided by, these terms, even as, at times, they attempted to question them. While their questions provide interesting insights about the problematics of using some of the terms comprising the discourse of planning, management, and organization, it is through their endorsements that one begins to gain a clearer picture as to the understandings they derived from the UBC Teacher Education Program about the purpose of clarifying goals and objectives in the process of instruction. Echoing views held by the majority of student-teachers participating in this study, Jocelyn spoke of the significance of learning, learning about, and using terms such as goals and objectives in education: They're important for us in order to understand what it is that we're t ry ing to do. If we don't have a clear understanding of what it is that we're trying to do then we really have no way of deciding whether or not we have accomplished what we've set out to do; we don't have any way of going back and asking: "what was it that I was trying to do and was that a good thing to do, was it val id and can I defend it?" So in that sense, before we even embark on a path, it's good to have some learning outcome or objective in mind. . . . [It] allows us to revisit what we had planned and ask "why d id I choose that, what d id that say about me or my perspectives at the time?" But that's not really essential. What's essential for us is to have an idea of where we started and what we intended to do so that when we get there, we can assess whether where we are at now is really where we wanted to be. (Interview #3, December 11, 1996) [ST1 Jocelyn: Again, I think this quote reveals my struggle to absorb a new language—to understand it before I begin deconstructing it (November, 1998) . ] Jack, too, thought that learning the language of planning and management helped "in terms of learning how to build a framework [in order] to initially think about something." But while he mentions the enabling side of the encounter with those terms, he explains they may also be restrictive because your activities have to relate back to your objectives and h o w do you know what ... I mean i f you're try ing to get a student involved in a certain issue, then ... i f you're l imi t ing yourself to the specific objectives you have laid-out in your unit plan, then you' l l also be l imi t ing students in what they can learn at the same time. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) Although Jocelyn and Jack highlight different aspects of the discourse of planning to teach—one its possibilities, the other its problematics—their different perspectives in fact demonstrate inherently similar understandings as to the role goals and objectives play in the educative process. Both ultimately see the construction of goals and objectives as the guiding force, somewhat of a superstructure which directs (and therefore also limits) instruction and, at the same time, provides a way to evaluate it. Having what seems to be a life of their own once they are established, goals and objectives become the definers of instruction—limiting the possibilities of instruction 144 beyond their original framing, in Jack's case, and providing a perspective from which to evaluate what one has accomplished, in Jocelyn's case. Rather than simply being a way of thinking about and organizing instruction in the direction one desires and abandoning them as soon as they become a hindrance to what one believes must take precedence as the educational endeavour unfolds—even if and even as what unfolds does not correspond to what was initially planned, the versions presented above see goals and objectives as authoritative structures to which teachers become responsible and accountable. Regardless of the fact this was not the way goals and objectives were engaged in the methods course, it was nevertheless how student teachers chose to articulate their importance. In their view, goals and objectives are no longer beneficial tools to think about and enable instruction but the very means to "understand what it is we're trying to do." [STf Jocelyn: This terminology was merely a tool for me. I did question the use of objectives and the rigidity of the POT class demanding one objective per concept. It is a way to "a tool" for comprehension; it's not comprehension itself (November, 1998).] The responsibility of teachers, it seems, is toward their own goals and objectives. What matters most, in the minds of these students, is that the end of the educational interaction corresponds with the goals and objectives determined at the outset, regardless of what those initial goals and objectives sought to accomplish. In that sense, it is interesting to examine what Jocelyn believes is essential and unessential about goals and objectives. While she believes they allow us to revisit what we had planned and ask "Why did I choose that, what did it say about me or my perspectives at the time?" those questions, she adds, might be beneficial but they "are not really essential." Again, goals and objectives are no longer a reflexive way to evaluate what it is we chose to advance through our teaching and ask why we chose that particular topic in that particular way, what (and who) did that enable, what (and who) did it disable, and what does that tell me about my own teaching, about myself as a teacher, about the structures in which I operate that advance such knowledge and knowing. The ability to revisit our goals and objectives and examine those issues seems unimportant to Jocelyn at this point. This, of course, is not surprising since, as Ron noted in his comment, little emphasis was put on those kinds of questions in this teacher education program. Instead, and in accordance with what was promoted in the program, Jocelyn states that goals and objectives allow us to "have an idea of where we started and what we intended to do so that when we get there, we can assess whether where we are is really where we wanted 145 to be." While what Jocelyn says makes perfect sense, I question her use of the word "wanted," for it is the past tense of the term that becomes problematic rather than the concept in which it is presented. It seems that, as a measuring stick, goals and objectives do not tell us whether where we are is where we want to be—a question every teacher must ask as he/she evaluates what has been accomplished as a way of looking to the future, to educational endeavours still to come. Rather, the use of the word "wanted" (in the past tense) indicates that we don't use goals and objectives to explore where we want to be as we go ahead but whether where we are is where we initially wanted to be when we started. While this may seem an issue of mere semantics, the difference is primarily pedagogical; the former looks forward, the latter backwards. The past tense indicates a reflection rather than a projection; a reflection to examine the correspondence to one's starting point, not a way of looking at where one actually is in the present. [STU Jocelyn: You cannot have reflection without "projection." In planning a unit, a lesson, even an objective, we are projecting. We haven't tried to go anywhere yet, but we plan to. Only then can we reflect on the process—once it's happened (November, 1998).] The focus is thus on the teacher—whether he/she has achieved what was designed at the outset, not on where the learner is at the present or where he/she is to be going in the future. Mary underscores that point when she discusses, with envy, Peter's ability to "find a teachable moment that had nothing to do with where he was trying to go and say: "Oh, that's an interesting question. Let's look at that!" While Mary claims she would like to be that kind of a teacher herself, "at this point," she adds, referring to the month and a half she has been taught to teach, "you're going to have everything written down: your unit plan and your lesson plan and your assessment strategies. It's all written down. And if you don't do what you've written down, then you've failed, at this point, right?" (Interview #2, October 19, 1996). Another enabling perspective of using words such as goals and objectives in the program, according to Jocelyn, is because they provide access to a professional vocabulary. "They help other [educators] understand what it is [I want to do] in that we have a common grammar from which to work." "In the first few years of your career," she adds, "you'll need to know that vocabulary because you'll be asked: 'What are your learning outcomes?' 'What are your objectives?' 'What are your goals?' So in a sense, it's one of the hurdles. I have to be able to speak in that language if that's the one everybody is using" (Interview #3, December 11, 1996). [ST1 Ron: "The tribe." "Do we pass?" To borrow from bell hooks, "passing" in white 146 society (Ron, February, 1999).] It is difficult to disagree that teachers need a common language in order to communicate with each other. What is interesting, however, is the notion Jocelyn and others in the program received that this particular discourse is the principal language teachers actually use. Not only in my five years of teaching have I rarely come across a teacher who actually uses such terms, but Jocelyn's indication that they are somewhat of a "hurdle" also reflects the fact that she herself taught quite successfully in Japan before entering the UBC Teacher Education Program and had never used any of those terms, though she regularly engaged the concepts they stand for. So while Jocelyn sees those terms as enabling, the journey to this enabling vocabulary is still, in some way, considered a hurdle—what Charles referred to as hoops. But as Jocelyn implies, and as Charles states more straightforwardly in response to the same question, "once you learn that to get through [the program] you have to jump hoops [and that] you have to do it and there's no way around it," he adds with a sense of resignation, "once you kind of get that in your mind, you'll be all right" (Interview #3, December 18,1996). What these hurdles, this hoop-jumping provide, however, is not only a common vocabulary but a specific discourse. "By learning the dominant culture, or imbibing its representative values," claim Giroux et al. (1996), "students are theoretically enabled in that they are given the wherewithal for particular manners of [language] action and behaviour within that culture" (p. 5). By providing students with this vocabulary and having them believe it is indeed the vocabulary of teachers, they begin feeling empowered that they have already entered the ranks of the profession. Speaking like a teacher is the first step to becoming one, even if by so speaking, one might neglect to engage the issues teachers do, or should, actually be considering. The degree to which this becomes an introduction to a discourse or an inculcation into it can only be measured by the meanings student teachers make of it as they try to construct and negotiate their own understandings of what it means to teach. Part of a professional jargon, terms such as rationale, goals, objectives, and assessment, are used by curriculum designers, university faculty, school administrators, and (therefore) teachers as substitutes for questions such as: "Why am I teaching this?" "What do I want students to get out of this?" "How will I go about doing what I want to do and how will I know whether I have achieved what I intended?" What needs to be asked of a teacher education program is whether the way students are made to use such terms actually enables them to ask those questions while using their substitutes? Or, whether the use of those stand-ins in fact 147 obscures the ability of having those questions actually asked? Indeed, can the use/overuse of these technical terms—often not actually thought about and thought-through—still address the questions they initially intend to represent? Embroiled in the language of goals and objectives, we often tend to forget to ask: Why am I doing this, Why am I doing this? why am I doing it this way? It is those why questions that should always undergrind our thinking. Yet, preoccupied with correctly articulating goals and objectives, such questions often get left behind, silenced, pushed to the margins. [ST! Peter: I disagree. These are exactly the questions I ask in assessing the unit plans, and I could not do it as well without what you are calling a "technical" vocabulary (July, 1998). Avner: Students know those are the kinds of questions they should be addressing as they prepare their unit plans. Consequently, what I am referring to is not whether students ask themselves those questions when they are being "tested" or evaluated on a unit plan but when they are not. When do they use them in the discourse of planning and management in preparation for teaching and in thinking about teaching on a day-to-day basis in the teacher education program?] Two examples serve to illustrate my point that, submerged in the discourse of plarming and management, the stand-ins increasingly cease to account for the questions for which they ultimately stand. Moreover, they show that the reasons for having particular goals and objectives become secondary to the very act of having them. The first of these examples is Jocelyn's response to an interview question at the end of the first semester at UBC, a question about which courses she found most interesting and beneficial in the program, and why. She says: The social studies methods course and my English methods course were f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c. Both teachers showed an incredible passion for what they were doing and in-depth understanding and they had a vision and they had a purpose. I may have not always agreed with their purposes but they had a purpose, they communicated this clearly and they went about to accomplish that purpose, their task. So I found those wonderful. (Interview #3, December 11,1996) It is not the kinds of goals and objectives presented and pursued in these two courses that brings about Jocelyn's recognition but rather the very existence of goals and objectives, the ability of the instructors to communicate them clearly and to continuously pursue them to the end. While Jocelyn specifically states that she did not always agree with the purposes presented in those courses, engaging the why questions embedded in such purposes seems beyond consideration, perhaps superfluous when there are purposes to state and tasks to accomplish. [ST! Jocelyn: It wasn't that simple, Avner. If I have something to work with and question, then I'm 148 satisfied—I can ask questions, I can try things on my own; I can learn myself. If I have no content, I feel lost. For example, in adolescent psychology, we read about and analyze case studies regarding students at a particular stage in their development. It was all speculation. Some students may feel this, some students may react that way; what would you do i f . . . ? These were not helpful concepts as every child is different, every class unique, and what I'd do today may not be the same as what I do tomorrow. The methods course had content and I could agree or disagree/engage or disengage in that content. I had a choice! (November, 1998).] Inspirational teaching is thus not measured by the philosophical, epistemological, or pedagogical issues underlying instruction—that is, whether one agrees with what is being done or not—but by the ability to pursue it, regardless of its consequences, its moral, ethical, or pedagogical implications. (By that, of course, I do not imply that the goals and objectives in either of the methods courses were any of the above but rather that such questions must drive our relationship to the goals and objectives set out in those courses rather than the ability of instructors to accomplish them). The second example, again one from an interview with Jocelyn, derives from an exchange we had about another social studies methods course (Curriculum and Instruction in Canadian Studies—SSED 324) she took during the summer. Jocelyn tells me, while stating she "really loved that course", that the instructor regularly brought in tonnes of resources and said: "if you want to discuss this or talk about that, here's a way that I've done it. How would you do it? How would you go about doing it?" He gave us a lot of opportunities for discussion and group work Sometimes he did that and sometimes he just gave us an assignment, like, "You have to teach this. What would you do?" Avner: Did you ever talk about why it is you had to teach that "this"? Jocelyn: No, we never did... . Sometimes we would go off on a tangent when somebody would say they wouldn't use it at all and then we'd talk about why. (Interview #6, July 31,1997) Preoccupied with devising strategies for teaching "something" and planning how to teach that "something," little time was left to examine the "why" questions I referred to earlier. Considered unimportant, perhaps, such questions are either never engaged, or, at best, when they are, their consideration is thought of as "going off on a tangent," never the main route, the avenue upon which a social studies methods curriculum and instruction course ought to embark. What this approach often reinforces in students is a "conceptions of the curriculum as given . . . as something that needs only to be considered in relation to designing 'appropriate' strategies for delivering it to students of various ages and 'abilities'" (Ginsburg, 1988, p. 120). 149 By not asking the "why" questions, at least in that particular social studies course, teaching becomes what Popkewitz (1987) identifies as "the representation of stable elements in the curriculum." "Once content is identified," he adds, "the instructional problem is to develop effective strategies by which to inscribe that content on . . . students." Teacher's responsibility" is thus "functional, and it is technically defined" (p. 290). Under such conditions, Popkewitz adds elsewhere (1991), "[d]iscussion is limited to the diverse activities of the student teachers as they have pupils learn a subject matter" (cf. Popkewitz, 1993, pp. 289-290). "The rush to find practical [teaching] solutions or the correct [teaching] technique," add Britzman & Pitt (1996) "does not allow the opportunity to even name conflicts, let alone work them through" (p. 123). This, however, was not the case in the social studies methods course taught by Peter. Many of the "why" questions mentioned earlier were often discussed in this methods course. Further, most of the interactions in class as well as all of the course readings dealt with broad epistemological and pedagogical issues that moved beyond the instructional aspects of teaching and the discourse of technical rationality. Yet, in spite of all that, the discourse of planning and management continuously loomed over. For while engaged discussions were carried out about, among other things, the nature of history (What is history? What is a fact? What is the difference between primary and secondary sources, between fact and fiction?) and social studies (Why and how do we teach social studies, and to whom?) or about the production, mediation, and interpretation of particular media representations (The Ballad of Crowfoot, the Heritage Minutes, textbooks, journal articles, "fiction," newspapers, photographs, or the provincial Social Studies IRPs), what students were actually evaluated on in this course had less to do with any of those discussions or course readings but with lesson and unit plans. Not surprisingly when teaching is equated with the ability to construct goals and objectives and tie assessment to them, students were evaluated not on any of those "theoretical" issues mentioned above but, rather, on how well they could construct lesson and unit plans, even if (and as) students were definitely encouraged to incorporate and integrate many of the above mentioned issues into their planning. [ST! J a c k : I strongly agree with you on this (December, 1998).] As important as students might have thought the "theoretical" discussions were in the process of learning to teach (and as Chapter III showed, they did indeed think they were significant), the true measure of significance is, no doubt, the assignments upon which students are evaluated. After everything is said and done, 150 what one has to produce for an assignment, what gets asked on the final exam, is what students believe (and are made to believe) is what is ultimately most important. [ S T f Peter: What kind of assessment would you suggest, alternatively? And how would you justify it? (July, 1998). Ron: Shouldn't we be assessing ourselves while being students since that's what we end up doing as teachers? (February, 1999).] The evaluation of students was based primarily on three assignments. The first, with a value of 20 marks, required students to "design a lesson around the use of a primary historical source" (Course outline, p. 3. See Appendix B). The second, with a value of 40 marks, asked students to create a unit overview. "Students," as the course outline explains, "will be given an outline of key elements in plarming a unit. Using those elements, they will plan a social studies unit. In evaluating these assignments," the course outline adds, "special attention will be paid to consistency among rationale, objectives, resources, activities and assessment" (ibid.). The third assignment was the final exam (See Appendix D) with a value of 30 marks (the ten additional marks were to be given to in-class assignments and class participation). The final exam consisted of three questions. The first, and in a way inconsistent with the other questions or tasks in all other assignments, asked students to evaluate the effectiveness of social studies as teaching students to read and write texts—the over-arching approach taken in this course. I say it was inconsistent with other assignment in that it asked students to evaluate an approach advocated in the methods course rather than apply it in a teaching strategy. The other two questions in the final exam, however, re-focused students' attention on planning. Question #2 stated: "Choose one of the [six] attached documents [primary sources].... Explain a teaching context (course, unit, place within the unit), where the document would be useful for achieving your goals and objectives. How would you use it? What questions would you have students consider, in order to help them read it critically?" Question #3 asked students to: "Choose one of the following topics [eight curriculum topics from grades 8-11 are provided]. Define four to seven student learning objectives that you would pursue in a unit on this topic. Then describe the way you would assess students' attainment of those objectives. The assessment(s) should include specific criteria, and should be directly linked to the objectives you defined." [ST1 Peter: I shaped assessment in this course to practices which teachers would need to master in order to teach well. Their ability to write a prose essay about their purposes for teaching would not, I believe, be an adequate measure of their competence. Ironically, the grounds on which you object to this assessment, is to argue that it does not assess what should have been the goals of the course (i.e., to have 151 students think more critically about the nature of history, media representations, etc.). But such an argument would still be grounded in the very discourse that you are attempting to criticize (July, 1998). Avner: Your comment undoubtedly exposes the inconsistencies of any method of critique and the implication of critique with that which it critiques. As to your question, I do believe that writing a prose essay about the purposes of teaching or the nature of history and representation AND connect that to what can be done in the classroom when history as representation is encountered (and when is it not?) can be a beneficial exercise both in theory and in practice as well as in theorizing practice, even if it is practice they themselves have yet to experience as teachers. I do believe that the purpose of teacher education is to provide structure for meta-thinking about practice as one constructs practice rather than simply practicing (in the sense of repetitive preparation) for (future) practice. (I discuss this issue more fully in the Conclusion).] Since the title of the course and its main theme, as the first question on the test indicates, was social studies as "reading and writing texts," I asked students during our third set of interviews at the conclusion of the methods course and following the final exam, to read the final exam itself as a text. To use Ron's words, I was asking them to look at the final exam "to tell [them] something which is quite different from looking at it as a test which is asking [them] something" (Interview #3, December, 10, 1996). My purpose was to learn what messages were being sent through this exam about what it means to be, or what one needs to know in order to become a social studies teacher. Assuming that the final evaluation of any course would measure what the course considered its most significant aspects [as well as recalling Peter's comment to students while discussing the upcoming exam that he hopes that "if you can do well on this exam, it means that you, in some way, will do well in the social studies class over a period of time." Or that "if a student does well on the final exam that means they're prepared to start the process of teaching social studies" (in-class transcripts, November 8, 1996)], I wanted to learn what final message, what concluding send-off, students were given as they enter the school system for their practicum. [ST1 Peter: If the assessment does not meet these criteria then there is a serious disjunction between the course and the school. Again, I don't see any other accessible ideal. In fact, the problem with too much teacher education is the disjunction between program task/thinking and school task/thinking (July, 1998). Jack: I think Peter makes a good point. The tasks students are asked to do in the program should relate directly to what they do as teachers in schools. There must be a limit to theory! (December, 1998).] 152 Without exception, all six participants in this study shared the view that the final exam sent a clear message that what seems to be most important for social studies teachers is the ability to devise lesson and unit plans and ensure one's assessment is connected to ones goals and objectives. That, by no means, is a message to pass by without further investigation. But what also emerges from their responses is how such a message is situated (or not) in the broader context of the course—with what happened in it and with what did not. When I asked Jack what, according to this exam, seems important for a social studies teacher to know, he said: to put together meaningful units and problems and themes for students, [and to ensure] that our assessment matches our objectives when we're creating a unit , that we're assessing the r ight thing. Avner: Do you agree these are the most important thing a social studies teacher needs to know? Jack: No. Avner: Why not? Jack: A l though it's important, and by that I mean you should always test what you're t ry ing to achieve because i f you don't, it's k ind of pointless. I just think this wasn't the central th ing to this methods course. Avner: What was the central thing in the course, in your view? Jack: How we read and wri te texts and the importance of exposing students to a variety of texts and therefore a variety of perspectives and also to engage the students by posing problems for them to solve. That's what I thought were the two major points of the course. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) While Jack showed little hesitation in identifying unit planning and the proper connection of assessment to objectives as the desired object of knowledge for social studies teachers according to the final exam, he felt such a message did not adequately reflect what he believed was the overall message of the course itself. The dichotomy Jack sees between what the final exam tested and the course it supposedly reflected, however, is not the result of a mismatch between the goals of the course and its assessment (a connection the importance of Peter continuously emphasized) but rather a consequence of the very issue I have been emphasizing throughout this chapter. That is, that while much more valuable things were taking place in the course (such as reading and writing texts, framing topics as public issues, engaging multiple perspectives whenever any issues is discussed, etc.), those issues were ultimately framed in a way that would lead to, or be discussed through, 153 the discourse of planning and management. Consequently, although Jack claims the final exam did not represent what he believed was the essence of the course, it was, in fact, a very clear reflection of the course according to its own definition—the goals did meet the assessment strategy. The very goals articulated at the outset of the course—at least the four about planning to instruct—were those indeed assessed in the final exam. And while the discourse of planning and management might have been dormant in the last phases of the course, much of what I have shown thus far illustrates that it had never disappeared. As a continuous undercurrent, often not explicitly apparent but nevertheless underlying much of the events and activities in the course even while it was seemingly absent, it simply resurfaced, appropriately, I would argue, to reclaim is legitimate space in the final exam. While the connection between the final exam and the course as a whole might have been obscure in Jack's mind, such a connection was very apparent to Jocelyn. In fact it was the raison d'etre of the final exam. According to her, the final exam gave students ample opportuni ty to demonstrate what i t is we've learned in this course and therefore to give him [Peter] some idea of whether he's obtained his objectives or not. . . . [But] I don't th ink it tells you anything about what social studies teachers need to know in order to be good social studies teachers. I t may, however, tel l you [more] about what this part icular teacher thought is important, and I don't even know i f it wou ld tell you that because this is [only] a reflection of the goals that he set out to accomplish. Avner: But don't we set goals according to what we think is important? Jocelyn: Yes. Avner: So what is important for this particular professor at this particular t ime for teachers to know? Jocelyn: Whether or not you can take a topic and derive a set of objectives f rom that topic and assess those objectives. Whether you can approach a pr imary source in such a manner as to flesh out some interpretation and allow your students to come to some interpretation of that resource. So pr imary resources w o u l d be important. Objectives and assessment wou ld be important and the centrality of text in this discipline. (Interview #3, December 11,1996) Although the connection between the final exam and the course is evident to Jocelyn, the connection she makes is not between the final exam and what social studies teachers need to know or even with what the course was actually about. Instead, the correlation exists between the goals Peter set for the course and what the exam measured. For Casey, as well, the final exam was an indication that, while "construct[ing] a good set of questions from a primary source [or] an outline of a 154 unit plan from a subject area," prospective teachers "need to construct lesson plans with clear goals and objectives and be able to assess those lesson plans accordingly." However, when I asked her, as I did Jack and Jocelyn, if she thought there was anything more important about teaching the final exam did not give her an opportunity to illustrate or discuss, she said, in a way that reflected the responses of the other four participants in this study: "nothing that I can think of." (Interview #3, December 16, 1996). While my other conversations with Casey and the other four participants, without exception, showed they all thought the methods course offered them much more than a practice in planning (as I have already discussed in Chapter III), the message they ultimately received from this final exam—the last and lasting message of this methods course—was that what is primarily important in learning to teach social studies is the ability to construct lesson and unit plans where goals and objectives tie to strategies of assessment and evaluation. And while the responses given by Jack and Jocelyn to whether they thought there were more important aspects in teaching social studies the exam did not reflect might provide evidence that refutes the theory I have been advocating about the powerful—almost authoritative—impact of the discourse of planning and management on student teachers' educational imagination and the ability of other discourse to allow them to think and speak of education otherwise, Casey's response—that she could think of nothing more important—gives some indication of the power and effect of that discourse on student teachers' ability to think and imagine outside of it. Although, as I have already mentioned, such a response did not reflect on, and was not reflective in, their teaching or the evaluation of the methods course in general, what it does seem to indicate is that by the end of the first semester at UBC they were so caught-up in the discourse of planning and management, they found it difficult to think outside and beyond it. One could, of course, argue that it is not the discourse of management and planning in the teacher education program that instilled in students the idea that teaching is fundamentally about lesson and unit plans, about coming up with appropriate goals and objectives but, rather, that students came into the program with those ideas already in mind. Hence, fitting into and onto the understandings students already had and the ideas to which they previously subscribed, courses such as POT and the methods course in which such language was primarily engaged, naturally seemed, in their eyes, as the most relevant and important courses. While there is no doubt some truth in such claims (i.e., see Britzman, 1991a; Ginsburg, 1988), student-teachers' idea of what constitutes good teaching at the 155 beginning of the program, as I will show, bears no correspondence to the notion of planning and organization. And yet, it was clearly stamped all over it at the program's end. The connection I wish to make between the discourse of planning and organization and what constitutes not only teaching but "good" teaching goes back to one of Peter's initial questions in the discussion about unit planning in POT which opened this section. Asking students about their concerns regarding unit-planning in POT, Peter says: "I'd like to hear a bit more about the nature of this discrepancy in expectations for what is put forward as good teaching" (in-class transcripts, Oct. 9, 1996). While Peter probably did not have in mind the correlation I am attempting to make at this point, we both share the view that the discourse of planning and organization did do much to determine the expectations put forward as/for good teaching. When I asked students at the beginning of the program what makes a good teacher or what, in their thinking, constituted good teaching, their responses were as far removed from the discourse of planning and organization as possible. In his response, Charles chose to remember a community college instructor who taught him prior to his coming to UBC. "She was really lively and had a lot of energy," he said. "You could tell she really liked what she was doing and that got us involved, kept us interested. She was nice. She talked to us out of class and stuff like that. She was really good. I really enjoyed her class" (Interview #1, Sept. 18,1996). Ron spoke of relevancy and interest. "Good teaching," according to him, is about br inging a relevance and immediacy to the subject matter; having a reason for what you're doing and making students aware of that reason (i.e., w h y we should or w h y we wou ld want to study history or geography, or the economy, or political science). Being w i l l i ng to participate in the learning process itself, that [is,] the teacher should be able to learn as much f rom the students as the students learn f rom the teacher. (Interview #1, September 12,1996). Jocelyn claimed that what makes a good teacher is the ability to integrate things and bridge subject-matter to real life, to students' lives: To be able to show relevance and not keep the subject merely as a 'subject,' apart f rom life and having no bearing on life. A good teacher also needs to be concerned, to really care about what you're teaching and about the students your teaching to. I think that's v i ta l ly important because students notice i f the teacher doesn't care and that just puts them right off, at least that's the way I reacted. So, I guess what's important is to have concern, enthusiasm, and passion for what you do but not go over the top, not be too gregarious. You are not there to entertain, although that helps. (Interview #1, September 15,1996) 156 Casey emphasized the caring aspect of teaching—both about one's subject area and one's students. According to her a good teacher was someone who cares about the subject they're teaching; someone who . . . gets the kids involved and actually thinking about what's going on and not just g iv ing them informat ion and having them regurgitate it back. Someone who believes in teaching and who cares about the students. (Interview #1, September 12,1996) In order to understand what good teaching meant to students at the end of the program, and, interested as I was in how the teacher education program positioned them to think about good teaching in particular ways, I chose to focus my questions on what student teachers thought good teaching meant at the very institution in (and through) which they were to construct images of good teaching. Hoping to engage students not with what they had been told good teaching was during their different courses at UBC but, rather, with the messages they received as to what UBC itself considers good teaching in its own instructors, I decided to focus their attention on the evaluation sheets students fill out at the end of every course at UBC (see Appendix E). As a summative form of evaluation, the SCETs (Standing Committee on the Evaluation of Teaching) not only ask students to evaluate teaching/teachers but, by asking specific questions about some aspects of teaching and not about others, also send students both explicit and implicit messages as to what constitutes good teaching. Having participants in this study read the SCET forms as texts (in the same way I had asked them to read the final exam in the social studies methods course), I asked them what the numerous (close to 20) SCETs they had filled out throughout the program value as good teaching. That is: what does the Faculty of Education at UBC think is important enough to ask course participants to measure? Since the issue was not to examine student-teachers' ability to read a text but rather to examine the consequences of those texts and the impressions they had made upon them, I did not bring an actual SCET form to these interviews but, instead, asked student teachers to read them from their memory. While I initially thought it might be difficult for students to recall what was on the SCETs, I soon learned the SCETs were very much in students' mind at the time and that they did not need a form to recall what was in them. In fact, as Casey, the first student I had asked that question in that round of interviews, said with a chuckle, "I've done so many of them, I don't need the form. [By this time in the program], I know it almost by heart" (interview #6, July 22,1997). The teacher education program at UBC, no doubt, supported and encouraged each and every one of the attributes of good teaching students mentioned as they 157 entered the program. That aspect of the program was recognized by all participants in this study. Yet, while students' comments about what attributes UBC valued most according to the evaluation sheets (SCETs) included many of the attributes they themselves stated at the beginning of the program, they all mentioned one more— organization. Not only was organization included in the list; it topped it. Four of the five students who responded to my question ranked organization as the most important issue asked about, or reflected in the UBC SCET forms (the fifth student put organization in second place), with "preparedness" coming a close second. The message Mary remembered most from the SCETs was that, as a good teacher, "you have to be organized, you have to be prepared, willing to answer questions, be available (Interview #6, July 23, 1997). Jack responded by saying the SCET form "asks about the organization of the course. It asks students about the motivation of the instructor and their interests and how they presented themselves, not in terms of clothes but how they spoke and things of that nature" (Interview #6, July 30, 1997). Jocelyn, in a similar fashion, said the SCETs ask this about teachers: "Are they organized; are they prepared; do they present materials in an interesting and intriguing way; are their assignments helpful" (Interview #6, July 31, 1997). Casey was the only one who did not put organization at the top her memory list. For her it was: "Content, organization, being in-tune with students' needs, being mteresting, having knowledge of what you're teaching" (Interview #6, July 22,1997). Putting organization back at the top of the list, the first thing that came to Ron's mind as he tried to recollect what the SCETs were about was: "Was the teacher well organized? Did the teacher respect students' opinions? Was the teacher interesting? Was the course material relevant? .... I can't remember more than that, and yet that would make a very interesting text, wouldn't it?" (Interview #6, July 19, 1997). Indeed it does. Interestingly enough, in spite of the fact that five of the students thought organization and the need to be organized the number one (or two) characteristic of a good teacher according to the SCETs, when I later examined an actual SCET form I found that only two of its 30 questions dealt directly with organization—one about the organization of the course as a whole, the other about the organization of class presentations in the course. The message about the importance of organization was therefore something student teachers projected upon the SCETs rather than something they actually found in them. While speaking about the importance of organization in the SCETs, they were actually speaking about its importance in the program as a whole, the very program the SCETs are intended to evaluate. In a 158 program that continuously invoked the discourse of planning and organization and one in which planning and organization were also the object of study while using such a discourse, students simply (and not uncharacteristically) reversed the evaluating measure with the object of its evaluation. The notion of organization, generated by the activities done in class and the assignments they were required to produce thus also became the implicit message about the instrument of evaluation: how they evaluated the program, how they thought the program evaluates itself, and, ultimately, how they evaluated themselves as teachers. Or, was it that the idea of organization was so embedded in the way prospective teachers were taught, that when asked by the end of the program to read the SCETs, organization had already become the only organizing discourse through which they could read them, the only language with which they could speak about them? Regardless, the consequence is identical. Whether it was the SCETs or the teacher education program as a whole, organization and the importance of being organized were undoubtedly what this group of student teachers received as the predominant message about what counts for quality teaching, at least from the way in which the Faculty of Education at UBC—the institution that teaches them about teaching— evaluates its own instructors. But the impact of such an understanding was not only on how student teachers viewed good teaching at UBC. It also impacted the way they thought about teaching in general and their own teaching in particular. How the idea of organization as the ultimate measure of good teaching transferred into students' understanding of their own teaching could be illustrated by the following two examples. When I asked Jack at the beginning of the program what, in his view, makes a good social studies teacher, he said it would be someone who challenges kids, someone who "turn[s] on the[ir] light and makes sure the kids sit there and learn something "not because they'll get tested on it or because they'll get into trouble if they don't, but because they become passionate about the issues they are being taught" (Interview #1, September 13,1996). In my first interview with him during the practicum, Jack said he felt that a lot of pressure was put upon him to be a "good" teacher. I asked: "What is a good teacher?" Jack responded: "To be organized .... to have something planned that engages them, that keeps them busy for an hour." And while he immediately qualified his statement by adding that "keeping them busy" entails "keeping them doing something worth while and thinking and that keeps everyone engaged for an 159 hour" (Interview #4, March 13, 1997), the initial requirement—what first sprang to his mind when describing "good" teaching, his own good teaching—was an image of organization, of being organized. When I asked Mary at the beginning of the program, what she thought are the attributes of a good social studies teacher, she responded by saying it is someone who is a facilitator more than a lecturer. Someone who facilitates students' own decision-making by presenting them w i t h the necessary facts and figures and then helping them make their own decisions. . . [And] when the students share their points of view everybody can learn f rom that, even the teacher. [The teacher can say:]Wow! I never quite thought of it that way and stuff like that! So, yeah, the social studies teacher does teach historical facts and junk l ike that (and I say "junk" because it's run-of-the-mil l). But they also have the opportunity to do a lot more w i th the students. (Interview #1, September, 16,1996) In a later conversation, when a similar question came up, Mary added she thought good teachers educate kids not to think only one way by introducing them to controversial issues because [presenting issues to students in such a manner] . . . makes them think in more than one way. If students look at a controversial issue and can't understand why it's controversial, then we haven't done our job. As educators, our goal is to make these kids think . . . teach them how to think so that they can solve not only the problems that we give them but the problems that life gives them. A n d by looking at controversial issues, I mean, that's perfect, isn't it? It's phi losophy and it's moral studies, and, my gosh, it's everything rolled into one. (Interview #2, October 19,1996) Visiting Mary in her practicum classroom and talking to her after observing a few of her classes that day, I asked her, as I did all other students in this study, to tell me of a lesson or a unit she was particularly proud of, and why? Mary chose to tell me of a lesson, a problematic one in her view, she had just concluded with her grade 11 students. Learning about Canadian society at the turn of the century, and specifically the section in the history textbook that dealt with immigration at the time, Mary's class engaged issues of racism through the exploration of immigration policy at the beginning of the century and then connected those to current immigration policies and the kinds of immigration policies her own students (of which more than half were visible minorities, many of them new immigrants themselves) thought should be implemented in Canada today. Exploring immigration policies as a political, economic, and cultural issue, always embedded in controversy and change, Mary had her students, working in groups, role-play and advocate a variety of perspectives, many of which students personally opposed, in order to better understand the motives that led to the establishment of specific (and often racist) immigration policies at different times, even as they were being 160 critiqued and re-formulated for today. Interestingly, Mary found, while many of the students criticized the restricting policies imposed on minority immigrants entering Canada since Confederation, many similar restrictions—an immigration fee, a head-tax, or the need to be proficient in English prior to immigration—were apparent in the immigration policies her own students (mostly non-white and immigrants themselves) were advocating for today. True to her own definitions of good teaching, Mary engaged her students with a public issue that is not only controversial but was also made so in the classroom—with and by students. She also ensured students "don't see things only one way" by having them both advocate and oppose a variety of perspectives often different than their own. But when I asked Mary why she was particularly proud of this specific lesson, she said: Well , it was wel l organized. Nothing caught me off guard. They were stimulated. They were very actively engaged. Everybody was on-task. They l iked it and that's hard to do, that is, give them something they like to do. It met all of my objectives. It just worked out really wel l . (Interview #5, A p r i l 24,1997). Although Mary incorporated all of what she believed constituted good teaching at the beginning of the program, when she tries to explain why she was proud of this particular lesson out of all others, she says: "It was well organized." She is not proud of the time spent on dealing with "official" racism and an important public policy issue. Nor is she proud of introducing students to a controversial issue and making them think "both ways," although those are exactly the things she did. What becomes the prized object of good teaching is that everything was well organized, that students were on task, that they were actively engaged, that she had met all of her objectives. How is it, then, that in spite of all the efforts put forward by many (perhaps most) involved in this teacher education program to enable students to imagine otherwise, organization emerged as its prized attribute? Or, to put it more boldly, what is it that went so wrong in this teacher education program that at its conclusion, what students believe this program values, above anything else, is organization? The message of organization as the panacea for good teaching was obviously transmitted to students in a variety of ways, mostly, as I have argued, through the discourse of planning and organization which ultimately overruled the variety of discourses which might have positioned students to think otherwise. And while I have focused much of my attention on how that discourse influenced students' 161 thinking in the direction of what they ultimately found, when I asked Jocelyn about the notion of organization she added another aspect I had not thought of. It pertained not only to the kind of discourse with which students were engaged or the kinds of assignments they were asked to produce but to their very being in the teacher education program. Telling Jocelyn how surprised I was at how embedded the message of organization seemed to be in students' thinking, Jocelyn responded that she was not surprised at all. For, in her eyes, the whole program inculcates that. You have to juggle six courses in the first semester, you have to do this in your practicum, and you have to come back in the summer and juggle some more. And you have to have 9000 assignments that are due and they're all due at different dates and you have to keep this organized and that organized. If you're not organized, it's a lot more work. So I think the whole program inculcates that. (Interview #6, July 31,1997) Organization, thus, was not only a discursive practice that affected how one thinks about what is being studied; it also became a way of being in a program that provides a framework from which to begin one's thinking about what is studied. In other words, one needs to be organized in order to even begin thinking about what it is you ought to organize. Organization was, therefore, not only an epistemological and/or pedagogical aspect of this program but also an ontological one. Immersed in this triple bind, it is not surprising that when this group of students read the SCET forms as text, organization emerged as what the UBC Teacher Education Program valued most. And while organization was by no means the only attribute of good teaching they mentioned, when one takes a closer look at their lists, what seems equally mteresting and /or alarming is not only what students included on those lists but also what they did not. I will begin with what they did. While organization appeared to top the list, there were other—and I would argue more significant—aspects of good teaching they mentioned as well. Those included: being prepared, motivated, interesting, intriguing, relevant, helpful, available, in-tune with students' needs and respectful of their opinions, and willing to answer students' questions. What was most striking for me, however, was not what found its way onto their lists about what this teacher education program values most but what did not. For while all of the above are important attributes any good teacher should strive for, I question a teacher education program where none of its students, only a week from graduation, mention any aspect of teaching that moves beyond the delivery of content or the technical aspects of teaching within the classroom. None of the students mention ethics. None mention equal opportunity, equity, and social justice. None mention questioning, challenge, reform, and change. None mention 162 thinking critically about one's world. [ S T ! Mary: I would have thought you'd get better answers than just being prepared. Did none of us say anything about critical thinking? I wonder how that was omitted when critical thinking was something that was drilled in, over and over, for 11 months? (September, 1998). Avner: Indeed, how is it, one may ask, that a teacher education which "drilled in [critical thinking], over and over, for 11 months" in its own students doesn't seem to recognize critical thinking as something worthy of evaluating in its own instructors?] In short, none say anything about education as a political and social endeavour for making the world more of what we want it to be—more democratic, equitable, inclusive, and just. Instead, it all comes down to the technology of teaching and the performance of governance and organization which, by its very (political) nature leaves many other discourses beyond the limits of its imagination, exploration, and articulation. Indeed, as Banks & Parker (1990) caution, "by narrow attention to questions of what methods are most effective, focus is fixed on the means, or technology, of teaching and kept away from questions that could change the status quo " (p. 682). [ST1 Jack: After one and a half years of teaching experience at the intermediate and secondary level in social studies, I would have to say that the single most important key to success is being well organized. This is not to suggest that other things are not also very important. However, I am so busy at my school with teaching, administration, and extracurricular responsibilities, that I need to be very organized. Perhaps it is the nature of the profession that led the program to emphasize this skill or characteristic (November, 1998).] Notes 1. One methods course in each teaching area i f the student-teacher has two teaching concentrations (i.e., social studies and English) or a second content-area methods i f he/she has only one teaching focus. I n the case of social studies as the single teaching concentration, prospective teachers were required to take SSED 317—Curriculum Topics in Social Studies i n addit ion to the Social studies methods course (SSED 312). 2. For a more detailed description of these required courses see Chapter I I I . 163 CHAPTER V T h e p e d a g o g y o f the q u e s t i o n a n d the p e d a g o g y o f the a n s w e r : O r , the d o u b l e exposu re o f the p e d a g o g y o f the q u e s t i o n Are our ways of teaching students to ask some questions always correlative w i t h our ways of teaching them not to ask - indeed to be unconscious of - others? (Johnson, 1982, p. 173. cf. Fish, p. 241) I l ike Peter's approach of critically examining things and questioning and raising issues. But at the same time, as I take that approach and apply it back to the course and to what I d id in the course, I k ind of question: [did] I practice them? Can I practice them? Have I seen them modeled in the program? Are they possible in the schools? So in a sense I'm left w i t h more questions than answers. (Ron, Interview #3, December 7,1996) [The teacher education program] should establish procedures for students to question what they're doing. I think it happens informally a lot i n the hallways but i t gets left out there; it ' gets forgotten when students go back into the classroom. (Jack, Interview #3, December 17, 1996) Reflecting a prominent trend within educational discourse in the last decade or two, and particularly perhaps within the discourse of teacher education, critical thinking was by far the term invoked most frequently within this teacher education program. Incorporated into almost each and every course to the point of redundancy (one particular article, Case et al., 1996, was assigned in three different courses), and circulated everywhere and by everyone, students naturally became suspicious its wide-spread inclusion could be the result of nothing less than a conspiracy orchestrated from above. "How else could they all be focusing on critical thinking," asked Mary, "unless somebody had been talking about it at some meeting somewhere along the line? Either that, or it's a buzz word in the industry. I just don't know which" (Interview #3, December 14,1996). And although the reappearance of the same reading in three different courses might refute the conspiracy theory (unless, that is, we give the conspirators more credit that they deserve), what cannot be left unexamined is the outcome of the relationship between what Mary identifies as the well orchestrated effort to parade critical thinking so prominently in the program and the fact that critical thinking has indeed become more of a buzz word in teacher education than a pedagogical tool for prospective teachers to meaningfully engage and learn from their own education as teachers. 164 To examine that relationship, I pose some guiding questions: what (and how) does critical thinking mean in teacher education? How and when is it used? Who is it used by and for what (and whose) purposes? What (and who) do its various manifestations enable, what (and who) do they disable? To answer these question I find it useful to address the ways in which critical thinking was engaged in this teacher education program at two different levels, each with its own constituency and purpose in mind. The first focuses on student teachers' ability to create learning environments that initiate, maintain, and foster critical thinking in their future students in school. The second focuses on student teachers' ability to think critically themselves about the content and context of the teacher education program itself, thus making pedagogical connections between how the ways one teaches and learns structure and determine what is learned. The former externalizes learning for its application elsewhere—in schools; the latter uses the experience of learning to teach as a tool to think about teaching and learning both at the university and school settings so that each connects to and builds upon the other. The distinction I make between these two levels represents and follows the lines reflecting the inherent complexity of teacher education which, through a double helix, does not simply teach prospective teachers how to teach others but also, and simultaneously— through the explicit and implicit messages embedded in the content and context of learning to teach—teaches them what it means to teach and be taught. The questions I raise and the way in which I propose to explore them indicate that my purpose is not to bring forward a definition of critical thinking and examine whether the application of critical thinking in this teacher education program measured up to that definition but rather to examine how and where critical thinking—regardless of its definition—was and was not applied.1 Like the terms rationale, goals, and objectives discussed in Chapter IV, critical thinking soon became part and parcel of student teachers' discourse, often becoming a substitute for actually thinking critically about critical thinking or about many of the issues for which critical thinking was to be a thinking tool. The degree to which critical thinking had become an unquestioned mechanism was illustrated to me when, as with many other concepts promoted in the program, I questioned students about it. In a discussion I had, for example, with Jack, who forcefully and enthusiastically embraced critical thinking, I suggested there are perspectives which view critical thinking with some suspicion and question what, in the process of its implementation, gets forgotten, covered over, and silenced (McLaren, 1989, 1994; Walters, 1990, 1994; Giroux, 1988b; McVicker Clinchy, 1989; Phelan & Garrison, 165 1994; Warren, 1994; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1996). Ignoring such questions, I explained, removes from the term 'critical' its political and cultural dimensions and reduces critical thinking to little more than an undertheorized set of thinking skills (McLaren, 1989). In a rather defensive and apprehensive response, both toward me for trying to destabilize what he held firm, but also toward the teacher education program for keeping critical and dissenting perspectives about critical thinking out of students' reach, Jack stated: In a lot of my classes we've learned the value of critical th inking. W h y have we not learned another perspective? Why have we been led to believe that critical th ink ing is the only [way]? I mean I stil l think it is the best way [because] we haven't really been led to believe there is any other way of quality thinking. I'll need to see some evidence before I think differently. (Interview #2, October 20,1996). (I provide Jack w i th those references the next time we meet.). Only by the program's end, and only after having taken a summer course which critically focused on the relationship between culture, language, and identity, did another student, Ron, assume a critical stance toward critical thinking. Critical thinking, he said, was a constructed and value-based endeavour, not the neutral and unproblematic one his other courses made it to be. Knowing that, Ron said, makes me feel that critical thinking wasn't practiced. We talk about i t but we don't do it. A n d we don't al low for other perspectives. [Instead,] we're very much reaff i rming the o ld tradi t ion of whi te, Western, liberal thought—the enlightenment thinking. I mean critical th ink ing is a very useful tool, but one of the exciting things about critical theory and postmodern ways of th inking is that we can use that tool to turn it back on the tool itself and look at it, and that's really neat. Instead, critical th inking is becoming yet another quick-fix in our arsenal of teaching methods where we go: "Oh yeah! Now the way to teach is critical th ink ing so I 'm going to base m y teaching on critical thinking. [When we do that], we are devaluing i t because i t is something that has to be experienced and lived. (Interview #6, July 19,1997) Ron provides a most poignant critique of critical thinking itself—one all students should obviously have the opportunity to address and engage as they (are made to) learn how to incorporate critical thinking in the activities they produce for their students. But what interested me more than the critique of critical thinking itself was Ron's comment as to how critical thinking was used, underused, or misused, and how such a use prevented other students (including Ron himself up to that moment) from imagining, let alone articulating, an examination of critical thinking such as the one provided by Ron. Frustrated, Ron claims that, while there was much talk about critical thinking in the program, critical thinking itself, at least the way he understood it by the program's end, was not practiced. For critical thinking to become something useful, Ron adds, it needs to not only be invoked (whether as the 166 new quick-fix or not) but also experienced and lived by those who are being called upon to impart it to others. Although Jack was perhaps the strongest proponent of critical thinking among the students in this study, he too, while finding little wrong with critical thinking as a teaching tool, had some reservations as to how it was used as a learning tool for teaching. "Interestingly," he says, as he addresses the social studies methods course specifically, while as student teachers we are asked to ensure our students think critically, we've done very l i t t le crit ical th ink ing ourselves in the methods course. We haven't really analyzed approaches to anything. We read all these articles in which we're being told which approaches to use in the classroom: like to think critically about historical texts [or] "what is history?" but we don't really we aren't really able [given encouragement? permission?] to criticize the content of what we're reading. It's like we're not really practicing it. (Interview #2, October 20,1996) However, Jack's critique and the one provided by Ron (although his was directed at the program in general, not at the methods course) only tell part of the story. Jocelyn, in contrast, thought Peter's methods course provided a wide-range of opportunities for student teachers not only to talk about critical thinking but to actually experience it. "Peter's approach to social studies," Jocelyn says, is very different than the tradit ional read-out-of-the-textbook, memorize, do the questions at the end. He's really tr ied to promote critical thinking and he's really tr ied to promote h igh order thinking. I th ink his premise is that i t can happen at any grade level; that i t should start at the earlier grade level possible and should continue on through and that that's part of our job as social studies teachers. So I th ink that part has been really good, especially because his activities have also promoted critical th inking w i th in us and have given us lots of opportunities to engage in critical thinking. I think his hope is that if we are critical thinkers then our courses w i l l be and if our courses are based on critical thought that w i l l encourage critical thinking i n our students. Avner: H o w has Peter done this: how has he focused on critical thinking? Jocelyn: Wel l , the way he structures his classes and the way he structures his activities for the class. They are all based on critical thought. I mean the readings that he asks us to read as wel l are all ... I mean the Roland Case article [1996] and others. I just think that he encourages it in his materials and everything he does or the assignments that he gives, the questions that he poses. They're all open-ended and higher-order trunking questions. (Interview #2, October 20,1996) Jack and Jocelyn, speaking on the same day, tell a very different story about whether or not the social studies methods course encouraged student teachers to think critically. The difference between these two versions, however, stems not from the fact that they are two opposing points of view about a similar course but, rather, because each addresses a different level of critical thinking which was (or was not) 167 engaged in it. Jocelyn addresses the fact that Peter created a learning environment which emphasized both the need for student teachers to create opportunities for their own students to think critically and, at the same time, for student teachers to think critically themselves about the content they may be called upon to teach and the pedagogy through which they were to teach that content when they become teachers. [ST! Jocelyn: As I've said before, much of my learning goes on well-after class has ended. Seeds are planted but growth takes time and the thought processes begun in the methods course were simply that—a beginning (November, 1998).] Jocelyn's description of the learning environment created by Peter was supported by all other five participants in this study, including Jack who, on numerous occasions, expressed similar views. But what Jack speaks of in this particular case is not the level of critical thinking in the methods course which engaged student teachers with their future role as teachers but rather with their current role as students learning to teach. He addresses the level of critical thinking students were encouraged to assume not toward what they will teach in schools but toward what they learn as students in this course, two roles Jack seems to think inform each other and are therefore inseparable. In other words, these two opposing comments are complimentary rather than contradictory. In fact, to better understand how critical thinking was dealt with in the methods course, one needs to examine the connection between these two perspectives and how one makes way for, or occupies the space of, the other. To examine how the two come together to educate, I turn to explore what took place in the methods course the first time critical thiriking was specifically discussed and engaged. I say specifically, because while critical thmking, as Jocelyn pointed out, underlay most everything in the methods course, this particular class, as the course outline specified, was devoted directly and exclusively to critical thinking as/in pedagogical practice. While I have already alluded to this particular class in the previous chapter, I'd like to re-focus on it once again, this time, however, for different purposes and from a different perspective. Students came to class having read Case et. al.'s (1996) article about critical thinking. As class began Peter summarized the article for students and pointed out the strengths and benefits the specific version of critical thinking presented in that article could serve in and for education. Having provided such an enthusiastic endorsement for this version of critical thinking, little room was left for students to criticize the article, let alone question the very idea of critical ' thinking itself. While students might have thought critically about this article, having heard such a convincing argument in favor of critical thinking, and of this 168 version of it in particular from their instructor, students did not (or felt they could not) articulate such thoughts publicly (though when I asked all six participants whether they had such critical thoughts, none said they did [ST! Jack: I did not feel I had the knowledge to look critically at critical thinking at that time. I did not possess knowledge of other "types" of formal thinking (December, 1998).] They all found both article and its presentation by Peter compelling and fully convincing). Consequently, no opportunity was afforded reflection on what, if at all, is critical about critical thirLking (McLaren, 1994) or how the prevailing discourse in critical thinking, while encouraging teachers and students to examine the world critically, leaves its own already gender- and culturally-biased exclusive and excluding practices out of such an investigation (Walters, 1994; Phelan & Garrison, 1994; Warren, 1994; Giroux, 1988b). As soon as the very brief (in many ways, nonexistent) class discussion— comprising only four clarification questions from students—was over, Peter, quickly, oriented students toward an activity in which student teachers were to: a) examine a social studies textbook; b) try and determine in which grade level it might be used; c) examine the text's strengths and weaknesses; and, d) define a critical challenge stemming from a topic or segment in the textbook and create an activity or a Avner (to Peter): Why did you choose to overtly support the position advocated in the article or take any position at all at the beginning of class rather than allow a discussion to unfold as you have in all other classes? Why did you not encourage them to critically think-through the article itself? Did you intentionally choose to avoid a discussion as to what critical thinking is, why critical thinking is defined the way it is (rational, etc.) or who it privileges, what kinds of ways of knowing it privileges, etc.? Why did you choose not to make expliciit the connections between how the definition of critical thinking we subscribe to affects/determinse what we teach, how we teach, and who we connect with (and who we ignore)? Peter: Ah--wonderful. I am not going to offer a defense of what I did, rather a genealogy: how did the class come to take this form? The term "critical thinking" is ubiquitous in curriculum documents and materials, and often, I'm afraid, quite meaningless. This short article gives me a relatively simple way to present something I found meaningful to teachers and student teachers. My reading of this piece, this fall, offered more promise than either of two presentations I have heard Roland give, and certainly more promise than other definitions have offered. There are many ways to engage an article like this. One is to discuss the article itself. Another is to attempt to apply it to a lesson-planning task, and then discuss what emerges. I chose the latter, mainly because, in the short time we had, I also wanted to give the students a first experience in thinking through a lesson plan. You ask why did I choose not to make the connections between the theoretical and the pedagogical. If I understand what you mean by this dichotomy, I think that is exactly what I attempted to do, though not simply by discussing the article. Well, perhaps that is a bit of a defense after all. (E-mail interview, September 11, 1996) 169 mini-lesson around that topic which would engage their own future students in critical thinking. As Peter began distributing the textbooks—a different one to each group—for this half-hour activity, I moved to sit with Jocelyn's group. This was the first time in many years any of the group's four members had seen an actual social studies textbook. The excitement/ anxiety seemed very evident through students' comments and body language as textbook kept exchanging hands back and forth. Students were also thrilled with this activity because, as Jocelyn told me later, "it was nice not to dwell so much on what is critical thinking because it has already come up in a lot of my courses and I don't think it's something that can be resolved. So it was nice to say: 'All right, whatever we think critical thinking is, how can we encourage it with our students when we use the textbook (which often doesn't). So without dwelling too much on it—on the "what is it?" stuff—we actually applied it which I thought was good" (Interview #1, September 15, 1996). Jack, too, thought this activity was very beneficial. It showed us, he said, that as a good social studies teacher, you're going to have to take this book of facts and challenge students to make them use their brain rather than just memorize these chapters that you assigned them or just having them read those chapters and then quiz them on content. That's not good enough. A n d because textbooks aren't usually designed for that, you have to do it yourself and formulate questions or activities to challenge the student and force them to th ink so they w i l l benefit f rom the course or the unit. (Interview #1, September 13,1996) The activity was especially good, however, Jack added, because it established how we need to translate critical thinking over to our students because whi le all of us in this course are famil iar w i th it, we can't assume that the students we're going to get are going to be critical thinkers. So it was wor th while to familiarize ourselves w i t h the concepts because we're going to have to instil l them in my students and make sure they get transferred to them, (ibid.) While I fully agree with Jack that a variety of important issues were embedded in this activity, I question his a priori assumption that student teachers already think critically and all they have to do is learn how to translate that thinking in order to instill it in their own students who don't. To begin illustrating my point, I turn to what Charles had to say about the activity and the degree to which he believed it required student teachers to think critically themselves. While stating the same benefits addressed by Jocelyn and Jack, Charles also had this to say: Charles: I thought i t was beneficial, for sure. But I don't think i t was an exercise i n critical th inking for us. 170 Avner: It wasn't? Charles: To a point. I mean I guess ... well, maybe the two tie together .... I guess he wanted us to learn how to translate our [critical thinking] so we'll be able to enable students to think that way about whatever text we give them. (Interview #2, October 17,1996) Charles is connecting two different activities. The first, and the one he believes this activity did not focus on, was student teachers thinking critically themselves. The second, which he thought was beneficial, was to teach student teachers how to translate their own critical thinking (which he claimed wasn't activated) so that their students might learn to do the same. The question, however, is what does Charles mean by "enabling] students to think that way"? While, as he specifically states, he refers to student teachers' ability to think critically, he also says this activity did not encourage them to think critically themselves. So which of the two messages are their school students to receive as a result of such an activity: to think critically as student teachers did not? Or, to not think critically as they did? While this is obviously not the intended message of the activity or one Charles attempts to convey, there's something intriguing in student teachers thinking they were not thinking critically while working on activities that are supposed to promote critical thiruong in others. To be sure, and bringing into account Charles's other comments about the benefits of this activity, what Charles meant by his comment is not that student teachers were not thinking critically as they were creating critical challenges for their students but that they were not thinking critically about the activity through which they were producing critical thinking opportunities for their students. [ST! Peter: When you say student teachers were not thinking critically . . . . [do you mean] that they were not, at the same time, asking about power and privilege in the class? And if so, do you think that this should be done in every class? (July, 1998). Jack: I think we were thinking critically during that activity if thinking critically is defined as "quality thinking." We devised activities for students, then discussed their effectiveness as a group. Granted, we were not thinking critically about the benefit of the process itself (December, 1998).] This connection (or disconnection, if you will) is profoundly illustrated in the conversation I had with Jocelyn a day after this particular class. Recalling the difficulties Jocelyn and her group encountered in order to complete the assignment in a meaningful way in the short time allotted them, I began my interview with a question about the activity per-se. 171 Jocelyn: I found it diff icult, very very difficult because .. wel l , number one, there wasn't enough time to really look at that textbook. It was the first time I had seen that textbook and to try to determine what are its problems and what are its strengths and weaknesses, that was hard because I didn't have time to really read it. So how do I know what's good or bad about it? That was sort of a very diff icult task to do. A n d then to pick out an activity that encourages critical th ink ing and develop a min i lesson plan) again, the directions [?], it was diff icult in that short amount of time, but I thought it was worthwhile. Avner: Wel l , I sat in on your group and I didn't hear you say any of that to your group members or in class. In fact, I didn't hear anybody else say anything to that effect in class. Jocelyn: Wel l , we had a task to do. Our task was: "Do this!" Yeah, we didn' t assess i f this was a good task or a bad task and we didn't ask: "Why are we doing this?" Avner: I 'm confused. You are doing an activity to encourage students' critical th inking and you have critical thoughts about it, thoughts you've just expressed, and yet you thought you had to hide them or that they were irrelevant to a task of doing critical thinking? Jocelyn: That is true. Yeah, that is true! Avner: Why? [STf Peter: This was a problem w i t h the class, a very real one, but I would call i t a technical problem: too large a task for too small a period of time. You sound as though something over-ridingly important hinges of students' articulation of this problem (July 25, 1998). Avner: It's not that I believe there's an over-riding importance in them articulating the problematics in th is activity as much as I believe that in the process of learning to teach the problematics of activities need to be discussed. Th is , for me, stands at the centre of teacher education. It relates to the connection between what we learn and how we learn and the inability to separate the two.] Jocelyn: Wel l because we were given a task [she laughs]. It's l ike Pavlov's dog: "Here you go!" "Here's your stimulus, here you go!" Of course I thought all of that but I just chose not to say it. It's not that I thought it was irrelevant but I thought that the purpose wasn't for us to engage critical dunking. The purpose was to learn or think about how we can encourage our students to engage critical thinking. Avner: Do you th ink it's possible for a teacher not to engage i n critical th inking and yet create opportunities for their students to engage it? Jocelyn: [laughs] Of course not. Even when we were discussing what we were going to do we were employ ing crit ical th ink ing but i t tells a lot. Wi thout even knowing i t , it's been inculcated in to you when is a good time to question what you're doing and when is not. I mean I questioned what we were doing but I thought: "Well, O.K., what-ever." Peter has asked us to do this so I gave h i m the respect that there was some reason for doing this: "Al l r ight, we' l l go w i t h this." But of course you question that and it's almost automatic whether you voice i t or not. It's inculcated i n you that there are times to ask questions and there are times to voice the questions you are th ink ing i n your head and there are times that aren't. [ST! Jocelyn: Interesting. Now I find that some of my greatest classes come from students who are willing to question why\ We are often sidetracked but this is always a pleasant surprise (November, 1998).] 172 Avner: Was there anything in Peter's actions that sent you a message or gave you the impression that you should not be asking or voicing questions at this time and that you should just get on with doing the task? Jocelyn: I don't know what gave me that message. I don't really know. I think maybe it wasn't even a message from him at all. Maybe it was just the nature of the classroom, the nature of education and of my experiences in education. When a teacher asks you to do something, unless it's profoundly wrong, you do it because you assume that there's a point to this and that by doing the task you'll get to that point. It's like you become a willing participant and you give the person who is leading the benefit of the doubt that they have a place that they are going to lead you to and that you're going to get there. So when a teacher stands up and says: "O.K., we're going to do this activity, here is the outline of what I want to do and we'll have a discussion afterwards, then I think: "Well, I may not agree," but the fact is they've asked me to do this so I'll do it and then maybe in the discussion we can get to some of the points I disagree with. So maybe it was my interpretation more that anything he [Peter] did or did not do. As a teacher, I would want cooperation from my students if I ask them to do something. I don't want them to ask "Why?" every minute and I don't want to spend 90% of the time explaining why and what are the reasons for what we're doing. I would hope that they would assume that I have good reason for choosing what I have. If they don't, then they can ask, but I've still got things that need to get done. So [I'll tell them], if you give me the benefit of the doubt, hopefully I'll produce for you, or you'll produce for yourselves and it will all work out. That's why I think I didn't analyze the activity. That's not what I was asked to do. I was asked to do something else. (Interview #1, September 15, 1996). [ S T ! Peter: Without this level of assent from students, it is impossible to teach: the process comes to a standstill (July, 1998). Ron: This is true. We do need the assent of students in order to teach, we need them to trust us. But, that puts us back in the position of pouring our knowledge into "empty vessels." It also denies the agency of the teacher. Don't we learn when we interrogate? And don't we learn when we are interrogated? (February, 1999).] Kerrigan, a reading instructor advocating the virtues of docility to his student readers: "Docility means 'teachableness' and is simply the quality of being willing to follow simple instructions and to have confidence in the instructor, who has been through all the learning—and perhaps much teaching—before and just might know what he [sic] is doing ... [You] even without any talent, by patiently, docily, and seriously following a step by step method can produce a good theme." (1979, p. 32. cf. Giroux, 1985, p. 26) Jocelyn's comments, no doubt, are rich enough to fill an entire dissertation. She touches upon a variety of issues which are fundamental to any examination of teacher education, and to my discussion in particular: how and what are student teachers positioned to learn? How is the process of coming to know related to the knowledge being produced? What and when do student teachers question, and what structures inform that? What is the relationship between the ways in which student teachers are dis/en/couraged to think critically and question as students, and their ability to become critically questioning teachers? What Jocelyn raises both anchors and illustrates the discussion thus far about critical thinking and moves it 173 beyond. And while I will periodically return to Jocelyn's words as I address these questions throughout this chapter and broaden the discussion from one focusing primarily on critical thinking to one which engages questioning in general—an inherent characteristic of critical thinking—I would like to begin by examining the image of critical thinking emerging out of Jocelyn's reflections. What lies at the heart of Jocelyn's comments is a particular notion of when student teachers think (and believed they are encouraged to think) critically—that is, to question—as well as what they are encouraged (or feel they can) think critically about. [ST! Peter: Certainly by Case's [1996] definition of critical thinking (and you have not objected to that), the tasks that students faced in this class involved critical thinking. But what you are calling for is a relatively simple—and I would even say pervasive (among adolescents) disposition towards formal learning (July, 1998).] Whether from Peter or from her previous experiences as a student (though she tends to pin it on the latter), Jocelyn nevertheless received the message that the purpose of this activity "wasn't for us to engage critical thmking . . . The purpose was to learn or think about how we can encourage our students to engage critical thinking." Jocelyn thus illustrates not only the existence of the two different levels I have already pointed to of engaging critical thinking in this program—critical thinking as an activity designed to initiate critical thinking in others, and critical thinking which is practiced by those who create (and as they create) opportunities for others to think critically—but also, and more importantly, their separation. Although Jocelyn herself had a variety of critical thoughts about this particular activity—thoughts she articulated in our discussion—she chose not to raise any of them either within her group or in the large-class discussion which followed. This, she states, was because she believed it was high school students' critical thought this activity was designed to activate, not her own. In making that separation, Jocelyn points to a second dichotomy, which, in the context of teacher education, has more profound pedagogical implications. It separates the text student teachers are writing (for their students) from the text they are reading (about their own experience of producing the text for students). Moreover, the distinction Jocelyn points to divorces the products of learning to teach (the lessons they prepare) from the process of learning to teach (the lessons they learn about teaching and learning while producing lessons for their students). It excludes an examination of the product—the learning tool— from the pedagogy which made it both possible and impossible. In other words, what critical thinking amounted to was something at once spoken about, incorporated in student teachers' assignments and lesson plans, even directed at 174 what prospective teachers will be needing to teach others, but not something with which they themselves should think about the process in which they learn all of the above—their own learning in the teacher education program itself. In that sense, what Jocelyn says in this excerpt does not contradict what she said earlier about Peter's actions which promoted critical thinking and the avenues he opened up for student teachers to think critically in the methods course. But, at the same time, it also corroborates Jack's assertion that student teachers were not encouraged to think critically about what they are provided with in the methods course or about the learning context itself in which they learn how to become teachers who critically trunk. As we have seen, and as Beyer (1987) says, "[b]eing a student teacher means acquiring . . . knowledge and learning how to use it in a context that does not include criticism and has little patience with analysis" (p. 22). According to Jocelyn, she didn't analyze the activity because "that's not what we were asked to do. I was asked to do something else." "We had a task to do. Our task was: 'Do this!' Yeah, we didn't assess if this was a good task or a bad task and we didn't ask: 'Why are we doing this?'" [ST1 Peter: A poor program is far more likely to stimulate this question-as a poor textbook is more easy to deconstruct (July, 1998). Avner: It is indeed more difficult to stop and question a good program, a good course, a good instructor (which I argue the course has been and you are). But does that mean that we learn from poor instruction by deconstructing it and from good instruction by emulating and following? I would say not. But in order to learn meaningfully from good instruction, it must too be put to a test, not in order to undermine it but in order to understand what makes it good and how one can learn from in and apply that learning to other—different—contexts and situations (August, 1998).] It seemed this analytic question—"Why are we doing this?"—was a question students did not only not articulate publicly but one they did not even entertain privately since this "was not their task." And in a task-oriented curriculum which also prepares prospective teachers for a task oriented career, one performs one's task rather than question or analyze it. But this "little" question— "Why are we doing this?"—the question school students like asking most and the one teachers tend to therefore like least (and ignore most), is, however, perhaps one of the most significant questions in education, especially, I would argue, in teacher preparation. What seems equally interesting, therefore, is why that question was not asked. Beyond the idea that Jocelyn believed asking such a question was not part of the task at hand (we were asked to do something else), and that when one is given a stimulus one reacts to it rather than analyzes it, Jocelyn also mentions the fact that 175 asking such a question would disrupt the flow of the class, would derail learning, and destabilize the authority of the teacher who needs the cooperation of his/her students in order for learning to take place. The issue for Jocelyn was not that she did not think of that question but that through her previous experiences in education she has learned when to ask questions and when to refrain from doing so, when to follow and when to disrupt the flow. While Jocelyn attributes her inability (or unwillingness) to ask such a question to the accumulation of messages from her previous educational experience more so than to any explicit message from Peter, the very fact that the messages she has received previously were not brought to the table to be analyzed, discussed, and deconstructed, sends an implicit message that the kind of learning she has experienced in the past is the way things are in the teacher education program and the way things ought to be in her own future classroom as well. [ST! Jocelyn: I would agree. However, my classroom is radically different than the ones I spent my high school years in. I have analyzed my educative experiences and vowed to change teaching. The way I teach is NOT the way I was taught. There are some elements in it that I've chosen to keep. People do not always articulate their opinions or thought processes, but that doesn't mean they don't think about these issues (November, 1998).] Ignoring the existence and impact of previous messages doesn't make them disappear, it only reifies them through their avoidance (Britzman, 1986, 1991a; McDiarmid, 1990; Ginsburg, 1988). As Ron claims, "we are working with the model of teaching that, at some level, we're not really actively thinking about; we're working with this model of teachers that we have in the past [and say:] 'I'm going to do what they did. All I need to know are the tools they used to do that.'" (Interview #3, December 7,1996). According to Britzman (1986), the underlying values students bring into the program which coalesce in one's institutional biography, if unexamined, propel the cultural reproduction of authoritarian teaching practices and neutralize the context which generates such a cycle. . . . the ways that prospective teachers understand and experience power throughout teacher education shape their acceptance or rejection of the status quo. Similarly, teacher education's conception of knowledge can promote a view of the teacher as either technician or intellectual, and the extent to which values are rendered explicit can either inhibit or encourage a more critical pedagogy, (p. 443) The fear of having a "Why are we doing this?" question disrupt the flow of learning to teach was also part of Ron's experience in his POT class. In a conversation I had with him a few weeks into the program, Ron tells me of his frustration as he attempts to reconcile the dichotomy between what was preached and what was 176 practiced in that POT course—the difference between what student teachers were expected to provide their students and what was being provided to them. Whereas the expectations put upon student teachers in POT, according to Ron, were to continuously incorporate cooperative learning, where knowledge is actively constructed by learners, POT itself was very teacher- or lecture-centered, where knowledge was transmitted and transferred. Believing that was an important and relevant issue, particularly in a course that focuses on principles of teaching and instructional strategies, I asked Ron whether he had raised that issue in his POT class. Ron: I probably will, very soon. [STf Ron: But as you can see, I lacked the courage of my own convictions (February, 1999).] I've been talking a little bit about it but, again, in POT, I think my lab leader was concerned that .. you know, we only have two hours to get through all this stuff so she's getting the point of what you're saying and then restating that and then going on to somebody else. Avner: Did other students raise those kinds of things? Ron: Not really. But I think I'm going to try to do that a little bit more although I am also hesitant to do that because I'm aware of the demands of the course and what people want to know and the information that we want to acquire. And to start saying: "Why are we doing this?" would disrupt that flow. (Conversation, September, 27,1996) Disrupt the flow of what? Oddly, both Ron and Jocelyn seem to think that "Why are we doing this?" is a problematic question in teacher education. I say oddly because, while this question is important anytime and anywhere, it becomes doubly important in teacher education and particularly in a Principles of Teaching course. For in such a context, it is no longer simply a question which challenges the authority of the instructor (although that is always a positive stance) or even a question about content ("Why are we doing this"?) Rather, and simultaneously, it is a question about the process of learning, about pedagogy ("Why are we doing this?" or "Why are we doing it this way?") and, inevitably, about the relationship between what one learns and how one comes to learn it. But when the process of teaching and learning in a teacher education program is excluded from its own curriculum, it becomes apparent why Ron and Jocelyn felt such a question might disrupt the flow. Still, it seems strange that a question about teaching would disrupt the flow of a course that focuses on teaching. What, after all, is teacher education about? How else can it reconcile itself with its own name? [STf Jocelyn: I often feel that if I'm going to ask "why" and question the effectiveness of a certain approach, I need to provide an alternative. I 177 didn't always have one and hence was reluctant to voice concerns (November, 1998). Avner: Isn't the very act of asking that question already an alternative? For the beginning of an alternative is a question about that which one feels ought to change, even if the precise direction of change is still unclear.] Whereas all teaching faculty across all university disciplines all engage in the process of educating, classroom discussions in disciplines outside of education, at least from my own experience, tend to focus on content and ignore the role of pedagogy in determining that content. Such a "privilege," however, becomes a peril in a faculty of education. For while a history instructor might be able to pass (though poorly, in my mind) teaching about the past without interrogating how the past is pedagogically made to tell in his/her very classroom, teaching in teacher education requires an exploration not only of what but also of how one comes to know and the politics through which one frames, determines, and builds upon the other. While the inherent connection between these two aspects of education in the public school system is made apparent to student teachers through their assigned readings and class discussions, few connections are made between how they themselves come to know in teacher education and what they come to know from (and through) it. Similarly, overt discussions are conducted regularly in this teacher education program (especially in EDST 314) about how the organization of schooling and learning in the public school system produces particular learning and learners rather than others. How the learning organized for student teachers produces particular kinds of future teachers, however, remains one of teacher education's best hidden secrets, at least from those who might benefit from it the most. [ST1 Peter: If this is a secret, then someone has to know it. I'm not sure that teacher educators know as much as you imply. There are a lot of assumptions in teacher education programs (July, 1998).] Divorcing the ways in which student teachers are taught to teach from the discussion about how they will need to teach, student teachers become exiled in and from their own experiences in learning to teach. That is, while living the program and living in it, student teachers are nevertheless exiled—both epistemologically and pedagogically—from the materiality of their own education as they learn about education. Avner: How, then, can we make the classroom dynamics a text to be considered in the classroom? Ron: Start by posing a question: what is a text? I suppose you could pose that question directly in the classroom. ... Maybe ask questions about why we have the classroom set-178 up the way we do. why are the desks in rows? why am I standing at the front pacing? why is my desk larger than yours? (Interview #1, September 12, 1996). Understandably, few instructors would welcome a public interrogation of their own teaching (though Peter, having encouraged this kind of study, could definitely be counted among them). But for teacher preparation to bear the characteristics of teacher education rather than those of teacher training (See Bullough & Gitlin, 1994), the advantages of such a process obviously outnumber its disadvantages. This becomes especially true for a teacher education program such as this one which tried to ensure (though verbally more so than by example) its graduates don't simply reproduce the "system" but challenge it in order to make education more of what they want it to be—more democratic, equitable, inclusive, and just. Across the board, instructors—through readings and class discussions emanating from those readings—encouraged student teachers to challenge the current organization of knowledge and knowing and the existing regulations of teaching and learning; to question the status quo and the practices of "things as they are;" to question and challenge the authority of curriculum designers and textbooks, to critically read all texts brought into the classroom and examine not only what they say but what they do with (and through) what they say; in all, a critical perspective of education that required student teachers to challenge and reject rather than comply and reproduce. As Jocelyn, discussing the methods course, put it earlier, Peter believed that "if we are critical thinkers then our courses will be. And if our courses are based on critical thought, that will encourage critical thinking in our students." The connection Jocelyn makes between the way one is taught and the way one will hopefully teach—the very issues I engage throughout this dissertation—is at the very heart of the matter. For as I will show, how student teachers critically question and think, what and how they question and think about is not only rooted in the equation Jocelyn suggested but also makes such an equation problematic. That is because what must be considered, if we take that equation seriously, is whether, as teacher educators, we can expect student teachers to critically think, question, challenge, and reject when they are in the school system if we don't create learning environments which open up opportunities for them to question, challenge, and reject what they think ought to be questioned, challenged, and rejected in teacher preparation? Can we truly ask them to do so there (is it ethically sound and procedurally feasible?) if they don't do it here; if we don't provide a model which 179 shows them how, that encourages and even requires them to challenge and reject here—to indeed be able to ask: "Why are we doing this?" here and actually expect to receive an answer. As teacher educators we can talk all we want about the need for teachers to select, choose and build their own curriculum when they get to the school, to not blindly follow the textbook, the prescribed curriculum. But if we don't force them to do it when they are learning to teach, indeed, if we don't expect them to do it here, how can we expect it to happen there? I ask Jack how many of the students in this course he thinks will create spaces for students to question and challenge when they go into teaching? Jack: None. Avner: Why not? Jack: I don't know. I just don't think they will. It's too difficult. I think most of them are still left with their impressions of school. What they leave this program with is a lot like the impressions they came in with. I think some will, maybe. But most won't. (Interview #3, December 17, 1996) [ST! Jack: I don't like this quote. It suggests that I thought student teachers learned nothing from the program; that they will leave the program with the same ideas they entered with. Also, your question, now, doesn't seem clear enough. Were you asking me if the student teachers will create spaces for students to question and challenge student teachers' own teaching and methods or to challenge previously held notions of history or simply to critically think? If it is the former, then my answer would remain "No!" If, however, it is the latter, then I would like to change my response to "Yes. I think they will, to some degree.] Walking the borderline between a pedagogy of the question (Bruss & Macedo, 1985) as a method for what student teachers need to do with their students in school but not encouraging such a pedagogy to be rooted in their own experience as students learning to teach, left student teachers with a problematic, ambivalent, and mostly unrealized understanding of the role and purpose of questioning in education. (I recognize the role my own interview questions might have had in furthering that confusion.) The struggle between the pedagogy of the question and the pedagogy of the answer, according to Bruss & Macedo, "is a struggle between those who believe they have definitive knowledge (both substantially and procedurally) about teaching and those who argue that teaching has less to do with procedures and more to do with the pursuit of questions" (Smyth, 1988, p. 32). "Unlike the pedagogy of the answer which reduces learners to mere receptacles for . . . knowledge," claim Bruss & Macedo (1985), "the pedagogy of the question gives learners the 'language of possibility' to challenge the very constraints which relegate them to mere objects . . . 180 [and stimulate^] and challenge[s] learners to question, to doubt, and to reject" (p. 8. cf. Smyth, 1988, p. 33). All six student teachers in the sub-sample group talked about the need to question and emphasized the importance of questioning as an educative tool. Further, they all believed the ability to question was the most valuable and powerful thing they got out of the social studies methods course, and, subsequently, the most crucial and substantial thing they could give their own students. Yet, as they spoke of the importance of questioning, they themselves did very little of it either in the UBC portion of the program or in the practicum. Verbally articulated yet very much unrealized, I therefore question in the remainder of this chapter how much of the wholesale adoption of the pedagogy of the question by student teachers was jargon they simply picked up from their instructors, how much student teachers played (or felt they needed to play) to the tune of a program that advocated questioning but didn't much allow it to flourish within its own boundaries; a program that while encouraging students to ask questions, did not encourage them to question? "Discourses which contest the organization and selective interests of dominant forms of pedagogy," claims McLaren (1991), "are likely to be . . . dismissed by most teachers" (p. 235). Such discourses, however, are not only dismissed by teachers, they are also unarticulated by student teachers. Not once did student teachers openly and publicly question or challenge the organization of knowledge and ways of knowing in the methods course (nor did they in the practicum, a coincidence?!). That is, other than when the organization of knowledge pertained directly to their assignments. The only occasion in which they did publicly challenge what they were instructed (beyond the discussion about the unit plans in POT I presented in the previous chapter) was when, a few classes before the end of the course, Peter made public his thoughts about the final exam. While students were unsuccessful in challenging Peter's assumptions about the need for an exam, questioning the benefit of asking two of the questions Peter was considering, nevertheless resulted in their (the questions, that is, not students) being eliminated from the final exam. While this example illustrates that students can (and did) challenge Peter when they thought such a challenge was appropriate, it is the very idea that the final exam deserved a public challenge and not anything else in the course that seems problematic. I make that claim since the only challenge (or challenges, if one considers the discussion about unit plans in POT which, in effect, was also about an assignment) was launched from student teachers' position as students, not as prospective teachers. How they were positioned by the end of the 181 course within the student-teacher nexus, I argue, is, by and large, demonstrated by what challenges they pose and from which of those two positions they pose them. But what it also demonstrates, to some degree, is that while the teacher education program spoke of a critical and non-traditional education, the kind of education student teachers received was very much a traditional one, even if the examined, were not. This teacher education program mostly followed the patterns of other educational endeavours student teachers had previously encountered, ones which situate teachers as question posers and students as answer-givers, unless the issue under consideration is an assignment or an exam. In school, students often remain disengaged until a teacher mentions that "something is going to be on the test." That is when students' ears perk up and where they devote their attention. So while I was encouraged to see prospective teachers finally challenging Peter, even if it was only by the course's end, the kind of challenge—that is, the issue for which the challenge was launched—seemed to reify student teachers' position as students rather than provide a way for them to move beyond it and into the realm of teachers. For the challenge did not pertain to final exams in general—why we have them, should we have them, what kind of learning do they encourage/discourage?—but to their own particular final exam. The fact that after taking an entire semester (the most significant, I would argue) in teacher education student teachers still think like students, reflects some of the problematics in a teacher education which, while speaking of innovation and change, provides students with a rather traditional education that reinforces the current nature of education and the roles students and teachers each play in it rather than provides alternatives for student teachers to think otherwise. As for the more explicit curriculum of the methods course—the readings and in-class activities—while student teachers critically challenged the texts that were used in the classroom, asked "difficult" questions of them, they rarely applied a similar examination to the context of their learning or to the teaching that made it all possible. While critical comments were part and parcel of heated debates about "What is history?" or "What is a fact?", debates in which student teachers challenged each other's comments continuously, they rarely pursued a follow-up question challenging Peter's response to one of their or any other student's questions or comments. In fact, as my transcripts illustrate, there was never even one "but" question as a challenging or questioning come-back to one of Peter's responses. Having asked a question, as critical as it might have been (and many were), Peter's response always seemed to satisfy them in a way they felt no need to probe further. 182 And while Peter's responses to their questions and the way he took up the challenges they posed to the curriculum might have indeed always been satisfactory, there is more to the idea of not challenging Peter than the above explanation provides. This explanation is rooted in student teachers' experience as students in someone's classroom, experiences Jocelyn so well articulated earlier on: suspending judgment, refraining from asking difficult questions that might disrupt the flow, giving the teacher the benefit of the doubt, allowing the teacher to lead, even if that inhibits analysis and critical reflection. Periodically, I would ask participants what they liked or found beneficial in the methods course and what they did not, and why. The purpose was to allow them a space for critical reflection and, by ascribing value to class activities and having to articulate that value both to me and to themselves, to better understand their own values, perspectives, assumptions, and understandings about teaching and learning. While it seemed easy for participants to identify and articulate what they liked and found beneficial (see Chapter III), they demonstrated immense difficulties coming up with what they did not like or did not find beneficial. Although they themselves had to think-through, explain, analyze, assess, and justify the teaching methods they proposed in their lesson- and unit-plans, such dispositions were not undertaken in their assessment of the teaching presented in front of them and practiced with them. In response to my initial question, Ron, for example, had this to say: "I can't think of any class I didn't like." I continued: "Was there any activity you thought was not beneficial to you or that you thought you, as an instructor, might have not pursued?" "No," says Ron. "Like I said, I can't think of a single thing I didn't like" (Interview #2, October, 19, 1996). Casey, too, said there wasn't even one class that was not beneficial to her: "I can't think of such a class. They all seemed to have some purpose, goals, rationale" (Interview #2, October, 20, 1996). "You're beginning to do your own thinking about planning to teach," I said to Mary in our second interview. "If you were the instructor in this course, would you have designed it differently, and if so, how?" Her response: "No. I think the way he's done it is quite good" (Interview #2, October 19, 1996). By the end of the course, I asked Jack whether there was something he didn't agree with in the course. He said: "Let me think There were many things I didn't agree with at the time but I didn't write it down uhmmmmmm .... what did we do? ... No. I can't think of anything (Interview #3, December 17,1996). What student teachers don't say is no doubt a compliment to Peter and to his teaching. Yet it becomes less so when one considers that they didn't say. For the 183 purpose of teacher education is very much to think about the things student teachers chose to ignore, to not say. Finding that a particular class or an activity was not particularly beneficial for a student does not minimize the quality of teaching, it only raises the quality of learning by identifying the fact that no instruction is equally beneficial to all students and that what one student might benefit from at one point, another will not. In that very sense, the idea of asking student teachers to problematize their own education was always and already intended not as criticism at the program or at Peter but as a way to activate their thinking about what they often chose not to consider themselves. As you can see, I was not always successful, however. Student teachers' unwillingness (or inability) to re-think or critically think-through their environment and consider alternatives was not only evident in their evaluations of the social studies methods course but also toward the practicum and education in general. During their practicum, and attempting to engage some of the problematics of what they found there or the conditions under which they were asked to operate as student teachers in someone else's classroom, I asked student teachers what, if this were their own classroom, they would do differently. I hoped that might provoke reflection not only about what they wanted to do but also about what they were prevented from doing. Many of the participants said there was nothing they would change or that (and also because) their sponsor teacher's classroom felt very much their own. (If this seems to contradict Jack's critique of his sponsor teachers mentioned in the previous chapter, it does not. For that critique was offered by the end of the program, almost three months after his practicum was over). Some mentioned rearranging the desks, others hanging more of students' work on the wall. Those, however, were all the changes student teachers, at that time, could conceive of. I asked participants a similar question about education in general. My assumption was that having been in the schools for two or three months they might have used some of the critical perspectives encouraged at UBC and provide an analysis of education that would move beyond the specifics of their own classroom, or, alternatively, would engage that broader analysis within the context of their own classroom. Yet little of that ever took place. The nature of the relationship between prospective teachers' inability to critically examine the methods course and their inability to examine the practicum is obviously speculative. Nevertheless, the same pattern seemed to apply in and to both settings. To be sure, student teachers' lack of questioning cannot be attributed to the fact that UBC encouraged them not to ask. On the contrary, UBC faculty did 184 as much as they could to encourage them to ask. Yet, I fully believe that one cannot meaningfully ask someone to question without affording them an opportunity to do so in the very learning environment which claims to promote it. That is, one can ask, but one's message no longer sounds credible or doable. The reason for asking participants the questions I did about their education emanates from the notion that, just as student teachers need to subject textbooks and other assigned readings to critical analysis (an approach the methods course continuously advocated), they need to do the same with the educative process in which and through which they analyze those textbooks. After all, education—and their own in particular—is a text, a narrative that is as subject to agendas and biases as any other and requires a similar critical examination. Further, to read one's education means that one incorporates the same concepts one uses in education to do the reading of one's education. That, however, often seemed more than what participants in this study were willing to do. I asked Mary what critical thmking meant to her: Mary: Questioning wou ld be the one term which I wou ld use to sum it up. Question what you see. Is there a bias? In any case: f ind the bias! and you're thinking critically. Question where it's coming f rom, who is wr i t ing it, what context are they wr i t ing it from? Thinking critically means getting more in depth than what's actually there, what's actually wr i t ten. Read between the lines. That wou ld be critical f lunking. (Interview #1, September 16,1996) A fine definition of critical thinking, one, I would add, a methods course entitled reading and writing texts was very much about. But when I asked Mary to apply her thinking to the methods course itself, by asking whether there was anything Peter had done in the methods course which she did not find beneficial, she said: I don't think so. Like he's experienced and so I take his look at . . "what are we doing here? O.K. I know there's a reason for it; just f ind the reason." If I'm confused about the reason [as to] why he's tell ing us something or w h y he's teaching us something, there is a reason [and it's up to me to] f ind the reason! It's m y task, right? Otherwise I wou ld become disenchanted, I 'm sure. Avner: A n d do you often f ind the reason? Mary: Yeah. A n d i f I don't, then it becomes clear in the next class or whatever. (Interview #2, October 19,1996) I then moved to ask Mary more specifically about Peter—the instructor of the course—again with the idea of having her critically examine what she, and-other students, seemed to think was beyond examination: 185 Avner: Let's take a look at Peter as a model. What, in your view, are his strengths and weaknesses as a teacher? Mary: Well his strength is that he's flexible. He has a good sense of humor and I think that ties in with his ability to communicate with his students on their level. I have no idea what his education is and whether or not he has his doctorate, or whatever, and I don't care to know. With the other teachers I'm thinking: 'Ah! Where is this person coming from and what qualifies him to be standing there and teaching me? Where do they get their authority?' To me all of Peter's authority comes from his experience. Avner: Experience in what? Mary: Teaching social studies in the classroom. Avner: In your classroom? Mary: No. In the public schools. I can tell by the way he's teaching us that he was as good a teacher then as he is now... There's no doubt in my mind that he knows what he's talking about. He definitely knows what he's talking about. He's coming at it from like, "I know what you should be doing because I've been there, I've done it." His experience speaks volumes. Avner: Any weaknesses? Mary: If there is one I can't find it. (Interview #2, October 19,1996) Mary couldn't find any weaknesses in the methods course because, as she put it, Peter's knowledge and experience speak volumes. He's been out there, he's done it, and therefore knows what he is talking about. As a student in his class, Mary's understanding of her role is not to ask "why are we doing this?" but, rather, to find the reason for what is being done: "Just find the reason. It's my task, right? Otherwise," she said, "I would become disenchanted." Believing that experience is what makes someone a good teacher and that in order to learn from experience one needs to submit oneself to that experience rather than interrogate it, Mary chose to put the onus for finding the reason for "Why are we doing this?" on herself and in herself rather by questioning Peter—both in the sense of posing questions and in assuming a critical and questioning stance towards his actions, whatever they may be. While Mary claimed that in order to read a text critically (which she said one Thorndike (1975) claims that "The half educated [person] ... is likely to try (and fail) to understand the specialises] instead of obeying [them]. ... The educated [person] should know when not to think and where to buy the thinking he [or she] needs" (pp. 238-239. cf. Ginsburg, 1988, p. 99) Thus, as Ginsburg adds, having examined the teacher education program at Houston University, "teacher education may be conceived in this case as a process that encourages the development of half-educated persons into fully-educated persons, who 'know when not to think" (pp. 99-100) but rather buy (and buy into) the thinking of the more experienced knower. 186 must always do), one has to "question where such a text is coming from, who is writing it, what context are they writing it for. . . . Read between the lines!" she made no attempts to read between Peter's lines, between the lines of his teaching— her own learning. While these are the questions Mary believed one needs to ask of a text, Peter was not considered a text in her view and, therefore, did not require a critical read. Yet, Peter's experience and the quality of his teaching could be measured against the experience and quality of writing demonstrated by the authors of the texts Mary does believe require a critical reading. But while their (authors') experience and quality writing must be deconstructed according to Mary, Peter's must not. In fact, although Mary has an undergraduate degree in geography and history, Peter's experience as a social studies educator was so overwhelming to her that during our interview at the end of the social studies methods course, and while we were discussing how or whether her views of social studies had changed having taking his course, Mary said: "I never really had a preconceived notion of what social studies was. So everything that Peter presented to us was social studies as far as I knew because Peter was saying so" (Interview #3, December 14,1996). Whether it was Peter's experience or the quality of his teaching (or a combination of both), there seemed to be a reluctance among students to apply what was taught by Peter to his very own teaching. An invisible wall was erected in students teachers' minds which served to separate the theories they were learning from Peter about how to activate one's critical reading and writing of texts and the application of those theories to Peter as a text. The following conversation with Jack might shed more light on this dichotomy: Avner: I often heard students say that teachers can (and must) remain neutral whi le presenting topics and issues in the classroom; that they can avoid imposing views upon students. Students, they said, w i l l objectively make up their own minds if we simply present them w i t h a variety of perspectives. Do you agree? Jack: I had trouble w i t h that throughout the term. Avner: Why? Jack: I'll point at the obvious: you can't help but impose your view. I mean it's going to pervade everything that you do, it's always going to be there. No matter how neutral you t ry and be, your slant is going to be there . . . and its going to come out. Avner: In what ways is i t going to come out? Jack: Wel l , I guess i n the materials you select, for one: the texts you select. Like you might pick more reasonable arguments to support your v iew and more r idiculous ones i n order to show how wrong the other side i s . . . . 187 Avner: And do you think that if a teacher doesn't specifically state his or her views then students don't know what those views are? Jack: I think they do sense it. So you might even be doing more harm if you try and hide it because students do sense it, the bright ones do anyway. I mean I do that when I write papers if I sense what I think teachers want to hear. . . I mean, I probably do that with you too. So I think you might be smarter to come out and say: "look [this is my view] but there are other valid perspectives and by no means are you expected to believe what I believe." . . . Avner: Did Peter impose his views on the class? Jack: No. Not at all. Well maybe he did but I thought he was pretty open. He rarely imposed his opinions in class discussions. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) According to Jack, a teacher—any teacher—cannot help but impose his or her views on students simply because he or she determines the topics under study, the texts brought into the classroom to study, and the pedagogy for that study. Yet, when I ask him whether Peter, who had done all of the above, imposed his views on student teachers in this class, Jack's response is: "No. Not at all." Only after some hesitation and discomfort, he suggests that maybe Peter did, but then comes back immediately to state that Peter was very open as a teacher and did not impose his position during class discussions. That may be true. Indeed, Peter's style of teaching was very open and democratic and he did the utmost to give every student the feeling that their views were as valid and credible as his own—no doubt an important characteristic of a good teacher. Even good and democratic teachers, however, impose their views. For such an imposition derives from the very act of teaching which entails making choices among a variety of possibilities—about content and pedagogy; choices that advance some knowledge and knowing over others. That inherent characteristic of teaching is present in what Peter or any other teacher chooses to do and not do with their students. Those choices—as good as they may be—still convey to student what knowledge and knowing are of most worth. Jack, as did all other students in my study, knew that; his words in the above excerpt attest to that. Evidence of such knowledge seems to evaporate, nevertheless, when the topic of discussion is Peter—his own teacher. What students thought of Peter's teaching in particular, or whether they thought he imposed his views or not, was not my main concern, however. For the issue, of course, is much broader. It is one that pertains to the ability to question authority and use the same critical theoretical framework with which you think and know about education to those who have power over you in education. Two issues 188 are embedded in this. First, the idea that student teachers do not critically scrutinize (at least not publicly or during interviews) the only teaching that is available to them as they learn about teaching. (Another example of teaching available to them is their previous images of teaching with which they come into the program. Those, as I have already discussed were not scrutinized either). Resulting, is a decontextualization of the theories prospective teachers learn about teaching from the teaching that occurs right in front of them (I deal with this issue in more detail in Chapter IX). Second, and more importantly for this part of the discussion, is that in the eyes of this group of student teachers, the instructor becomes exempt from analysis according to the very theories he or she promotes due to the power relations inherent in that relationship. This power does not have to be exercised explicitly (and Peter indeed did not). It is nevertheless always implicitly embedded in the relations of power that, if unquestioned and unproblematized, govern the knowledge produced by reifying those relations of power and privilege. Thus, the issue at hand is not as much that student teachers did not interrogate Peter's teaching per-se. Rather, what becomes problematic is that when they don't question Peter because he has power over them—whether defined as experience, as expertise, or as having the power to grade them—they tend not to question the sponsor teacher, or the faculty advisor, or the principal who have power over them, or the system of education that employs them, and so on. How prospective teachers were embedded in relations of power during their practicum and the degree to which they were aware of them and were able to interrogate them was an issues brought up in our interviews. As I have already mentioned, most of the participants saw the classroom in which they were teaching as their own. While I would argue that generally enables more authentic teaching than when one feels a visitor in someone else's classroom, the idea that they did not feel as if they were entering an already well-established learning environment with all its rules, regulations, requirements, and incentives, does lead one to question their willingness to understand and analyze an educational setting. Or, equally probable, the rules, regulations, requirements, and incentives already in place felt so natural to them that, as they said themselves, they would not change a thing, that they felt this indeed was their own classroom. The former, however, illustrates somewhat of a rudimentary analysis of education, the latter, a discouraging attitude toward reform and change in education. Yet I believe neither account for students' responses as much as the fact that the power relations in which they were embedded left little room for them to say, let alone think, otherwise (I address that issue in my 189 conclusion). To examine those relations of power and how (or whether) students were already entangled in and implicated by them, I proceeded in a roundabout way. Rather than ask students directly (which I did and had very little success other than them saying there are no relations of power), I asked students whether they had found some role models in school and, if they had, why (that is, why a particular teacher and not another)? Of the six participants in this study, Charles was the only one who said he wasn't looking for a role model in the school because: "I don't want to be like somebody else. I think I'm doing all right as I am. . . . I don't want to be another [gives the name of his sponsor teacher]. I want to be the first [gives his own full name] (Interview #4, March 7). All others chose their sponsor teachers as their role model. And while they all had good reasons for choosing their sponsor teachers as role models (i.e.: have good rapport with and respect for students and faculty; are consistent, organized, and knowledgeable of content; are dedicated to students and learning; care about their students and do the best to ensure they grow up to be good people; challenge students by making them think about the issues being learned), the issue, for this discussion, is not so much the reasons for choosing sponsor teachers as role models but the consequences of that choice. For when someone becomes a role model (for what ever reason), one is less likely to look at him/her critically and more likely to simply accept as natural what he/she does or what they expect you to do in and beyond the classroom. Whether it was the attributes mentioned by the participants for choosing their sponsors as role models or whether it was the mere fact that by being a sponsor already qualifies one in the eyes of a student teacher to have attributes that ought to be emulated, student teachers were not inclined to question their sponsors. When they accidentally did, prospective teachers most often felt they had to justify the sponsor's actions or make excuses why things were the way they were, even if their explanations contradicted the educational philosophy they had articulated only moments prior to that. This approach was also found to be the case when Palonsky & Jacobson (1989) conducted their research with student teachers. They document how student teachers were reluctant to criticize their sponsor teachers during the practicum. By working with sponsors and in their classrooms, the authors argue, student teachers have developed a relationship of dependability that is very much like that with a family member or a loved one where, while criticism exists, it is often not verbalized to an outsider (p. 29). 190 The degree to which Peter, unknowingly I may add, did influence (even impose) his views of knowledge and knowing initially became apparent to me when students handed in their first assignment in the course. In this assignment, students were to construct a question sequence—a mini-lesson, based on a primary source. To prepare students for that assignment, Peter brought to class a set of photographs from the 1930s depicting the Great Depression in Canada. After using one photograph as an example, each group of students was assigned a different photograph for which they prepared a question sequence for prospective students. Class then came back together for each group to share its photograph and the mini-lesson they had prepared. Discussing the first assignment the following class, Peter stated that, as a primary source upon which to build their question sequence, students could use a variety of textualizations. Among the possibilities Peter mentioned were: print documents, photographs, film or video, radio recordings, music, or artifacts. While presented with such a wide range of textual possibilities, almost all of the course participants chose texts which, by that time, had already been brought into the classroom by Peter, thus being sanctioned and legitimated within the classroom. Not one student chose film or video. None chose radio recordings or music. One student chose an artifact, two used sets of maps, and three chose cartoons. The rest, overwhelmingly, used photographs. In fact, of the remaining 30 students, 21 used photographs (16 used photographs exclusively, 5 used them in combination with a print document), and 9 students chose to use only print texts (always and already legitimated in education). How did the actual become the "real," and the real assume the space of the possible and the imaginable? Put otherwise, why did so many of the students in this class use photographs instead on any of the other choices made available to them? The simple answer is that it was easier. While film and video required some technology (or a private collection) and radio or music texts needed to be accompanied by a transcript, all that a photograph required was to locate it in a book and photocopy it. But the simpler answer is, and Mary says it: "Because we had done it [photographs] in class and I had practice" (Interview #2, October 19, 1996). In a program which required a grade point average higher than those required in law and medicine, a program in which students compete for letters of reference in an ever-shrinking job market, doing something because it is "easy" doesn't necessarily count, especially at the beginning stages of the program when students are still all geared for success. What Mary points to, however, is much more illuminating. The possibility for being rewarded for creativity, innovation, and extra 191 effort are exchanged for the prize of being rewarded (in the eyes of student teachers, that is) for giving the instructor what he himself has already sanctioned, what has been already practiced and legitimized communally. Creativity is thus reduced to and substituted by conformity. Jocelyn: I would say most of the students in this class have a fairly traditional approach to teaching. They want to do it the "right" way or whatever is the canonized way that you're supposed to do things. Pretty standard. Lots of hard workers but pretty much: "tell us exactly what we need to know and don't make us change too much. This is what you [the Prof.] want? this is what we'll do. O.K. Here it is" kind of thing. (Interview #3, December 11 , 1996) Jack: When I did my unit for Peter I knew going in that I was going to get a good mark because I had done exactly what he asked for. And I guess I'm more perceptive than other people in that way because other people didn't have a clue at all. I saw some people walking in [to present the unit to Peter] who didn't have an overriding question or problem for the unit, who didn't encourage critical thinking, and who didn't use as many different sources as they could find. So: "Like, where were you for the last four months? This is what he wants. This is what you're being tested on. Give it to him." And that's what I did when I put together that unit. (Interview #3 , December 17, 1996) But the fact that Peter had used photographs while engaging student teachers with the primary source question-sequence activity in class did not only determine the kind of text students chose for their assignment, it also defined what they thought was within the realm of the possible. In spite of Peter's statement in class which opened the possibility for students to use video, film, radio, music, or artifact (in addition to print and photographs), it wasn't what Peter had stated that remained present in students' minds as they thought about and did the assignment but rather what Peter did. When I specifically asked students, just days after the assignment, what kinds of texts they could have used, the list Peter had previously mentioned suddenly seemed much narrower. Casey: I don't remember exactly but. . . lets see .. I think he mentioned photographs or [print] text. (Interview #2, October 20,1996) Charles: I guess pictures, obviously .... u m m m m m I don't recall. (Interview #2, October 17,1996) Mary: Documents, maps, pictures, I don't remember. D id he mention anything else? (Interview #2, October 19,1996) Actions, as the saying goes, speak louder than words. And it was what Peter did in the classroom—the kinds of texts he used—rather than what he spoke of that 192 remained in students' minds and determined the possibilities made available to them. (While Jocelyn was the only student who remembered the inclusion of video on the list of possibilities, she used a combination of print and photograph in her assignment). What we do in the classroom and the choices we make therefore don't only determine the actual and the real for students in the classroom but also, and concurrently, the realm of the possible and the imaginable. As teacher educators we talk about the need for students to question, to critically analyze, to not simply comply and reproduce. We need, we say, a thinking citizenry who would be able to challenge and intervene, who will be able to read and read into what is been produced, packaged, and disseminated to them. But do we afford student-teachers such opportunities in their own learning? Can we assume teachers will enable their students to do it if the way they are treated as students, indeed the way they treat themselves as students, is far removed from the kind of student we want them to produce? How are prospective teachers to enable their students to question the directives that come at them from politicians, business, and the media industry if they themselves take what is given to them as unquestioned gospel? Greene (1986b) claims a sense of agency is required of teachers through which they can "become challengers, when they [can] take initiatives", and through which schools become places fundamentally committed to asking questions" (p. 73. cf. Smyth, 1988, p. 485). In order to ensure teacher education does its part to advance Greene's challenge, it ought to make itself a place that is fundamentally committed to asking questions; questions that student teachers direct at their own education, not only questions they prepare for their students to engage their (students') education. If, as Fenstermacher (1983) adds, "We believe that students should emerge from schooling not just knowing and believing what their teachers do and not thinking, deciding, and acting exactly as their teachers do, but rather as autonomous, authentic persons," we may ask, he adds, "whether teachers are likely to treat students in ways that will produce educative ends if they are constantly treated as if their primary duty it to conform to policies, rules, mandates, and regulation?" (p. 498. cf. Smyth, 1988, p. 6). Fenstermacher's words are relevant to my discussion both in what he asks and in what could be asked otherwise, still using the initial statement from which his question derives. What is of most interest to me is the connection Fenstermacher makes between what teachers expect of students and the expectations put upon 193 teachers. I would like to use the relationship Fenstermacher points to and ask similar questions whose focus is not teachers but specifically student teachers. No researcher, regardless of perspective, could have honestly claimed the UBC Teacher Education Program treated students as if their primary duty was to conform to either university or school policies, rules, mandates, and regulations. That is, explicitly they did not. In fact, as I have already stated, student teachers were encouraged to question those aspects of their professional lives as teachers. What remains to be asked, however, and I rephrase Fenstermacher's words to ask it, is: If "we believe that students should emerge from schooling not just knowing and believing what their teachers do and not thinking, deciding, and acting exactly as their teachers do, but rather as autonomous, authentic persons," we may ask, he adds, "whether [student] teachers are likely to treat students in ways that will produce [such] educative ends if they [feel they need to] conform to policies, rules, mandates, and regulation?" Or, using Fenstermacher's preamble once again but substituting his question: ". . . . if student teachers themselves emerge from teacher education just believing what their teachers do and indeed thinking, deciding, and acting exactly as their teachers do? The social studies methods course was entitled "Social studies education as reading and writing texts." I have elsewhere (Chapter III) described Peter's reasons for this approach and the possibilities embedded in it to explore social studies education in a more critical way, one which enables students to deconstruct and reconstruct knowledge of the world rather than simply and unquestionably accept the world provided for them. It is, I would argue, an extremely beneficial approach to moving social studies education beyond the traditional cycle of fact finding, memorization, and fact returning in the form of assignments and texts. Yet, if the purpose of such an approach, as good as it may be, is for learners to become critical rather than accepting, to question rather than confirm, I question the fact that such an approach did not produce any questioning or rejection of the approach itself— that all 37 students in the class (at least publicly, and the six participants in my study also semi-privately) thought reading and writing texts was the best (best=only) way to engage social studies education. Similarly, Peter emphasized using primary sources as a way to engage students with the past and the six student teachers participating in this study all think primary sources is the best way to approach the teaching of history. The program in general, and Peter as well, advocated critical thinking and not surprisingly, that's what student teachers think is important too. 194 To be sure, all three approaches—engaging history as reading and writing texts, using primary documents, and critical thinking—are educationally sound and when practiced (and practiced well) have profound educational possibilities for making education a more critical and engaging endeavour where students are provided with tools to critically engage the world beyond the one presented in the classroom and beyond their "time" in the school system. Yet the fact that they were blanketly accepted by the student body as the ways to teach seems problematic, especially if we consider that at least two of them directly encourage students to question and possibly reject. What is at issue here is not that students accepted these approaches but how and why they did so. For those approaches to be accepted beyond the ritual of complying with the perspective of the instructor, they need to be critically engaged and debated (which as I have shown thus far, they were not), accepted (or rejected) for what they make possible, not for who advocates them. An example: all six student teachers in this study repeatedly praised the merits of the approach advocated in the social studies methods course which focused on social studies education as reading and writing texts. Yet at least three of them, on many occasions, claimed they really didn't understand what it meant and what it might entail for them as teachers beyond the idea of presenting students with texts that provide a variety of perspectives on any given issue. When this and other approaches to education are accepted not because one fully understands their educative possibilities but because one might be compelled by the authority, experience, expertise, and the art of beautifully-crafted teaching of the instructor, good teaching becomes an authority in teaching. The danger, however, is that authority in teaching can easily cross the line between example and imposition— even if that imposition is a voluntary action by the instructed rather than (as in this case) an imposition by the instructor—and become authoritative teaching. Such a transformation can easily take place even if it is unintended by, perhaps unknown to, the instructor when "good" teaching itself is not deconstructed for what it makes possible. The movement from good teaching to authority teaching to authoritative teaching is thus not an issue of intent but one of outcome, an outcome which can be quite removed from that which was initially intended by the instructor (as in this case). Bakhtin draws an important distinction between authoritative and internally persuasive discourses. The former demands our acknowledgment. It is presented in a formal, hierarchical context, one that makes it a taboo to question it. [This, of course, was not the case in this methods course.] 195 Bakhtin (1935/1981, p. 342) adds: "It is spoken with enormous strength that binds people to the speaker's ideas, independent of any power it might have to persuade us internally " In contrast, internally persuasive discourse "engages us from within, rather than imposes itself from without" (Bloom, 1992, p. 315). This discourse enables [students] to engage ideas in ways that make them their own. Identifying the difference between these discourses is not always obvious. (Goodman & Fish, 1997, p. 106) To explore how authority in teaching becomes authoritative in the eyes of the instructed, I return to the conversation I had with Jack (of which I have already presented an excerpt) in which he claims that a teacher cannot help but impose his or her views on students but at the same time states that his own instructor—Peter— did not. As we continue that conversation, I turn his attention to a comment Peter had made in class about the fact that many social studies methods courses in other teacher education programs across North America don't emphasize reading and writing texts or using primary sources but rather focus, for example, on citizenship education. I ask Jack what he flunks students in those classes might advocate at the end of their methods courses as the "best" approach for teaching social studies? Jack: Encouraging responsible citizenship. Avner: From what I hear in class and from what you guys say in our interviews, I think we have over 30 student-teachers who believe they are supposed to go into the classroom and encourage students to come up w i th their o w n views on things and to challenge and to criticize. Right? Jack: Yes. Avner: A n d yet i n our own classroom, there was very l i tt le dissent. Peter thought pr imary sources was a good approach, this is what you focused on in class, everybody thinks pr imary sources is a good approach. Peter thought reading and wr i t ing texts was a good idea and, as you said, he never imposed anything in a direct way, and, yet, everybody in class tends to think that reading and wr i t ing texts is the best approach to take while teaching social studies. What does all that tell you? Jack: Wel l I suppose he did impose what he thought upon us. I mean if you look at it that way, he is tel l ing us that using pr imary sources is the most important thing about doing social studies. I mean he's a history person and that's what he likes. Yeah, [what you're saying,] is true. . . . Peter certainly has a lot of power in that he's pumped out 90 or so students [Jack is referring to students in all three of the methods classes) that think that exposing students to pr imary sources is pretty darn important and didn't spend a lot of time on responsible citizenship and stuff like that. Yeah. I guess it could be a problem But hopefully I'll be exposed to other views f rom other teachers when I get into the school. Jack seems to avoid my point. For him is it an issue of exposure—what students are exposed to—rather than the idea that a teacher—through his or her inevitable choices and preferences—ultimately imposes a world view on students by focusing 196 on certain knowledge and knowing and not on others. What might counter Peter's influence, according to Jack, is not a process of questioning Peter's approach but an exposure to other authority figures who might propose different perspectives. And while those new and other perspectives might challenge the approach taken by Peter, they do not challenge the fact that all are emulated rather than critically examined. What gets substituted is one particular methods of instruction for another. Yet the idea of having someone with authority providing it, does not. Avner: What I am saying is not meant as criticism directed at Peter or at students; it's only an observation on the effects of teaching that we need to recognize: the power we have when we teach and how litt le students actually question. It's interesting that out of 30 students, there wasn't even one who said: "this is perhaps not the best way to teach social studies." Or: "this idea has some problems..."? Jack: Wel l I don't think it's that interesting. We didn't really know enough to criticize. We're pretty naive when we come into the program. I can speak for myself. I 'm pretty naive. I want to come in , learn how to be a good teacher, then go out and be a good teacher. A n d you sort of gradually get insights into: "O.K., maybe this is not the best way to do it when you go out to the school and see there's a problem w i th it and listen to what others suggest. A n d maybe we didn't touch on that [suggestion] in the teacher Ed program but when we come in [to the program] we don't really have the tools to make those decisions. So it makes i t hard for us to criticize the program. . . . But you're right. I never thought of it that way. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) [ST1 Peter: So now, using your set of moves, we can see you teaching Jack, and Jack accepting what you say. Why didn't he question what you said? Is this the best (the only) construction of this exchange? No!"(July, 1998). Avner: I fully agree that not questioning my questions is as problematic as not questioning your teaching for, as you said, we're both teaching them something. ( I address that issue further in Chapter VIII.)] Why is it that having taken an entire semester at UBC Jack did not think of that? What is it we do (and don't do) in teacher education that prevents this otherwise critically thinking person to think about it that way? Whose interests does his not thinking about it serve? What education might his not thinking about it enable, what kind of education—both his own and that of his future students—might it disable? Is it not the responsibility of teacher educators to give Jack and his colleagues the tools so they can indeed think of such issues rather than "get pumped" into particular positions? Instead of enabling a space for them to consider such questions we drown them in the discourse of planning, organization, and management (see Chapter IV) which, by opening a particular discourse for students discourages the entrance of others—perhaps those through which Jack could indeed think about "it." Because when these "naive" students, as Jack chooses to characterize them, stand at the entrance of teacher education with a multitude of closed doors in front of them and we open one door, that will be the door through which they enter. Once they 197 are in and fully engaged, can we expect them to go back, to return to that entrance and attempt to open any of the closed doors left behind? I engage Ron in a discussion about this issue: Avner: You said that you'd like to do pr imary sources and question sequences and use critical thinking w i t h your students. Most of the students I've talked to say the same. Do you think that's coincidental? Ron: I was thinking about that at a number of times and I was k ind of struck by the number of students who do seem interested in engaging critical thinking. There was a very large number of people who were excited about this stuff and I was going: "Wow! That's neat!"... You know, you really don't f ind many people [here]who are into citizenship education or teaching history as fact. Avner: Using pr imary sources is one way of engaging social studies and yet many students think it's the only way. I understand that it is exciting and extremely beneficial when it's done wel l . It's just that when you think of the overall picture and you hear everybody say "we don't want to indoctrinate anybody" it's surprising that Ron [ jumping in]: we all got indoctrinated. Avner: and that everybody came out saying: " I want to do pr imary sources." What does it tell you about the power of teaching? Ron: Sure. A n d that's part and parcel w i t h the pace of the program. There's only one course in which we were asked to wr i te reflective journals and I actually had time to sit down and wri te and make connections and think about what I was learning, what I'd been talking about, what I'd been reading and so on. Sure we get caught up about talking about pr imary sources because we don't talk about anything else. We don't have time to think about anything else. Avner: What surprised me is not that everybody says the same but that they want to say the same and be the same. It seems to counter the very essence of what this teacher education programs speaks of. Ron: I think we're all, by nature, very obliging, want to help, want to be agreed w i t h and want to agree w i t h others and if the pace is kept up like that [then] sure; we all just lock step and fol low. (Interview #3, December 7,1996) Ron presents two interrelated reasons for student teachers' compliance. First, the pace of the program which leaves them little time and few spaces to think about what they're learning and discussing. As Ron mentions elsewhere, a lot of the program is so t ight ly and intensely packed that there's very l i tt le time to reflect on what you're learning and what you're doing. It just gets to be a matter of reading such and such a book and wr i t ing such and such a paper and then forgetting it and moving on to the next thing. [It's like] factory production; assembly line knowledge. (Interview #6, July 19,1997) [STf Jack: I agree with this strongly (November, 1998).] 198 The second reason for student teachers' compliance, according to Ron, and one which works in concert with the first, is student teachers' desire to oblige, help, agree, and be agreed with. While these are all admirable attributes in anyone, in this particular context they tend to inhibit the possibility of a critical perspective becoming rooted in what otherwise might be considered a pleasant, civilized, and CONsensual (Tyler, 1991) educative process. Critically questioning teachers, claims Kincheloe (1993), "find themselves too often as pariahs, outsiders, who are banished because of their 'bad attitudes' and their reluctance to become 'team players'" (p. 9; see also Dillard, 1997, p. 90). This observation is illustrated not only by what Ron said but also by how Jocelyn responds to my question about why so few "challenging" questions were raised by students during the course: Jocelyn: When you have 40 student-teachers who are pretty much "get out there, get out into the trenches and start the fight," maybe people felt . . . and I know I sometimes felt: "wel l , this is really what I want to ask or say but I don't want to offend anybody and, sure, it wou ld be great to explore that for a whi le, but am I obstructing what Peter wou ld really l ike to have [done] in this class? A n d am I just baiting somebody or getting off on a tangent? (Interview #3, December 11, 1996) In order to be a team player who doesn't obstruct or offend, Jocelyn often found herself not asking or saying what she felt needed to be asked and said. Indeed, while prospective teachers were encouraged to have their students question, the feeling they, as students, received was that supporting the team, not rocking the boat, was the appropriate way to go about one's own education, even as one prepares for another kind of education for one's own students. When questioning is directed at the content one learns but not at the process of learning or how the learner interacts with that content as learner, questioning becomes a teaching technique rather than a methodology to inquire about teaching and a pedagogy for one's own learning. Encouraging questioning within the discourse about education but not in the discourse of their own education resulted in student teachers speaking of questioning but rarely having the experience of doing it themselves. This schizophrenic relationship to questioning is very much present in Jack's next comment. Although Jack believed the teacher education should establish procedures for students to question what they're doing because, as he put it, "it happens informally a lot in the hallways but its left out there: it gets forgotten when students get back into the classroom" (Interview #3, December 17, 1996), he had very little patience with what he called "complaining." The difference, in his view, was that the former 199 related to what was being learned in the program, the latter with how one learns in the program. While the former is praised by Jack, the latter is reduced to mere complaining. While Jack was one of the most vocal students in the methods course and more than any other student (together with Jocelyn) posed many questions in class about what was being advocated and discussed, he had an aversion to asking questions that were related to his own learning process. Often, in interviews, when Jack raised issues he was uncertain or concerned about, issues pertaining to the realm of the "how things should be done," I suggested he speak to Peter after class. But Jack never followed up on my suggestions believing that addressing such issues in that manner would, in his words, make him a "complainer," a characteristic with which he did not wish to be associated. "I'm pretty sick and tired," Jack says, "of all these student teachers complaining and talking about how terrible the program was because I don't think it was that bad. I think a lot of them are just complainers by nature. And [to think] they're all going to be teachers!" (Interview #6, July 30,1997). [ST! Jack: I feel you are narrowing what I was referring to in your excerpt. It is true that I felt many students were too critical of the program and should have simply "gotten on with it," but much of the complaining was not of a constructive nature and did not involve "quality thinking." Examples of these types of complaining include workload, marks they received, and of feeling ill-prepared for the practicum. A frequently heard complaint was how little the program focused on classroom management skills. Many of these complaints were likely attributable to feelings of anxiety and nervousness and (of course!) that these people probably complain about many things in their lives. (December, 1998)] Jack, however, had one more adjective in mind as he speaks about questioning and critique. While this one pertains to students, it adds one more dimension to our understanding as to the message about questioning with which student teachers left this program and what they do with it as teachers. Jack: I n the methods course we were encouraged to frame things ... to encourage students to sit around and criticize and to question all the time. [But when we get into the schools], I think a lot of students w i l l think: "Well , that's great for a class or two but I mean I've got to cover this curriculum. I have a responsibility to do that. And i f I focus on questioning and criticism, I'll have to justify that to the principal and to the other teachers in the department and to the parents and to whomever." A n d i f you just sit around making students into what you [the researcher] might consider to be responsible citizens, a lot of others w i l l say you're just creating these disagreeable young people. So I think a lot of student-teachers just won't bother. (Interview #3, December 17, 1996) 200 How telling a correlation! Questioning is thus equated with disruption (Ron and Jocelyn), with a possible offense (Jocelyn), with disenchantment and an improper role (Mary), with complaining and with being a disagreeable person Qack). Yet, at the same time, the very same students talked about the need to create spaces within the program where students can question. The dichotomy between these two perspectives, I believe, is a result of a dissonance between a discourse about questioning (in favour of) and a spirit which ultimately discouraged it; a practice in which questions about practice are indeed left outside the classroom instead of becoming central to what we do in them. Notes 1. The def ini t ion o f /mode l for critical th inking used in much of this teacher education program (including the Social studies methods course) was that provided by Roland Case et al. (1996) who, moving away f rom advocating the need to fol low a set of steps or procedures, provide a broad and inclusive definit ion, associating critical thinking w i th "quality thinking." 201 CHAPTER VI T h e d i s c o u r s e a n d prac t ice o f h i s t o r y : C r i t i c a l h i s t o r y a n d the e d u c a t i o n a l i m a g i n a t i o n [ A crit ical perspective asserts that history] is always posit ioned, is always fabricated, is always ultimately self-referencing and is never true beyond peradventure; that history has no intrinsic meaning, that there is no way of pr ivi leging one variant over another by neutral criteria, and which sees histories located at the centre, or on the margins, not necessarily by virtue of their historiographical r igour and/or sophist icat ion—for bri l l iant histories can be variously marginal ised—but by their relationship to those that have the power to pu t them there. . . . [Further, a critical perspective has] no yearning for, or feelings of despair for, the loss of either 'reality' or 'the reality of things past', accepting that what tradit ionalist might regard as a 'crisis' is more of an opportunity to carry on work ing w i t h an increased reflexivity i n all types of 'different' and 'other' areas. (Jenkins, 1995, p. 38) History as it is taught in school is like treating a dead beast where all's that left to do is label. It's not a creative process. I met somebody yesterday who asked me what I was going to teach. I said "History." A n d she said "That's so boring! It's just dates." A n d I said "No! Perspective is everything." I gave her a three-minute spiel on i t and she said: "Well i f you th ink of i t that way, it sounds like wr i t ing a novel!" (Student teacher, in-class transcript, September 30,1996) Since its inception in the early years of this century, the goal of the school subject called social studies, according to the National Council for the Social Studies (1998), has been to provide students an integrated, coordinated, systematic study [of society] drawing upon such disciplines as anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, polit ical science, psychology, religion, and sociology, as wel l as appropriate content f rom the humanit ies, mathematics, and natural sciences. In essence, social studies promotes knowledge of and involvement in civic affairs. A n d because civic issues . . . are multidisciplinary in nature, understanding these issues and developing resolutions to them require multidiscipl inary education. Yet, as Goodlad (1984) has pointed out, "something strange seems to have happened to [the proclaimed goals of social studies] on the way to the classroom" (p. 212). "One can forcefully argue," claims Barth (1990), "that the social studies reform has possibly never been substantially instituted in the schools" (cf. Brady, 1993, p. 13). The term social studies, Sears (1997) adds, "was quickly adopted to describe a curricular area [and] the concept of interdisciplinary study of social issues was not embraced, particularly in secondary schools" (p. 23). In fact, as Barth notes elsewhere (1996), "secondary social studies remains true to the twentieth-century preference for separate subjects that derive their content from disciplinary fields" (p. 329). Indeed, 202 when one examines most social studies curricula and textbooks, or visits almost any social studies classroom in North America (perhaps anywhere), it soon becomes apparent that while social studies is premised on the idea of interdisciplinarity—"a movement away from the discrete and totally separate disciplines toward a richer, more integrated view of reality" (McFarland, 1993, p. 80; Longstreet, 1996, p. 318)—it is in fact very much divided into the study of discrete and separated disciplines, most prorrunently among them, history (Davis, 1992, p. 20; Longstreet, 1996, p. 318; Bragaw, 1993, pp. 47^8; Saveland, 1993, p. 131). Not only did the social studies never overthrow history from the curriculum, the California Department of Education (1987) and the National Commission on Social Studies in the schools (1989), among others, have recently called for a greater emphasis on the study of history in social studies classrooms (Longstreet, 1996, p. 318). Similar patterns were reflected in the social studies methods course in which this study was conducted. The course was divided into three major units—history, the media, and geography—with little integration among them. And yet, while history was only one unit among three, it by far occupied a more significant space than the other two. Most of the course readings and assignments (including the final exam) were weighted heavily towards history (see Appendix B). Occupying such a prominent role within social studies—and in this social studies education methods course—the kind of history taught and the ways in which it is taught play an important role in determining the nature of social studies education which ultimately emerges. How one engages history education in classrooms—whether those in schools or in schools of education—influences and regulates the kind of questions students will and will not ask of history, of society, of their own education, of themselves and their immediate surround. It sends students powerful messages about the parameters and boundaries of history, about what accounts as historical, about how, what, who, and where history counts and accounts for. The discourse and practice of history as a disciplinary and pedagogical imperative within social studies education and social studies teacher education are thus the focus of this chapter. Specifically, I wish to engage the relationship between how history is engaged and how that engagement impacts the educational imagination of prospective social studies teachers learning to teach. Critical history on the verge In a paper subtitled Does postmodern history have a place in the schools? Seixas (1998) presents three possible models for teaching history, "reflecting three 203 fundamentally different orientations toward historical pedagogy and epistemology" (p. 2).1 "The first approach, which Seixas terms "collective memory," simply teaches the best story [a grand narrative] of the past "the way it happened" (ibid.)- This approach, is problematic, according to Seixas, first because it is difficult and contentious to decide which is the right version of the past to teach. And second, there is a problem with history as dogma. If historians, curriculum experts, textbook writers and school authorities make all the decisions about the right version of the past, then the students' only job is to absorb it. What starts out as a contentious, debate-ridden investigation about truth, right, and meaning in the past and present, ends up before the students as a catechism to be memorized. At best it comes in the form of gripping and vivid stories; at worst, it is a dissicated version of the past, a relatively meaningless batch of names, dates, and events, in which case the social project of history learning is lost in any case. In either case, historical knowledge appears as something fixed by authority rather than subject to investigation, debate, and its own system of warrants, (p. 4) The second approach to history education is to present students with multiple versions of the past and teach students to reach conclusions about which one is a better interpretation, on the basis of a series of documents, historians' assessments, and other materials. In a classroom with this orientation, rather than being told the best story, students come to understand which is the best story on the basis of the evidence at hand. In the process they learn disciplinary criteria for deciding what makes good history, and thus I will call it a "disciplinary" approach, (p. 2) From the perspective of the disciplinary approach, Seixas explains, attention is devoted "to learning how to question a historical account, understand the evidentiary base upon which it rests, and assess it in relation to competing accounts." In this version, history would be an objective, disinterested investigation. Students would be careful not to superimpose late twentieth century notions of racism on nineteenth century actors, who lived with different assumptions. Nor would identity politics shape the historical investigation. Rather, students would be asked to see the difference and uniqueness of the past, not necessarily its relation to the present, particularly if its relation to the contentious contemporary issues clouded students' ability to understand what happened in the past (cf. Wineburg, 1997). . . . It would help [students] to develop the ability and the disposition to arrive independently at reasonable, informed opinions, (p. 5) The third orientation to history education—the one Seixas terms the "postmodern" approach—calls "into question historians' implicit claim to stand outside the flow of history, and their abilities to be impartial observers of the past" (p. 11). It claims that historians' goal of bridging the disjunction between present and past is impossible: "the past," and here Seixas uses Harlan (1997), "is immense, infinitely polysemous, 204 sublime, and gone." While historical accounts, postmodernists claim, "are organized as narratives, with a beginning, middle, and end," Seixas continues, "[t]he past is not organized at all; it has no beginning, middle, or end (except as chosen by the historian) and it has no meaning (except as imposed by the historian) . . . Historiography is the attempt to impose "a meaningful form (or narrative) on a meaningless past (Jenkins, 1995, p. 137)" (Seixas, 1998, p. 8). For history educators, this approach "reflects uncertainty about the notion of a 'best story'." Here, students, exarruTiing documentation, consider multiple versions of the past, but then also relate the versions of the past to their political uses in the present. The task for students, in the th i rd [approach] is not so much to arrive at a "best" or most val id posit ion based on historical evidence, as to understand how different groups organize the past into histories, and how their rhetorical and narratological strategies serve present-day purposes, (p. 2) Seixas, however, does not only present readers with three possible models of history education. In the conclusion to his paper, he also, and significantly for this chapter, positions himself within that taxonomy. I f we had an easy consensus on collective memory, a knowledge of the past through tradit ion, then school history could be mobilized for a coherent social purpose. But the lack of consensus is precisely what thrusts us beyond history as consensual tradit ion, into the realm of history as a disciplinary practice. Disciplinary history provides students w i t h standards of inqui ry , investigation, and debate. History taught through this approach exemplifies the l iberal , open society, and should prepare students to part icipate more fu l l y i n one. Postmodernism, i n turn, calls up the flaws and l imitations of our o w n l iberalism and objectivity, whi le offering a relativism perhaps so profound as to be disabling, (p. 15) Positioning himself within the disciplinary approach, the purpose of this methods course, at least from my perspective as a researcher, was to move student teachers' understandings of history education, based upon prior experiences in schools, from the first model—collective memory—to the second—the disciplinary approach. Indeed, always presented with multiple perspectives of the past (or present), using a variety of primary and secondary sources, prospective teachers were not only encouraged to develop the ability and the disposition to arrive independently at reasonable, informed opinions; they were also encouraged, through class activities and assignments, to encourage their own students to do the same. History education, in this methods course, was not about presenting the "best" story of the past. Rather, it was about learning how to question historical accounts, understand the evidentiary base upon which they rest, and assess them in relation to competing accounts, historians' assessments, and disciplinary criteria. 205 Peter Seixas' success in promoting this approach to history education has already been established through student teachers' comments provided in Chapter III. While many of the participants expected to be taught how to teach the "great" story of the past, they all left Peter's course convinced that the disciplinary approach is the only viable one for history education (this, I have already discussed in chapter V). And while the story of this "conversion" would indeed be telling (and beneficial for other history educators), the purpose of this chapter is to tell another story. It pertains not to the movement from the first orientation to the second, but to the possibility of moving from the second orientation to the third—from the disciplinary to the postmodern approach. [STf Jack: Is this an assumption that the postmodern approach is better than the disciplinary approach? It reads as if the former would replace the latter. Do you discuss an integrative approach of the second and third approaches? (March, 1999).] I choose to tell this latter story in particular for a three reasons. First, because, as I will show below, the postmodern approach in history opens important possibilities for the educational imagination in history education. It does so primarily not by replacing the other two approaches Seixas mentioned in his paper but by working in conjunction—that is, with and against them. A postmodern approach, therefore, does not work autonomously of other approaches but in combination with them, subverting them rather than replacing them, replacing them only by subverting them (Segall, 1999). The second reason for focusing this chapter on the postmodern—what I tend to call a "critical" approach to history education is that I believe Peter himself a good example of many history teacher educators "on the verge." I am referring to educators trying to bridge the gap not between past and present (one they understand can never be fully bridged) but that between the disciplinary approach in which they were trained and the postmodern perspective which challenges the very assumptions underlying that training. Standing "on the verge," those history educators are, to borrow from Derrida (1979), willing to bear more readily the most apparent revolutionary postmodern ideological "content," as long as that content does not touch upon the borders of the historical method and language and all the juridico-political contracts they guarantee. Thus, while intrigued by the postmodern perspective which questions their own disciplinary beliefs, it is those disciplinary roots that allow history educators on the verge to only go so far in questioning the underpinnings of their own position. The third reason for exploring the potential in the transformation of history education into the postmodern emanates from prospective teachers' own 206 understanding of history. While their former experiences in history education, as students, might have positioned them to expect the methods course to teach them to teach history as "collective memory," their views of history itself—that is, separate from the way in which it ought to be engaged in classrooms—prior to the methods course, and as I will show in this chapter, were very much embedded in the postmodern. As contradictory as it may seem, the two are not mutually exclusive. What keeps them apart are not different understandings of history but an expectation that one can (indeed, one does) separate one's personal understanding of history as a socially and discursively constructed endeavour about the past from one's teacherly role of educating students about it. Telling that particular story, however, seems more problematic than those told in previous chapters. For it engages one position—the disciplinary approach— from the perspective of the postmodern. In other words, one discourse is employed to engage the discourse and practice of another. Speaking to potentialities in practice in relation to actual practice, this chapter addresses the possible as much as it does the actual. What does the postmodern discourse employed in this chapter entail? In the last twenty years, developments in historiography, intellectual history, and philosophy of history—both influencing and influenced by literary theory, postmodernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, postcolonial theory, hermeneutics, phenomenology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis—have redefined the boundaries of history. Putting all of history's taken-for-granted procedures into question and casting serious doubts upon the classical notions of truth, reality, and objectivity, scholars such as Hayden White (1973,1978), Dorninick LaCapra (1985), F. R. Ankersmit (1983, 1994), Joan Scott (1988, 1991a, 1991b, 1996), and Robert Berkhofer (1988, 1995), among others, have raised significant questions regarding historians' claims to knowledge. Scrutinizing the idealized version of history as a picture-perfect representation of an unmediated, authorless past ("collective memory" in Seixas' taxonomy), they have advocated a heightened awareness of history's literary and creative functions thus returning the modernist historian—an omniscient narrator—from the objective side-lines to the very centre of what could, at best, be defined as partial, subjective, and partisan history-making. In light of their writing and the theories that inform them, history has lost its innocence, its claims to truth, objectivity, and immediate correspondence to an unmediated past. How are history educators to respond responsibly to the challenges posed by the reflexive, and linguistic turns? What are the implications of the issues 207 summoned into the discussion on history by the infusion of philosophy, poststructuralism, and literary and critical theory? How might postmodern /critical history allow educators to think differently about what they currently do in history classrooms? What does it mean to teach history which is both the study and practice of interpretation (Scott, 1996); where the 'investigation' of interpretation becomes "part of the object of knowledge and itself becomes an object" (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 143); when we no longer dream "of deciphering a truth or an origin which is free from freeplay" (Derrida, 1972, p. 264. cf. Cherryholmes, 1988, p. 166); when history education is no longer "the reduction of the unknown to the known, but the estrangement of what seems so familiar" (Ankersmit, 1994, p. 42), already well-known, widely recognized, fully comprehensible, coherent, and 'readable'; when the study of history, according to Giroux (1996), is not "about constructing a linear narrative but about blasting history open, rupturing its silences, highlighting its detours, and organizing its limits" (p. 51) and possibilities as a discursive, disciplinary, and pedagogical endeavour? To explore these questions—as they manifest themselves both in the literature and within the social studies methods course—the remainder of this chapter is divided in two. In the text running on the left, these questions are addressed through an elaboration and extension of the narrative I have already begun discussing about critical history and its implication for the educational imagination in history/social studies education. On the right, I attempt to answer the above questions as they pertain specifically to the social studies methods course and how it, through a particular focus on history education, positioned prospective teachers to think about, imagine, and practice history/social studies education in particular ways as students and, consequently, as teachers. While these two narratives are separated spatially, I will routinely point to the "theoretical" narrative on the left and incorporate issues raised there into the narrative about history teacher education, on the right. HISTORY AND THE EDUCATIONAL IMAGINATION Questions about the relationship between discovery and creation, between 'truth' and 'fiction' in historical representations, Hamilton (1996) reminds us, have underpinned the discipline of history since the days of Herodotus—the 'father of history'—and his immediate successor, Thucydides. The inability to differentiate between record and story, When I asked the six student teachers participating in this study which of all classes in the methods course class they liked best, which they deemed most memorable, they unanimously pointed to the two 208 between fact, theory, and fiction in historical texts, and discussions of the appropriate degree to which historians negotiate the probable from the possible and the possible from the probable as they give meaning to the past, did not seem surprising in the context of Ancient Greece. "Memory—Mnemosyne—after all, was the mother of the Muses, and the leading muse, Clio, presided over history" (p. 9.). Even as late as the early nineteenth century, White (1978) points out, the division between history and story, between historian, poet, and philosopher, and between art and science was blurred. Intellectuals in all fields were still willing to cross boundaries dividing one discipline from another. "Men like Michelet and Tocqueville," adds White, are properly designated as historians only by their subject matter, not by their methods. Insofar as their method alone is concerned, they are just as easily designated as scientists, artists, or philosophers. The same can be said of 'historians' like Ranke and Niebuhr, or 'novelists' like Stendhal and Balzac, of 'philosophers' like Hegel and Marx, and of 'poets' like Heine and Lamartine"(p. 42) Hegel, Balzac, Nietzsche, and Tocqueville, according to White (ibid.), all rejected the idea of the historian's 'innocent 'eye' and stressed the active, inventive aspect of 'inquiry' (p. 54). Yet, since the second half of the nineteenth century, when historians got wedded to conceptions of "what art, science, and philosophy ought to be " (p. 42), history increasingly estranged itself from art and philosophy and, by affiliating itself with 'science', progressively became "the refuge of those 'sane' men who excel at finding the simple in the complex and the familiar in the strange" (p. 50). Increasingly tying their scholarly commitments to science, historians separated theory from story, fact from fiction, knower from known. Employing an unbiased historical method, historians were able to illuminate the past and represent it 'as it was'. Implied, was the belief that, in spite of some complications, there is a past reality or truth, waiting to be discovered and described (Southgate, 1996, p. 12; Smith, 1994, p. 108; Appleby, et. al., 1994, p. 89; Ankersmit, 1994, pp. 45, 172; LaCapra, 1985, pp. 42,117). particular classes (Sept. 18, 20, 1996) which opened the unit on history; classes in which prospective teachers critically grappled with four questions: What is history? What is a fact? What, if any, is the difference between a primary and a secondary source? And what, if any, is the difference between history and fiction? Having asked students at the end of the preceding class to think about these four questions individually, at home, and formulate an initial response, these four questions were then taken up in a large-class discussion at the beginning of the following class (September 18, 1996). But due to students' overt interest and enthusiasm in engaging these questions, the excitement in which they pursued them, a discussion that was intended to last one class spilled over, in fact occupied much of the following class as well. Many of the critical understandings about history I have already mentioned and those which are elaborated upon in the text running on the left came to play in this lively discussion. While some students had initial 209 Reality and interpretation claims Scott (1996) were "posited as separate and separable entities" where the "legitimacy of interpretation . . . [rests] upon its faithfulness to a reality that lies outside, or exists prior to, interpretation" (p. 2). "When history is provided as 'truth" and authorless, when [quoting Barthes, 1986] "there is no sign referring to the sender of the historical message, history seems to tell itself (p. 131). To achieve this effect, Scott continues, "[n]ot only must the voice of the historian be rendered neutral" but the writing must also equate "referent and signified." As a result, Scott concludes, "the troubling intervention of language (the presence of the signified) in the representation of the real is denied. The signifier is taken as a faithful reflection of the referent; signified and referent thus become one" (ibid.). Appearing as though history rather than the historian was narrating the past, historians employed the voice of a distant, scientific, and all-knowing narrator, telling a truth which, in a world where "truth was one, the same for all" (Novick, 1988, p. 469), would be acceptable and recognizable to any other historian using the same evidence and applying the same rules (Appleby, et al., 1994, p. 73). While researchers might have disagreed over interpretations of facts, the body of knowledge that was subject to such interpretation was generally agreed upon (Norton, 1994, p. 25). And while students/readers of history might have questioned the validity of a particular historical account, what counted as the materia of history or as the metier of the historian, were not. Seeing language "not simply a 'mirror' to a separate 'reality'" but rather as "part of that reality" (Corfield, 1991, p. 27, cf. Zamitto, 1993, p. 796), critical historiographers, intellectual historians, and philosophers of history over the past two decades have advocated that "the very definition of history must take a more reflexive meaning, one that shows its socially constructed nature," and a self-consciousness of its own creation (Berkhofer, 1995, p. 8). difficulties going beyond the traditional notion of history as the factual representation of the past, and while others resisted abandoning the comfort zone provided by that notion of history, the majority of students tended to agree upon the following ideas: that history and the past are not one and the same; that we can only get to the past from a particular present which determines the kind of past we ultimately find; that there is much in common between history and literature—that history, because it is a textual endeavor, is as much invented as found; that facts do not simply exist out there ready to be incorporated by historians but are brought into being through particular ideologies and interpretive framework; that primary sources, just as much as secondary sources, are subjective constructions which tend to provide a particular and partial glimpse onto a past, that while neither are transparent windows to the world, each can assist in answering no more than the particular questions we ask of it. Corrung to history education 210 Exposing what Leitch (1986) calls "the 'made up' quality of knowledge" (cf. Fish, 1994, p. 233), scholars such as Hayden White (1973, 1978), Dominic LaCapra (1985, 1994), Joan Scott (1988, 1996), Robert Berkhoffer (1988, 1995), and F. R. Ankersmit (1983, 1994), among others, have challenged history's authoritative and unproblematized discourse, thus "spotlighting the politics of historical methodology, the politics of the viewpoint from which history is seen and told, and the politics of the discipline as a professional community" (Berkhofer, 1995, p. 8). By placing inverted commas around the notion of the real, they have invite[d] us to see history not as a record of the past, more or less faithful to the facts . . . but as an invention, or fiction, of historians themselves, an inscription on the past rather than a reflection of it. . . [They ask] us to consider history as a literary form, on a par with, or at any rate exhibiting affinities to, other kinds of\ imaginative writing—narrative or descriptive, comic or realist, as the case may be. (Samuel, 1992, pp. 220-21. cf. Jenkins, 1995, p. 36) Building upon such a differentiation, Seixas (1993a) claims "history is only a discourse about the past, a story constructed to make meaning for us in the present" (p. 307). "[T]he past and history," Jenkins (1991) reminds us, are not stitched together; "they float free of each other, they are ages and miles apart" (p. 5). Since neither the past nor history tell themselves, writing the past into history is a discursive process—"a deliberate selection, ordering, and evaluation of past events, experiences, and processes" (Kaye, 1991, p. 71). While historians may use methodologies and discourses different than those used by writers of fiction to emplot their (his)stories, they nevertheless employ discursive practices and devices, conventions of representation, and modes of narrativity common to those utilized by writers of literature. The "difference between a historical and a fictional account," in which "fiction is conceived as the imaginable and history as the actual," states White (1978, p. 98), must give place to the recognition that such differences "are matters of degree rather than of kind" (p. 78). from the "postmodern" perspective myself, I was naturally fascinated by students' questioning the distinctions between the objective and the subjective, between fact and opinion, primary and secondary. For as Carey (1996) points out, these distinctions are precisely what a postmodern approach "seeks, as first order of business, to dissolve" (p. 64). By placing inverted commas, metaphorically speaking, around the notion of the real, this kind of discussion invited prospective educators to see history not as a record of the past, more or less fa i th fu l to the facts, nor yet as an interpretat ion answerable to the evidence even if i t does not start f r o m i t , bu t as an invent ion, or f ic t ion, of historians themselves, an inscr ip t ion on the past rather than a reflection of it. (Samuel, 1992, p p . 220-21 . cf. Jenkins, 1995, p. 36) While my own excitement about the possibilities opened up by the discussion may seem natural, expected, I was curious about what made it so memorable for students as well. Why is it that, in spite of their different backgrounds, perspectives, expectations, and experiences, all six participants choose the two classes in which those questions were engaged as the 211 Historical narratives, adds White, are "verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found" (p. 82). The difference between history and literature thus results not as much from actual practice but from claims made about practice. It is not that "the former deal[s] with real things and the latter do[es] not . . . but that history purports to tell only the real things and to refer only to a real, not imagined, world" (Berkhofer, 1995, p. 68). And yet, to say that historical reality is "produced," claims Scott (1996), is neither "a shameful distortion of objectivity" nor a denial of the "seriousness or the usefulness of the enterprise." Rather, it simply calls "attention to the interpretive operations of the discipline, to the various ways it achieves its authority" (pp. 2,7). "The absence of inherent meanings," she adds, "does not plunge us into an abyss;" it simply reconciles history with its own name, makng the production of meaning human and mutable (p. 7). As history educators, then, our choice is between "a history that is aware of what it is doing and a history that is not" (Jenkins, 1991, p. 69). Yet, history encountered in schools today is still engaged primarily as 'objective' and authorless—a disinterested site making unbiased choices and judgments about the past 'as it was'. History is still seen as a clear window to the past; its texts "for what they seem to represent or say rather than for what they do" (LaCapra, 1985, p. 38; Ankersmit, 1994, p. 38). Texts and the pedagogical environments in which they are engaged portray, according to Greene (1994, p. 92), a "strong faith in the objectivity of history," where students "treat their assigned readings and textbooks, if not their teachers, as divinely inspired" (Berkhofer, 1988, p. 21). While students may be asked to critically engage information in texts, they are rarely encouraged to explore the construction of those texts (Seixas, 1994, p. 108). Textbooks are often written "as if their authors did not exist at all, as if they were simply the instruments of a heavenly intelligence transcribing official truths" (Schrag, 1967,p. 74. cf. Wineburg, 1991, p. 511). highlight of the course? What took place in that discussion that made prospective teachers repeatedly come back to it during our numerous conversations throughout their teacher education program, long after it or, for that matter, the entire methods course was over? Indeed, what made this discussion, for this group of students, a magical moment above the rest? Assuming prospective teachers' experiences with/in history prior to this class did little to encourage them to critically consider such questions, I had expected Peter to be the one steering—indeed, struggling to steer—students toward the understandings generated by this discussion. Yet, to my surprise, those critical perspectives originated primarily from students, with little direction or probing by Peter. In fact, it seemed to as though Peter had to hold back students enthusiasm in order to ensure the disciplinary notion of history did not fully unravel before his very eyes. Thus, and contrary to my own expectations, what seemed to make this discussion memorable for this group of students was perhaps not as much the result of their learrdng 212 Textbooks, which rarely include indications of judgment, emphasis, and uncertainty, "convey the sense that. . . interpretation had anything to do with the words on the page" (Crismore, 1984, p. 295. cf. Wineburg, 1991, pp. 511- 512; see also Seixas, 1994, p. 108). Resulting, students see text(books) as "just reporting the facts .... just saying what happened . . . [simply giving] straight information" (Wineburg, 191, p. 501) and history as a closed story about the past rather than a socially and politically oriented discursive construct about our presents and futures (see also Salter, 1997, p. 19). By engaging history as science, 'objective', and 'true', claims Hvolbek (1991), "we advance our own personal estrangement from it." For by not questioning the obvious, by not challenging the taken-for-granted, students are left with the notion that the historical narrative is unnegotiable: "when something is accepted as absolutely right and an end in itself, conversation is over" (pp. 5, 7). The effort to install truth—in its many guises as objectivity, reality, experience, authenticity, or transcendent morality—as the guarantor of the knowledge they produce, claims Scott (1996), "not only does violence to historical practice . . . it also substitutes dogma for open-ended inquiry." When reality is "offered as uncontestable truth," she adds, "we have reached the end of history" (p. 3). Indeed, the educative value and the "kind of politics that one can develop in relation to history [is] quite different if one starts from the conviction that we must give a meaning to history rather than find a meaning and direction in it" (Roth (1995, p. 143). The later opens up new pedagogical opportunities for history education that force attention onto the text of history, not through it onto its content (Kellner, 1989, p. 4. cf. Zammito, 1993, p. 799). It allows educators to ask different questions about knowledge, about our relationship to the past, present, and future, as well as "questions about the status of historical inquiry, and to realize that the relation of the historical [and/as social] text to reality is itself a historical problem" (Bann, 1990, p. 34. cf. Zammito, 1993, p. 805). something new, of reaching a level of understanding they had not obtained before (although, as I will illustrate below, it did have that effect on some students), but, rather, the result of the opportunity, for many for the first time, to publicly articulate, to themselves as much as to others, what they were never able to say openly within the boundaries of the Cartesian models of history education with which they had been presented in school (often while doing their B.A. degrees as well). [STI Ron: This reminds me of the notion of "naming" in women's studies. There, to name something is to have power over it, or to break its power over you (March, 1999).] The enthusiasm with which students engaged Peter's questions and the understandings generated while discussing them were perhaps proof such perspectives were already very much embedded in students' understandings about history. About history but not in history education. That is, while those were understandings prospective teachers might have already held about history, they were not ones they were able to activate in history classrooms. Hence, I would argue, 213 It allows educators to ask different questions about knowledge, about our relationship to the past, present, and future, as well as "questions about the status of historical inquiry, and to realize that the relation of the historical [and/as social] text to reality is itself a historical problem" (Bann, 1990, p. 34. cf. Zammito, 1993, p. 805). To address the question of "production," as Minh-Ha (1990)suggests, is to endlessly "reopen the question: how is the real. . . produced? Rather than catering to it, striving to capture and discover its truth . . . it is important also to keep asking: how is truth being ruled?" (cf. Giroux, 1994b, p, 48). Addressing discourse as means of storying the past allows us to examine under what conditions and through what means we come to know and "the lack of innocence in any discourse (Lather, 1992b,. 120). It allows us, according to Knoblauch & Brannon (1993), to recognize the extent to which language practices articulate, objectify and rationalize social reality, as well as the extent to which those with the political power to 'name the world' come to dominate its meaning (p. 23). Through this problematization, Rosenstone (1995) points out, new questions can be asked about what history currently is and is not as well as what it can and cannot be; about why we learn about the past and how we use that knowledge for our present and future; "about history as self-reflexive inquiry, as self-conscious theatre, as a mixed form of drama and analysis" (p. 42). Rather than simply asking students whether a text accurately reflects the past, this pedagogical approach encourages students to ask: according to what conventional and methodological practices, whose discourse, whose standards, whose past? As a multiplicity of historical textualizations are problematized, we begin asking: why and how do different media, different texts, different genres produce different truths about a common past? Why do different audiences believe different truths? What makes some media, some narratives, some conventions more convincing in their storying of the past? the greatest contribution of the discussion about the four questions was in that it brought understandings about history into the process of history education, legitimizing rather than transforming those understandings and, in doing so, transforming students' ability to utilize those understandings by legitimizing them. And yet, as excited as this group of students might have been about the class discussion regarding the four questions, when I later—both at the end of the methods course and during their practicum—asked them which of the classes in the methods course they found least beneficial, they all pointed to those very same two classes. Paradoxically, what prospective teachers liked best about the methods course simultaneously seemed the least beneficial. While still maintaining that discussing the four questions was "extremely important," they found the way in which those questions were engaged, not as much during the discussion but therafter, to be too theoretical, of little practical 214 Questioning the authority and conventions of different interpretive communities to tell the past, engages ways of challenging and legitimating particular histories and textualizations (what counts as history, what does not?), particular voices, particular pasts, presents and futures, over other. It is a reading that, in Wineburg's (1991) words, "sees texts not as ways to describe the world but as ways to construct it" (p. 499), exploring texts as "social instruments masterfully crafted to achieve a social end" (p. 502). This, by no means, entails "ceasing to 'do' history and restricting oneself to thinking about [its constructedness]" (Zammito, 1993, p. 806). Rather, the juxtaposition of those two terms— 'doing' history and 'thinking' about that doing— as separate methodologies becomes problematic (see Zeichner & Lisaton, 1996). As White (1978) points out, the distinction between 'proper' history and metahistory obscures more than it reveals. For "there can be no proper history," White claims, "without the presupposition of a full-blown metahistory by which to justify" a historical representation (p. 52). Further, the distinction between proper history and historiography, whereby history is the study of the past and historiography is the study of historians' interpretations of the past, is also untenable according to White. For historians can only know the past through textualizations and can write about that past in form of text alone. Consequently, and since the past students engage in classrooms is always already discursive and textualized, we perhaps should, as Jenkins (1991, p. 34; 1995, p. 16) suggests, re-name the school discipline in which students engage the past historiography rather than history (see also Alvarado & Ferguson, 1983, p. 25). Exploring history as historiography and questioning the authority of historians, of the historical method, and of historical texts helps make both visible and problematic the presuppositions of discourses, values, and methodologies that legitimate and enforce particular arrangements constituting history education and its relation, through power and convention, to knowledge. implicat ion i n / f o r the classroom. Al though the classroom meant the public school classroom, one cannot ignore the role of the dynamics of the social studies methods course c lass room i n m a k i n g student teachers believe issues deliberated in that d i s c u s s i o n h a v e l i t t l e application i n the (public school) classroom. [ST1 Ron: In retrospect, I agree. However, at the time, I would have defended the methods course as the space which enabled us to have such a discussion and (possibly) find ways to integrate that into our practice as teachers. I would have said that "the rest of the program" was to blame for making us believe that the issue in that discussion had little application. And yet, it is no accident that at some point we all felt that while that discussion was great, we had to "get on" with the "real" business of learning to teach (March, 1999).] N o r can one refrain from inqui r ing about the degree to wh ich the methods course was able (or unable) to translate the k ind of critical understandings about history brought up i n that discussion into a postmodern 215 Engaging the inevitability and partiality of inscription and how language, author(ity), and agency become factors of truth, we begin to see how history constructs and conditions knowledge—any knowledge, regardless of perspective or worldview. Once the authority of realism is broken down, explains Roth (1995), there is a clearing which "allows us to think again about the enormous range of choices there are in establishing our connection to our past and thus in developing a stance in the present" (pp. 144-145) and for a future. Engaging the history curriculum in such a manner illustrates to students that there is choice in history. And choice, according to Davidson (1986, cf. Berkhofer, 1995, p. 8), "implies that . . . [history] is not simply inherited but constructed, and constructed according to the . . . categories we devise" (pp. 255-256). possibilities. I turn to exarnine those issues more specifically. What Mary enjoyed most about the methods course were class discussions because there are so many different perspectives that I don't normal ly see . . . that people f rom other backgrounds see . . . because they look at things differently. I th ink that's valuable. How else wou ld I know those other perspectives unless I heard them say it? A n d Peter is giv ing us an opportunity to say it whereas other teachers might say: "Well, no! We're getting sidetracked. You guys, come back!" A n d he doesn't do that. So I r-e-a-l-l-y like those classes because I learn a lot f rom listening to other people's opinions. Avner: Is there any particular discussion you remember more than others? Mary: The discussion on 'What is a fact?'. That was interesting because we all went into i t w i th : "Well , we know what a fact is. No problem! Right?" and at the end I wasn't at all sure I knew what a fact was. So that sticks i n my mind because I was clear on the subject before but unclear after the discussion. . . . A n d [she rushes to explain] I think that's good. It's somewhat humbl ing too, eh? (Interview #2, October 19,1996) Much of Ron's enjoyment of the methods course also came from these discussions in which nobody takes anything for granted. You say: 'What is history?' and you get a debate. You say: 'What is a fact?' and you get a debate. That's great! I know that some of my fel low students k ind of wish we hadn't got that far into it, you know; it's like: "Let's just get on w i t h it" k ind of thing. But I really enjoy it and I trunk this is important to think about as teachers.. . . I th ink that's of more value than learning how to wri te a unit plan or a lesson plan, the nuts-and-bolts k ind of thing we are already doing elsewhere. So in this course, I appreciate the chance to really think about and start questioning what it is that we're try ing to teach. A n d I th ink that some of those questions lead us then to trunk of ways to encourages those questions in the classroom, to bui ld a community of thinkers. (Interview #2, October 19,1996) pedagogy of history education. What must be examined, then, is what was (and was not) done with the issues raised in that discussion as the methods course progressed, the degree to which the understandings generated in that discussion infused what took place in the methods course thereafter, the extent to which a critical, postmodern discourse of history was transformed into practice, and theories advocated about history were translated into pedagogical 216 Yet, while all six participants thought discussing those four questions was imperative to an understanding of what one teaches in history, less of a connection was made as to how one uses those understandings to teach history. How, in Ron's words, "could we have focused [the discussion] more toward something that could be useful in the classroom?" (Interview #4, February 25, 1997). "We discussed 'What is history?', which re-enforced the idea that sources need to be examined and students need to be aware of all that," claims Jack, "but Peter never I never had a really good idea of how I might teach that." (Interview #2, October 20, 1996). "We talked about 'What is history?'," Charles concurs, "but we didn't talk about how to teach it to students. (Interview #4, March 7, 1997). "I can see the benefits of [those] discussions," Charles adds, "but to spend two classes just arguing about 'What is history?' or 'What is a fact?' I mean it's important to understand those things but when we're teaching in a practical situation, how much will that come into play?" (Interview #2, October 17,1996). Jack and Charles raise important questions about the relationship between theory and practice, between practice (in teacher education) and practice (in schools). Their questions, and particularly Charles' last question—How much will that come to play in a practical situation?—can only be answered by examining how these four factors came together to educate prospective teachers both in and about history. That is, what did the understandings underpinning the four questions posed in the methods course and the discussion that followed make possible in social studies education? How were they dealt with in the remainder of the methods course and what effects did that have on students' willingness to make those understandings "play" in a practical situation? And to what degree do the realities of the "practical situation" itself—history education in schools—make such transformations possible? I will begin with the latter. To date, history encountered in schools is, more often than not, engaged as objective', neutral, and authorless—a disinterested site making unbiased choices and judgments about the past 'as it was,' where students "treat their assigned readings and textbooks, if not their teachers, as divinely inspired" (Berkhofer, 1988, p. 21). While in this "collective memory" version of history students may often be asked to critically examine information in texts, they are rarely encouraged to explore the constructedness of those texts (Seixas, 1994, p. 108). Such questions are impeded since both the grand narrative of history and the textbooks which convey it are frequently written "as if their authors did not exist at all, as if they were simply the 217 instruments of a heavenly intelligence transcribing official truths" (Schrag, 1967,p. 74. cf. Wineburg, 1991, p. 511). Providing no footnotes, no explicit historiographic positioning, no expression of methodological or epistemological doubt, no rejection of alternative interpretations—indeed, none of the characteristics that make public the grounds for and limitations of the historian's knowledge claims" (Seixas, 1994, p. 108), textbooks rarely "convey the sense that historical certainty is elusive at best... [or] that interpretation had anything to do with the words on the page" (Crismore, 1984, p. 295. cf. Wineburg, 1991, pp. 511- 512). Consequently, students see text(books) as "just reporting the facts .... just saying what happened . . . [simply giving] straight information" (Wineburg, 1991, p. 501), and history as a closed story about the past rather than a socially and politically oriented discursive construct about our presents and futures. [ST! Ron: My recent experience as a teacher suggests room for optimism. I had a discussion with 3 or 4 students who expressed dissatisfaction and boredom with having had to study Canadian history over and over throughout the course of their school careers. But it was not that they were "bored with history," but rather they were bored by the questions posed to them and the answers expected of them in the history classroom (March, 1999).] The four questions posed by Peter at the beginning of the history unit in the social studies methods course fundamentally question both the substance and delivery system of the "collective memory" approach to history education. For the educative experience and the politics one can develop in relation to history when one questions the relationship between history and the past is quite different if one starts from the conviction that one gives meaning to history rather than finds a meaning and direction in it (Roth, 1995, p. 143). Indeed, teaching history in a manner that is aware of its construction (Jenkins, 1991) means that students are made to consider that between the 'facts' and the textfbooks) lie "analysis, interpretation, and narration . . . shaped by values, skills, questions, and understandings of a particular teller" (Holt, 1990, p. 17). Yet while such an endeavour moves prospective teachers away from the "collective memory" approach, the question remains as to which of the other two approaches to history education does this kind of politics direct prospective teachers' educational imagination and practice? For the four questions can be well situated both within the "disciplinary" and "postmodern" approaches, each taking those four questions in a different epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical direction. Approaching those questions from the "disciplinary" approach, as Seixas explains elsewhere (1993b), emphasizes 218 the use of 'inquiry' to gain an understanding of the problems of historical interpretation. Acknowledging the significance of the 'structure of the discipline', it considers exercises in historical method to be appropriate for school students and so engages in close analysis of primary documents, in the weighting of evidence, in the construction of historical argument, and [from within that discourse] in debates over historical interpretation (pp. 238-239) Yet, while the disciplinary approach encourages students to critically examine the relationship between historical sources, evidence, and interpretation, it naturally does so within the accepted method and disciplinary structure. Thus while particular texts are interrogated for what they claim and for how they make their claims for knowledge, the structures, discourse, and methods which both make those claims possible and allow others to adjudicate them, are not. Operating within the disciplinary model of history education, prospective teachers are, to borrow from Terdiman (1982), fundamentally "molded by the disciplinary structures within which . . . instruction occurs, . . . the ideological representation of [history is] involuntary naturalized even through critique of its specific detail" (p. 221. cf. Fish, 1994, p. 241). Addressing the four questions from the "postmodern" perspective, however, opens up new pedagogical opportunities for history education that force attention onto the text of history (as a "project"), not through it onto its content (Kellner, 1989, p. 4. cf. Zammito, 1993, p. 799). Such a focus allows educators to ask different questions about knowledge, about our relationship to the past, present, and future, as well as "questions about the status of historical inquiry, and to realize that the relation of the historical [and/as social] text to reality is itself a historical problem" (Bann, 1990, p. 34. cf. Zammito, 1993, p. 805). Such an approach does not mean that learning the past is insignificant. Rather, through the understandings that we can never actually know an unmediated past, what we should encourage is thinking about how we construct and textualize the past and why we do it the ways we do. This does not entail "ceasing to 'do' history and restricting oneself to thinking about [its constructedness]" (Zammito, 1993, p. 806). Rather, the juxtaposition of the two—'doing' and 'thinking'—as separate methodologies becomes problematic. Questioning the authority of historians, of the historical method, and of historical texts helps make both visible and problematic the presuppositions of discourses, values, and methodologies that legitimate and enforce particular arrangements and their relation, through power and convention, to knowledge. Engaging the inevitability and partiality of inscription and how language, author(ity), and agency become factors of truth, we 219 begin to see how history constructs and conditions knowledge—any knowledge, regardless of perspective or worldview. Once the authority of realism is broken down, explains Roth (1995), there is a clearing which "allows us to think again about the enormous range of choices there are in establishing our connection to our past and thus in developing a stance in the present" (pp. 144-145). And choice, according to Davidson (1986, cf. Berkhofer, 1995, p. 8), "implies that. . . [history] is not simply inherited but constructed, and constructed according to the . . . categories we devise" (pp. 255-256). The openings made possible through the discussion about the four questions in the initial phase of the methods course, I argue, were positioned in neither the disciplinary nor the postmodern approaches but rather stood in between the two, providing an opportunity for either to occur. Indeed, I believe that for a limited time both flourished within the methods. Yet, immersed in the process of lesson- and unit-planning (see Chapter IV) in which primary and secondary documents were examined and used as the basis for prospective students' engagement with the past in order to determine the "best" possible interpretation of the past as it never actually was, the understandings derived from the discussion about the four questions were very quickly brought into a disciplinary approach, thus determining the particular horizons of educational imagination prospective teachers could develop. And while those four questions operated well within that discourse in order to question the construction of a particular texts as well as readers' and writers' ability to know the past, they were no longer used to question history itself or the historical methods used, as texts. The following extended example from an in-class discussion serves to illustrate my point. As the history unit was winding down, and in preparation for the unit on media—perhaps as a transition between the two—a specific class was devoted to the role of film as history in which students were shown four films. The first, and in a category on its own, was a fifteen-minute version of The Ballad of Crowfoot, an early 1970s film produced by First Nations' people to tell their version of the "Opening of the Canadian West." Juxtaposing a series of historical photographs, primary and secondary documents put to music, the film tells a rather emotional story of devastation, oppression, degradation, of stolen land, disease, and cultural annihilation. Having watched the film, Peter asked students whether they would use it in a secondary school classroom. Student #1:1 really like it but I think it's extremely biased and if you're going to show it to your students, there should be a warning that tells students they are being manipulated. 220 Student #2: It is biased but hopefully this wi l l not be the only piece you show the students. You'l l also want to show something that represents more tradit ional views. [ S T ! Jocelyn: It's interesting that "more traditional views" must be represented. How did these views become traditional, anyway? (March, 1999).! Mary: I w i l l definitely use it but I wou ld use it only after everything has been established, after your lessons were completely understood and kids know what's going on. Otherwise they won't get as much f rom the f i lm as they could. Student #3: Just a question on the bias issue. Haven't we looked at the native issue f rom a white man's bias for years and years and years? Why is i t wrong to look at it f rom a Native Indian bias and to see what their thoughts are and their feelings through the years? . . . . Student #4: Can we choose a source that does not have a bias? I mean the textbook we are going to use has a bias whether it's as adamant as this one or not. A n d how are we going to teach the feminist movement wi thout being biased? Every source, I think, w i l l have a bias . . . Jocelyn: I think that i f this f i lm were shown in conjunction w i t h another f i lm that showed the excitement of Europeans in "opening" the west and how wonderful it was to have new lands and [bui ld new settlements] then you can get at perspective. You then get each are speaking about the same th ing but f rom two different viewpoints. Then you can begin asking: wh ich was right? Which was wrong? So I think it could be very useful in a classroom if shown in conjunction w i t h something else. . . . Putting students in groups, Peter asks them to discuss whether they would show this film in their classrooms. If they would, he asks them to consider when they might use the film, for what purposes, and how they would initiate a discussion with students after they have shown it. When students return to a large-class discussion, some students have reservations about using the film. Student #5: Where I grew up there's 50% natives and 50% non-natives and everything is segregated. The natives live on the reserve and the non-natives l ive in the city and there's a huge clash between natives and non-natives. A n d if I was to show this in a classroom there, there wou ld be utter chaos. I think that some of the non-natives wou ld just use this as a tool to further offend the natives. A n d the natives wou ld be totally upset w i t h this f i lm because there's such a clash between the two groups so I think it wou ld be very difficult to show. Mary: So you think it's better to combat the problem by not educating them? Student #5: I 'm not saying that. I just think it's too much. This is very emotional for some students. You'l l have to ease into i t w i t h something. I think it's too strong. Student #6:1 grew up in a small town where there's a lot of racism. A n d if I were to go back there now and show this video it wou ld offend a lot of people. So I w o u l d show it in a Vancouver classroom but I wouldn ' t take i t back home and show it there. Student #7: What you have to do is ease into it, discuss the issues .. it's not something you could just say: "Welcome to class, look at m y video!" You need to explain that i t was put together by a group of natives, to look at the different issues, discuss them and then debrief students about 221 their feelings and what they got out of it after you watch it. I think that way it could actually be a positive experience.... Student #8:1 personally have a conflict of interests showing it being of native ancestry. It would seem very biased coming from me. It would seem like I'm using it as a propaganda tool. [STI Jocelyn: I feel, as a white, privileged Canadian, that I have a very limited perspective to offer on the Native issue. When I touch on these issues in my social class I always admit this. I cannot suppose to understand the Native experience. I can only provide opportunities for students to reflect upon issues and in the end they can't expect to understand the Native experience. They can gain an awareness of hopefully a tolerance for (empathy for) these issues, but they will never "know" them as a Native has known them. Therefore, a teacher of Native ancestry would (in my opinion) have much more credibility than I would ever have in engaging students with these issues (March, 1999).] Peter: Because you personally have some native background? Student #8: Not that I wouldn't show it but Peter: You would feel personally more vulnerable to Student #8: Pushing my own agenda. Peter: This is fascinating because what you're saying is that your perspective as a native person is a perspective whereas with a white person's there's no perspective somehow. Student #8: I do keep a fair mind no matter what color I am but I think it would be taken as a perspective by others. Student #9: I'm having a little problem with this. I thought that as social studies teachers that's what we're supposed to be doing. Being Jewish I can't imagine not being able to present the Holocaust because I may not feel comfortable that there may be Germans in my classroom. . . . I don't think you cannot show it. It has to start somewhere and by you stepping back and saying: I can't do this, I don't think it helps. Ron: I agree. We can't keep the lid on the pot. These tensions are there and it's our job as social studies teachers to deal with these issues. But at the same time I agree that you really have to look at the context of your particular classroom and consider who you have in your classroom and how it needs to be presented. [STI Ron: As I read this transcript, I am struck by the irony of it. So often we hear from students that history is dry, dull, and boring. And yet, when we are presented with a perspective designed to provoke an emotional reaction, we not only shy away from it for fear of being offensive, we subtly denigrate it as being too "manipulative" or "biased," and therefore not sufficiently academically credible. The cost of privileging reason to this extent may very well be failure to engage students' passion to learn (March, 1999).] Peter then moved to show students three other, very different, films which are part of the Heritage Minutes Project, initiated in 1991 by the Charles Bronfman (Seagram) Foundation and supported by Canada Post and Power Corporation of Canada in order to improve the teaching of Canadian history. Shown widely on Canadian television and in movie houses across the nation, these one-minute films were 222 intended to "inspire patriotism and trigger curiousity about Canada" (Cameron, 1995, p. 13).2 "Valour Road" was the first of three Heritage Minutes shown in the methods course. Unlike the American version of a hero—a larger-than-life, aggressive individual—the Canadian version of the term presented in this film focuses on group effort and "documents the renaming of Winnipeg's Pine Street after three young men who lived there received the Victoria Cross in the Great War" (ibid., p. 20). In the Canadian tradition of underplaying the achievements of individual heroes, the second film, "Jacques Plante," focuses on the Canadian Hockey Player but "emphasizes his courage and ingenuity as a goalie in protection from violence rather than his number of saves" (ibid.). "Underground Railroad," the third film shown, depicts the community effort to assist slaves escaping from the United States during the Civil War. While, as Cameron points out, Canada at the time had about 3,500 slaves of its own, the film builds upon Canadian's self-image of a "tolerant multicultural society valuing freedom and family, whose citizens work cooperatively and are prepared to take risks to help others" (ibid., p. 22). Peter: Wou ld you use these i n your classroom? Most of the class yells: Yeah! Sure! Peter: W h y and how? Student #8: They show what W.W. I looks like and Canadian pride even though we didn't have our o w n ident i ty [at the time] . . . They t ry to show tradit ion as history, m y t h and legend as history and I really respect that. Jack: A l though these f i lms were pretty Anglo-centric, they're nice because they are a positive celebration of our culture rather than the other approach [Crowfoot] wh ich is negative and shows the institutionalized racism of our past. Peter: The f irst response to Crowfoot that it was propaganda. Is this propaganda in the classroom? Class: Sure! Student #10: But it's good propaganda. Class: [laughs and says]: Sure! Jack: It's not assigning blame. It tries to make us feel good about Canada Peter: Is there a difference other than the negativity? .. I also see a difference between these fi lms and the Ballad of Crowfoot. Student #11: One of the differences is that w i t h the Ballad of Crowfoot we can look at the relationship between pr imary sources which were used to construct the interpretation of history 223 and then the interpretation that comes from it. With these one minute Heritage clips, they're like better than and worse than the best textbook because they present such a believable picture to our students that they will look at this and think: "That is the way it was". They are not going to see this as somebody's point of view. They will see this as what really happened because that's what the actors put together. So that emotion that comes along with it will not be emotion of "This is an interpretation" but it would be emotion that comes along with "This is the way it was." So for history education, I might very well show one of these Heritage clips but I would make very sure that I start to pull it apart and show what was really going on: what are other sources saying about racism in Canada at that time? Or where did this come from? These films, made in 1992, are not a direct window on the past. (In-class transcript, September 27,1996) While this last comment, as did previous ones, illustrates prospective teachers' understanding that all four films are constructions, that each is embedded in a particular perspective and advocates a certain agenda, the constructedness of these texts is engaged separately from the constructed nature of history—and its particular construction in specific ways—within and against which those films were produced. This tendency is highlighted when students, while acknowledging that each of the films was biased—that is, perspectival—bias itself seemed to be perspectival. Crowfoot, which challenged the traditional, sanitary discourse in classrooms about the Opening of the West, was a negative bias while the Heritage Minutes which are aligned with the Grand Narrative, carried a "good" bias. After all, as Jack put it, "Although the [Heritage Minutes] films were pretty Anglo-centric, they're nice because they are a positive celebration of our culture rather than the other approach [Crowfoot] which is negative and shows the institutionalized racism of our past." Consequently, students argued, a screening of Crowfoot must "carry a warning sign to alert students to the fact that they are about to be manipulated." While the Heritage Minutes films, students agreed, are just as constructed and biased as Crowfoot, the nature of their bias—their "good" bias—allows teachers to show them as they are. The former requires other texts to counter its bias, the latter do not. What then, a postmodern approach would ask, do these statements say about the position of the supposedly neutral history taught in schools? Where does the differentiation between good and bad bias position us as learners, as citizens? Why is it, such a position would inquire, do the Heritage films make students feel good about Canada? What is it they make Canadians feel good about? Do all Canadians feel equally good having viewed such films? Why do we consider the Heritage minutes appropriate for all audiences while Crowfoot must be screened with caution and only to specific populations? Is feeling good the purpose of history education? If not, what is it? 224 What did not get decentered, then, in the class discussion, and in spite of the careful examination of each filmic text, is the very centre through which students come to conceive of the place and role of some histories in the history classroom compared to others. Why is it that so many students considered Crowfoot "bad" bias while believing the Heritage films were "good" bias? "Good" and "bad" according to whom, to what and whose standards? Are those standards unimplicated in the very system that renders one version of history a better—that is, a more comforting— interpretation than another? [STf Jocelyn: Should we not consider how these views become traditional anyway!? (March, 1999).] The difference between the questions asked and the issues raised in the above discussion and those which were not, I argue, are those that symbolize the difference between the kind of questions and issues raised by the disciplinary approach to history education and those raised by the postmodern approach. For as Jenkins (1995), representing the postmodern approach points out, "Histories located at the centre, or on the margins, are not necessarily [there] by virtue of their historiographical rigour and/or sophistication—for brilliant histories can be variously marginalised—but by their relationship to those that have the power to put them there" (p. 38). Interpretations at (say) the 'centre' of our culture," Jenkins adds elsewhere (1991), "are not there because they are true or methodologically correct . . . but because they are aligned to the dominant discursive practices" (p. 66). It is those discursive practices, put there by those who had the power to do so, which must be examined. Thus, as much as the above excerpt illustrates the kind of history that emerged within the disciplinary approach, it also illustrates how the begmriings of a postmodern discourse about history emerging from the discussion of the four questions at the beginning of the course, slowly began to dissipate from the consciousness and dynamics of the methods course. While it is difficult to point to a specific action or event which led to that dissipation, the fact that two discourses had emerged within the social studies methods course in its initial phases—one operating within the disciplinary approach, the other within the postmodern—is illustrated by an in-class discussion directly following the one about film as history. In it, as you will see, Jack attempts to reconcile between these two discourses. Jack: One approach [we've been emphasizing in the course] focused on whether or not you should use historical texts to uphold [the past as fact] or encourage value judgments by the students on the facts. The other approach was that we look back more as investigators to look at different perspectives and make our decisions f rom a least biased posi t ion as possible. I understand the pros and cons of each but I'm not really sure how we tie them together. 225 Peter: It sounded as if there was one big piece we did that talked about the notion of historical evidence, primary sources, history as investigation, the problem of ourselves in the present and the past back there, what kinds of evidence are we going to unearth in order to put together the best possible picture of the past. Is that your sort of objective: history as investigation? Jack: Right. Peter: And on the other side as you were saying there's . . . history as a strong moral stance and using history to deal with moral positions, to arrive at moral positions and to make moral judgments and possibly to engage in political disputes in the present day. And you don't see how those two can be reconciled with each other. Jack: I just thought they were at odds with each other. Peter: Reconciling those two, I think, is a core intellectual task for coming to grips with what we are doing with history in the classroom. So I think you named it exactly. [But] I do not hold the position that these two are necessarily in conflict with each other. Ron: Even when we look at history as investigation, interpretation, I think it's important to recognize that whatever we do, we do make moral judgments. It's not whether we should or we shouldn't, we just do! And it's valuable and important to be aware of those judgments and to recognize where they come from. Peter: So even history as investigation is not value free. And history as we construct stories of the past to engage in political debate in the present, it, too, should not be without investigation and recognition of how those stories and those accounts have been put together. (In-class transcript, September 30,1996) Ron and Peter's responses focus on the fact that history is ultimately a story and that no rendition of the past is without value and purpose. And yet that is not the same as recognizing that history has more in common with fiction than it does with science, with opinion more than with fact. For to state that history is a value-laden story addresses the narrative aspect of organizing the past—an inevitable imposition put upon the historian who attempts to convey the past—not the fictive inherent in its telling. Thus, while their responses address similar issues as those raised by the "postmodern," the origin of their discourse—the disciplinary—will determine, if not require, different answers. And it is those different answers, those different discourses, those two different pedagogical approaches that Jack was trying to reconcile. To examine how the "postmodern" approach to history education began to dissipate from the discourse and practice in the methods course, I take a specific look at one of the four questions raised in that initial discussion: 'What, if any, is the relationship between history and fiction?' In order to outline the kind of thinking students went through as they engaged that question, I propose a response provided by Mary. Though her 226 response was given outside of the methods course and a few weeks after the discussion took place, it is very much representative of what took place in it. Avner: How do we know about the past? Mary: Through texts like primary and secondary documents. I mean, somebody has to tell us one way or the other. Either somebody from the past or somebody who has read and is now writing about the past needs to tell us. Avner: So you're saying that in any event someone is telling us something. Mary: Yeah. Avner: So is there anything we can find that isn't told, that is, "fictionalized," in some way? Mary: I don't think so. Avner: So what, if at all, is the difference between history and fiction? Mary: There shouldn't be a difference. No, no no! Fiction is not true. Um well I guess the difference lies in truth. Avner: In what sense? Mary: Well, fiction is stuff that's not true; history is stuff that's supposed to be true. So the difference is truth. But in reality, I guess we have no way of knowing if our history is true at all, right? . . . Everything is told from a perspective and the perspective tends to change the history. It's history according to person A or history according to person B, or whoever. It's always got to be told to us in one form or another and in the telling it gets tainted. So I guess the answer to your question is: "Nothing." There is no difference between history and fiction. They are the same. (Interview #2, October 19,1996) While not all students needed to work-through the difference between history and fiction the way Mary did, the consensus (at least the articulated one) by the end of the class discussion was very similar to the resolution reached by Mary. That is, that "the older distinction between fiction and history, in which fiction is conceived as the representation of the imaginable and history as the representation of the actual [gave way] to the recognition that we can only know the actual by . . . likening it to the imaginable." (White, 1978, p. 98). What students' comments pointed to, as Spiegel (1990) explains, was that although the traditional historical discourse conventionally (and conveniently) distinguishes between history and fiction, history, no less that literature, "participates . . . in the political management of reality" (p. 62. cf. Southgate, 1996, p. 75). Historians' project of recovering the realities of the past and presenting them 'truly' or even 'fairly' is thus a delusion," adds Cronon (1992). In narrating the past, historians cannot avoid fictionalizing for, as Roth (1995, using 227 White, 1973) points out, historians do not find story types in the past; they form the past into story types (p. 141). While historians may use methodologies and discourses different than those used by writers of fiction to emplot their (his)stories, they nevertheless employ discursive practices and devices, conventions of representation, and modes of narrativity common to those utilized by writers of literature. The difference between a historical and a fictional account, states White (1978), must give place to the recognition that such differences "are matters of degree rather than of kind" (p. 78). Historical narratives, according to White, are "verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences" (p. 82). The artificially-maintained difference between history and literature, thus, results not as much from actual practice but from claims made about such practice. For as Berkhofer (1995) offers, the difference is "not so much that the former deal[s] with real things and the latter do[es] not. . . but that history purports to tell only the real things and to refer only to a real, not imagined, world" (p. 68). And while examining the ways in which authors of historical texts use literary devices to make their claims to knowledge continued to be paramount, the broader correlation between history and literature as commonly constructed endeavours was no longer a focus in the methods course beyond that initial discussion. That separation was made apparent not only by the questions no longer asked of history in the course but also by its design. While the unit about history was engaged at the beginning of the methods course, a specific class about the role of literature in the history classroom was included, as a distinct and separate class, toward the conclusion of the methods course, long after the history unit was over. In it, and using excerpts from two novels about adolescents in the middle ages— Cushman's (1994) Catherine called Birdy and Bradford's (1992) There will be wolves— prospective teachers discussed ways in which fiction can be used in the history classroom to further an understanding of the period under consideration. Although there are, no doubt, a variety of important reasons to incorporate literature in the history classroom, by separating the two spatially and temporally, a message was also being conveyed as to their epistemological and methodological difference: while history and fiction may work well in conjunction in the history classroom, they differ not only in degree but in kind, they are inherently and essentially different. Interestingly, the term "fiction" was used specifically only once more during the methods course, this time in relation to another "popular" genre from 228 which history has distanced itself—film. And although film, unlike literature, was discussed not for its flavour-giving supportive role when studying "real" history but, rather, as part of the study of that "real," both were, nevertheless, categorized as that which disciplinary history is not. Thus the initial possibility of thinking of history and fiction as one and the same diminished fairly quickly. Though they might be complementary, students soon realized, each is constructed differently, contributes differently, and should consequently be treated differently in the history classroom. Following a visit to one of Jack's practicum classes, we discussed the homework assignment he had given his students. In it, he had asked students to read an excerpt from a book about the early forest industry. The assignment stated that what students will be reading "are excerpts from a fictional novel." I asked Jack why he chose that specific combination. Jack, somewhat impatiently, responds: I know that, by definition, a novel is fictional. I already had that pointed out to me by [my sponsor teacher], thank you very much!" For Jack and his sponsor the issue, of course, was that of redundancy; why specify fictional while referring to a novel? A novel, by definition, can only be fictional. Yet, for me, the issue was not redundancy but the idea that by designating a novel as fiction we therefore distinguish it from other—"historical"—sources; the former is fictional, the latter are not. I thus refer Jack back to the conversation they had in the methods course about the relationship between history and fiction, and ask: "Is history not fiction?" Jack [thinks for a while]: No. Avner: What, then, is fiction? Jack: A story that someone made up. Avner: A n d what is history? Jack: I t is, very simply, what happened! though more often i t is an interpretation of what happened. Avner: Is that interpretation fictionalized? Jack: To varying degrees. But generally not intentionally fictionalized. Avner: I f we think of fictionalizing as put t ing something into words then even though history may be more factual than a novel, aren't they both inherently fiction? Jack. I agree. But i f you start saying that, then there are no facts in the w o r l d , it's all f ict ion. (Interview #5, A p r i l 15,1997) 229 Although Jack is aware (as I believe he was during the discussion about the four questions) that history is made rather than found, fiction seems to enter the classroom not through that which historians already always do but in the form of a novel. The two have by now separated; history is one, fiction is another. Yet, the demarcation Jack makes between a historical and a fictional account, in which "fiction is conceived as the imaginable and history as the actual," states White (1978, p. 98), must give place to the recognition that such differences "are matters of degree rather than of kind" (p. 78). Historical narratives, adds White, are "verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences" (p. 82). The artificially-maintained difference between history and literature thus results not as much from actual practice but from claims made about such practice. For, as Berkhofer (1995) offers, the difference is "not so much that the former deal[s] with real things and the latter do[es] not... but that history purports to tell only the real things and to refer only to a real, not imagined, world" (p. 68). Indeed, with an undergraduate degree in English and history, making the separation Jack made between fiction and history was more difficult for Jocelyn. She could not understand "how anybody can choose not to do English if they're going to study something like history." Avner: Why? Jocelyn: Because the substance of an English text is often historical. The substance of Shakespeare, the substance of any novel or any book is based in personal experience and history. A n d it is a way of recording history. I t is a way of communicating history. It's the same as history. The substance of history is people and peoples' perceptions and the way somebody puts that on paper might be different than in a novel but the substance of both is human. As a wri ter of fiction you're going to be more concerned w i th character development than i f you were a history wri ter who w o u l d be more interested in authority bui lding. (Interview #1, September 15, 1996) [ST! Jocelyn: Having taught "history" courses now for two years, I think I agree with this statement even more. Historians feel a need to "sell" their interpretation and to do so they often present it as "fact," unquestionable. Authors (although historians are also authors) do not hide behind any pretenses of omnipotence. They simply claim: This is my story; read it or don't! (March, 1999).] Having raised the commonalities between literature and history not only in that first interview but throughout this study, and having specifically mentioned Shakespeare in that regard, I ask Jocelyn, several months later, whether an English course she was taking about Shakespeare had informed her in any way as a social studies teacher. 230 Jocelyn: I don't know that it has directly. I mean I would obviously use Shakespeare in a humanities or social studies classroom. I would use the construction of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare's play and compare it to the historical construction of Caesar if we were talking about him [Julius Caesar]. But it doesn't have direct, immediate relevance to the social studies classroom other than looking at the history and maybe looking at what kind of historical information we can get from a play: are we getting historical information about the 1500s or are we getting a retrospective look? Avner: [Since the focus of that course was drama, I ask]: How about looking at history as drama? Jocelyn: [she thinks for a while, then says:] Yes. History as drama. Yeah!... Yes it is drama and it's about people. And what furnishes the substance of a drama? People! Avner: So how are they [history and drama] different ? Jocelyn: A very good question. Are they different? All the world's a stage! Al l of history is a script! (Interview #6, July 31,1997) While Jocelyn comes to the same conclusion about the inherent commonalities between history and literature (and drama) by the end of this exchange as she had in her initial comments at the beginning of the methods course, she is much less certain about that connection than she was at the outset of the program and, as it seems, has to re-discover them for herself all over again. Yet Jocelyn did not attribute this dissonance to the social studies methods course. In fact, when we spoke following a first visit to her practicum classroom, she claimed the methods course has given me some wonderful teaching ideas on how to create critical challenges in the classroom. That's probably been the best thing it did. For instance, the activity we did today—looking at the textbook, not for the information itself but for the presentation of it, for the effect it has on us and how that is part of the interpretation—I don't know that I would have done something like that without the methods course. I mean, I just really liked the way Peter opened up the course to broad overall arching questions such as 'What is history?' which I've tried to integrate in almost all of my classes. I continuously ask myself and the students: "O.K. What are we doing here?" Without that focus in the methods course, I don't know that I would have had that focus in my own social studies classroom. (Interview #4, February 18,1997) I return to the 'What is history?' question during my next visit and ask Jocelyn whether that or any of the other questions raised by Peter in the initial classes of the methods course have been relevant to her as a teacher/in her teaching Jocelyn: I think it has been relevant to my teaching. It has also allowed me the opportunity to decide for myself what is a fact and what is fiction and also that that it is an issue you can actually bring into the classroom and discuss. Avner: And did you? 231 Jocelyn: Yes I did. In both my regular [social studies] and incentive [humanities] grade 10 classes we talked about 'What is history?' and 'What is a fact?' and it was f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c! (Interview #5, April 14,1997) Jocelyn was not alone. Four of the six other participants in this study, sometime in their practicum, also conducted a class in which they engaged all or some of the four questions poses by Peter at the beginning of the history unit in the methods course with their own students. They all referred to that class (the one they did with their students and the one that took place in the methods course as the 'What is history?' class). The fact that a majority of participants chose to devote class time to discuss those questions with their own students did not surprise me. After all, and as I have already stated, the discussion around those "four questions" seemed to be their favourite and most memorable part of the methods course in the eyes of this group of prospective teachers. In each and every interview, participants repeatedly returned to this debate in some shape or form. Hence, what interested me more than the fact they had engaged those questions with their students (though I did find it intriguing, reflective perhaps of events in the methods course, that while 'What is history?" and 'What is a fact?' were discussed in all of the cases in which prospective teachers raised any of the four questions with their students, the question about the relationship between history and fiction was not raised even once) was to explore what kind of life (if at all) did the understandings derived from the engagement of those questions take on after the initial discussion was over. That is, to what degree and in what way did those understanding inform the learning that took place thereafter? What did those understandings make possible in the social studies classroom once they had been publicly articulated? Which of the two approaches to history education mentioned earlier by Jack were they going to be part of? Was it to be the postmodern approach which engages history as a subjective, value-laden project determined by the present and determining the future or the disciplinary scientific, objective, and disinterested approach which emphasizes inquiry and investigation to best arrive at the past as it was? To what degree were prospective teachers able to transform an initial and theoretical "postmodern" discussion into postmodern pedagogical opportunities in which those understandings come to play, especially in light of the discourse and practice which did and did not take place in the methods course. A beginning of a response can be found in a discussion I had with Jack following an introductory lesson about government he had just finished teaching his grade 11 social studies class. Having already engaged with his students ideas such 232 as liberalism, conservatism, socialism, communism and fascism, Jack had students fill in a chart to outline the main theories of each of those political philosophies. It was to be done using four categories: economic freedom, economic equality, intellectual freedom, and intellectual equality. Sensing students had difficulties using those categories as I walked around the room, I asked Jack after class why he chose to use those particular categories Jack: They were textbook prescribed [?]. They were O.K. I used them Avner: Were you comfortable using them? Jack: No. Not particularly. Avner: Why not? Jack: I thought they were confusing in the way they were labeled and in the value they carried in that particular presentation. No. I didn't think the language used [ in those categories] was great. [ In fact,] it was bad Avner: So w h y d id you use them? Jack: Why d id I use them? I didn't want to confuse the students even further. I t was confusing enough already. A n d I felt that if we didn't stick to the language of the textbook students might easily get frustrated. I f ind that if we deviate f rom the textbook, i f I tell them something in the textbook is wrong or if I choose to discuss things differently that the textbook, they get very confused. I mean I won't tell them it's wrong. But if I suggest a different way to th ink about it, often they get confused. And although I don't accept everything in the textbook and we do br ing up the fact that we shouldn't always accept what's in the textbook as t ruth and that we shouldn't accept eveiything we read, I still am careful not to confuse then too much. Avner: I n the discussion you had earlier w i t h students about '"What is history?' d idn ' t you discuss issues of "truth" and how every author necessarily inscribes a particular t ru th about the wor ld which can and should be questioned and contested? Jack: Yes we d id . But I guess I've just become more weary i n the pract icum of cont inual ly introducing abstract ideas. For what purpose? Simply to further confuse things and complicate them? I mean this is an introduction of political theory. None of them knew what any of this was. Some of them didn't even know what communism was so I just didn' t want to make i t tougher for them than it had to be. It was problematic but generally I think the students got it. (Interview #4, March 13, 1997) [STf Jack: This process of confusing students can be better accomplished in one's own classroom where one can take the time to sort things out. As a teacher, I now regularly encourage students to challenge the textbook and to read it critically though I haven't yet gotten to teach the government section of grade 11 again. Further, I see the entire activity describe above as another example of the hoop-jumping process involved during the practicum. When you are constantly being evaluated by conservative teachers and you are under a lot of stress, you aim to please those who are doing the evaluation (March 1 9 9 9 ) . Ron: We fear deviating from the textbook because it creates confusion. And yet, I know that confusion is where learning takes place. But how do we reconcile that with the "need" or "goal" of fulfilling the "prescribed learning outcomes"? How do we assess and evaluate it? How 233 do we do all the things that we're supposed to do so that we can go to parent-teacher nights or to our principal without blushing and stammering? (March, 1999).] While Jack acknowledges that students should not take for granted what they find in the textbook, while he himself is uncomfortable using the categories defined and offered by the textbook, Jack nevertheless proceeds. His reason: not to confuse and thus frustrate his students. Yet confusion, according to Jack, will occur not from using categories of analysis he admits are confusing but from questioning them. Questioning equals disruption. Disruption equals confusion. Confusion equals unproductive learning. Unproductive learning equals questioning, and so it goes on. What also seems to emerge, and in a pattern very similar to that which took place in the methods course itself, is a disjuncture between the initial discussion Jack held with his students about notions of representation and truth and what takes place in the day-to-day activities in the classroom. "For what purpose?" asks Jack. "Simply to further confuse things and complicate them?" "I guess I've just become more weary . . . of introducing abstract ideas." While Jack and his students engaged those issues theoretically, the understandings derived from them remain at that level of the abstract—something one ought to know, perhaps acknowledge, but not something one necessarily needs to apply. Engaging in an initial philosophical discussion about truth and the real, that discussion is then suspended for the search for the truth and the real; where issues of truth and representation become theoretical, abstract ideas which can then be forsaken for the comfort of undisturbed practice. Follow the system, don't question it. After all, as Jack has stated elsewhere, while the methods course hoped we would "encourage students to question all the time," if you do that too often, many "will say you're just creating these disagreeable young people. So I think a lot of student-teachers just won't bother (Interview #3, December 17,1996). Jocelyn, however, did bother. Not only did she discuss 'What is history?' and 'What is a fact?' with her students, as Jack did, she attempted to revive those questions and bring them into the discussion (almost) whenever history was engaged in her classroom. Speaking, for example, of a unit on Canadian history she was doing with her grade 10 incentive class, Jocelyn illustrates how she incorporated some of those issues in this unit: We looked at excerpts wr i t ten by black people about their experience in BC and in Canada. A n d I think that was really a neat exercise for the students because they were wr i t ten differently and f rom a different perspective and comparing and contrasting those texts w i t h the ones they were used to [the textbook] and realizing that one text does one thing and the other does another, we 234 began looking at how we can account for that discrepancy and how different accounts are constructed about similar events and the power of the word. . . . We also looked at a social history textbook as opposed toOwr land: Building the west [the textbook normally used in that classroom as well as in most grade 10 classrooms in BC] and we talked about the differences between them and what constitutes social history and what constitutes factual history and why one would say this is a social history of Canada and the other a factual history or simply a history of Canada. (Interview #5, April 14,1997) 3 Driving Jocelyn's instruction was an emphasis on history as an interpretive project, a method of constructing the past rather than finding meaning in it. After all, in Jocelyn's own words, "meaning is not found in the facts. It's all the glue that puts the facts together that gives meaning. And that glue is interpretation" (Interview #6, July 31, 1997). Exploring history as an interpretive and textual project might have been easier for Jocelyn than for any of the other participants not only because of her academic background but also due to the fact that hers was a humanities course in which she taught the same group of students both English and social studies. In spite of that, however, and perhaps because schedule requirements and administrative expectations mandated Jocelyn teach the two subjects separately rather than integratively, interpretation, as the following excerpt illustrates, carried a very different role in the eyes of her students in English than it did in history: Jocelyn: In the English part of Humanities 10, they expect me to give them the answer; they think there is an answer to what we we're doing so they are waiting for me to provide it. . .When we discuss a story, they first respond individually, move on to discuss it with a partner and a small group and then we have a plenary session. In the plenary session, they look to me: "Well is that right?" "What does that mean Ms. [Jocelyn's real last name]?" So in terms of the literature end anyways, they expect that I give them the answer, that I tell them what's right and what's wrong. ... They want to know: "What is your answer?" "What do you think?" . . . But those are masked questions. They ask that so that they can give it back to me on a test and get a better mark. Avner: Why do you think they expect that in the English part and not in the socials part? Jocelyn: I don't know why! It is bizarre!... Maybe social studies is something they feel they can read about and know and that's it: "We can do it!" "We can read about it and know it!" "The facts are in the text." "We can do that." But whereas interpretation is involved and they don't know [whether what they believe is the correct] interpretation, they say: "You tell us." (Interview #4, February 18, 1997) [ S T ! Jocelyn: Even in my classes now—I no longer teach humanities 10 but rather social studies 10 and 11—my students find the essay questions and other interpretive tasks difficult. My tests usually incorporate multiple choice, short interpretive answers, and one argumentative essay. Students still look to me for the right answer. I did that as a student too—psyched out the teacher. I don't know how to dismantle this. I try in my class but it seems they come to my class with other experiences which predispose them to this sort of thinking (March, 1999).] 235 Why is it that Jocelyn's students see English as an interpretive subject and history as a compilation of facts? "The facts are in the text." "We can do that," her students comment about history. "But whereas interpretation is involved [that is, in English]. . . they say: "You tell us!" Their confidence in being able to produce a correct answer on a history but not on an English test speaks not only about the way the two subject areas are treated but also about the expectations teachers hold about knowledge and knowing in those areas, especially, perhaps in texts. The next time I visited Jocelyn's classroom was during one of her final classes in a first unit on Developing the West. In this particular class, students were asked to compare two accounts about the founding of, and conflict at, the Red River settlement (Manitoba). The first of these accounts was from their textbook Our land: Building the West which presented events from the perspective of the Hudson's Bay Company, one of the two colonial trading companies operating in western Canada at the time. The second account, taken from another textbook (though students, having been presented with unreferenced photocopies, did not know that) presented events from the perspective of the rival company—the NorthWest Company. Having read the two accounts, students compared them by responding to a series of questions asked of each of the two accounts: "What is the significance of the year 1812 in the history of western Canada; How did the Hudson's Bay Company (and the NorthWest Company) feel about the establishment of the Red River Colony?; What was the cause of the Battle of Seven Oaks? What did the coming of the railway do for Red River? Who won the battle of the fur trade?" At the bottom of the question-sheet Jocelyn added the following: "Notice the difference in tone between these two historical accounts. Why are they so different? Is one more correct than the other? What role do you think the historian plays in the construction of history?" While the class discussion did not neglect to address the events at the Red River Settlement, what ensued was primarily a lively discussion about why the two accounts differ, about which is more believable and why, about how historians participate in the making rather than the finding of a particular past. In all, the discussion (in which students' regular textbook was referred to as "the text," the second account as "the print") was primarily about interpretation and its role in the construction of history. Student 1: The print is biased toward the NorthWest Company. Jocelyn: Toward what is the textbook biased? Student 1: The textbook is not biased. 236 Student 2: The pr int was more passionate. It had anger. It wasn't dry. It didn' t pretend to be objective. Student 3: The text is giving facts, information. But the print is wr i t ten differently. The pr in t is more like a story, the text is simply giving facts. Student 4: The book may be more accurate because it provides more views [than the pr in t ] and therefore is more neutral. Student 5: The text must be more accurate because it's in the curr iculum; we use it in school; the pr int is not. I don't know of any other class that has used i t [the print]. A n d i f it's not used by anybody else, i f we're not required to learn it, then it can't be accurate. Otherwise every grade 10 student wou ld have to study it. Student 6: The different perspectives derive from the fact that they are wr i t ten by different authors and use different language. Student 7: The historian makes choices as to which aspects of an event to wr i te about. Student 8: History is what the historian thinks happened. It is their opinion of what happened but that then is taken as t ru th by people who read it later on because people don't have t ime to do the research themselves, so they trust the historians, (in-class, February 18,1997, paraphrasing). As we spoke after class, Jocelyn showed me the end-of-unit test she was giving that class at the end of their unit. It comprised a large fill-in-the-blanks section, some map work (locating 10 items on a blank map of Canada), four short-answer questions (primarily identifying, synthesizing, and analyzing information), and a mini essay. While this was a good test according to most standards, it reflected very little of the dynamics and understandings I had just witnessed in her class. Surprised, I asked Jocelyn why questions about the interpretive and literary nature of history, ones students engaged so well in class, were excluded from the test Jocelyn: I d idn' t think that it was fair to test the students on tha t . . . The essay question I gave them in the English side of things was on interpretation. It was on mterpret ing the tensions and conflicts that arise and that f ind voice in literary texts. . . . I guess I could but I just didn' t feel like . . . I though t . . . You know what? In light of today's discussion, I should al low it, especially for those students who really flourished in that discussion. A n d i f I 'm giv ing them choice as to what they can wr i te about, there should be room there for them to wr i te about i t i n history as wel l . Yeah. I agree w i t h you. I'll do that, (interview #4, February 18,1997) [STI Jocelyn: Why was I surprised by the division of English and history into interpretation and fact-finding if I, at some unconscious level, held this division myself? It came from one—or at least was perpetuated by me! (March, 1999) . ] The philosophical and historiographical aspects of history, so prevalent in Jocelyn's classroom, seem to have vanished from the test which fundamentally asks students to recount the past, while paying little attention to the nature of history, to the 237 validity of historians' claims to knowledge, or to the inevitable intrusion of ideological considerations into their historical judgments (Southgate, 1996, p. 2). This disjuncture, between what Jocelyn did in her classroom and what she was about to ask on the test, sends a variety of messages. It illustrates that while such questions might be mteresting, perhaps even important for students' understanding of history during in-class discussions, they are not essential to in/to students' historical understanding, at least not according to what matters most in measuring those understandings—the test. Hence such questions are not legitimated beyond verbal interactions in the classroom, not validated as inherent in the study of history. This, then, sends students a message that, while we speak of history as an interpretive subject, what history is fundamentally about is getting the story straight. Interpretation becomes a bonus, an add-on to "real" historical knowledge; something we speak of, engage from time to time, but not something which underlies anything and everything we do in the history classroom regardless of whether it specifically gets defined and labeled as such. Philosophical issues revealed in the writing of history can thus be taken as a sort of veneer, extraneous to the inner core of historical knowledge and glued on with varying success to a solid historical carcass; it can be seen as something to be engaged independently of the underlying historical enterprise or its study (Southgate, 1996, p. 2). Including a question that requires students to interpret the tensions and conflicts in a text on the English test but excluding it from the history test might provide a partial answer as to why Jocelyn's students treat the two subjects differently (see previous excerpt), and why, in spite of Jocelyn's emphasis on interpretation in the history classroom, they still believe interpretation is inherent in English but not in history. But beyond the existence of that separation and the kind of messages it was conveying to students, I was also interested in the messages Jocelyn herself received, messages which might have led her to create and maintain that separation, in spite of her initial inclination to do otherwise. When I addressed that issue and asked Jocelyn why she had made that separation, she claimed it was because she did not feel she had done enough of it—that is, focusing on interpretation—in her history classroom to legitimate including it in the test. Yet, my visits to her classroom, the many discussions I held with her about her teaching proved the contrary: her practice was very much focused on interpretation. The reason lay elsewhere. A variety of elements could have contributed to her decision. In line with the focus of this dissertation, however, I would like to focus on one in particular—the methods course. [ST! Jocelyn: Perhaps it was more than this. Perhaps I felt vulnerable (in terms 238 of someone else evaluating me) when I incorporated interpretation into my tests. How does one evaluate interpretation? More to the point, how does one justify to one's faculty advisor or sponsor teacher the evaluation of that interpretation? I was confident in my ability to evaluate "objective facts" but not so confident in my ability to justify my evaluation of subjective opinions (March, 1999).] As I have noted earlier, Jocelyn attributed much of her critical perspective in teaching to what Peter did in his classroom; "Without that [critical] focus in the methods course," Jocelyn stated, "I don't know that I would have had that focus in my own social studies classroom (Interview #4, February 18,1997). But while what Peter did in the methods course might have enabled Jocelyn in a variety of ways, what he did not do might have equally disabled her in other ways. Since Jocelyn had come into the methods course already believing the kind of understandings generated in class during the initial discussion about the "four questions," in fact, she was one of the staunchest advocators of those understandings during the discussion, what the methods course did, especially for Jocelyn, was to legitimate the understandings she already had rather than provide her with new ones. It did more than legitimate her own understandings, it legitimated (though didn't always encourage) their use in the classroom. For Jocelyn that was enough. She did not need to be converted, she needed to be acknowledged, approved, legitimated. That, Peter did well through that initial discussion. Further, unlike the other participants who, following events in the methods course, generally incorporated the issues underlying the discussion about the "four questions" into the discourse of the disciplinary approach, Jocelyn—both during the methods course and, as I have shown, as a teacher—engaged them from a more postmodern perspective, one she had already assumed during her undergraduate studies. To a large degree, then, Jocelyn's incorporation of those questions into that particular discourse (and the kind of practice that allowed her to develop with her own students) took place mostly in spite of, rather than because of, the methods course. Yet, Jocelyn could only go so far. While the methods course legitimated using such questions in class, it did little to legitimate them as part of the process of assessment and evaluation. Other than the first question on the final exam, none of those questions ever appeared on any of the assignments students were required to produce within the methods course. While they were important in discussions (to a certain point), they were not legitimated in the process of evaluating student teachers' understanding of teaching historical knowledge. In a fashion similar to that displayed by Jocelyn in the above excerpt, such questions also conveniently evaporated in the methods 239 course when things mattered most-that is, on the test! Thus, while one ought to give credit to events in the methods course which legitimated, made possible, much of what Jocelyn did do in her classroom, one must also acknowledge where those fell short. While Charles' attempts at integrating 'What is history?' into his practice were not as successful as those demonstrated by Jocelyn, his example illustrates a pedagogical, not only an epistemological, perspective made possible when one engages history as an interpretive endeavour. "To say that historical reality is produced by the interpretive practice called history," claims Scott (1996), "is not to deny the seriousness . . . [and] usefulness of the enterprise [or its study]. It just calls analytic attention to the interpretive operations of the discipline, to the various ways it achieves its authority" (p. 2). As such, it opens a variety of pedagogical opportunities excluded when history is considered primarily an accumulation of undisputed facts. To discuss the pedagogical, I turn to a conversation I had with Charles after visiting his grade 9 social studies class. Prior to our discussion about that particular class, however, Charles mentioned he had discussed 'What is history?' with his students in the first lesson of his practicum. I asked him what that entailed Charles: Well like we did in Peter's class: 'What is history and why do we study it?' And I took what students said and put it on the overhead. I don't think that everybody in the class said something but a lot of people had very good ideas and then we talked about it. It worked out well. Students were very receptive. It' an interesting class. There's 31 kids cramped in a portable and while they're always sociable, they don't always all contribute. But that day, I thought they were all really good. They had a lot of the same ideas that we had in our [methods] class. I mean I checked my socials notes [from Peter's class] and there were a lot of the same ideas. Maybe not to the degree of depth of what we said [in the methods course] but the basic ideas were there. So it was good. Avner : Were the ideas students raised in this discussion re-visited down the road, were they actually incorporated when you later engaged in the study of history? Charles: I didn't focus on that kind of thing [later on]. It wasn't a major focus. But we had a discussion on why Europeans would explore and what was going on in Europe at the time that they would do it or how did fishing off the east coast lead to fur trade. So there was some stuff about looking at reasons why and some problem-solving. But no, it wasn't a major focus. Avner: The discussion about 'What is history?' in Peter's class led to discussions about 'What is a fact?' and the relationship between history and story. Did you engage those issues in your discussion with them during the discussion about 'What is history?' or anytime after? Charles: I didn't think it was that relevant because we haven't really used primary sources. But we did talk a little bit that there is bias almost in everything. But at some point you need to say that "There are facts you need to know." Because before you can start looking for the truth, you kind of have to have a starting point . . . . some background knowledge so you can start looking 240 whether it's true or not. And I think the facts that we presented in class today are as true as we're going to find right now. (Interview #5, May 1,1997) While Charles, as did other participants, thought it important to devote an entire class to questions such as "What is history?", as he himself describes, that question had little relevance to what took place in his classroom thereafter. Since that demonstrates a pattern among this group of participants (with Jocelyn being the exception), what seem more interesting, perhaps, are the dynamics that took place during the discussion in Charles' classroom about "What is history?", especially, in comparison to those during the class I had just witnessed. The topic of that particular lesson was the interaction between European explorers and First Nations and the impact of that interaction on the indigenous peoples of Canada, (Students had already studied about North America's aboriginal cultures and the initial phases of "contact." They were now about to examine the affects of European trade and settlement on First Nations). In preparation for that discussion, students were given a worksheet entitled "White vs. Indian cultures." Part of that worksheet—a list of cultural traits and how those manifest in White culture—were already provided. Reading a section in their textbook, students were to complete the two blank columns in that chart—one about Indian cultural traits, the other what took place when the two cultures interacted with each other. Students spent most of the class reading and filling in the chart. The last half hour of class was spent going over the chart and discussing students' findings. For the purpose of this discussion I will not focus on what students said in that discussion but rather on who did and did not chose to participate in it. Only five or six students chose to participate. The rest sat silently unless called upon. This seemed in contrast to the lively class discussion Charles had mentioned having with his students when he raised 'What is history?' question. To be sure, Charles' class was not the typical grade 9 social studies class. More than half of his students were ESL and about a quarter had already been identified by school administrators as having (serious to moderate) learning disabilities. In almost every possible way, Charles' class was the antithesis of Jocelyn's incentive, upper middle-class, high-achievers' classroom. Yet both teachers recall students thoroughly engrossed in a discussion about 'What is history?' I asked Charles why he thought most students were so active in that class while only a small number participated in the class I had just observed 241 Charles: It is interesting that many of them [ESL and learning disabled students] actually participated in that discussion. They do participate when I ask them about their opinions (and I try to do that when we do current events) or when it's about someone else's opinions. But when we're answering questions [from/about the textbook material] it always tends to be the same [4-5 bright] students in the class who speak up. And I don't know if they [the ESL etc.] are scared to give their answer or whether they just don't know the answer. (Interview #5, May 1,1997) What Charles describes in the above two excerpts are two very different epistemological approaches for engaging history, each with its particular pedagogical opportunities. The first—when 'What is history?' was brought up and the one I have been pointing to throughout this chapter—questions the very nature of history and examines it as a tentative, interpretive, and partial endeavour, constructing rather than describing a particular past from a positioned present. The second uses history rather than questions it; it sees history primarily as an unnegotiable, objective depiction of the past as it was. The latter provides students with what to think, the former encourages them to think. And, as students in Charles' class demonstrate, confronted with the latter, they remain silent, disengaged, uncommitted. When confronted with the former, however, when they are encouraged to think, they participate, contribute, engage, become active not only in the study of history but in their own learning as well. For by engaging history as science, 'objective', and 'true', Hvolbek (1991) points out, "we advance [students'] own personal estrangement from it." And when students are left with the notion that the historical narrative is unnegotiable, "when something is accepted as absolutely right and an end in itself [as was the case in Charles' second class] conversation is over" (pp. 5, 7). As Scott (1996) explains, "when history is provided as 'truth" and authorless, when [quoting Roland Barthes, 1986] "there is no sign referring to the sender of the historical message, history seems to tell itself (p. 131. cf. Scott, 1996, p. 2). Only when the study of history becomes "both the study and practice of interpretation," claims Scott (ibid., using de Certeau, 1986), is a space designated where learners have something to do (p. 199. cf. Scott, 1996, p. 11). For when the authority of history as an authoritative, authorless discourse is broken, cracked open through "querying the notion of the historian's truth, pointing to the variable facticity of facts, insisting that historians write the past from ideological positions, stressing that history is a written discourse as liable to deconstruction as any other (Jenkins, 1991, p. 66), new spaces open up in which students can insert themselves. These spaces encourage students to inhabit them: to question, debate, refute, engage in a conversation; to realize that the past is what historians have made of it and 242 those makings could and should be questioned, undone and redone if we want to understand not only what the past means but how it comes to have meaning in our lives both in the present and for a future. Notes 1.1 present Peter Seixas' taxonomy, so to speak, not simply because I think it is representative of the field but also because it provides a window into his own thinking about history education. As the instructor of this methods course that thinking determined the kind of history education that ultimately took place in this methods course. 2. In addition to the Heritage Minute films, a glossy magazine—a teacher's guide—created by Canada Post was sent out to thousands of schools in order to further engage the issues presented in each of those films (McGinnis, 1995, p. 25). 3. The dichotomy Jocelyn is pointing, as it appears, seems problematic since social history can be presented as fact just as much as any other history. What Jocelyn is trying to convey here is the difference between social history as a bottoms-up approach in which multiple perspectives are presented as opposed to the "regular" textbook which presents a single and unquestioned narrative of the past as it was. 243 C H A P T E R V I I G e n d e r a n d m u l t i c u l t u r a l i s m i n s o c i a l s t u d i e s e d u c a t i o n : A d d i t i v e s , seda t ives , o r p e d a g o g i c a l a l t e r n a t i v e s ? A curriculum that teaches people to think about difference—not as a biological essence but as a historically created and changeable identity—is a democratic curriculum. (Scott, 1991a. cf. Pinar, et al., 1996, p. 346) Given the multicultural nature of contemporary classrooms; the "mainly white and middle-class teacher population; the persistence of equity issues surrounding schools . . . and children; the salience of curricular issues, especially in social studies, about the inclusion of all peoples and the role of multiple perspectives; and on-going questions about "historical honesty" in the social studies curriculum," states Armento (1996), "it is clear that the social studies teacher preparation research agenda should be very full and focused on a range of diversity-related issues" (p. 491). How, then, and "to what extent," Armento asks, "are diversity and equity issues addressed in social studies teacher preparation programs? How are historical content issues examined? What knowledge and skills are novice teachers learning in order to critique and improve unbalanced curriculum?" (p. 492). Addressing the issues and questions raised by Armento, this chapter focuses on the discourse and practice of difference in the UBC Teacher Education Program— specifically, as they pertain to social studies education. My interest, as it has been in previous chapters, is to examine the relationship between the opportunities made possible for prospective teachers to engage issues of gender and multiculturalism while learning to teach and what they, in turn, made possible because of them. To foreground my discussion, I turn to conversations I had with each of the six participants in this study about gender and multiculturalism.1 These conversations were part of the third set of interviews, conducted at the conclusion of the first semester at UBC (which also means the end of the methods course), immediately before student teachers began their long practicum in schools. I present them almost in their entirety since they bring to light many of the issues I wish to discuss in the remainder of this chapter. Further, situated, as they were, between the university-and the school-based components of learning to teach, these excerpts provide a way of both looking back at how gender and multiculturalism were engaged in the first and formative semester at UBC, as well as an opportunity to look forward and examine how students' experiences in this first semester positioned them to deal with issues of gender and multiculturalism during their practicum. 244 Goodwin's (1994) research, which examined how 120 prospective teachers from a variety of pre-service institutions across the US understand multicultural education, claims that "student teachers seemed to perceive multicultural education primarily as a mechanism for delivering cultural content or for changing the way children behave with one another." "What they indicated they were prepared to do seemed dependent on how much control they would be given, the kinds of preservice teachers or communities they would work with, the models or materials available." For the majority of respondents, "multicultural education appeared to be reactive education—it depended on the circumstances one was in." "[Respondents seemed to define multicultural education as an externally driven concept; apparently one reached outside oneself for the answer to multicultural education. These teachers did not seem to include themselves in the multicultural education (cf. Goodwin, 1997, p. 14. See also Sleeter, 1993). The question initiating participants' responses was: "In some of your courses [in this teacher education program] you talked about issues of gender and multiculturalism. Do you think those are important issues to raise in a teacher education program, and if so, why?" In response to the first part—"is it important?"—prospective teachers chose the following: "Yes," "Of course," "Absolutely," and "Definitely." What I present bellow begins with each of the participants responding to the second part of the question—"Why is it important?" Charles: [they are important because] they've been issues, they are issue, and they're going to be issues in the school system. I mean, gender equity is always an issue whether it be the teachers or the students themselves. And multiculturalism? It's obvious! simply because of the vast different number of cultures we have in the schools today. You have to discuss it at some point. Avner: How does it relate to social studies? Charles: First, because of the different students you have in your class. But it can affect the content too and how you stand on those issues. . . . You can decide whether you want to cover women in WW II or not, or if you want to talk about immigration in the 60s or anything else you want to teach. I mean you can decide to talk about women in history or you can decide not to. So I guess it affects it in that way. Avner: And do you see yourself mcorporating those issue as a social studies teacher? Charles: Oh yeah! Avner: In what way? Charles: Well, just like I said: women in history, it's obviously important. Avner: Why is it important? Charles: It's important because it's a part of history and it doesn't get talked about much, although it is getting talked about more. I guess it's important for me to know that my students are seeing some of it. One of my objectives would be for them to see, to be exposed to some of 245 these other parts of history like talking about Chinese railroad workers in the 1880s. I want them to see some of that instead of just seeing the European history that we always see. . . . I think exposing them to the different histories and cultures and stuff like that, will give them a greater appreciation for the way that all these different people and their ancestors had an affect on where we now live. I mean it wasn't just Europeans who built Canada; it was women and natives and Asians and Americans and British and all the other people who had an effect on how we live now, not just white Europeans. (Interview #3, December 18,1996)2 Jack: [those issues are important] because we should be aware that racism exists and that, as a teacher, you might want to engage it. I mean you want to be aware of it so it doesn't keep taking place or so that you can try and challenge those ideas if kids are racist or have racist leanings. I mean society is racist in general and knowing that can give you opportunities to challenge it. As for gender, sure! Gender inequality exists. I just read an article about a teacher who addresses the male students in the class X times more than the female students and it argued about the male evaluation system that women are forced to conform to. I thought it was all pretty interesting. Avner: Is that important as a social studies teacher? Jack: If you're ever going to engage those topics specifically, it would probably be in a social studies class. I mean it's something you can teach a unit on and make students aware of these ideas and that there is inequality. Avner: So as a teacher you'll deal with issues of gender or multiculturalism in a specific unit? Jack: Well, there's different ways to look at it. You could incorporate it in every unit to try and bring female perspectives in on topics that are usually dominated by these white males. Or, I guess, if you're not just dealing with gender then you can bring in other cultures' perspectives on different things, if you can and when ever you can. When you're doing the settlement of the West, you might want to look at women's experiences as well, not just the men's experiences and if you can't find [it in the textbook?] then just [use] diaries and whatever sources are out there that show how women felt about it. And then, if you want to do a specific unit on gender you can just look at how women are portrayed by society. . . I think both approaches are valuable. I would take both. Avner: So it's important for social studies? Jack: Yes. Definitely. Avner: I want you to think back on the methods course. How well do you think those issues were addressed in that course? Jack: Well, they weren't at all... were they? I don't think they were at all. Avner: What message does this send you as a social studies teacher? Jack: I guess that they're not as important. But that's not fair because we looked at it in our other methods class [SSED 317]. We looked at both multiculturalism and gender equity specifically and we looked at how we would shape units on it, at how we would do it directly Avner: Of the articles you read for this course, how many were written by women? Jack: Ahhh I don't know. Were any? I'm trying to think I don't know if any were. 246 Avner: By people of colour? Jack: I don't know. They didn't have pictures. (Interview #3, December 17,1996). Jocelyn: I think that if we're going to be doing anything about the social inequities which manifest themselves in an education environment—because education is a social environment, then we need to be, first, aware of them and, second, alerted to how we can rectify the problems or challenges. When I went into the school I was appalled at how much attention the boys received and how little attention the girls received. And then I thought: "You know, that's a comment on just on education but on society." Society comes through in the classroom; the classroom is made up of society and if we want to do anything about what goes on in society, we've got to start now, start young, start in the classroom. Avner: Is it important for a social studies teacher? Jocelyn: Incredibly important, incredibly relevant. They are relevant because your subject-matter is society and when you come to a text you've got to be able to understand that the person's perspective on life is going to affect what it is they write and how their interaction with their environment made them write this. You also need to know that different people in your class are going to react differently to that very same text for a variety of reasons: gender, culture, language, all those kinds of things. So you can't get through your subject-area material without talking about some of those issues. It's [also] important to understand that the materials we're studying in Western society, in a Western history classroom, are different from those being studied in Japan. It's the same history, supposedly, it's the same chronological time, but there are different issues involved. It is important to understand that what we call history is our interpretation and how do you even begin to communicate that to students if you don't first of all talk about multiculturalism, about different perspectives, different ways of looking at things. Gender can affect that, age can affect that, culture can affect that, society can affect that, class can affect that. You can't separate those things from the content; they are the content. Avner: You were just telling me how important it is to address issues of gender and multiculturalism in a social studies class. How were they addressed in the methods course? Jocelyn: Gender and multiculturalism? [a surprised] ummmmmm [another surprised] ummmmmmm .... Gender really wasn't touched on, was it [she asks herself in a whisper]? Avner: How do you think students coming out of the course will see issues of gender and multiculturalism relating to social studies? Jocelyn: Well, I guess the same way as they saw it going in [to the course], unless they chose to actively take them on. Avner: You said one can't write without one's positionality affecting what one writes. Jocelyn: Right. Avner: How many of the close to twenty articles you read in Peter's course were written by women? Jocelyn: Two Avner: By people of colour? 247 Jocelyn: I'd have to look at the whole thing again. It didn't strike me as [something to look at]. There might not have been anybody. I don't know.. . . You know, I hadn't thought of it, actually. It may be because we had talked about it and done so much of it in other classes, as things to be aware of, and after that it's up to you. And it was left up to us. Peter didn't give any weight to that at all. (Interview #3, December 11,1996) M a r y : Although [prospective teachers] might be more sensitive to issues of gender and multiculturalism than the average person, those issues still need to be spelled out because they are important for anybody who deals with kids in schools. Being sensitive to the cultural needs of others is something that all teachers should be aware of regardless of their faculty. Avner: As a social studies teacher, how would you incorporate those issues? Mary: I would incorporate it into the history of the province and stuff. There's the historical racism that has gone on in British Columbia that needs to be dealt with in social studies, for sure. We've got loads of information where that could be incorporated into a lesson plan. Like when we're teaching about the railroad, you can do: how the railroad was built and why it came to BC? Or, you could deal with who built the railroad and why did they build the railroad? You're still teaching about the railroad so you're fulfilling the IRP, right? But now you're also mixing in stuff about the Chinese workers and how they were disposable. Avner: How, in your view, did Peter deal with gender and multiculturalism in this course? Mary: I can't remember. I can't remember him dealing with it..... I'm sure he must have, though. Didn't he have a unit on that? (Interview #3, December 14,1996) Casey: [Incorporating issues of difference is important] because we're going to be teaching students from different cultures, students of different genders and there's a lot of empirical data that suggests there is a lot of bias where that's concerned. Its something I think we need to be aware of and I think it's absolutely necessary to teach teachers about it. As for gender bias, we discussed it in Educational Studies (EDST 314) and the instructor asked all the females in class if they ever felt discriminated against on the basis of gender. And we all said; "No!". And her remark was that maybe it's so entrenched in society that we don't ever realize it's happening, but it is. Avner: Do you think it's important to engage those issues in social studies? Casey: Yes. I mean, it's part of social studies, it's part of history, it's part of our society. The whole gender issue, for example, with history, I mean, we study what we think are the significant events in history which usually involve men. But there were also women who were involved in some way or another.and I think, again, it's important to recognize that. Avner: How do you do that it in the classroom? Casey: Well, we're sending these students into society and so I think we should, definitely, incorporate it and I think it would be a good idea for a teacher to have the students watch the teacher for one day and see if there is a gender bias when they're teaching, that type of thing. So it's relevant, it's right now, in their classroom and they see the importance of it. Avner: Any other way? 248 Casey: I would want students to look at what's around them too, you know, in their own lives .... with multiculturalism—getting to know the different students in their classroom: their backgrounds, their culture, where they came from, what they consider important, what holidays they celebrate, that type of thing and to respect that and also be proud of their own culture. Avner: How about gender? Casey: Well yeah. I would like to teach about women in history. I think it's hard to find a lot of information and a lot of the information is more bottom-up because women weren't making, you know, a lot of important decisions. But I would want to use current events too, especially in Vancouver, because it is a multicultural city. Avner: How were gender and multiculturalism incorporated in Peter's course? Casey: I think he was definitely aware of gender because of the remark he made at the beginning of the course [when he said he hoped male students wouldn't monopolize the space by taking most of the air time , an issue he soon found not to be a problem at all]. So I don't think it was addressed directly but I think it was threaded through the class. (Interview #3, December 16, 1996) Ron: [Dealing with issues of difference and positionality in a teacher education program is significant] because they influence how we teach and I think that's something we need to make explicit and really think about and discuss, especially if we have any intention of changing the way we run society or the way that we teach. If we want to teach students to be critical about society, about what they're learning, then, sure, we have to examine our own values. And I think also that there's no such thing as value-free education. Even the idea of being value-free is value laden in itself. So yeah. I do think we have to engage these topics. Avner: When you say "engage," what do you mean? Ron: I think it's not enough to read a bunch of viewpoint about those issues. I think it's important to reflect and find out where we ourselves stand on these things, what we believe, what we're going to be acting on. Avner: Is it important to also engage those things as a social studies teacher? Ron: Yeah. I do think so. I mean certainly a part of social studies and history will be, at the very least, to look at gender roles and gender relations. And, again, if you're in a social studies class and you're taking about issues such as power relations, you're going to have to start dealing with it in terms of multiculturalism and gender and sexual orientation. Avner: You said it's important to engage those issues in education and also in social studies. Were those issues engaged in Peter's course? Ron: Not explicitly. . . . But I think they were engaged because they are part-and-parcel of the approach of critical thinking which the course focused on. I think that a critically reflective person will, at the very least, question these issues of gender equity and multiculturalism and think about them. And Peter seemed to model a kind of a democratic approach to learning in the classroom and I think that those values are part of that. Avner: Did the words "gender" or "multiculturalism" ever come up in class? 249 Ron: Not really. No. . . . And maybe it would have been better if we had discussed them explicitly. Avner: Who is multicultural education for? Ron: Ideally it should be for everybody but the cynical part of me wants to say that it's for mainstream Anglo-white people. Avner: Were most of the students in Peter's class mainstream Anglo-white students? Ron: Yes So why weren't we talking about it?! Actually, as a friend of rnine said, the problem with multiculturalism in Canada is that the French and English think they are above it. (Interview #3, December 7,1996) Speaking to students' own understandings of the role, place, and purpose of discussing gender and multiculturalism in education as well as to how those were (and were not) engaged in the their own education, the above passages begin to provide answers to some of the questions raised by Armento in the opening section of this chapter. Naturally, each of the participants, addressing different aspects, responds differently. And while I will occasionally return to individual responses as the chapter progresses, my purpose is to focus on the commonalities rather than the differences in student teachers' thinking. Indeed, the power of the message coming out of these excerpts, I believe, lies in what participants share in common when they speak about difference in education. That is, in the answer their combined responses provides to the following question: "Why and how gender and multiculturalism in social studies (or any) education? To what and whose educative ends?", a question to which I will keep coming back throughout this chapter. Examining these excerpts, several issues and, consequently, corresponding questions, become immediately apparent. First, perhaps, participants' articulate and to some degree already thought-through answers imply that issues of gender and multiculturalism were not ignored in this teacher education program, that students had ample opportunities to discuss them prior to this interview. Such discussions, however, as students make explicit, did not take place in their social studies methods course. How then and where were issues of difference engaged in this teacher education program? And what impact did their omission from the methods course and their commission elsewhere have on prospective teachers' understandings of difference in social studies education? Second, these excerpts definitively indicate that while participants vary in their responses as to the purpose (though not the process) of including issues of difference in education, they are unanimous about the need for, the benefits of, and their own undivided 250 commitment to such an incorporation. Indeed, throughout my six interviews, issues pertaining to gender and multiculturalism very often came centre-stage as student teachers—both as students at the university and as teachers in schools— continuously discussed their importance. Further, participants all demonstrate an understanding that difference is not only pertinent to the broad context of society and education but is connected to, and permeates (and thus should be addressed in) the social studies curriculum, and, more importantly, in the social studies classroom itself. Combined, participants bring forth a variety of reasons for focusing on issues of gender and multiculturalism. These range from the reality of a multicultural student-body to the need to empower students, challenge societal inequalities, combat misogyny, racism, and other forms of discrimination. How would such goals be achieved according to these six student teachers? The connection between the past and the present is overtly apparent. By learning about women and Other in the past, participants unanimously argue in the above excerpts, one doesn't only expose students to the contributions of those groups to our collective history and culture but also, by placing them as equally important contributors to our past, advance the possibility of seeing them as equal partners in our present. And yet, at the same time as participants' commitment to issues of difference is unquestionable, a closer look at their above responses and those to follow, raise questions as to the nature of education about/for difference to which they are committed as well as its relation to the one they received. What constitutes an education about gender and multiculturalism for this group of participants and in this teacher education program? How, when, and where is it to be manifested? Who are gender and multiculturalism about, who are they for? Are the two one and the same? How, when, and where is difference implicated in the process of education? Students' comments provide some explicit answers to these questions, though those pertain mostly to their own education while learning to teach rather than to their role as future teachers. The only question they address explicitly from that latter perspective is the first—What constitutes an education that engages issues of gender and multiculturalism? Their unanimous and, in many ways, only response to that question pertains to the need to infuse the curriculum with histories of and by women and Other. It is this recurring response, coupled with an absence of any explicit discussion about any of the other questions, which needs to be addressed. For while few would disagree with the need to rectify a mostly Euro-centric, white-, male-dominated history curriculum, the question remains whether incorporating 251 content about and by women and Other as a singular educative focus is sufficient to rectify the inequalities prospective teachers wish to redress. "While stories of difference proliferate in education, along with the pluralistic desire to count them all," claims Britzman (1997), "making room for diversity and making diversity a room is not the same as exploring the tangles of implication" (p. 32). According to Britzman, inclusion is insufficient unless it is examined, pedagogically, in the context of exclusion— how one is implicated in the other, how both implicate the educative process and are implicated in it, and how learners themselves, never abstracted from culture and history, are already entangled in those webs of implications. Any educative process which relies on inclusion but, as Mastermen (1985) points out, "fails to recognise the extent to which patterns of Who are gender and multiculturalism about? Examining who prospective teachers believe are included within the terms gender and mult iculturalism, who remain outside of them, provides a prism with which to explore what those terms meant to this group of participants. I will begin with gender. Of the six participants, Ron alone emphasized the need to examine gender roles and relations in a social studies classroom, thus recognizing, as Scott (1988) has, that gender itself, as a historically and socially constructed web of relationships, gives meaning to the organization and perception of reality. By doing that, Ron, to borrow from Scott, suggested " tha t in fo rmat ion about women is necessari ly information about men, that one implies the study of the other. This usage insists that the world of women is part of the world of men, created in and by it" ( Ib id. , p. 32). [ST1 Jack: Although I discussed studying gender roles as looking at women's roles, I believe it is implied that this would also involve looking at their relationship wi th men and how men have constructed their (women's) roles and how they (women) also have had agency in their roles and in history (March, 1999).] For all others, as will be illustrated in the examples to follow, gender simply meant women. Whether the focus was on learning about women in the past or enabling women in the present of prospect ive teachers ' c lassrooms, gender, nevertheless, pertained to one of the sexes, not the other. While male students, according to these participants, were not precluded from the need to learn about women, the definition of gender used, precluded men from the equation. Yet trying to make sense of a woman's perspective without taking into account the forces which maintain her as wo/man or fe/male is, as Frey (1983) claims, "like trying to explain why a marble stops rolling without taking friction into account" (p. xi-xi i . cf. Treichler, 1986, p. 70). Gender, however, Jocelyn points out, seemed not only to separate women from men, it also separated them from people. "Why on earth," she asks of the discourse and practice in the UBC Teacher Education Program, "is mult icultural ism separate f rom gender issues and why are gender issues separated f rom everything else? Whenever we're asked to write a paper, we're either asked to write on gender or multiculturalism. Why can't we write on both when one leads up to the other and the manifestation of both are really the same thing? (Interview # 3, December, 1 1 , 1996). Difference, it appears, has its categories, each are defined, engaged, and ruled separately. But as was the case with gender, mult icultural ism, too, it appears, applies to some, not all. While participants emphasize that engaging issues of multiculturalism (as in the case of gender) is meant to benefit all students in the c lass room, regard less of co lour , e thn ic i t y , or cu l tu re , mult iculturalism, it seems, is still inherently about the Other, not the privileged, normative centre (the dominant Other) which, as standard and erasure, creates Other, makes Othering possible, intelligible, at t imes, even profitable (Roman, 1993; Sleeter, 1993; Giroux, 1997; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997; Fine et al., 1997) 3 . 252 dorrvination and subordination are deeply embedded within . . . pedagogic practices and, indeed, within all of our perceptions of ourselves and others," will scarcely achieve any of the goals to which participants strive. However different or radical new content may be, Masterman adds, if the relationship between teachers and students to knowledge, and to their own implication in knowledge remain unproblematized, it will do little to challenge existing patterns of domination (p. 37). Participants' understanding of the nature of engaging issues of difference in the social studies classroom revolves around, and stems from, the infusion of Other in the current exclusionary curriculum. Britzman and Masterman start similarly but move beyond; they enter the pedagogical. While what participants say addresses the need to teach about women and Other (either in a specific unit or throughout the curriculum), the position advocated by Britzman and Masterman uses what and how women and Other story as a pedagogy with which to inquire—a critical prism through which one might investigate everything and teach all. Consequently, and while focusing on the need to infuse new—previously "marginalized"—content, none of the participants see difference as a means for a different kind of pedagogy— an interrogative pedagogy of difference which, as Ramsey (1987) points out, is a perspective that is reflected in all decisions about every phase and aspect of teaching. It is a lens through which teachers can scrutinize their options and choices in order to clarify what social information [and formation] they are conveying overtly and covertly to their students. In a sense, it is a series of questions to induce educators to challenge and expand the goals and values that underlie their curriculum designs, materials, and activities. This perspective infuses educational decisions and practices at all stages and in an expansive way of thinking that enables teachers to see new potential in both familiar and novel [curriculum materials] activities and events, (p. 6. cf. Goodwin, 1997, p. 12.) The emphasis participants put on content rather than on pedagogy—indeed the separation they make between them—I argue, is not innocent. While that separation may be the result of a variety of factors, some, no doubt, beyond the realm of teacher education, it must be regarded as implicated in and tangled in the structure, discourse and practice of this particular teacher education program with regards to issues of difference. S t r u c t u r i n g d i f f e r e n c e , p r a c t i c i n g d i f f e r e n t l y Addressing difference in teacher (any) education, claims Gay (1986), can generally be organized in two ways: through the infusion approach, which integrates attention to diversity throughout the program's various courses and field experiences, or through the segregated approach, which 253 treats diversity as the focus of a single course or as a topic in a few courses, while other components of the program remain untouched. While studies indicate a clear preference for the infusion approach, not surprisingly the segregated approach dominates, (cf. Melnick & Zeichner, 1997, pp. 27-28). Incorporating a discussion about issues of difference in some of its courses but not in others, the UBC Teacher Education Program was an example of this latter, segregated approach.4 The primary responsibility for dealing with issues of difference—multiculturalism, gender, race, class, and sexual orientation—in this teacher education program was delegated to a compulsory Educational Studies course—the Analysis of Education (EDST 314). Bringing gender and multiculturalism to the forefront, this course focused on how the politics of difference and differentiation are always already inscribed in education (that which is) and thus also, and simultaneously, prescribe education (that which will be). Discussing the various ways in which women and minorities have been (and are still) marginalized—in society and education—students were made aware of the need to address and redress such marginalization in their classrooms. Two other courses—the Educational Psychology courses (EPSE 307 and 317)—also engaged issues of difference in their curriculum, specifically the latter which focused on the inclusion of "special" students. With an emphasis on educational psychology and cognitive development, however, the contribution of these courses to the incorporation of difference was at the individual rather than societal level, focusing on the importance of recognizing one's learners as different while at the same time accommodating their different needs equally. Courses focusing on pedagogy, on the other hand, were mostly silent about issues of difference. The degree to with the social studies methods course neglected to address those issues, at least explicitly, has already been demonstrated in students' responses excerpted above. Being the main focus and location of this study, I will naturally return to this course to examine the impact of that silence on prospective teachers' understandings of difference. But the silence in this course on issues of difference was not an isolated endeavour; it coincided with the omission of difference from the discourse in Principles of Teaching (POT)—the one course about pedagogy required by all student teachers, regardless of their teaching concentration. In the five lectures students attended in that course—each focusing, in turn, on the role of the teacher, instructional planning, teaching strategies, assessment and evaluation, and classroom management—issues of difference played no role. Nor were they incorporated in any of the readings or the dozen case studies 254 student teachers were asked to read, analyze, and respond to while discussing the above topics. Although the multicultural nature of the student-body was often referred to in these case studies by referring to Other students' non-European names, difference was never addressed as an issue in any of those case studies. Nor did it present itself as something to consider while thinking about pedagogy. Difference seemed to have no relevance, in any way, to prospective teachers' planning, teaching strategies, assessment and evaluation, or classroom management. Those all stood above and beyond issues of difference, never affecting or affected by them. And in spite of the fact that a third course on pedagogy—-Issues in Social Studies Education—did focus on issues of gender and multiculturalism, specifically, in the social studies classroom, it did so primarily by emphasizing the need to insert content about the Others into the existing history curriculum. By doing that, the argument went, prospective teachers will be able to illustrate to their future students that although subjugated groups—i.e., women, Chinese, Japanese, or First Nation Canadians—have been mostly excluded from and rendered silent in the chronicles of "official" history, they were nevertheless influential and active members of past communities. (It is therefore not surprising to find these very examples in participants' comments opening this chapter). [ S T f l Ron: I think that toward the end of one POT class, toward the end of the course, we all suddenly "waxed enthusiastic" about the need to address issues of gender and multiculturalism. And then left it at that (March, 1999).] What emerges, then, is a structure whereby issues of difference were engaged primarily in foundations or "content" courses while being mostly excluded from the two courses on pedagogy—two courses which, as I have indicated elsewhere (Chapter V) seemed to matter most to this group of participants. And while the contribution of those courses to student teachers' understanding of difference (and the need to infuse difference) in education is quite apparent in participants' initial responses, what these courses did not do is provide prospective teachers a pedagogy of how to engage issues of gender and multiculturalism in the classroom (and the social studies classroom in particular) or how to engage a classroom or a curriculum with and through them. [ST1 Jocelyn: I note the separation you observe and I agree. It's problematic, but I wonder how many currently employed teachers focus on the "how" in their teaching along with the "what" in their courses. I'll bet the number is very small (March, 1999).] Although a variety of issues pertaining to difference in what I or the participants have stated thus far could be pursued in this chapter, it is this last 255 aspect in particular—the question of addressing difference in social studies education as content/pedagogy—I will focus on. While such a focus might seem overly narrow in light of what participants have already stated (and will state below) regarding gender, multiculturalism, and difference, the relationship between engaging those issues as content as opposed to pedagogy seemed most prominent to me both as a researcher in the context of this teacher education program and as a social studies teacher in the context of teaching in high school social studies classrooms. The social studies methods course The comments participants made in the passages opening this chapter raise three issues pertaining to the social studies methods course in particular. First, in spite of the fact that, as they all stated, issues of gender and multiculturalism are inherently relevant in/to social studies education, those played no explicit role within the social studies methods course itself. Second, although the methods course did not engage issues of difference explicitly, two of the participants claimed those issues were nevertheless always there implicitly, through Peter's open, inclusive and democratic pedagogy. The third issue, while not raised by participants themselves, nevertheless becomes evident from their responses. It pertains to the idea that while participants believed it is important to include issues of gender and multiculturalism in the education they are to provide their own future students, they seemed to be indifferent, at least prior to my conversation with them, to the fact that issues of difference were absent from a methods course preparing them to be social studies teachers. Yet, while I believe the avoidance of making such a connection is related to the first two issues, I see it more as part of a larger separation taking place in the entire teacher education rather than the responsibility of the methods course alone. Therefore, at this point, I will focus on the first two issues and leave the discussion about the third to the following section. Although the most obvious message coming out of prospective teachers' comments was that the methods course did not incorporate issues of difference, I wish to begin with those who stated it did. Casey and, especially, Ron, stated that while issues of difference were not present in the explicit curriculum of the methods course (and should have been), they were nevertheless always implicitly there in Peter's pedagogy. Ron gave two reasons for this assertion. First, that Peter had repeatedly emphasized the need for prospective teachers to bring in a variety of perspectives (texts) on any issue studied in the classroom. And while the focus in the 256 methods course was on variety rather than diversity, students were, no doubt, encouraged to include diversity in their variety: to incorporate peripheral histories that glean the past differently; to bring texts currently at the margins to the centre of the curriculum in order to "view concepts, issues, and problems from diverse cultural perspectives" (Banks, 1991, p. 138. See also Banks, 1995, 1997; Edgerton, 1996). But the incorporation of difference in the methods course was most apparent, according to Ron, through Peter's modeling of a "democratic and egalitarian pedagogy," a pedagogy which, as Huber et al. (1997) advocate, was "responsive to diversity in the classroom [by] starting with where the learner is" (p. 136). This latter point, in particular, Ron added appropriately, was not only advocated in the process of student teachers' learning to teach but was also, and contrary to what took place in other courses, actually practiced as they were learning to teach in this methods course. When Ron spoke of Peter's open and democratic pedagogy he was also referring, I believe, to a learning environment which fit well within pedagogical approaches advocated in some of the feminist literature. This entailed, among other things: an atmosphere of self reflection, trust, mutual respect, and community (Goodman, 1992; Hicks, 1990), based in/on egalitarian and cooperative structures (Schneidewind, 1987), and a teaching style that was constantly open to questioning (though little of it ever took place) through its tentativeness and pauses, inviting students to enter, critique, and reject, as well as support, add, and connect learning taking place in the classroom with their previous educational experiences (see also Shrewsbury, 1987; Kenway & Modra 1992; Sikes-Scering, 1977; Boxer, 1982; Treichler, 1986). Indeed, any researcher located in that methods course would have had to recognize that a respect for difference infused Peter's pedagogy. But as a critical researcher, I find it necessary to ask two questions. First, if, as Ron mentioned, Peter's pedagogy was an example of how to incorporate issues of difference as pedagogy, and if issues of difference are indeed important in social studies education, why not bring this pedagogy to the forefront in a course focusing on pedagogy so as to examine (and learn from) what it makes possible, who it enables, and why? The fact that Ron alone made the connection between issues of difference in social studies and Peter's pedagogy, might give some indication that such an examination was not conducted. Thus, paradoxically, students lost twice. Once because issues of difference were not engaged as pedagogy anywhere else in this teacher education program and, second, because the only place perhaps in which 257 difference was infused, it did not serve as a learning opportunity for all. [ST! Jocelyn: However, I think that these issues surround us in everything we do and therefore we need not "talk" about them—we live them. No one articulated this in class but I know I thought/felt them (March, 1999). Avner: Isn't it exactly because these issues are all around us, impact so much of what we do, that we need to "talk" about them? (April, 1999).] The second question that ought to be asked, and either regardless of the above or in combination with it, is whether incorporating elements of what Kenway & Modra (1992) call a liberal feminist perspective, as important as they may be, are sufficient to reconcile the fact that none of the terms "difference," "gender," or "multiculturalism" ever entered the discourse of the methods course. Granted, simply invoking these terms guarantees little. But excluding them entirely necessarily gives some indication as to their value, or lack there of. For silences are as informative as are the utterances surrounding them; the former always works with, through, and against the latter to educate. Ron addresses this silence and its impact when I ask him, during out last interview, to look back and re-evaluate the methods course. But as he speaks about the omissions in this methods course, he also relates them to its commissions and how one informs the other. Ron: At the time, Peter's course was the most valuable and the most central of all my courses. I enjoyed it the most, it seemed to be most immediately relevant. I felt that it and my ED Studies 314 [the course focusing specifically on issues of difference] were the most important for me. But now thinking back, Peter's seems such a small part of the learning I value and the things that I'm really interested in and engaged in and really enjoy talking about. Avner: What are some of the other things you enjoy talking about? Ron: All this business about language, about culture, about discourse, about dealing with racism and multiculturalism and anti-racist and anti-sexist teaching. Avner: And those were not part of the methods course? Ron: We didn't talk about them at all, really. It's funny, you know, most, if not all, the authors we discussed in Peter's course were male. I actually don't remember if there was one female writer, other than the two in the literature component [Ron is referring to the class I discussed in the previous chapter in which students engaged the role of fiction in the history classroom] Avner: What does that tell you? [ST! Avner: I recognize this question (as many of my other questions elsewhere) is a leading question which invites Ron to provide the answer he does. But don't all questions, even those cloaked with an aura of "neutrality" have similar effects? Is there ever a "neutral" question, one which does not position participants to respond in particular ways?] 258 Ron: First, that male knowledge is more important than female knowledge. But it also tells me that female knowledge has more to do with literature and less to do with so called hard facts. It's rubbish but that's the message. We get into this whole idea that women are in charge of the affective side of learning and men are in charge of cognitive aspects of education. (Interview #6, July 19, 1997) [ST! Ron: Earlier in the "text" it was pointed out that the separation between history and fiction is not as clear as we wanted to believe. And yet, at the same time, the metadiscourse subtly enforced that separation by placing the "literature" component toward the end of the course. And it is very interesting that the only two female authors I could remember from the course were in the literature section—the section we came to see as a nice but non-essential adjunct to the "real" (male authored) business of reading primary sources (March, 1999).] Other than providing a more detailed account as to what it is the methods course neglected to address, Ron adds another dimension to the discussion by illustrating how the ways in which knowledge is positioned, how we use it and for what purposes, determines its status and positions those participating in the educative process to ascribe it particular value. Though Peter surely did not intend to convey the message Ron received, it is difficult to conceive of any other message he or any of the other participants might have taken away when, to their understanding, women's knowledge in history was only relegated to a literature section, discussed outside the history unit proper, and lumped together toward the conclusion of the methods course with other peripheral issues outside the realm of the "disciplined." But while this message is understandable, as it is insightful, it raises another issue— one about the positionality of knowledge and knowing. For although Ron—and as the opening statements illustrate, also Jack and Jocelyn—believed that women's knowledge in this course was only relegated to the "literature section," the course outline indicates that female authors were also included elsewhere. But since it is perception rather than accuracy I am (as I have been thus far) after, what must be addressed is why this group of participants thought what they did? Why did they only think of the authors in the literature section as women, not those elsewhere? I have no answer to the first part of the question other than that which Ron himself provided. As he suggested, it is perhaps because prior experiences in history classrooms had already conditioned students to expect to find female authors writing about the role of literature in history that they in fact found what they were looking for. (If that is indeed the case, the relationship between history and fiction cannot, as I have suggested in the previous chapter, remain unexamined). The answer to the second part of the question—why did participants not identify female writers as such elsewhere—is, however, easier to come by. It derives, primarily, I believe, from the fact that class discussions about course readings (and, as a result, 259 what students learned from those discussions about how to read future course readings) neglected to address the positionality of its authors. Nor, for that matter, did they ever address the positionality of students as readers. Writing and reading, thus, were abstracted from the very ways which make them possible. Such an omission is intriguing since one of the readings underlying the course was Wineburg's (1991) On reading historical texts. In it, Wineburg discusses the difference between how a group of high school students and a group of historians each read a set of six documents about the break out of the American Revolution. "For most students," Wineburg writes, "the text's attribution carried no special weight; it was merely the final bit of information in a string of textual propositions. But to historians, a document's attribution was not the end of the document but its beginning; sources were viewed as people, not objects." And "when texts are viewed as human creations," Wineburg adds, "what is said becomes inseparable from who says it" (p. 510). And although most historical documents brought into the methods course—i.e., photographs of the Depression, The Ballad of Crowfoot, or the Heritage Minutes—were indeed read the way Wineburg proposes, course readings, by and large, were not. [ST% Peter: There are various and multiple purposes for reading any particular text. Are students interested in Wineburg's social location? Do they need to discuss it? I think not, at least not for the richest use of the article in the context of the methods course. (March, 1999). Ron: In other words, we're only interested in the author's location when we are reading a primary source. Yet it seemed to me that we abolished the distinction between primary and secondary sources in Peter's class. I remember us coming to the conclusion that whether a text is a primary or secondary source depends on our purpose for reading it. What this says, then, is that we need not—or even should not—integrate our purpose for reading someone like Wineburg (March, 1999). Jocelyn: It seems to me that you, Avner, would agree that "social location" and the discussion that could have ensued, would have been the richest use of the article for a methods course. Perhaps you and Peter simply have different values. Of course you do! You are different people (March, 1999).] "A necessary part of perceiving how the assumption of Whiteness shapes the construction of classroom knowledge is understanding its centrality to the academy's practices of intellectual domination . . . Such domination is often couched in the language of detachment and universality, wherein the class, race, and gender position of the "knower" is ignored or presumed irrelevant." (Maher & Thompson Tetreault, 1997, p. 325) 260 Consequently, although course readings did include articles by people of colour, it is not surprising that Jocelyn, in her opening comments responds to a question—how many of the course readings were written by people of colour?—by stating that according to her knowledge there were none. Similarly, how could have Jack responded to that same question other than by saying, as he did, facetiously, that he had no way of knowing since course readings included no pictures? For when the gender, race, or ethnicity of the author do not become part of the conversation, when the attributes of a reading are not where one begins (or ends), and when what is considered is only what and how authors say rather than from where they say it, it is not surprising that students provided the responses they did. [STf Ron: It is interesting to note that one of my classmates in my First Nations' Education course presented his discussion paper to the class in the form of an icon painted on a buffalo robe, in the tradition of his ancestors (Blackfoot). This certainly provides a "picture" of the author! (March, 1999).] In my view, however, the most powerful messages sent by the lack of explicit engagement with issues of gender and multiculturalism in the methods course were not those corning out of the methods course itself but rather those which worked in conjunction with those conveyed by the teacher education program as a whole and particularly with the messages coming from the other methods course—the one which did address the place for gender and multiculturalism in social studies. It is the particular combination of what the latter offered and the former did not, I propose, that shaped prospective teachers' understandings of how one does (and should) engage issues of gender and multiculturalism in social studies education both as students, then as teachers. By relegating issues of gender and multiculturalism to SSED 317—a second social studies methods course required only of students with social studies education as their single teaching focus (thus, in my case, excluding Jocelyn, Charles, and Ron), by not making them part of the "basic" social studies methods course, two important message were simultaneously conveyed. First, that gender and multiculturalism are not part of, or not relevant to, basic social studies instruction. They therefore become an after-thought, aspects social studies teachers might add on to the existing curriculum, if and when time permits, if and when materials are available, if and when the student-body necessitates it, not issues fundamentally embedded in and always relevant to everything social studies teachers already do, regardless. Second, by addressing issues of gender and multiculturalism in the second social studies methods course primarily as content, 261 and by not infusing them into the explicit discussion about pedagogy in either of those courses, students were left with the notion that while it might be important to include those issues in what social studies teachers teach, they are not as pertinent to how they teach any content, whether or not it includes Other texts. [STI Jocelyn: I think there may be other reasons for making the choice to exclude multiculturalism and gender from what was done in the social studies method course. EDST 314, another "basic" course, was to touch on these issues and as a matter of economy, perhaps, this division was then made. Unfortunately, this teacher education program did not turn out to be as cohesive as it could have been. My EDST 314 course, for example, failed to address issues of gender and multiculturalism adequately (March, 1999).] Elements of these two messages come through as Jack and Ron speak about their practicum. Jack: In the grade nine classes, we briefly discussed the lack of women in history and that everything is about men, studying men. I tried to get a few women in the biographies we did, but not many. I'm trying to think if I talked about it with other classes not a lot. Not enough. I would like to do it more. Avner: So why don't you? Jack: It's difficult to find opportunities. Again, I'm teaching the curriculum. And [when you do so] you try whenever possible to talk about women's issues or issues with women or you can briefly talk about their omission. . . . But I think it would take a lot of work to put together any sort of unit or even a few lessons on women and their role; it's just hard. The sources aren't out there and I didn't have a tonne of time on my hands. (Interview #4, March 13,1997) Ron: I did a bit [of incorporating multiculturalism] in the grade eleven, but not so much. I could have talked a lot about the Asian Exclusionary Act or the Head Tax [but I didn't]. I did, however, bring in a little bit about some of the battalions in the First World War being made up, for example, of Japanese Canadians or Chinese Canadians... . When I gave that class an assignment to write a letter to Prime Minister Borden either supporting or criticizing the Conscription Act, I gave them a list of possible perspectives from which to write. On the board, I gave examples of a farmer, a loyalist, a woman. But afterwards I thought: "What about a Chinese immigrant? What about a Native Canadian or a Japanese Canadian? What would their thoughts be about the conscription issue? But because I only thought of it much later, after they had all started doing their writing, nobody took up that thread. Other than that, I haven't done anything explicitly multicultural. Avner: How about gender? Ron: With grade elevens, again, talking about women getting the right to vote. I managed to get in a couple of readings on that issue. But the majority of what I've been doing is very curriculum-based, very close to the textbook. So that, of course, restricts, in a way, how much I'm getting into issues of race and gender in class. . . . I mean it is quite a risk to stop the class and say: "Take a look at all the names I've just listed," in my grade nine socials class and ask, "How many women do you see?" "None," "Why is that?" and start thinking about that. Although I might very well do 262 that now that I think about it. It might be an interesting point of discussion. But somehow that feels like I'm getting off topic, off track somehow. There's still a sense that by the end of my practicum, and I only have two weeks, I have to be at the end of chapter 19. And if I go off on this tangent, I'm going to lose time. (Interview #5, April 15,1997) Although Jack and Ron both included issues of gender and multiculturalism in a variety of instances elsewhere in their practicum (and I will provide examples further on), the notion that those are somewhat external to the curriculum, nevertheless, persisted throughout. "It's difficult to find opportunities. I'm teaching the curriculum," claims Jack. "What I've been doing," Ron adds, "is very curriculum-based . . . So that, of course, restricts, in a way, how much I'm getting into issues of race and gender in class." Why "of course"? Is the curriculum of social studies education antithetical to issues of difference? Or is it Jack and Ron's conception of the curriculum, of what it entails, of what it curtails? And if it is, as I believe, the latter, what positioned them to think about the curriculum the way they do? And what does Ron mean by "in a way" when speaking about the degree to which he is "able to get into issues of race and gender in class"? How and what does "that way" restrict? That is, what is it that the curriculum restricts and in what ways does it do so? Answers to these questions begin to emerge when one examines the different approaches for engaging issues of difference in the social studies classroom embedded in the responses Jack and Ron provide. Broadly, they speak of three different approaches. The first, strives to teach students about women and Other by including information about their past contributions. This, from the examples Jack and Ron provide, is where much their energy was directed (and if they only had more time and resources, would have been even further). The second approach, perhaps compensating for the lack of resources necessary for the first, is to "briefly speak about their omission." The third approach, while beginning with inclusion (the essence of approach #1), not only highlights the omission of subjugated groups from the curriculum and moves on (as does approach #2) but, rather, by asking the "why" and "how" questions about their exclusion, engages the politics of representation. Contrary to the first two approaches, the third is overtly political in nature. Questioning how, in spite of its acts of exclusion, history, as a school subject, manages the illusion of a narrative that speaks equally to and for all, this third approach examines how (and whose) knowledge is positioned to tell and how it positions audiences to listen. It moves from the transmission of content to a 263 discussion about the politics of annunciation and the relationship between power and knowledge, inclusion and exclusion. But the restricting elements of the curriculum come to light, in a self-regulating process more than an imposition, through the degree of appropriateness Jack and Ron ascribe each of the three approaches. Both believe the first two approaches are permissible, perhaps desirable within current practices of social studies education (I would like to do it more," states Jack). The third, on the other hand, claims Ron, is a "risky" endeavour—"a tangent," "getting off topic," "a diversion" from the real business of social studies education. But what is the real business of social studies education with regards to issues of gender and multiculturalism? For what purpose inclusion? To what and whose educative ends? [ST! Jack: I disagree with Ron. It is not risky, a tangent, or off topic. Perhaps he is referring to teaching this within the constraints of a practicum. These are in fact very much opportunities that engage students. My sentiment remains that I would like to do it more—that is, discussing gender from a more critical/postmodern perspective (March, 1999).] The politics and poetics of representation In A philosophy of history in fragments Heller (1993) claims that people "are thrown into a World, but only by having been thrown into History do they have a world" (p. 33). The question facing social studies educators, therefore, is not only how one "gets thrown" into history to claim a world, but, as Yerushalmi (1982) puts it, "what kind of past [and whose past] shall we have" (p. 99) in order to do the 'claiming'? Answers to such questions are significant for history not only renders a particular past intelligible but through it, also makes for a specific present and a possible future. Thus, any decision as to who is excluded from our rendition of the past and who is included, as well as how and where, has consequences far beyond the pages of the textbook. Influenced by new understandings within the academe as well as by grass-roots movements and ministry guidelines sensitive to community voices, her-story and Others'-stories are increasingly finding their way into the mainstream—his-story—of the history curriculum. Though often still relegated peripheral status through their marginalization as add-ons in particular highlighted and/or segregated sections of the text, women, First Nations' people, and a variety of other un- and under-represented groups, nevertheless, increasingly find their place in the history textbook, often not only as objects but as, subjects of their own stories. 264 Utilizing what was already in the textbook in use, often supplementing it with other—more inclusive—textbooks and curricular materials, student teachers did their best to insert Other into the curriculum. As Mary, for one, explains, she supplemented the existing textbook with another "because I wanted to focus on groups the school textbook doesn't cover like women and native history and immigrant history" (Interview # 5, April 24,1997). And while "covering" women's and native history is, no doubt, important, simply incorporating their experiences guarantees little beyond incorporation itself. For, as Scott (1996) claims, and as the following example will illustrate, simply adding experiences of women and Other in the history/social studies curriculum provides little more than "a rediscovery of ourselves in the past." Experience itself, Scott (1991b) argues, is "always already an interpretation and in need of interpretation" (p. 779. cf. Olesen. 1994, p. 167). Experience is experienced one way, not the other because one is positioned, pedagogically—through language, power, culture, and previous experiences—to experience certain things and in particular ways. "Merely taking experience into account," claims Olesen (1994), "does not reflect on how that experience came to be. [Thus] oppressive systems are replicated rather than criticized in the unquestioning reliance on 'experience'" (p. 167). In his statement opening this chapter, Charles was passionate about the need to engage issues of gender in education because "gender equity is always an issue... . [hence] you have to discuss it at some point." As social studies teachers, he added, "you can decide whether you want to cover . . . women in history, or not." Charles himself said he would choose the former—to talk about "women in history. It's obviously important... because it's a part of history and it doesn't get talked about much. (Interview #3, December 18, 1996). Visiting Charles during his practicum, it was apparent he had made good on his initial decision. When asked about a lesson or a unit he was especially proud of, and why, Charles tells me of a two-lesson mini-unit about the 'King's daughters', one he received from his sponsor teacher who, in turn, borrowed it a few years earlier from the school's vice principal (both males). These two lessons, Charles explains, are part of a grade nine unit about Canada in the 1600s, specifically about New France (Quebec). The king of France wanted to populate the colony but there were no women in New France [no white women, that is]. So he recruited interested orphan and young women in France, paid them, and sent them over to marry the men who were already here to start making families." Charles' purpose was to have students understand" that this is what happened and this is how it worked and this is how women came over and what marriage was actually like at the beginning. 265 After discussing "how things were in Europe at the time, who these girls were, and why they might have chosen to come over instead of living in France," and in preparation for the re-enactment of the selection process following the arrival of the King's daughters in New France, Charles had students create their own imaginary biographies, the boys of the white settlers, the girls of the 'King's daughters'. "Each student could choose the character they wanted to be and their own name." In their biographies, "the King's daughters had to answer the following questions: 'who are you, where are you from?' 'What do you expect life to be like in New France?' 'What are your expectations in marriage?' And 'what qualities do you think you could offer your new husband?'" The boys, too, had to write their biographies, responding to the following: '"who are you?' 'What was your past job?' 'Where did you come from?' 'What are your expectation of marriage?' And 'what kinds of things are you looking for in a wife?'" Using these biographies, Charles hoped to simulate the initial selection process experience whereby the girls [King's daughters] didn't have much of a choice at all, where the women would get herded into a room and one at a time the guys would go: 'That one.' and that would be it. And they'd get married. . . . So I had the girls [in my class] come into the room and put the biographies they had written on the wall (no pictures!) and then leave the room. Then the guys came in and had 30 seconds to pick the one they wanted. . . So now they are paired off and tomorrow they will actually get married in a ceremony." Avner: Why are you particularly proud of this unit? Charles: Because they were all right into it. It was fun. They were either pretty excited or not too thrilled when they found out who they were matched with. It's totally different from anything they've already done. It's a fun activity. I mean there are a couple of little paragraph-assignments that they have to do. It's not worth a lot of marks. It's just something fun. I mean they're still learning but they're not taking notes and stuff. Avner: What are they learning? Charles: They're learning the whole process [of selection] without them even thinking about it. They know who these women were and they know why they came. And they're going to write about how life was back then on their own. [So] they're going to learn for themselves a little bit. Tomorrow they're going to get together [in their pairs] and create a little one- or two-minute dialogue of what kinds of things they would say to each other. And then for homework, they're going to write [about] how they feel the day after: are they happy with their wife so far or their husband? What are they looking forward to? I mean it's not a lot of factual information. But it's getting them role-playing, getting them to kind of pretend they were in the time and how they would feel being selected. It would probably be interesting to see what some of the girls think, if they didn't get picked by the person they hoped to be picked by. If that happened, it would be a little different than if you were picked by a friend. So this particular assignment is about their feelings the day after the marriage. But then they'll have other assignments in the next four days about how they feel five and ten years into the marriage [where they'll discuss how things are] 266 now [that] you're on the farm, now [that] you work for the seignior, now that you've cleared the land and life is hard. Avner: So students will continue exploring Canadian history for the rest of the year from the perspective of those couples and how those couples experienced life in Canada at the time? Charles: No. They'll only be married for a total of four days, until the end of this unit. (Interview #5, May 1,1997) There are obviously a variety of pedagogical aspects that ought to be addressed in the above mini-unit. My analysis, however, will only focus on one, with the intention to illustrate that striving for authenticity, empathy, and immediacy of experience—whether in the case of the King's daughters, women in the French Revolution, or the Chinese railroad workers—social studies teachers, eager to include, risk replicating, perhaps entrenching, oppressive systems rather than challenging them. As this example illustrates, simply adding or integrating content about ethnicity, women, or other marginalized groups to existing curriculum is insufficient (Spina, 1997, p. 32). Rather, and "with the understanding that difference is organized within relations of power, the point becomes more than to validate minority cultures [or to position the mere establishment of diversity as a final goal (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1997, p. 26)]; it is [partly] to 'provide a sustained critique of institutional practices that exclude them" (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 102. cf. Dutton & Grant, 1991, p. 40). For as important as inclusion may be, as Ron points out, this whole thing of inclusion we are now all getting into is still an Othering because we're still saying: " Oh, now we have to include aboriginal issues in education, now we have to include women, now we have to include this or another." And maybe now we're getting better at it and it can be a chapter rather than a few paragraphs in the textbook but it's still: "Here is history, here is women's history." How well would it go down to teach a course primarily based on women's history and say: "O.K.., now we have a section on men's history? (Interview #6, July 19,1997) What Ron is referring to is the need to examine the relationship between centre and margins, an issue inclusion alone fails to address. By pointing to that relationship, Ron enters the pedagogical; knowledge is no longer examined for itself, abstracted from the powers who put it there but, rather, in relation to other knowledge which makes it possible and the kind of knowledge it makes possible in return. Engaging history with a critical eye, according to Willinsky (1998), is not only about [adding] what or who has gone missing in the story of the past, but about a way of interrogating their exclusion when (and even as) we include them. 267 When the world-history textbook terminates the timeline of Chinese history in the sixteenth century ... the problem is not simply that it thereby misses the reality or truth of China. ... What is required of teachers here is an explanation of the textbook's suspension of Chinese history that would increase the intelligibility of the West's project with history and its teaching.... Good teachers have long found supplementary works on China to cover what's missing from the traditional program. But it also needs to be made apparent to students that such exclusion is not simply an oversight but a feature of how the disciplines of geography, history, science, language, and literature (as well as the arts and mathematics) have gone about dividing the world after the Age of Empire, (p. 250) Such an explanation requires more than "briefly speaking about their omission," as Jack had suggested earlier. For excluding histories of women, minority groups, and indigenous peoples from the overwhelmingly white, male-dominated curriculum, Giroux (1988a) points out, "is not politically innocent when we consider how existing social arrangements are partly constitutive of and dependent on the subjugation and elimination of the histories and voices of those groups marginalized and disempowered by the dominant culture" (p. 192). Without making these connections explicit, Mascia et al., (1989) point out, the historical links between cultures and the hierarchies of discourses within them can be ignored. "Then, they add, "the history of the colonial, for example, can be read as independent of that of the colonizer" (p. 29). "The assumption," to borrow from Goodson's (1995) discussion of voicing in research, "is that by empowering new voices and discourses, by telling stories, we will rewrite and reinscribe the old white male bourgeois rhetoric." But "new stories do not by themselves," Goodson adds, "analyse or address the structures of power." Thus, he suggests, "is it not worthy of pause to set the new stories and new voices against a sense of the centre's continuing power?" Otherwise, "is it not more likely then that new discourses and voices that empower the periphery at one and the same time fortify, (pp. 97-98. See also McCarthy, 1993, p. 294). What is needed, Spina (1997) agrees, is a shift "from superficial nods to subordinate groups which often celebrate deficits and disguise the legacy of The degree to which it is appropriate for women's issues to "dominate" the curriculum and, specifically, how women's issues ought to be presented, was demonstrated when I asked Jack whether he had found any role models in the school. After naming his two male sponsor teachers, Jack mentioned a female social studies teacher who teaches "the women's studies course—the women's perspective on social studies." When I questioned why he found her a good role model, Jack said: "I respect the principle of what she's trying to do. I mean social studies is traditionally pretty male dominated and she's attempting to bring a woman's perspective to it which I really think is worth doing. But she doesn't rant and rave, you know. She's not a man-hater. And I like that; it's a nice combination." (Interview #5, April 15, 1997) enhance, and solidify the old centres of power?" 268 colonialism, to a pedagogy of critical analysis of the inequities inherent in such a system" (p. 27). "The borderline work of culture," writes Bhabha (1994), demands an encounter with 'newness' that is not part of the continuum of past and present" but rather which "innovates and interrupts the performance of the present." (p. 7. cf. Benhabib, 1996, p. 16). While "in the current dispensation of culture, diversity and disciplinarity" states Appadurai (1996), "diversity is typically the voice of the 'minor' . . . disciplines claim, generally successfully, the voice of the major (in all its senses of the senior, the larger, the more important)" (p. 34). When this approach is taken, Appadurai suggests, "the minor can be used to explore the historicities that constitute the relationship between majority and minority in the history." By exposing the relationship between 'major' and 'minor' texts, inclusion seeks "to destabilize the very majoritarianism that underlies disciplinary authority" to designate on as one and the other as the other (ibid.; see also LaCapra, 1994, Giroux, 1990, p. 19). "The denaturalizing that seems so much a part of post-structuralist practice appears most complex, contradictory, and provocative among feminists who are concerned with the dilemmas of entering a discourse that they assert, by its very structure as rational, sequential thought, excludes a certain notion of woman, as body, freedom, Other. Among these modes of masculine, phallocentric writing, history is particularly indicted not only because it is the substance of a story that has, to a large extent, excluded women from its scope, but, far more important from a post-structuralist perspective, because its alliance with narrative has indentured it to hidden forms of authority that are far more repressive to woman than being nameless in histories." The problem confronting these women is "how to speak, to find a voice within a discourse of reason and representation that has not only failed generally to speak of woman, but has more generally repressed the possibility of speaking as a woman from [their] very imaginations." (Kellner, 1989, p. 302) granted, the natural, the neutral, the known, to critically examine representation, the voicing of "Other", and contribute to coherence within difference while speaking differently. Too often, however, marginalized histories are simply incorporated into the unproblematic, unquestioned discourse already established within the existing culture of the classroom and the appropriated / marginalized spaces within the pages of the textbook. Rather than making the Grand Narrative strange (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 188), such a process coopts the "strange" into the familiar and limits its ability to question the given, the taken-for-269 For the very act of inclusion always already legitimizes the includer—its language, its codes and conventions, its methods of exclusion—and puts closer on the ability to question the presuppositions which allow the Grand Narrative to exclude and at the same time be presented as 'objective', as 'real', as 'true', as one narrative that speaks equally for all. What is abandoned is a method that examines a historical narrative which "fails to call into question the conditions of its own making; which forgets to indicate its subservience to unrevealed interests, which masks epistemological, methodological and ideological pre-suppositions that have mediated a specific past into a particular history" (Jenkins, 1991, p. 68). Most of the participants in this study followed this latter approach, sometimes with a brief nod at exclusion though not an analysis of exclusion. There were, however, a few instances to the contrary. Those, too, ought to be mentioned. Of the six participants, Jocelyn alone consistently moved beyond the incorporation of content to the exploration of how content itself is positioned and positions students to engage it. Speaking about gender, for example, Jocelyn explains her goal was never to simply teach about women but to connect what was being taught about women to the politics of representation, thus connecting past and present, women and men. Jocelyn: I t was never: "We're going to be dealing w i t h women" or "This is a gender issue. [Rather], i n m y grade nine class, for example, we talked about "Why aren't there any women ment ioned w h e n we're deal ing w i t h the French Revolution? Women d id an incredible amount, w h y aren't they i n the textbook? Does that mean that they didn't contribute at all? No i t doesn't. It just means that somebody f igured i t isn't impor tant enough to pu t i n the text. So I had students work w i t h some p r imary documents and o n another textbook wh ich d id h ighl ight the role women played in the French Revolution and afterwards, I had them go th rough their o w n textfbook] and analyze i t to see i f i t actually has a fair representation of woman's role i n the French Revolution or not. In my grade ten class we looked at it more for current events: "How come most Interest ingly, in spite of Jocelyn taking the teaching about women to a level other participants did not, she was the one student most regularly criticized by her supervisors for allowing boys in her class more air t ime than girls. And while encouraging equal participation is something all teachers should strive for, one has to wonder whether that is what amounts to a pedagogy of incorporating gender. I raise that question because when one considers the comments Jocelyn received from her advisors in relation to the emphasis both Jack and Casey put upon equal inclusion of male and female students in their opening s ta tements, one cannot but wonder what constituted a gender-inclusive pedagogy in the eyes of Jocelyn's superv isors du r i ng her p rac t i cum] . [STf Jocelyn: Of all the cr i t ic isms dur ing my practicum, this one hurt me the most. I believe in incorporating gender issues—I think as a woman, I embody many of these issues. For my supervisors, gender issues ended with "you asked 4 more males than you did females." How could I ever respond to that criticism when for me gender was so much more problematic and incorporated so much more than that? (March, 1999). ] 270 of the world news and the events we're looking at, it's all about men—male prime ministers and male leaders? Why? What's happening that keeps women out of those positions and out of the "news"? (Interview # 5 April 14,1997) While Jocelyn, as others did, focused on the role of women in the French Revolution, by examining the politics of representation, she did more than have students simply re-discover women in the past; she had students engage history as a construction from a particular present that determines the kind of past we find. In another example, Jocelyn speaks of a unit she had constructed about the history of British Columbia for her grade ten students. Jocelyn: We looked first of all at minorities and we looked at the whites as a minority group and how their experience, although they were really a minority group, dictated a majority mentality, a conquest mentality where the natives, although they were a majority, were treated like a minority and like an uncivilized group of people that we couldn't really understand. Avner: Why were they treated that way? Jocelyn: I think it's part ignorance and part an imperialistic attitude that came along with the fur traders: divide and conquer. So we started from that and then looked at how that attitude affected other groups. We looked at the Chinese working on the CPR: how did the railroad and the Gold Rush impact British Columbia? How did that meeting of people with all their cultural baggage and philosophies and perspective affect BC? How did each group respond to the geography, to the culture, to the history? We also looked at why blacks were brought in to Canada. We looked at a couple of primary resources and how we come to a historical interpretation out of a photograph and we looked at literature and we're ended on: "Is it the same now, is it different, and if so, why and what connections can you make between the history of BC and the present? I think that by taking the issues up to the present, it put things a little more into perspective as opposed to studying the past and the present as disparate, as separate entities. (Interview #5, April 14,1997) Ron, too, provides an example of how the perspective of Other can be used to question the dominant centre, usually taken for granted as neutral. Ron: At one point in my grade nine class we were discussing French and English rivalries in the Ohio River Valley and I had them debate as to whose claim was most justified and I made sure to include one perspective from the Natives themselves because the text, I noticed, was talking about French and English claims about something that wasn't even theirs. I think it was kind of valuable. It made the students recognize that: "Wait a minute! These are two foreign colonial powers going after somebody else's land." (Interview #5, April 15,1997). What Ron's "Wait a minute!" allows is not only an opportunity to teach students that nation-building in North America came at the expense of Nations already inhabiting that land; that it was not the story of an empty land heroically discovered and cultivated by white settlers. That disruption also provided students a possibility to consider why and how this land came to be considered "empty" in the first place and 271 what underlies the imperialistic notion of "emptiness" (emptiness of what?). But as Ron has also mentioned before, this was an isolated endeavour. Often, he forgot to include Other at all. And when he did, it rarely took the critical direction mentioned above. For, to repeat Ron's words, and those of others who might have been less articulate in that respect, it is quite a risk to stop the class and say: "take a look at all the names I've just listed" and ask, "how many women [etc.] do you see?" "None," "Why is that?" and start thinking about that... [S]omehow that feels like I'm getting off topic, off track . . . And if I go off on this tangent, I'm going to lose time. (Interview #5, April 15,1997) Including content about the Other/including the Other While allowing all students an opportunity to learn about the contribution of many rather than only a few groups to our collective past and explore history beyond the limited lenses provided by texts currently used in the classroom, proponents of including Other histories in the predominantly white, Eurocentric curriculum also speak about the specific advantages rendered Other students in our classroom by that inclusion. For it is through our curriculum that students receive a sense of what culture and whose history are considered worthy of valorization and what forms of culture and history are considered invalid and unworthy of public esteem (Giroux, 1995, pp. 109-110). An inclusive curriculum which incorporates knowledge about minority history and cultural achievements, claims Cummings (1986), reduces the dissonance and alienation characterizing current minority experience in schools (p. 24. cf. McCarthy, 1993, p. 292). Seeing their own cultures reflected in the official rendition of history gives Other students a sense of recognition and thus agency. When they are no longer silent in the past, the argument goes, they will be less inclined to be silent in the present of our thus far silencing classrooms. But without the kind of interrogation proposed above—not only about the pedagogical nature of content but also, and simultaneously, about the content of our pedagogical endeavours in classrooms—the inclusion of Other histories does not necessarily translate into an inclusion of Other in history education. In spite of participants' views expressed at the beginning of this chapter that the multicultural nature of Greater Vancouver classrooms requires including all, as the following example will demonstrate, infusing the existing curriculum with Other is not the same as including the Other in the curriculum. Speaking to the importance of engaging multiculturalism in the social studies classroom in her statement opening this chapter, Casey mentioned that one of her 272 goals as a teacher would be to encourage students to get to know each other's culture and way of life by having students share their experiences and culture with others. I would want students to look at what's around them too, you know, in their own lives .... with multiculturalism—getting to know the different students in their classroom: their backgrounds, their culture, where they came from, what they consider important, what holidays they celebrate and to respect that and also be proud of their own culture. (Interview #3, December, 16,1996) Indeed, during her practicum Casey devoted much effort to incorporate perspectives not normally included in the textbook. In accordance with her initial goal, Casey also encouraged her students to adapt class assignments to their own interests by choosing topics that speak to their experiences, culture, and history, and share those with their peers. The day I visited Casey's practicum classroom, she and her grade eleven students began a post-W.W. II history unit. She opened the unit by asking students to brainstorm, collectively, the most significant world events since the end of the Second World War. Students thought for a while and then began providing their responses. Casey put those on the board in the order of their appearance. Fifteen minutes later, the following list emerged: 1) The Gulf War 2) Nelson Mandella elected President of South Africa 3) The break-up of the Soviet Union 4) The fall of communism 5) The Oklahoma City bombing 6) The Quebec referendum 7) The Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords 8) The O.J. Simpson Trial 9) The TWA air crash 10) The development of technology 11) The Rodney King beating and the Lost Angeles riots 12) The Vancouver riots (following the Canucks Stanley Cup game) 13) Genetic engineering 14) The 1973 oil embargo 15) The Exxon Valdez oil spill 16) Chernobyl 17) Tienanmen Square (Casey's contribution) 18) Famine in Somalia 19) The Breakdown of/in Yugoslavia 20) AIDS 21) The Falklands Islands War. (Notes, April 18,1997). Sitting at the back of the room, behind the teacher's desk, I observed the process with fascination. In spite of the fact that more than half of Casey's students were Asian, the majority of them Chinese (from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore), only one event on the board—Tienanmen Square—was reflective of their history. But what was even more surprising was the fact that although Asian students in Casey's class participated as equally as any other in the construction of the class-list, the only event reflective of their history was put up on the board by Casey, not by one of them. 273 After discussing the reasons for students suggesting these particular events, Casey asked each student to construct his/her own top ten list, telling students they could use five events already mentioned on the board, but had to come up with another five on their own. As I was walking around the room while students were working on their lists, I noticed that of the Asian students who were willing to share their choices with me all selected to add five events from Chinese history to the five they chose from the board. Interestingly, none chose to make up an entire new list of ten events, all comprising Chinese history. Rather, in a somewhat schizophrenic manner, the top half of their list included five Western events taken from the board, the bottom part, five Chinese events. How does this inform us about the politics of inclusion? A few issues spring to mind. First, the class list. Which ever way one analyzes that list, what becomes immediately apparent is that, in spite of Casey's on-going efforts to include Other histories, most of the events that seem significant in the past fifty years to this group of students derive from or took place within Western, not Other history. (And even though some of those events include non-Western parties, event are nevertheless considered from a Western perspective—i.e., The Falklands rather than the Malvinas, The Gulf War, Famine in Somalia, etc.). Second, and more importantly, especially when one compares the class list and students' private lists, is a disjuncture between the public and the private spheres regarding inclusion in this classroom; not one which excludes some students from the public, but a self monitoring process in which some students regulate what they say in public and what they say privately. Those students had already learned the unwritten rules of the game: to give publicly what is expected in the public domain, and keep the Other to the private domain. And even if this private domain is then shared publicly, it still remains outside the realm of the official, public history. But what did and did not take place in Casey's classroom obviously exceeds the boundaries of her classroom. They point to the fact that more than a validation of Other pasts is necessary to fully include the Other in the (dominant) educative process. It raises questions about how to use validation as a beginning, not an end, creating a pedagogy that allows all to contribute equally within difference while still speaking differently. [ S T ! Ron: I think that this may point to some of the problems in ESL teaching; i.e., overcoming the "affective barrier." Chinese students; it seems to me, use Chinese language as a site of resistance—very few of us speak Chinese, after all. At the school I was teaching last year, myself, another teacher, and the librarian had students do a research project on the "outstanding events of the millennium." I adapted the list of 274 20-odd events that the other teacher and the librarian c a m e up with, but I couldn't help noticing that all the events occurred after about I860, mos t occurred in North A m e r i c a and W e s t e r n E u r o p e , and m a n y were accidents such as the Ti tanic or Mt. St. Helens! I pointed this out to the s tudents who agreed with m y observat ion but then general ly chose to write about the Titanic , etc. One i tem, the return of Hong Kong to C h i n a , was initially seen as important by m a n y Hong Kong born students. But by the t ime they were writing their p a p e r s , none ( m a y b e one) had followed t h r o u g h and written about it. I think the reason for this, was that they couldn't find any sources in the school l ibrary about this event . T h e structure of the library collection itself m a y have sent a message about "public" and "private" knowledge. (March, 1999).] T h e p e d a g o g i c a l i n l e a r n i n g t o t e a c h While the previous section focused on how prospective teachers engage students with issues of difference, part of one's understanding of difference as a teacher—and thus the possibility to address those issues with students—derives from one's experiences with issues of difference as a student learning to teach. How and where do prospective teachers locate themselves in relation to issues of difference? To what degree do they consider the relevance of issues of difference in their own education? How, if at all, are those translated into pedagogical opportunities for learning about teaching others? To discuss these questions, I present two cases. The first, pertains to a History of Education course three of the participants took during their final semester at UBC. The second, focuses around an event which took place during the last class of the methods course. One of the four courses three of the participants—Jack, Mary and Jocelyn— took during their final (Summer) semester at UBC was entitled: The History of Education. The course, according to Jack, "was basically about how the system of education in British Columbia has, through the years, marginalized minorities, mainly First Nations, Japanese, and, to some degree, women" (Interview #6, July 30, 1997). Having learned from all three that in that course—which all three defined as one of the best they had taken—they examined curricula and textbooks and read accounts of how women and Other have been continuously marginalized within British Columbia schools for more than a century, I thought my last set of interviews with this group of participants might shed some light on the ways in which they are able to take that "content" and transform it into pedagogical understanding for the overwhelmingly multicultural classrooms they were to occupy only one month ahead. Since by the time of these interviews I had already begun thinking about the 275 "content/pedagogy separation theory," as a researcher I was at an advantage; I knew what I needed to ask in order to either corroborate or refute what at the time was still a theory in progress. To learn about the connections student teachers were making between content and pedagogy, I asked all three the following question: Having learned what you have in this course, how, if at all does it inform you as a teacher, as a social studies teacher? Jack responded by saying: "Not too much." "It informed me as a person. It was great to just learn for myself rather than learning to become a teacher. It was exactly the kind of history course I like." I pause and wait for him to add something. After some hesitation, and realizing I expect more, he adds: Perhaps it did inform me as a teacher to some degree. I mean, all the stuff we did on residential schools, I could teach [that] in my classroom and the same with the Japanese internment. Avner: Other than content—that is, teaching about this or about that, is what you learned relevant in any other way to your teaching? To how you teach? Jack: I'm pretty sure it is. Avner: In what way? Jack: I don't know (Interview #6, July 30,1997) What did Jack learn from this course about the marginalization of minority and female students in schools? As a teacher, "not too much." That is not surprising when he adds that "It was great to just learn for myself rather than learning to become a teacher." Pushed to the wall, Jack realized he did, after all, learn something as a teacher—the ability to incorporate content about residential schools and the Japanese internment into the social studies curriculum. And while he is certain there was more to learn beyond content, he had little inclination what that might be. Mary's response was similar to Jack's. "Urrvmm ... I guess so. . . .," she responded to my initial question. It taught us about BC history and about social history and those are the sort of things we need to convey to our students in social studies. Avner: Like what? Mary: Certain things that occurred in history that would translate straight from history of education to social studies, like residential schools. (Interview #6, July 23,1997) 276 Similar to Jack, Jocelyn, too, found the historical dimension of the course most significant. It was fascinating to chart the general changes going on in Canada and how specifically they played out in BC and how that coincides with different historical events in BC. It also showed us how you can take the history of any one event or aspect, and by focusing on that, you can glean principles of historical interpretation of how history is created, how history is taught, how history is understood, all of which can be applied in a social studies classroom . Avner: If I understand you correctly, then what you learned about how First Nations students were put in residential schools and the treatment of minorities becomes content that you can teach in your social studies classroom? Jocelyn: Not content. I don't think I would teach that kind of content in my social studies classroom. But by looking at that you can apply skills and concepts of historical interpretation and development to your social studies classroom. Avner: How does learning about the maltreatment of women and minorities in schools actually inform you as a social studies teacher, in your own classroom? Or does it? Jocelyn: Directly it didn't because much of the content, much of the historical facts and figures and information I learned as a result of the course won't be relevant to my classroom. Perhaps grade 10 in a unit on BC, maybe some of it will come to play. . . . But by looking at that you can apply skills and concepts of historical interpretation and development to your social studies classroom. (Interview #6, July 31,1997) As prospective teachers, it seems, they learn about the systemic marginalization of women and Other in the very system of education they are soon to be part just as they learn about Mesopotamia, the Crimean War, or the movement of plate tectonics. This new knowledge, it seems, informs them about what teachers did in the past, not about what teachers must do in the present—a present that is very much a continuous part of that past. It pertains to other women, other Other, not those in today's classrooms being subjected to similar, though nevertheless more subtle, forms of subjugation and discrimination. Further, student teachers' roles as students appear to be separated from that of teachers. What they learn as students (and learning, as Jack put it, as student), while impacting what they might teach students, has little relevancy for how they might teach, and what it takes to teach, that group of students. But ignoring the implications of difference as teachers was not the only aspect left unexamined by this group of participants. They also chose not to consider whether and how difference was inscribed in the pedagogies embedded in their own education as students. The first example of that tendency was provided in the passages opening this chapter. When I asked prospective teachers how well they thought issues of gender and multiculturalism were addressed in the methods 277 course, my intention was not as much to learn whether or not they were actually addressed for I was there to observe that myself. Rather, my question was directed to find out whether student teachers themselves, having been immersed in a program that prides itself on its multicultural focus as well as encourages student teachers to incorporate it in their future teaching, had even considered to question the incorporation of multiculturalism in their own education. As their responses provided at the outset of this chapter illustrated, they had not. Many were surprised by such a question. It had not been an issue they thought worthy of consideration up to that moment. "Gender and multiculturalism? [a surprised] urnmmmmmm [another surprised] urnmmmmmm .... Gender really wasn't touched on, was it [Jocelyn asks herself in a whisper]?" (Interview #3, December 11, 1996). "I can't remember I'm sure he must have, though. Didn't he have a unit on that?" Mary, too, asks herself more than she was asking me (Interview #3, December 14, 1996). "They weren't at all .... were they?" asks Jack in a similar fashion (Interview #3, December 17, 1996). Similar responses were provided when I asked participants whether any of their readings in the methods course were written by women or people of colour. Again, the purpose, to examine if the overwhelming importance attributed by this group of participants to the incorporation of women's and Other's perspectives in the education they hoped to provide was equally important to them in the education they were receiving. Here, too, however, participants' responses indicate a disconnection between their thiruking about the value of that incorporation in their own teaching as opposed to the teaching they were provided with while learning to^ teach. Jocelyn's response as to how many of the course readings were written by people of colour was: "I'd have to look at the whole thing again. It didn't strike me as [something to look at]. There might not have been anybody. I don't know. . . . You know, I hadn't thought of it, actually. (Interview #3, December 11, 1996). Jack responded similarly: Avner: Of the articles you read for this course, how many were written by women? Jack: Ahhh I don't know. Were any? I'm trying to think I don't know if any were. Avner: By people of colour? Jack: I don't know. They didn't have pictures. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) When prospective teachers tend not to think it important to consider difference in the content of the methods course, it is only a short distance for them not to consider it in the context of the course as well. To demonstrate, I present a re-worked excerpt 278 from my research journal describing part of the final class in the social studies methods course. I choose to end with this piece because it describes an event (or, as you will soon see, a non-event) which not only brings together many of the issues I have been engaging throughout this chapter but because it also served as the impetus for its creation and for the content/pedagogy separation theory I have been discussing in it. November, 29, 1996—the last day of classes. Winter Break (or, Christmas Break, as it is referred to at UBC) and the ensuing practicum are just around the corner; their anticipation, felt everywhere. As class begins, I sit in my "usual" place under the wall-to-wall window, right behind the U-shaped formation of thirty-seven students-teachers' desks in this always overly-air-conditioned classroom. Pen in hand, a notebook on my lap, and a mini tape-recorder already rolling at the centre of the classroom, I am ready for my ethnographic endeavour. Two boxes of tangerines Peter had purchased with money left over from photocopying fees collected during the first week of classes are distributed among the students. A thank-you card for Peter is "secretly" exchanging hands as each student-teacher writes something to be remembered by. The focus of today's class is interviewing techniques. While the ultimate purpose is to illustrate a way to elicit community-members' recollections of the past, thus moving beyond the dry and decontextualized renditions of textbooks, Peter asks students, in this case, to interview each other about their experiences in learning to teach. The resulting comments, Peter promises, will be most welcome by a faculty currently undergoing a re-structuring of its entire teacher education program. As students pair-up, I leave my tape-recorder with one group and move to sit with another. Twenty minutes go by. Students are well-into sharing their critiques of the program thus far. Some seem especially excited as this is one of the only opportunities afforded them to incorporate their privately-held critiques of the program in a more formal manner. Suddenly, the classroom door bursts opens and a dozen festively-dressed student-teachers with music sheets and a variety of small musical instruments in hand barge into the classroom, headed by one of the program's music education professors. Stunned, Peter and students remain silent as the "intruders" quickly align themselves at the front of the room and, to the "visiting" professor's signal, begin singing Silent night, the first in a medley of three Christmas carols they share with us, their captive audience. Then, as quickly as they entered, and to the sound of a healthy round of applause, they leave the room to conduct their festive duties in yet another of the teacher education classrooms near by. In the aftermath of their departure, Peter makes a variety of attempts to "re-group" students and re-start the interrupted interviewing activity. But the social studies student-teachers are no longer interested in pursuing this or any other activity; their minds and interests are well beyond the confines of this activity, of this classroom. They have been transported to a "netherland" of holiday spirit, celebration and festivities. No time for analysis in this mainly white, predominantly Christian classroom. With all indeed lost, Peter suggests they adjourn. Following a few closing comments, Peter wishes students well in the practicum and bids them farewell. They'll be back at UBC in the summer. As students were saying their good-byes and leaving the classroom, I remember sitting in my chair overcome by a sense of disbelief. How can what just happened, I thought to myself, go unexamined in a teacher education program which has so 279 enthusiastically promoted (and promoted itself as subscribing to the ideas of) multiculturalism? How is that which did and did not take place in class related to the three ornately-decorated Christmas trees recently erected in the entrance to the education faculty library, in the Teacher Education Office and outside the dean's office, the three most representative locations of knowledge, power, and authority? What does the lack of such an examination say about student teachers' own positionality and their understanding of that positionality? What does it entail for prospective social studies teachers who not only will be teaching a grade-eight unit about world religions but who, more importantly, are expected to treat all religions and those who subscribe to them in their own classrooms fairly and equally? While a little, thankful researcher-voice inside of me was already planning where to position what would definitely become a section somewhere in my dissertation, the educator in me was devastated, the Jew, offended. Could one have deliberately orchestrated a better opportunity to compare the verbal declarations of this program about multiculturalism and its practices of monoculturalism, a comparison which, if left unexamined here, will probably then never be applied in schools where such a separation equally takes place? Could one conceive of a more worthy opportunity to examine and disrupt the ways in which Christianity, to borrow from Nakayama & Krizek (1995) "makes itself visible and invisible, eluding analysis yet exerting influence over everyday life"? (cf. Giroux, 1997, p. 292). What could be more pertinent, particularly for this reluctant group of prospective teachers, than to explore how this unquestioned manifestation of Christianity, this "nothingness, this taken for granted entity," to use Kincheloe & Steinberg's (1997) discussion of whiteness, "assumes a superior shadow that transforms in into . . . a 'transcendental consciousness'" (p. 30)? For without it, Christianity maintains its status not only as a positionality beyond history and culture but as a non-positionality at all. A critical multicultural pedagogy, on the other hand, Kincheloe & Steinberg add, would examine the normativity of what took place (Christmas) and its ability to designate itself as the standard, thus making sure students have an opportunity to rethink their understandings of their own position of privilege and the construction of their own consciousness (ibid.). Granted, as social studies teachers we often talk about the need to disrupt and interrogate the legacy of the White man in the curriculum. Is it not as important to explore the manifestation of that legacy in our educative minds, in what we take as natural and neutral, in what we take for granted, in what we don't even consider problematic enough to textualize and discuss? 280 As teachers who hope to promote a critical pedagogy of multiculturalism, Giroux (1990) points out, it is insufficient to engage just the positionality of our students but the nature of our own identities. . . If students are going to learn how to take risks, to develop a healthy skepticism toward all master narratives, to recognize the power relations that offer them the opportunity to speak in particular ways,. . . they need to see such behavior demonstrated in the social practices and subject positions that teachers live out and not merely propose, (p. 31) Indeed, how will prospective teachers enable their own students in that manner proposed by Giroux if they themselves refrain from doing it as students? How can they begin to diffuse the omnipotent centre of the history curriculum, of the current practices of teaching and learning, if they don't realize the embeddedness of that centre in their own learning? How can they begin to include Others if they refuse to examine their own compliance—through silence—with a centre that produces Others, maintains Othering? Dismayed by the lack of responsiveness to any of the above questions by the abrupt conclusion of the last class in the methods course, and hoping participants might have considered similar questions but, in the rush to begin their vacation, chose not to raise them at the time, I returned to what I now call the "Christmas episode" in my third set of interviews which took place shortly thereafter. Asked to reflect about the events of that last class, most claimed they were thrilled by the experience, enchanted by its message of celebration. "I thought it was great," says Mary speaking for most. "I was in a really bad mood before that, so I thought it was fabulous" (Interview #3, December 14, 1996). Some evidence of anxiety, however, came from Ron's direction. I wasn't thrilled. I felt very ambivalent about it. On the one hand I felt: "O.K.., it's Christmas, it's the last class, we should lighten up and have some fun." But at the same time I was really enjoying the interviews we were doing and . . . didn't really like that interruption. And even though I was nominally brought up in a Christian background, . . . it felt imposed somehow. I kind of wondered how appropriate is it to march into a classroom and start doing that, especially in a classroom where not everybody necessarily celebrates Christmas, (interview #3, December 10,1996) Ron raised two troubling aspects of that intrusion: the disruption of the interviewing activity and the imposition of Christmas. Asking Ron to elaborate, I questioned which of the two he believed to be more problematic. His response: "More the marching into the class and interrupting the activity" (Interview #3, December 10, 1996). [ST! Ron: At the time, I resented the interruption of the activity, of the discussion. Why? Because I was enjoying the discussion. But now the question arises, 281 why did I object to the interruption of an abstract, intellectual discussion of issues of Othering in education more so that a real-life, concrete example of it? Was it because I, too, privilege the realm of the intellectual over the emotional? That I preferred to be "ignorant" of my own experience of being re-colonized? Intellectual abstraction can also be a form of "Othering." It's safe for me to read about Black slaves being recaptured in the American South, as long as I don't have the fear of that ever happening to me. But what happens when your own Christian past literally comes knocking at the door? (March, 1999).] Finding it difficult to understand how prospective teachers could be blind to the educative possibilities embedded in the deconstruction of this "Christmas episode," and thinking maybe my particular questions did not allow them to articulate its importance, I decided to attempt another route. "Suppose you're the social studies teacher educator and this was your own classroom,' I told them. "Would you have done anything differently after the carolers left the room? Or would you have ended class on the same note as Peter had?" Casey: "I think I might have ended the class too. I think Peter probably realized he didn't have our attention and if he did keep us there he wasn't going to accomplish a hell of a lot anyway (Interview #3, December 16,1996). After all, added Jack, he tried for about thirty seconds to get us back on task and realized that it was absolutely hopeless; it wasn't going to happen. It was the last class so he let us go. I mean, what else could he do? Turn on the lights a few times and yell at everybody? Avner: Is there anything else you feel could have been done? Jack: We could have eaten the rest of the oranges or chatted. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) [STf Jack: It is very interesting to read the comments I made at that time. I am amazed that I was apparently unaware of the significance of the "Christmas episode." After my conversation with Avner on this I became very aware of the significance of this event. Since that conversation, I have become much more aware of similar incidents of "dominance," especially with regards to culture, gender, and sexual orientation. As a teacher, I am often puzzled at why other teachers in my own school don't seem to see the importance of "analyzing" those forms of dominance in the daily events and structures in our school (March, 1999).] What does Jack's response and those of other participants point to? Are they a reflection of what is not apparent to this group of prospective teachers or a way of avoiding what is? Do they simply illustrate an absence of a pedagogical imagination or should this form of "not seeing" be considered an act of deliberate—even if unconscious—negation? And if it this latter negation, which I tend to believe it is, one must consider how this form of creative absence actively participates "in the 282 ruling practices which regulate the social relations in which we live" (Bannerji, et al., 1991, p. 7. cf. Luke & Gore, 1992b, p. 194) and those with which we are educated and, in turn, educate others? I address the notion of "not seeing," albeit from another perspective, in the following chapter. Notes 1. Separating these two terms is problematic. And while I recognize that doing so in my own discourse only legitimates and further entrenches it, this separation was already established within the discourse of this teacher education program, one I thus needed to use in my conversations with participants. 2. This interview with Charles was cut short when students, for some reason, began entering the classroom half an hour before the scheduled time for the methods course. I was therefore not able to ask him the remaining questions pertaining to the methods course you will find in conversations with other participants. 3. Reluctantly, then, as this chapter will illustrate, I too utilize a discourse which equates gender with women and multiculturalism with Other in my interviews with students. 4. For a further and broader discussion about the problematics of such a separation, see Zeichner, . Grant, Gay, Gillette, Valli, & Villegas, 1998. 283 P A R T 3 CONCLUSION Three mini-chapters comprise the concluding section of this dissertation. The first revisits the methodology of this study, asking specifically, the degree to which it benefited its participants. The second, entitled "Revisiting teacher education: Becoming students of our own education," builds upon the responses participants provide in the first and examines how what the process of this particular research made possible for its participants might mean for preservice teacher education in general. The chapter ending Part 3 revisits the dissertation as a whole and provides its concluding comments. C H A P T E R V I I I R e v i s i t i n g m e t h o d o l o g y Let everybody tell me, in his own way . . . [h]ow, for him, is opened up—or closed—or how already he resists, the question as I pose i t . . . (Lacan, 1978, p. 242. cf. Felman, 1982, p. 30) Situated as it is at the beginning of a dissertation, a Methodology Chapter provides an outline, a blue-print of one's research design. Embedded in it are a variety of assertions and promises as to why and how a specific design would best serve the researcher to produce particular results. Having laid out my study, I leave it to you, the reader, to determine whether my particular research design did enhance my study, whether the assertions and promises made in my Methodology Chapter have been fulfilled. And yet a critical dissertation (as I hope this has been) can not be judged on that basis alone. For the purpose of critical research is not only to produce critical knowledge but also to have participants themselves critically examine their own situation in the process of that production, to question "things as they are," to imagine things otherwise. 1ST! Jocelyn: I think this, in particular, has been a strong point in your approach. As a participant, I have not only had a forum to unravel, expose, and question my learning, I have been able to revisit it in text and with a different perspective. Each encounter—a journey—has been fascinating and educative for me. Thanks (March, 1999).] The fundamental question facing critical researchers, in the 284 design phase of the study as well as at its completion, is thus not only whether the study proved to be beneficial for the researcher or the research community in general but also, and more importantly, for the researched. It is primarily an ethical issue of reciprocity (see Sparks, 1998). How and to what degree, then, this chapter inquires, was this research beneficial to prospective teachers as participants, as students learning to teach? In what ways did this study enable them to do what they would not have been able to do otherwise, in what ways did it disable them? Or, as Lacan asks: what has it opened up—or closed—for them? These questions became particularly significant to me after the third set of interviews in which I asked students why they had initially volunteered to participate in this study. I raise that point since, as you may recall, most, if not all of the participants did so out of a sense of obligation—wishing to be of assistance, believing that teachers ought to comply, to assist others, rather than because they believed they themselves would gain anything from this study. In fact, many of them, while volunteering, hoped they would somehow not be chosen. Concern is always felt about exploiting participants in the course of one's study (Limerick et al., 1996, p. 456). And while some degree of exploitation is inevitable—it was, after all, my study, my agenda, my interpretation, my representation—this study has attempted to give back to participants at least part of (or, to compensate for) what it has taken from them. To what degree have I been successful? According to participants' own initial, middle, and final analyses, and in spite of the fact many were driven into it without much enthusiasm, none regretted participating. When I asked Mary whether she found our conversations and the study in general of any benefit, she said they "definitely helped to clarify some of my own thoughts," "to solidify stuff in my own mind" (Interview #3, December 14, 1996; Interview #2, October 19, 1996). For Casey the study was "quite helpful," mostly, perhaps, as she thought forward to her role as a teacher. Having you ask me questions makes me articulate a response in a way I would not have done otherwise and I think that's good. Because when I think in my own mind, I don't, in a way, ask myself those kind of questions.... So it helps me articulate my own goals and why I'm teaching what I'm teaching. It allows me to really think about what learning is, what I want the students to actually get out of my standing up in front of them for an hour or however long it is. (Interview #3, December 16,1996) "I know that when I ramble on [during interviews] it doesn't sound like it," said Charles, "but I think [the study] has really helped." "Some of the questions made me flunk more than I probably wanted to. And that was probably good for me.... They 285 raised things that I probably never thought about but that I maybe should have. It was good." (Interview #6, July 6,1997). Asked whether she had found the interviews in this study helpful in any way, Jocelyn responded: Oh very helpful. Very helpful. The questions you ask and then actually having to formulate an answer helps clarify in my mind what is exactly going on; things that you know subconsciously or unconsciously or things that you really don't think about or you think about but you don't really articulate. If I don't actually articulate a lot of the things that are going on in my head, they stay that mess of ambiguities and asteroids whirling around in my head and I never really get a grasp on them. So that's really helped... Also, I find that our conversations and clarifying things in my own head as a result, affects the way I look at the next class or what's gone on in other classes too. (Interview #2, October 20,1996) Asked the same question in our following interview, Jocelyn added that Your questions—like, for instance, the one about gender and multiculturalism. I just didn't even really think about it ... as an issue before that—are such that they force me to actually look at things and say: "what is it that I actually feel? Hang on a second here! O.K. Yeah. O.K. This is kind of what I feel" or "I don't really know what I feel about that, do I?" And [it provided this] not only in term of the course [but] in terms of concepts and ideas and issues but especially in the course too. You've noticed things in the course of events [and asked me:] "Did you notice this? and then I'd take myself out of the situation and say: Oh yeah! Who said that? When was that said and in what context?" So, yeah. It has helped. Avner: Is it important to have these kind of exchanges in a teacher education program more than anywhere else? Jocelyn: Oh Yes!!! Yes!!! Because often we don't do enough analyzing of what it is that we think and why it is that we think the way that we think. . . . Yeah! It's important. It's important to wrestle with all of those things because you learn more about knowledge, you learn more about learning and even more about the situation and [ultimately] more about yourself in doing that... . I tJiink it's important anywhere. But I think it is particularly important in the teacher education program because we are having a direct affect on the education that our children are receiving. We're being the artists, we're choosing the materials and how they shape the end product. So if we ourselves don't have a clear understanding and value that kind of exchange, then how can we nurture our children to value that kind of exchange. So I think it's particularly important in a teacher education program. (Interview #3, December 11,1996) But participating in this study wasn't only an enjoyable experience for Jocelyn; it also carried a particular burden of responsibility. It's been difficult in some way because I've also felt a certain amount of responsibility that what I say is going to be used in a dissertation. So I really need to think about these things [before I say them] and in that sense it has been a little bit more of a responsibility. I say: "O.K.. Avner and I are going to meet today. So what has gone on last week? and what did I do? and those kinds of things. So it takes some effort but not the kind I haven't enjoyed. (Interview #6, July 31,1997) 286 Jack found himself in this study somewhat reluctantly—"I wanted to be a sport and I didn't want to not agree to be in it." "I mean if I'm going to be a teacher I want to . . . be agreeable and stuff. But I guess in the back of my mind I was hoping I wouldn't be selected."(interview #3, December 17, 1996). "And are you sorry you were [selected]?" I asked: No. I am really glad that I did it because I did learn. I think I've learned a lot and I've actually told other people that I thought it's really given me an edge on learning and in terms of questioning. I mean, most of the time when we're talking and you give me your perspective, I begin seeing things in a way that I hadn't thought of. So I'm less coasting through the course, simply learning everything and passing the exam which I think is just what most people in the class are doing. I'm hopefully doing a little less of that now. (Interview #3, December 17,1996) Although Jack considered himself "more inclined than most people to question things on [his] own" and ask "Why has this happened? Should this happen?" he believed the study had encouraged him to do even more of that since, as he explained, the interviews make me reflect on what I've learned and how I'm going to apply it to my teaching so I don't just go in and learn without thinking about it. It's forcing me to think about what I'm learning and why I'm learning. So I think I'm probably getting twice as much from my methods class because of these interviews. I'm very glad that I agreed to do them and I guess it's given me an opportunity to critically assess the course more thoroughly. I mean you need to talk about ideas to get through them and although these are interviews, we've talked about different things and I'm getting a better idea of what I like or what is good in the methods class or what I would use and what I may not. Avner: Do you feel our interviews have allowed you to act, not only to think and reflect, differently in the methods course itself? Jack: I think so. I think my question in class roughly a week ago when Peter showed us a unit he used with his students about the Maritimes—about the poverty of the region—is a good example. I raised my hand and asked what sort of view that unit would leave the students with (because I love the Maritimes). I was afraid it might lead students to resent the Maritimes because the rest of Canada needs to subsidize the region through transfer payments. So I guess these interviews have led me to more critically think of things like that. I mean your questions involve values and critically looking at everything. So these interviews have led me to more critically think about the course in general: how would I improve it? I mean I'm constantly thinking about it after every class. (Interview #2, October 20,1996) For Ron, who opened our first conversation with a discussion on Hegel and Foucault, this study was often the only place he could actually articulate the kind of understandings with which he came into the program, a place to move outside the immediacy and utility of practice and think about education and his own process of education in broader, more critical terms. Above all, this study was a learning experience for Ron: "It made me really think. I mean I have to do a lot of thinking 287 back to answer your questions . . . and they also serve as a model in some way for some of the questions I'd like to be using in my classroom" (Interview #2, October 19, 1996). "I learn from the questions you are asking and it gives me a chance to reflect on what I've been learning" (Interview #3, December 7, 1996). "I often wonder," he adds, "how much you're questioning me and how much you're actually teaching me something through those questions" (Interview #6, July 19,1997). This study enabled Ron to become both an insider and outsider, a participant in and critic of his own education. "It sort of temporarily allows me to remove myself from [the situation] in order to stand outside of it and look back at it. It's kind of strange because at the same time I'm definitely part of it and participating in it" (Interview #1, September 12, 1996). "Much of our cultural knowledge is implicit, consisting of over learned ways of thinking and acting that, once mastered, are held outside conscious awareness," writes Frederick Erickson (1991). "Consequently," he adds, "we are too close to our own cultural patterns to see them without making a deliberate attempt to break our learning set—to introduce a bit of distance between ourselves and our taken-for-granted 'reality'" (p. 4). This study allowed Ron exactly that. By seeing somebody or by interacting with somebody who is observing the course, in a sense, from the outside, it allows me to do the same thing. I can step into your shoes for a moment and think about the same questions you're asking. And that's interesting and important too because, you know, even today we talked about some things that were reneging in the back of my mind but I hadn't quite figured out what it was about it. For example, when you raised the idea that the Christmas caroling thing could have been a perfect lesson in colonialism, [I thought:] "Yeah!" And then that makes me ask: "Well why didn't I take up that thread at the time?" Avner: Why didn't you? Ron: Well it didn't occur to me. A: Why do you think it didn't? Ron: I guess I had accepted it as a way of being, something to expect: "It's Christmas. It's really out there." And when that happens, and there's that cue to respond appropriately, which is to drop what I'm doing and to join in that definition of fun, it's hard to question it. So, in away, I guess, I, too, have been colonialized. (Interview #3, December 7,1996) Although Ron was one to always appreciate the "difficult," unsettling questions, even at difficult, unsettled times, the case was not always the same with all. Within "this factory model [of teacher education] of which we're all products in one way or another," claims Ron, "all people seem to be concerned about is just getting this piece of paper and getting out and making money. They say: T don't have rime. Don't ask 288 me these questions. I don't want to deal with them right now. I can't. They're too dangerous. Don't upset me right now. I just want to get this [teacher education program] over with." (Interview #6, July 19,1997). But acting as a critical ethnographer who is positioned behind participants' "backs to point out what they could not see, would not do, and could not have said" otherwise (Britzman, 1995, p. 233), one necessarily puts forth questions, interpretations, and "provocations that disturb the impulse to settle meanings" (Britzman, 1995, p. 236) for those implicated in the knowledge-making process, for those who, as participants, hold a stake in it (Ropers-Huilman, 1997, p. 8). While some participants appreciated at all times the opportunity to engage questions which called up what they, for some reason chose to ignore or repress (Fiske, 1990, p. 96), others found them disturbing, especially during the practicum—a time to settle meanings, they claimed, rather than unsettle them, to gain competence, not to question one's confidence in one's competence. In the concluding interview with Jack, conducted at the end of the teacher education program, he discusses the difficulties dealing with unsettling interview questions during the practicum: Sometimes your questions made me think more than I wanted to during the practicum because I didn't have time to sort them out. I mean, I had taken Peter's class and had thought about it in one mind-set and then sort of put everything together. But when I then talked about it with you and you'd make comments and bring different perspectives about it, I'd realize that maybe I wasn't thinking about it [Peter's course] the way I wanted to and had taken things at face value and accepted things. So it would make me think about things at a time in my practicum when I didn't want to be thinking about them because I didn't have time to think them through and I was just confused as to what I really wanted to do. So at times it did cause problems for me, just within myself because I didn't want to think about them. Avner: That's fascinating. I mean for me the purpose of education is to unsettle things. Jack: Oh yeah. Absolutely. And I completely believe it. And I think the worst thing someone can do, and a lot of teachers do, and I see it, is that they become set in their ways and don't want to hear new ideas because they think the way things are is just fine. . . . And what I did like about these [our] talks is that as soon as I would sort of become accepting and set in what I wanted to think, I'd talk to you and get different ideas and realize that I wasn't really that comfortable and it forced me to re-analyze things. But sometimes it just confused me at a time when I didn't want to be confused because I was under too much pressure that the last thing I needed was to be confused and begin the process of self-doubt. I mean you just don't have time for self-doubt in your practicum. But I think self-doubt is critical to some one's growth, [but] not during the practicum. (Interview #6, July 30,1997) The benefit of "distance" Ron spoke of—the ability to take oneself out of one's own situation and reflect back on it and on one's actions and non-actions in it—did not seem to materialize for Jack. While Jack believed questioning is the basis of 289 education and self-doubt is critical to self-growth, those are luxuries which don't seem to apply in "survival mode." The practicum is a time for doing, performing, not questioriing. Jocelyn, too, explains the problematics of posing questions which might promote self-doubt during the practicum. I think it's wonderful to have those interviews while you're in [the practicum] because it reflects back to you the state of mind that you were in. But I think that when I was in it I knew what I had to do: "Well, this is what I've got to do. This is the way it is and I can't change it." So I wasn't in the mind frame of asking those questions. It's not that there weren't things I wanted to change in my classroom. And I did have criticism about the way some classes were run and the ways that certain teachers did certain things. But it's like you almost don't want to hear those questions because in a sense you know the answer. Why acknowledge the fact that you are playing the game when in essence you don't want to play the game. So if I don't even ask the question, then maybe [I can pretend] I'm not doing it. It's a coping mechanism! (Interview #6, July 31,1997) What we find, then, in Jack and Jocelyn's desire to unquestion the "real" of the practicum is, to quote from Zizek's (1989) discussion of ideology, "the paradox of a being which can reproduce itself only in so far as it is misrecognized and overlooked" (p. 28). Putting forward the thesis that ideology's dominant mode of functioning is cynical, Sloterdijk (1983), as Zizek (1989) points out, "renders impossible—or, more precisely, vain—the classic . . . ideological procedure" (p. 29). "The most elementary definition of [that classic] ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx's Capital: 'Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es' - 'they do not know it, but they are doing it'. The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naivete: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called social reality and our . . . false consciousness of it" (p. 28; see also Goodman, 1998, p. 56). The cynical subject, however, as Sloterdijk proposes, and as Jack and Jocelyn's comments illustrate, in my view, is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: "They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it'. Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very,well, one is well aware of a particular interest hidden behind . . . [it], but still one does not renounce it. (p. 29) The desire not to renounce, to ignore, is, thus, not passive but active. As Felman (1982) points out Ignorance is . . . [not] simply opposed to knowledge: it is itself a radical condition, an integral part of the very structure of knowledge [and knowing]. But what does ignorance consist of... 290 ? [ I ] t can be sa id to be a k i n d o f f o r g e t t i n g — o f forget fu lness . . . [ I t ] is t i ed u p w i t h repress ion, w i t h the i m p e r a t i v e to f o r g e t — t h e impera t i ve to exc lude f r o m consciousness, to n o t a d m i t to k n o w l e d g e . I gno rance , i n o the r w o r d s , is no t a passive state o f a b s e n c e — a s i m p l e lack o f i n f o r m a t i o n : i t is a n act ive d y n a m i c o f nega t ion , an act ive re fusa l o f i n f o r m a t i o n . . . . the i n c a p a c i t y — o r the r e f u s a l — t o acknow ledge one's own implication i n the i n f o r m a t i o n , (pp . 2 5 -26) With ignorance constituting not simply a lack of knowledge but the active negation of it, my role, as a critical researcher, was never only to have students examine the "real" of their practicum or any other experience of learning to teach but, rather, and as irritating as it might have been for some, to better understand their own implication in maintaining that real through ignorance. Thus, turning this ignorance—what Rudduck (1984) terms the seductive, soothing, non-productive, and anxiety-free tendency (p. 5. cf. Smyth, 1992, p. 285) to "not see'— "into an instrument of teaching" (Felman, 1982, p. 27). Ignorance becomes such an instrument only when participants' own education is not left unquestioned, when their own implication in knowledge and its negation are interrelated, when the process of learning, as Felman (1982), coming from the field of psychoanalysis, suggests, "does not just reflect itself, but turns back on itself so as to subvert itself and truly teaches only insofar as it subverts itself" (p. 35). For "[j]ust as psychoanalysis refuses to accept our self-explanations and our speaking about ourself, and instead uses this speaking against itself to show that it conceals an unsuspected mechanism "(Ankersmit, 1994, p. 129), so my research tried to show participants themselves what lies behind the apparently open self-presentation of the knowledge offered by them and how they themselves, while struggling to change their situation, often become part of the "problem" by refusing to implicate themselves in their situation. "The degree to which we are conscious of our experience," claims Grumet (1992), "is the degree to which we are made free by that knowledge to act in the world" (p. 33). And the freedom to act in one's world of preservice education is the freedom which allows prospective teachers to become not only products, but active students of their own education. How one creates a learning-to-teach environment which produces student teachers who are students of their own education, is the focus of the following chapter. [ST! Peter: I don't think you have taken seriously what students say about the challenges of the practicum (March, 1999). Avner: I recognize those challenges but that does not mean one should become paralyzed in their midst, unable to critically engage them. A critical engagement does not entail refusing those challenges; it means that one recognizes and explores their potentialities and problematics as one often has to go along with them. Doing what one must do in one's 291 practicum in order to "pass" does not mean one must believe—even temporarily—that the practices one does not believe in should be endorsed because one is asked to perform them by one's supervisor. Learning, I believe, occurs through continuously questioning that which we do (or are asked to do) rather than letting "action" eradicate thought about action (March, 1999).] 292 C H A P T E R IX R e v i s i t i n g teacher e d u c a t i o n Inherent in the discussion throughout this dissertation, and regardless of the different issues addressed in each of its chapters, has been an underlying focus on the relationship between theory and practice in preservice teacher education. Addressing the connection between the knowledge prospective teachers were given and the knowledge they themselves produced, the relationship between theory and practice was examined at two levels. First, between the theory prospective teachers were provided at the university and the pedagogies they developed as a result— both for and during their own practice as teachers. Second, between the content (theory) prospective teachers were provided at the university and the strategies they developed, as a result, in order to examine the pedagogical practices provided them, as students learning to teach. The first addresses the relationship between theory in one location and its potential transference to practices in another, the latter the degree to which theory was used, reflexively, to interrogate the pedagogical practices of the very location within which it was promoted. I address the relationship between theory and practice at those two levels since, as I have shown throughout, I believe there is a close relationship between how prospective teachers learn and how they teach. Consequently, one cannot separate the ways in which prospective teachers relate theory to practice as students with the ways they relate the two as teachers. Indeed, as this study has shown, by not theorizing their own experiences as students, prospective teachers are not only less likely to theorize their practices as teachers but also to infuse theory, pedagogically, in those practices. For theory to become a material force, this dissertation has argued, it has to be engaged pedagogically. That is, theory must be used to learn from one's learning if it is to be meaningful in one's teaching. Theory must be practiced in order to serve as the foundation for future practice. I return to discuss the theory/practice nexus in preservice teacher education in this concluding chapter both as an opportunity to look back at the practices of teacher education this dissertation has thus far described but also, and more importantly, in order to explore the possibilities a re-examination of that nexus might open up for the future of teacher education—a future in which prospective teachers and teacher educators alike become active students of their own education. 293 Becoming students of our own education1 What if teacher education began from the assumption that a great deal of its work is to produce debate, multiple perspectives on events, practices, and effects, to move toward creative dialogue on practices, and to experiment with negotiation within learning and teaching? (Britzman et al., 1997, p. 20. my emphasis) Why does student teaching assume such importance in the perceptions of preservice teachers? Are university courses so theoretical as to be bereft of practice? (Kersh, 1995, p. 103) Speaking of their university-based teacher education courses, "most student teachers," writes Fullan in The new meaning of educational change (1991), "will say that they get too much theory, that it is irrelevant and a waste of time. Many professors of education, on the other hand," he adds "will argue that students get too little theory, that they are uninterested in developing a solid grounding in theories of education and teaching^ Most seem to agree, however," Fullan concludes, "that the integration of theory and practice is a desirable, if elusive, goal" (p. 293). Beyond the obvious disagreement whether student teachers get too much theory or too little of it, what must be considered is: a) why is it that student teachers think they get too much theory; and, b) how is theory treated in teacher education that results in prospective teachers believing it "is irrelevant and a waste of time"? Further, if, as Fullan concludes, the integration of theory and practice is a desirable goal, what conditions make that integration so elusive? Asked about their own teacher education program, participants in this study produced answers very similar to those given by the student teachers Fullan had in mind. Mary: It's all theory! It's all academic until you come back [to UBC] after the short practicum. We learned so much more in the short practicum than we did in the whole semester at U B C . . . . UBC was just all theory and we need to get more practical. Until we get more practical in the program, the theory will still just be a wash-out. (Interview #4, April 9,1997) Jack responded in a similar fashion: What you learn in the Fall [at UBC] helps you along and gives you some ideas but no real learning, I think, takes place until you get into your practicum. . . . [Instead of] just get[ting] bombarded with all this theory [at UBC], I think we should spend more time in the schools so we can apply that theory and so it can become more relevant. . . . I mean, you need to learn by experience. (Interview #4, March 13,1997) Participants' disdain for theory and their desire for the "practical" which can easily be implemented in the classroom is not unique; such a tendency among prospective 294 teachers is well documented (i.e., Sarason, et. al., 1986; Ginsburg, 1988; Britzman, 1991a). But Mary and Jack's comments go beyond. What they also point to is a separation, at least in their own eyes, between theory and practice in teacher education. Theory, according to them, is the domain of one part of learning to teach, practice, the domain of the other. Theory—often seen as useless and irrelevant—is what prospective teachers receive at the university, practice and relevant "doing" is what takes place in the practicum. As such, while generated in university-based courses, theory, it seems, is not pertinent to those courses, its application, if at all, is elsewhere—in schools. The separation Mary and Jack allude to is, however, not coincidental. Rather, it is a reflection—perhaps the result—of a separation between theory and practice permeating much of this teacher education program; a separation whereby theory learned at the university, while intended to infuse future practice in that "elsewhere" of the practicum, was not used to examine (and thus learn from) the here-and-now practices of university-based teacher education itself. As a result, and as I have illustrated elsewhere and throughout this dissertation, learning to teach was not a process prospective teachers were encouraged to learn from, only an avenue to learn about some thing to be practiced some place else in the future. By that I do not mean to imply that the primary purpose of preservice teacher education should be to focus inward, on its own teaching, instead of preparing prospective teachers for that elsewhere of schools. Rather, an adequate preparation, I argue, cannot take place without exploring how the elimination of the former operates to perpetuate the existing regularities of the latter. When the two are not made to be one and the same, theory is treated more as a body of knowledge to be learned—what Giroux (1994c) calls a "pedagogy of theory." But as a pedagogical issue," Giroux adds elsewhere (1996), "theory is not only a matter of students learning other people's discourse.... Theory has to be done; it has to become a form of cultural production" (pp. 49-50). Addressing theory in that manner results in what Giroux calls a "pedagogy of theorizing," whereby theory is an activity to be practiced in the lived world of the educational experience; where the practices of learning to teach are investigated as the materia with which to learn about teaching and learning. From this perspective, "Theoretical does not . . . mean abstract. [Rather,] it means reflexive, something which turns back on itself: a discourse [or practice] which turns back on itself is by virtue of this very fact theoretical (Barthes, no reference, cf. Young, 1981, p. 1). 295 Yet, by focusing on a pedagogy of theory, the university portion of teacher education not only separates theory from practice but also, and simultaneously, makes the relevancy of its own practice questionable. That is, without interrogating the relationship between what prospective teachers learn and how they come to learn it, indeed, without implicating the two, teacher education has little transformative impact on student-teachers' existing understandings of teaching and learning. In other words, the university-based portion of teacher education becomes irrelevant; it simply perpetuates and certifies the understandings student-teachers come with rather than challenges them, thus inviting prospective teachers to see otherwise. And when teacher education simply provides its students more of what they have experienced in previous educative environments, it is not surprising to find that prospective teachers claim preservice education has had little impact upon them (See i.e., Bennett, 1996; Britzman, 1986,1991a; Goodman, 1988b; Richardson, 1996; Tabachnick & Zeichner, 1984). "To tell you the truth," Charles offered, I don't think being in the program has changed much of anything from when I was doing my undergraduate or anything I learned then. I don't want to say it had no effect... but off the top of my head I can't give you an example of something I do differently now than I would have done before I went into the program. . . . It's not that I regret going through the program because it gave me a sense that I got through it and now I have confidence—not necessarily that I have learned anything but that I have done it and I can go into the schools now and be confident that I will be able to do what I want. (Interview #4, March 7,1997) Charles was not alone. Most of the participants in this study shared similar opinions about the impact (or the lack there of) of this teacher education program. Student teachers coming out of this program, according to Ron, would not be very different than what's out there now in the schools. Maybe people who are less likely to use a textbook, more likely to use a variety of materials. But really, the objectives will be the same, the topics of discussion will largely be the same. I think we'll be teaching the way we were taught. Avner: it sounds as if the first semester at UBC had little impact Ron: Exactly. And that's why we, as students, get so worked up about wanting lesson plans and wanting techniques and strategies and stuff. We've seen what teaching's like. We've had 16 years of it, at least, up to this point. Now we want to know how to do it. [We say to ourselves:] "How am I going to control a class of 32 kids and make them learn what I'm asked to make them learn?" So I think we are working with the model of teaching that, at some level, we're not really actively thinking about. We're working with this model of teachers that we have had in the past [and say:] "I'm going to do what they did. All I need to know are the tools they used to do that." (Interview #3, December 7,1996) 296 Student teachers' desire for teaching techniques, according to Ron, derives primarily because the practice of teacher education has not destabilized the images of teaching with which they came into the program, has not allowed them to think alternatively. When what one already knows gets validated, all that remains is to learn how to "do" it, how to do what our teachers did to us. Thus, although a pedagogy of theory might provide prospective teachers with new models of teaching, only a pedagogy of theorizing can get them to "actively think about" models of teaching—those presented to them and those they themselves will present in the future. Yet, most courses in colleges of education, writes McLaren (1988), "rarely provide students with an opportunity to analyze the ideological assumptions and underlying interests that structure the way teaching is taught" (p. 42). Student teachers, as do teachers and students in school, McLaren (1991) adds, come to believe and accept that the rules, regulations, systems of moral scruples, and social practices that undergrind and inform everyday life in [educational institutions] are necessary if learning is to be successfully accomplished. They fail to recognize that tradition has provided this condition, not because it is based on some 'metaphysical truth' or wisdom but because these regulations have been 'discursively won' through a long series of historical and cultural struggles over whose knowledge counts, what knowledge is most worthwhile, and who is to benefit most from things remaining the way they are. (p. 237) Because prospective teachers are not taught to think "in terms of exposing the tacit assumptions in our conventions and everyday practices, claims Kincheloe (1993), they become "oblivious to the fact that," as teachers, they too will be "propagating a specific ideology when they design their tests and teach their classes" (p. 30). Consequently, Cherryholmes (1985) claims, student teachers are more concerned with "performing expected actions than analyzing them" (p. 45. cf. Kincheloe 1993, p. 43; see also see Smyth 1988,47). Indeed, while students in this teacher education program soon came to realize that knowledge—both the knowledge they were receiving and that which they were required to convey to their own students—is always positioned and reflective of the human interaction which constituted it, the knowledge structures they were presented with and the ways in which knowledge was communicated to them were "largely accepted as neutral and right" (Beyer & Zeichner, 1987, p. 316). The regularities of the educative process were treated as given, beyond examination and investigation; they were not aspects prospective teachers considered important to deliberate, question, or inquire about while learning to teach. "Teaching in this program," as Ron put it, "is a paradigm that is taken for granted. It's something we've been exposed to since kindergarten. So it takes quite 297 an effort [for us] to stop and say: 'Why is the teacher at the front of the room? Why this particular model of doing this? Can we do anything differently? It's tough." (Conversation, September 27, 1996). Yet, by not pausing to ask those "tough" questions, teaching within preservice education is able, at least in the eyes of this group of prospective teachers, to "pass off as real, true, universal and necessary what are inevitably selective and value-laden constructions within which are inscribed particular interests, ideologies and ways of making sense" (Masterman 1985, p. 21). An unexamined educative process, Young (1977) adds, is mystifying "in the way that it presents itself as having a life of its own and obscures the human relations in which it, as a conception of knowledge [and knowing], is embedded" (cf. Alvarado & Ferguson, 1983, p. 26). All teaching faculty, across academic disciplines, engage in the process of educating. Yet, while classroom discussions in disciplines outside of education focus on content more than they do on the role of pedagogy in determining that content, this "privilege" becomes a peril in a faculty of education. Teaching in teacher education requires more than teaching about teaching. The content and pedagogy of teacher education, Ginsburg (1988) proposes, must become not only purveyors of relevant teaching "skills and tools, but also the focus of critical examination" (pp. 211-212). This, according to Ginsburg, "would entail instructors and students identifying and discussing what messages are evidenced, and those which are not evidenced or are only part of the taken-for-granted background, in a given reading, handout, lecture," or any other classroom interaction. Further, Ginsburg adds, "the content of any specific message in the formal curriculum would have to be analyzed in relation to other messages in the formal curriculum, as well as those in the 'hidden' curriculum—that constituted by the social relations of the teacher education program" and the university community (p. 212). Such a process, however, Ginsburg suggests, is not likely to be a comfortable one for instructors or students. From the instructor's perspective, this makes what they say, what they may decide upon as curricular materials, and their routine practices . . . subject to critical inquiry and reflection. For students, not only would they be placed in the awkward position of publicly discussing the contradictory elements of a program organized by instructors who may be gate-keepers for their projected careers in teaching, but they would also have to interrogate their own actions and statements and those of their peers, (ibid.) Indeed, asking a teacher education program to promote critical and public reflection upon its own practices is, to borrow from Willinsky (1998), to ask for a level of educational courage not often evident in current conceptualizations of the 298 teaching/learning environment. But recognizing that as a challenge is not a reason to abandon the project. For it is precisely that kind of courage—one similar to that demonstrated by Peter in allowing and encouraging this particular study—that must be undertaken if there's any hope of making student teachers (and teacher educators) students of their own education. Much of what prospective teachers read and discuss in teacher preparation engages education as a site of struggle over the organization, circulation, and legitimation of knowledge, meaning, and experience. Critical literature, in particular, emphasizes the need to analyze the interests and power relations that structure teaching and learning by bringing instruction and the classroom setting to the fore to be critically examined and demystified (Yonemura, 1986). While such an approach is encouraged in classrooms as a general goal, the ways in which knowledge, meaning, and experience are organized, circulated, and legitimated in those very classroom settings are given extraterritorial status—a form of immunity from such investigation. Instead, critical analysis is directed elsewhere—towards other structures, other institutions, other educators—in what I call the "not in my classroom" syndrome. And while much of that literature depicts a "theoretical" world of turmoil, critique, and contestation, teacher education courses in which that literature is engaged are mostly characterized by orderliness, consensus, and compliance, where questioning is discouraged and contestation eliminated.2 Yet, as teacher educators, we can no longer simply alert students to the need to critically read, write, and act in the world. We must also allow them to act on and with that knowledge in order to publicly reflect upon, converse with, and problematize their own lived world of learning to teach. If, as hooks (1989) suggests, we need teachers who can talk back to their situation by talking to their experience, is preservice education not the appropriate place to begin? Where better to initiate what Schon (1983, p. 42) called a "reflective conversation with the situation" by which, according to Smyth (1988), individuals and communities acquire knowledge, skills and concepts that empower them to re-make, and if necessary re-order, the world in which they live. This takes the form of on-the-spot surfacing, criticizing, restructuring, and testing of intuitive understandings of experienced phenomena, (p. 34) The teacher education program, as Jack suggests "should establish procedures for students to question what they [teacher educators] are doing. I think it happens informally a lot in the hallways but it gets left out there, it gets forgotten when students go back into the classroom" (Interview #3, December 17,1996). Forgotten? 299 Probably not. Excluded from classroom dynamics? Most often. What becomes pedagogical by opening the kind of spaces advocated by Jack, according to Britzman & Pitt (1996), "is the possibility of learners implicating themselves in their learning" (p. 117). Through such a provision, claim Britzman & Pitt, "one makes a finer distinction in learning. This concerns the difference between learning about [education as] an experience . . . and learning from one's own reading of one's own [educational] experience" (p. 119). And having become aware "of one's implication, one begins to examine what prior knowledge or understanding one brings into [and those which are already inscribed in] the educative process and what knowledge and understandings are affirmed or made strange in the process" (p. 119-120). Through such a process, Giroux & McLaren (1986) add, the educative endeavour becomes a site where questions "of how experience is produced, legitimated, and accomplished become an object of study for students and [instructors] alike" (p. 235). This, they offer, helps "make both visible and problematic the presuppositions of . . . discourses and values that legitimate the institutional and social arrangements constituting everyday life in schools [of education]" (p. 224). Motivating such an examination is not the desire for criticism but for the beginning of a dialogue on experience. Even the best of teaching advances some knowledge and knowing over others. Exemplary instruction, as any, adheres to some ideologies, values, assumptions and underlying interests that structure the way teaching is taught. Thus, it is not the quality of instruction in teacher education that comes under scrutiny through such an interrogation but, rather, the very idea of what constitutes quality teaching, for and according to whom? By bringing the teacher, the organization of knowledge, and the classroom setting to centre-stage as legitimate "content" to be examined, both instructors and students break with and disrupt the taken for granted. As a result, different questions emerge; questions that explore the predominant concepts of knowledge and power, teaching and learning, and community; questions students use to make connections between the overt, the hidden, and the null curriculum, not only in education but in their own education, through their own learning. Engaging structures pedagogically—as framing for meaning—reveals, as Erickson (1991) points out, "the action patterns and underlying assumptions in the conduct of educational practice that otherwise might go unnoticed, or they might be dismissed as trivial because they are so commonplace" (p. 11). While we often tend to think of the course time-table, the allocation of students' "air time," the choice of readings, or the particular course assignments and their grading as a necessary yet transparent, 300 unproblematic grid upon which students' learning can be maintained, such procedures, structures, and processes are not simply what enables learning to take place thereafter or an infrastructure that is provided before "real" learning occurs. As pedagogical sites—always positioned and positioning students to engage the world in particular ways—procedures, processes, and structures determine the kind of learning that ultimately unfolds as their consequence. As such, they draw attention to the process through which knowledge, meaning, voice, identity, and experience are produced by addressing the 'how' and 'why' questions of their production. Examining them critically enables learners to connect the processes through which they 'come to learn' with how they learn and, ultimately, with what they learn (Lusted, 1986, p. 7). To arrive at any of the above, however, teacher education needs to abandon practices that maintain "the politics of the usual" and establish itself as an oppositional space (Alvarado, 1983) whose purpose is to displace, deconstruct, and disrupt the existing unquestioned delivery system; a space that actively works in opposition, to borrow, as van Reijen & Veerman (1988) do, from Lyotard, "to established thought, to what has already been done, to what everyone thinks, to what is well-known, to what is widely recognized, to what is [easily] readable" (p. 302. cf. Peters & Lankshear, 1996, p. 11; see also Greene, 1978, pp. 53-73). In making a pedagogical shift from the expected to the unexpected, (Britzman & Pitt, 1996, p. 119), this oppositional space strives to avoid that which, to borrow from Lather (1996), "maps easily onto taken-for-granted regimes of meaning,' no longer endorsing, legitimating, and reinforcing the very structures of meamng-making and symbolic value we wish to overthrow (p. 528). Rather than simply teach meanings, an oppositional teacher education strives to undo meanings, "displacing the . . . satisfaction of easy intelligibility with the disruptive dis-ease of . . . critique" (Fish, 1994, p. 236). The task of the teacher educator, then, to borrow from Hvolbek (1991), is to "undermine confidence in the obvious, to destroy 'common sense,' that horrendum pudendum, as Nietzsche called it, of all forms of training 'education.' For when something is taken as 'common sense,' when something is accepted as absolutely right and an end in itself, conversation is over" (p. 7). Yet, conversation is precisely what is required if we wish to make teacher education "a site in which pedagogy as a process is itself textualized (Ulmer, 1985, p. 52), to refocus attention to that which is taking place in this place (ibid., p. 43. cf. Zavarzadeh & Morton, 1994, pp. 43^4). 301 This oppositional—or what Zavarzadeh & Morton (1994) call the "defamiliarizing"—classroom, "aims at making itself opaque, 'strange,' 'different' from the world outside" (p. 48). And by making itself strange from the world outside—that is, from the normatively transparent "familiarizing" classroom— "problematizes itself as a cultural (that is, political) situation" (p. 53). In such a classroom, they add, students become aware of the way they are sites through which structures of social conflicts produce meanings. Conscious of this cultural role, the reader knows she is playing the role of the reader and is not a natural discoverer meanings. She becomes an interrogator of the ways that cultural practices turn the 'actual' into the 'real' and make the world intelligible. She, in short, becomes a 'theorist' (p.50).... [Theory is not] an abstract apparatus of mastery, but an inquiry into the grids of social intelligibilities produced by the discursive activities of a culture. Theory is a critique of intelligibility, (p. 53) The defamiliarizing classroom, then, utilizes pedagogies that invite teachers to read and write against the grain of unquestioned tradition; a pedagogy that encourages students to read and write their own environment critically, to make connections between how they learn and what they learn, between the overt, the hidden, and the null curriculum of their own experiences as students learning to become teachers. To use terms which, coined by Barthes (1974), now circulate the discourse of literary analysis, the defamiliarizing classroom presents the educative process as a more writerly text than the predominantly readerly text offered by the familiarizing classroom. A readerly text, is a predictable text which, according to Fiske (1989), invites an essentially passive, receptive, disciplined reader who tends to accept its meaning as already made. It is a relatively closed text, easy to read and undemanding of its reader. Such texts conform to ordinary expectations of meaning and are often processed passively and automatically." It is precisely that "predictable structure," write Sumara & Luce-Kapler (1993), "that makes the reader feel comfortable, so that once the reading is finished there is a sense that the experience with the [text] has been complete" (pp. 389-390). Opposed to this readerly text is a writerly text, "which challenges the reader constantly to rewrite it, to make sense out of it. It foregrounds its own textual constructedness and invites the reader to participate in the construction of meaning" (Fiske, 1989, p. 103). "Within the reading experience with a writerly text," Sumara & Luce-Kapler add, "the reader is not meant to feel comfortable." Yet it is those feelings of estrangement and discomfort that "lead to a deeper understanding of one's self and the living situation" (p. 390). For dissatisfaction, according to Szuberla (1997) "admits the existence of a problem, and in the perception of a problem, reflective thinking finds its origins." (p. 384; see 302 also Dewey, 1933). The readerly manner in which teacher education is currently conducted and read has "the flattening effect of habit. Habit is seductive; it is soothing, non-productive and anxiety free." (Rudduck, 1984, p. 5. cf. Smyth, 1992, p. 285). The writerly process, on the other hand challenges rather than affirms. It works to estrange the habitual by challenging readers and their expectations of the "real" they read. Instead of becoming the product of unthinking customs, an oppositional, defamiliarizing, or writerly mode of teaching education invites students to wonder about practice, to mull over alternatives, question motives, and critically reassess values and purposes (Knoblauch & Brannon, 1993, p. 8). Rather than fitting into and onto the structures of teaching and learning student teachers already know so well and therefore no longer question, these latter modes open a deliberate gap between students and their expected environment (Daloz, 1986), a gap whose closure requires that students become more critically conscious of their own experiences learning to teach. As such, these modes work, to borrow from Caputo's (1987) discussion of deconstruction, "to keep things in process, to disrupt, to keep the system in play, to set up procedures to continuously demystify the tendency of our categories to congeal" (p. 236. cf. Lather, 1992b, p. 120). [ST! Peter: I would agree that this is the state in which student teachers go into the schools. But it is a helpless position from which to act—as teachers—unless they also understand the habits, assumptions, modes of discourse, etc. Otherwise, it will simply lead to alienation.] Comprising only a brief phase in prospective teachers' accumulative educative experience, it is difficult for preservice teacher education to undo understandings built in and upon close to twenty years of schooling. Difficult, but not impossible. It is the kind of educative process provided in teacher education, however, that will determine whether the understandings student teachers arrive with are also those with which they will depart. Rather than perpetuating those understandings and granting them professional and academic certification through pedagogies of the obvious, we ought to provide those learning to teach qualitatively different educational experiences; experiences that interrogate and de-familiarize the given; experiences that allow students to understand not only that education is never neutral (although that's a good start) but also to collectively explore why, and to recognize how every action (and in-action) inside (or outside) the classroom positions students to experience a particular world in particular ways. Teacher education courses need to enable its own students experiences that allow them to explore how teaching is taught rather than simply explore techniques to impart what is taught; experiences that engage teacher education courses not as preparation 303 for practicum but as practicum environments in-and-of-themselves, where practice as-it-is-practiced gets theorized, and theory is not only considered for practice but is indeed practiced. Notes 1. The title of this chapter is borrowed from John Willinsky's notion of reflexive education. The inspiration for its content, however, comes from my experience as a doctoral student in a seminar taught by Gaalen Erickson and Anthony Clarke. While it was initially intended as a seminar on teacher education, it ultimately also became a seminar in teacher education. I am thankful to both for demonstrating what teacher education can (and should) be about (See Segall, 1997; Erickson & Clarke, 1997). 2. The social studies methods course, as I have illustrated in Chapter III, was, in many ways, an exception to that rule. It invited and encouraged students to question and contest the notions of history education with which they entered the program, the ways in which history education is currently conducted in schools. The four questions I examined in Chapter VI and the class discussion in which they were engaged are demonstrations of that approach. And it was in fact the invitation to question and see otherwise, to contest the politics of knowledge that sustain the obvious that made the methods course a "highlight" of the teacher education program according to this study's participants. The politics of knowledge and knowing in the methods course, however, were an exception to the rule of this teacher education program rather than a measure of it. 304 CHAPTER X C o n c l u s i o n The importance of learning in preservice teacher education as a form of dialogue in which prospective teachers and teacher educators critically and publicly speak to their experience and thus learn from it, has been a central theme in this dissertation. Indeed, this dissertation itself—as process and product—should be seen as a move in a continuing dialogue about teacher education. As such, it would seem disingenuous, perhaps counter-productive to end a dissertation which has laboured to open a discussion about preservice teacher education with a conclusion. For a conclusion, by definition, is meant to end, close, halt, and terminate what has preceded. Hence, the conclusion in the title of this chapter. Rather than provide a final concluding statement about the signified— learning to teach at the UBC Teacher Education Program—the purpose of this chapter, as it has been throughout this dissertation, to borrow from Barthes (1981), is to maintain the playing-field of signifiers open, to sustain a critical conversation with the situation, to highlight the politics of knowing, to re-discover that which we believe we have already discovered, to unlearn that which we have already learned, and thus learn further by learning again. Thus, this study in general, and its final chapter in particular, is not intended to provide solutions to what it, from its own perspective, has identified as problematics, dichotomies, or contradictions within the UBC Teacher Education Program or the social studies methods course used as a prism from which to engage it but, rather, to highlight and publicly engage them in order to bring more of what we do (and how, what we do, by definition, creates the "what we don't do") in teacher education into the fold of the discussion both about and in teacher education. Engaging the various issues addressed in its previous chapters, and using critique as a strategic tool with which to engage them, this study, rather than devaluing what took place in the UBC Teacher Education Program or in the social studies methods course through which this teacher education program was explored, has attempted, as Britzman (1991a) proposes, to work the delicate line of articulating the tensions between and within words and practices by questioning the processes of knowledge production and the responses fashioned by it (p. 13). By asking "what kind of future do teacher education's politics of the present make possible?" this study has sought to disturb the practice of teacher education, 305 subverts it against itself so as to further learn in, about, and from it. As such, questions raised in this dissertation should be considered both a weapon and a tool. As a weapon, they invite analyses of everyday events in order to investigate how practices of a social organization encode and are encoded in practice. As a tool, they both make change seem possible and facilitate action. For the very essence of questioning, of critique, is an act of possibility, of imagining otherwise, of conceiving alternatives (Shannon, 1995). This study, as any, and as I have indicated at the outset, was never meant to provide a narrative that tells all there is to tell about learning to teach. Indeed, any attempt at ethnographic work, according to Tyler (1986) "will always be incomplete, insufficient, lacking in some way." But incompleteness, Tyler adds, "is not a defect since it is the means that enables transcendence. Transcendence comes from imperfection not from perfection" (p. 136). Looking back at what I have provided, and even as I acknowledge the inevitability of incompleteness, I am nevertheless struck by having told so little of all there was to tell. Still, I hope this study has, at least partially, been able to "elucidate through description, interpretation [and conversation], what Snyder, Bolin, & Zumwalt (1992) call 'the enacted curriculum,' those qualities, understandings, and patterns of meaning that comprise [educational] experience as it is played out in the day-to-day levels of classroom practice" (Flinders & Eisner, 1994, p. 342). While as an intrinsic qualitative case study its purpose is not to show how this particular case connects to other situations but rather to provide a thick enough description (Geertz, 1973), interpretation, analysis, and theory so that readers can make their own connections to other similar and non similar cases. "The value of such research," add Flinders & Eisner, lies in its capacity to produce a multi-tiered description. Put crudely, by describing in some depth what once happened, it sensitises the reader to many possibilities of what might happen under future similar (though never identical) circumstances, (pp. 349-350) Thus, I hope what my research has brought forward might help other teacher educators, whether in the area of social studies or beyond, to become more aware, to see again what we all have come to take for granted regarding the nature and activities (and the nature of activities) in our teacher education classrooms, to reflect anew upon practice and the webs of meaning and action emanating from it. "A thoughtful . . . critical inquiry into a particular practice or practices of teacher education," states Adler (1993), "can inform an audience and spark debate. Indeed, debate and dialogue are crucial to critical inquiry. At the very least," Adler adds, 306 teacher educators "may come away with a greater understanding of teacher education, the problems and possibilities" (p. 44): Whether one views the issues I have raised about this teacher education program or the conception of an oppositional, critical teacher education I have proposed in the previous chapter as crisis or opportunity will ultimately depend on the experiences with, and the visions of teacher education readers bring to their reading of this dissertation. Yet, the meanings I, as author, hope to convey, to cite van Maanen (1988), are not frozen in print and thus "may melt before the eyes of active readers. Meanings," he adds, "are not permanently embedded by an author in the text at the moment of creation. They are woven from the symbolic capacity of a piece of writing and the social context of its reception. Most crucial, different categories of readers will display systematic differences in their perceptions and interpretations of the same writing" (p. 25). Not all will agree with my reading of this teacher education program. While readers may reject some of my interpretations on a variety of grounds—experiential, methodological, ideological, or political—I hope they are nevertheless able to see the validity of this study and its findings, trace the lines of evidence and reasoning that have led me to my specific claims to knowledge (Flinders & Eisner, 1994, p. 354). The value of the descriptions, theories, and analyses provided in this dissertation, "is to be judged by others in terms of how useful they find them" (Hammersley, 1992, p. 15; see also Goodman, 1998, p. 55). Although this study is context-specific, I hope that by describing, in some depth, what took place in this teacher education program, this study is able to resonate with the experiences of teacher educators, prospective teachers, and educational researchers in other contexts, and, thus, transcend its specific particularities. And yet, what I hope readers take away from this dissertation are not only my theories about the practice of this particular teacher education but also my practice of theorizing teacher education. For the problematics of teacher education my theorization has highlighted will hardly be addressed meaningfully by importing theories—mine or anyone else's. What is required, instead, is a process of theorizing that takes place within the practice of learning to teach, creating a form of critique that works to highlight the problematics embedded in current manifestations of, and the relationship among, theory, policy, and practice in teacher education, to publicly engage them in order to bring more of what we do in teacher education into the fold of the discussion not only about but also in teacher education itself. 307 Refe rences Adler, S. (1984). A field study of selected student teacher perspectives towards social studies. Theory and Research in Social Education 12 (1), 13-30 Adler, S. (1991a). The education of social studies teachers. In J. P. Shaver (Ed.), Handbook of research in social studies teaching and learning (pp. 210-221). New York: Macmillan. Adler, S. (1991b). Forming a critical pedagogy in the social studies methods class: The use of imaginative literature. In B. R. Tabachnick & K. M. Zeichner (Eds.), Issues and practices in inquiry-oriented teacher education (pp. 77-90). London & New York: Falmer Press. Adler, S. (1993). The social studies methods course instructor: Practitioner researcher. The International Journal of Social Education 7 (3), 39^ 47 Agar, M. (1995). Literary journalism as ethnography: Exploring the excluded middle. In J. Van Maanen (Ed.), Representation in ethnography (pp. 112-129). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Alvarado, M. (1983). The question of media studies. In: M. Alvarado & O. Boyd-Barrett (Eds.). (1992). Media education: An introduction (pp. 94-96). London: The British Film Institute. Alvarado, M., & Ferguson, B. (1983). The curriculum, media studies and discursivity: A reconsideration of educational theory. Screen 24 (3), 20-34. Alvarado, M., Gutch, G., & Wollen, T. (1987). Learning the media: An introduction to media teaching. London: Macmillan Education. Altheide, D. L., & Johnson, J. M. (1994). Criteria for assessing interpretive validity in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 485-499). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Anderson, G. L., & Irvine, P. (1993). Informing critical literacy with ethnography. In C. Lankshear and P. McLaren (Eds.), Critical literacy: Politics, praxis, and the postmodern (pp. 81-104). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ankersmit, F. R. (1983). Narrative logic: A semantic analysis of the historian's language. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Ankersmit, F. R. (1994). History and tropology: The rise and fall of metaphor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 308 Appadurai, A. (1996). Diversity and disciplinarity as cultural artifacts. In C. Nelson & D. P. Gaonkar (Eds.), Disciplinarity and dissent in cultural studies (pp. 23-36). New York & London: Routledge. Appleby, J., Hunt, L., & Jacob, M. (1994). Telling the truth about history. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Arends, R. I. (1991). Challenging the regularities of teaching through teacher education. In: N. B. Wyner (Ed.), Current perspectives on the culture of schools. (pp. 203-230). Brookline: MA: Brookline Books. Armento, B. J. (1991). Changing conceptions of research on the teaching of social studies. In J. P. Shaver (Ed.), Handbook of research on social studies teaching and learning (pp. 185-196). New York: Macmillan. Armento, B. J. (1996). The professional development of social studies educators. In J. Sikula, T. J. Buttery, & E. Guyton (Eds.), Handbook of research on teacher education (second ed.). (pp. 485-502). New York: Macmillan. Aronowitz, S., & Giroux, H. A. (1985). Education under siege: The conservative, liberal, and radical debate over schooling. South Hadley, NA: Bergin & Garvey. Aronowitz, S., & Giroux, H. A (1991). Postmodern education: Politics, culture and social criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Atldnson, P. (1990). The ethnographic imagination: Textual constructions of reality. London & New York: Routledge. Atkinson, P., & Hammersley, M. (1994). Ethnography and participant observation. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 248-261). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Avery, P. G, & Gamradt, J. A, with Trygestad, J., & Sedro, S. (1991). Students geopolitical perspectives. Social Education 55 (5), 320-325. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. In M. Holquest (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press (org., 1935). Banks, J. A. (1991). Multicultural literacy and curriculum reform. Educational Horizons, Spring, 135-140. Banks, J. A. (1995). Transformative challenges to the social science disciplines: Implications for social studies teaching and learning. Theory and Research in Social Education 23 (1), 2-20. 309 Banks, J. A. (1997). Educating citizens in a multicultural society. New York: Teachers College Press. Banks, J. A., & Parker, W. C. (1990). Social studies teacher education. In W. R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 674-686). New York & London: Macmillan. Bann, S. (1990). The inventions of history: Essays on the representation of the past. Manchester and New York: St. Martin's Press. Bannerji, H., Carty, L., Dehli, K., Heald, S., & McKenna, K. (1991). Unsettling relations: The university as a site of feminist struggles. Toronto: Women's Press. Barone, T., Berliner, D. C , Blanchard, J., Casanova, U., & McGowan, T. (1996). A future for teacher education: Developing a strong sense of professionalism. In J. Sikula (Ed.), Handbook of research in teacher education (pp. 1108-1149). New York: Simon Schuster Macmillan Barth, J. L. (1990). Methods of instruction in social studies education, 3rd ed. New York: University Press of America. Barth, J. L. (1996). The alternative futures of international social studies. In R. W. Evans & D. W. Saxe (Eds.), Handbook on teaching social studies (pp. 327-337). Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies. Barthes, R. (1972). What is criticism? In Critical essays (trans. R. Howard) Evanston, IL: North Western University Press. Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z (trans. R. Miller). New York: Hill & Wang. Barthes, R. (1981). Theory of the text. In R. Young (Ed.), Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (pp. 31-47). London and New York: Routledge. Barthes, R. (1985). Mythologies. New York: Hill & Wang. Barthes, R. (1986). The discourse of history. In The rustle of language (trans. R. Howard). New York: Hill & Wang. Benhabib, S. (1996). The intellectual challenge of multiculturalism and teaching the canon. In M. Garber, R. L. Walkowitz, & P. B. Franklin (Eds.), Fieldwork: Sites in literary and cultural studies (pp. 11-17). New York & London: Routledge. Bennett, C. (1996). Teacher perspectives: Strengthening reflective teacher education. Teaching Education 8 (1), 3-12. 310 Bennett, C , & Spalding, E. (1992). Teaching the social studies: Multiple approaches for multiple perspectives. Theory and Research in Social Education 20,263-292. Berkhofer, R. F. Jr. (1988). Demystifying historical authority: Critical textual analysis in the classroom. In R. Blackey (Ed.). (1993). History anew: Innovations in the teaching of history today (pp. 21-28). California State University, Long Beach, CA: The University Press. Berkhofer, R. F. Jr. (1995). Beyond the great story: History as text and discourse. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Bernstein, B. (1990). Class, codes and control: The structuring of pedagogical discourse. London: Routledge. Bernstein, B. (1996). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research, critique. London: Taylor & Francis. Beyer, L. E. (1987). What knowledge is of most worth in teacher education? In J. Smyth (Ed.), Educating teachers: Changing the nature of pedagogical knowledge. London: Falmer Press. Beyer, L. E., & Zeichner K. M. (1987). Teacher education in cultural context: beyond reproduction. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Critical studies in teacher education: Its folklore, theory and practice (pp. 298-334). London & New York: Falmer Press. Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London & New York: Routledge. Birch, D. (1989). Language, literature and critical practice. London: Routledge. Biriotti, M. (1993). Introduction: Authorship, authority, authorisation. In M. Biriotti & N. Miller (Eds.), What is an author? (pp. 1-16). Manchester & New York: University of Manchester Press. Bloom, L. (1992). How can we know the dancer from the dance? Discourses of the self-body. Human Studies 15 (3), 313-334. Blundell, V., Shepherd, J., & Taylor, I. (1993). Introduction. In V. Blundell, J. Shepherd, & I. Taylor (Eds.), Relocating cultural studies: Developments in theory and research (pp. 1-17). London & New York: Routledge. Borko, H. (1989). Research on learning to teach: Implications for graduate teacher preparation. In A. E. Woolfolk (Ed.), Research perspectives on the graduate preparation of teachers (pp. 69-87). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Boxer, M. (1982). For and about women: The theory and practice of women's studies in the United States. Signs 7 (3), 661-695. 311 Bradford, K. (1992). There will be wolves. Toronto: HarperCollins. Brady, H. R. (1993). The nature of social studies and the problem of definition. The International Journal of Social Education 8 (1), 7-22. Bragaw, D. (1993). A century of secondary social studies: Looking backward and forward. In V. S. Wilson, J. A. Little, & G. L. Wilson (Eds.), Teaching social studies: Handbook of trends, issues, and implications for the future (pp. 45-64). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Britzman, D. (1986). Cultural myths in the making of a teacher: Biography and social construction in teacher education. Harvard Educational Review 56 (4), 442-456. Britzman, D. (1991a) Practice makes practice: A critical study of learning to teach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Britzman, D. P. (1991b). Decentering Discourses in Teacher Education: Or, the Unleashing of Unpopular Things. Journal of Education 173 (3), 60-80. Britzman, D. P. (1995). "The question of belief": Writing poststructural ethnography. Qualitative Studies in Education 8 (3), 229-238. Britzman, D. P. (1997). The tangles of implication. Qualitative Studies in Education 10 (1), 31-37. Britzman, D. P., & Pitt, A. J. (1996). Pedagogy and transference: Casting the past of learning into the present of teaching. Theory into Practice 35 (2), 117-123. Britzman, D., Dippo, D., Searle, D., & Pitt, A. (1997). Toward an academic framework for thinking about teacher education. Teaching Education 9 (7), 15-26. Bruner, E. M. (1993). Introduction: The ethnographic self and the personal self. In P. Benson (Ed.), Anthropology and literature (pp. 1-26). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bruss, N., & Macedo, P. (1985). Towards a pedagogy of the question: Conversations with Paolo Freire. Journal of Education 167 (2), 7-21. Bullough, R. (1989). First year teacher: A case study. New York: Teachers College Press. Bullough, R. V., & Gitlin, A. D. (1994), Challenging teacher education as training: Four propositions. Journal of Education for Teaching 20 (1), 67-81. Butler, J. (1987). Gender trouble. London and New York: Routledge. 312 Calderhead, J., & Robson, M. (1991). Images of teaching: Student teachers' early conceptions of classroom practice. Teaching and Teacher Education 7 (1), 1-8. California Department of Education (1987). History-social science framework. Sacramento, CA: Department of Education. Cameron, E. (1995). Heritage minutes: Culture and myth. Canadian Issues/Themes Canadiens 7, 13-24. Caputo, J. (1987). Radical hermeneutics: Repetition, deconstruction, and the hermeneutic project.. Bloomington, Indiana: University of Indiana Press. Carey, J. W. (1996). Overcorrdng resistance to cultural studies. In J. Storey (Ed.), What is cultural studies: A reader (pp. 61-74). London & New York: Arnold. Carter, K. (1990). Teachers' knowledge and learrung to teach. In W. R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 291-310). New York: Macmillan. Case, R., Daniels, L., & Schwartz, P. (1996). Critical challenges in social studies for junior high students. Unpublished paper. Chambers, I. (1996). Signs of silence, lines of listening. In I. Chambers & L. Curti (Eds.), The post-colonial question: Common skies, divided horizons (pp. 47-62). London: Routledge. Cheney, L. V. (1987). American memory: A report on the humanities in the nation's public schools. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities. Cherryholmes, C. H. (1985). Theory and practice: On the role of empirically based theory for critical practice. American Journal of Education 94 (1), 39-70. Cherryholmes, C. H. (1988). Power and criticism: Poststructural investigations in education. New York: Teachers College Press. Cherryholmes, C. H. (1991). Critical research and social studies education. In J. S. Shaver (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching and learning social studies (pp. 41-55). New York: Macmillan. Cherryholmes, C. H. (1996). Critical pedagogy and social education. In R. W. Evans and D. W. Saxe (Eds.), Handbook on teaching social issues (pp. 75-80). Washington, D.C: National Council for the Social Studies. Cintron, R. (1993). Wearing a pith helmet at a sly angle: Or, can writing researchers do ethnography in a postmodern era? Written Communication 10 (3), 371-412. 313 Clifford, J. (1983). "On ethnographic authority." Representations 1 (2), 118-146. Clifford, J. (1986). Introduction: Partial truths. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus, (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 1-26). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament of culture: Twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J. (1992). Traveling cultures. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson & P. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 96-116). New York & London: Routledge. Cochran-Smith, M. (1991). Learning to teach against the grain. Harvard Educational Review 61 (3), 279-310. Cohen, L., & Manion, L. (1994). Research methods in education (4th ed.). New York: Routledge. Cole, A. L., & Knowles, J. G. (1993). Shattered images: Understanding expectations and realities of field experiences. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Atlanta. Conquergood, D. (1991). Rethinldng ethnography: Towards a critical cultural politics. Communication Monograph 58 (2), 179-194. Corfield, P. (Ed.). (1991). Language, history and class. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Crismore, A. (1984). The rhetoric of textbooks: Metadiscourse. Journal of Curriculum Studies 16 (3), 279-296. Cronon, W. (1992). A place for stories: Nature, history, and narrative. Journal of American History 78 (4), 1347-1376. Cuban, L. (1984). How, teacher taught: Constancy and change in American classrooms: 1900-1980. New York: Longman. Cummins, J. (1986). Empowering minority students: A framework for intervention. Harvard Educational Review 56 (1), 18-36. Cushman, K. (1994). Catherine called Birdy. NY: Houghton Mifflin. Daloz, L. (1986). Effective teaching and mentoring. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Davidson, C. N. (1986). Revolution and the world: The rise of the novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press. 314 Davis, O. L., Jr. (1992). "Your mother wears army shoes!" The silly debate between school history and the social studies. Citizenship as Social Studies Education. Bulletin 4. Munster, Ind.: National Council for the Social Studies Special Interest Group—Foundations of the Social Studies. de Certeau, M. (1986). History: Science and fiction. In Heterologies: Discourses on the Other (trans. B. Massumi). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Man, P. (1982). The resistance to theory. Yale French Studies 63, 3-20. Denzin, N. K. (1995a). The experiential text and the limits of visual understanding. Educational Theory 45 (1), 7-18. Denzin, N. K. (1995b). On hearing the voices of educational research. Curriculum Inquiry 25 (3), 313-329. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994a). Introduction: Entering the field of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 1-17). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994b). Preface. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. xi-xii). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Denzin, N. K., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1995). Transforming qualitative research methods: Is it a revolution? Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24 (3), 349-358. Derrida, J. (1972). Discussion: Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In R. Macksey & E. Donato (Eds.), The structuralist controversy (pp. 247-272). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology (trans. G. C. Spivak). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, J. (1979). Living on: Border lines. In H. Bloom, P. de Man, J. Derrida, G. Hartman, & J. H. Miller (Eds.), Deconstruction and criticism (pp. 75-176). New York: Continuum. Derrida, J. (1978). Structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences. In Writing and difference (trans. A. Bass), (pp. 278-294). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1933). How we think: A restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process. Boston, MA: D. C. Heath. 315 Dillard, C. B. (1997). Placing student language, literacy, and culture at the centre of teacher education reform. In J. E. King, E. R. Hollins, & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Preparing teachers for cultural diversity (pp. 85-96). New York: Teachers College Press. Doyle, W. (1986). Content representation in teachers' definitions of academic work. Journal of Curriculum Studies 18,365-379. Doyle, W. (1990). Themes in teacher education research. In W. R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 3-24). New York & London: Macmillan. Dutton, T. A., & Grant, B. C. (1991). Campus design and critical pedagogy. Academe 77 (4), 37-43 Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary theory: An introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edgerton, S. H. (1996). Translating the curriculum: Multiculturalism into cultural studies. New York & London: Routledge. Eisner, E. W. (1985). The educational imagination: On the design and evaluation of school programs (2nd ed.). New York: Macmillan. Ellsworth, E. (1989). Why doesn't this feel empowering? Working through the repressive myths of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 59 (3), 297-324. Ellsworth, E. (1990). Educational films against critical pedagogy. In E. Ellsworth & M. H. Whatley (Eds.), The ideology of images in educational media: Hidden curriculums in the classroom (pp. 10-26). New York: Teachers College Press. Ely, M., Anzul, M., Friedman, T., Garner, D., & Steinmetz, A. M. (1991). Doing qualitative research: Circles within circles. New York: Falmer Press. Erickson, F. (1991). Conceptions of school culture: An overview. In: N. B. Wyner (Ed.), Current perspectives on the culture of schools (pp. 1-12). Boston: Brookline Books. Erickson, G., & Clarke, A. (1997). Intentions and realities: Developing a community of practice in a teacher educational doctoral seminar. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Feiman-Nemser, S. (1983). Learning to teach. In L. Shulman & G. Sykes (Eds.), Handbook of teaching and policy (pp. 150-170). New York: Longman. 316 Feiman-Nemser, S. (1990). Teacher preparation: Structural and conceptual alternatives. In W. R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 212-233). New York: Macmillan. Feiman-Nemser, S., & Buchmann, M. (1986). The first year of teacher preparation: Transition to pedagogical thinking? Journal of Curriculum Studies 18 (3), 239-256. Felman, S. (1982). Psychoanalysis and education: Teaching terminable and mterrninable. In B. Johnson (Ed.), The pedagogical imperative. Yale French Studies 63,21-44. Fine, G. A. (1993). Ten lies of ethnography: Moral dilemmas of field research. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22 (3), 267-294. Fine, M., Weis, L., Powel, L. C., & Mun Wong, L. (Eds.). (1997). Off white: Readings on race, power, and society. New York & London: Routledge. Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fish, S. (1994). There's no such thing as free speech and it's a good thing too. New York: Oxford University Press. Fiske, J. (1989). Understanding popular culture. London: Routledge, Fiske, J. (1990). Ethnosemiotics: Some personal and theoretical reflection. Cultural Studies 4 (1), 85-99. Fiske, J. (1991). Writing ethnographies: Contribution to a dialogue. Quarterly Journal of Speech 71,330-335 Flinders, D. J., & Eisner, E. W. (1994). Educational criticism as a form of qualitative inquiry. Research in the Teaching of English 28 (4), 341-357. Foucault, M. (1972). The order of discourse. In Robert Young (Ed.). (1981).Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (pp. 48-78). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Foucault, M. (1977). Language, counter-memory, practice. (D. F. Bouchard & S. Simon Eds. & trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1979). The history of sexuality (trans. R. Hurley). London: Allen Lane. Freire, P. (1973). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press. 317 Frow, J. (1986). Marxism and literary history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frye, M. (1983). The politics of reality: Essays in feminist theory. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press. Fullan, M. G. (1991). The new meaning of educational change. London: Cassell. Gay, G. (1986). Multicultural teacher education. In J. Banks & J. Lynch (Eds.), Multicultural education in Western societies (pp. 154-177). New York: Praeger. Geddis, A. (1997). The practice of teacher education: Studying a doctoral seminar in teacher education. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Chicago. Gee, J. P. (1987). What is literacy?. Teaching and Learning: The Journal of Natural Inquiry! (1),3-11. Gee, J. P. (1990). Social linguistics and literacies. London: Falmer Press. Gee, J. P., & Green, J. L. (1998). Discourse analysis, learning, and social practice: A methodological study. In P. D. Pearson & A. Iran-Nejad (Eds.), Review of research in education 23 (pp. 119-169). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1983). Blurred genres: The refiguration of social thought. In C. Geertz (Ed.), Local knowledge: Future essays in interpretive anthropology . New York: Basic Books. Geertz, C. (1988). Works and lives: The anthropologist as author. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Geertz, C. (1995). After the fact: Two countries, four decades, one anthropologist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gibson, S. E. (1995). Emerging teacher identity: A study in learning to teach through the experiences of a secondary social studies methods course. University of British Columbia; unpublished dissertation. Giddings, P. (1984). When and where I enter.... The impact of Black women on race and sex in America. New York: William Morrow. Ginsburg, M. B., (1988). Contradictions in teacher education and society: A critical analysis. London: Falmer Press. 318 Ginsburg, M. B;, & Clift, R. T. (1990). The hidden curriculum of preservice teacher education. In W. R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 450-465). New York & London: Macmillan. Giroux, H. A. (1981). Ideology, culture and the process of schooling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Giroux, H. A. (1983). Theory and resistance in education: A pedagogy for the opposition. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (1985). Critical pedagogy, cultural politics and the discourse of experience. Journal of Education. 167 (2), 22-41. Giroux, H. A. (1988a). Schooling and the struggle for public life: Critical pedagogy in the modern age. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Giroux, H. A. (1988b). Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey Publishers. Giroux, H. A. (1990). The politics of postmodernism: Rethinking the boundaries of race and ethnicity. Journal of Urban and Cultural Studies 1 (1), 5-38. Giroux, H. A. (1994a). Doing cultural studies: Youth and the challenge of pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 64 (3), 278-308. Giroux, H. A. (1994b). Living dangerously: Identity politics and the new cultural racism. In H. A. Giroux and P. McLaren (Eds.), Between Borders: Pedagogy and the politics of cultural studies (pp. 45-55). New York and London: Routledge. Giroux, H. A. (1994c). Disturbing pleasures. New York: Routledge. Giroux, H. A. (1995). The politics of insurgent multiculturalism in the era of the Los Angeles uprising. In B. Kanpol & P. McLaren (Eds.), Critical multiculturalism: Uncommon voices in a common struggle (pp. 107-124). Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Giroux, H. A. (1996). Is there a place for cultural studies in colleges of education? In H. A. Giroux, C. Lankshear, P. McLaren & M. Peters (Eds.), Counter narratives: Cultural studies and critical pedagogies in postmodern spaces (pp. 41-58). New York: Routledge. Giroux,, H. A. (1997). Rewriting the discourse of racial identity: Towards a pedagogy and politics of Whiteness. Harvard Educational Review 67 (2), 285-320. 319 Giroux, H. A., & McLaren, P. (1986). Teacher education and the politics of engagement: The case for democratic schooling. Harvard Educational Review 56 (3), 213-238. Giroux, H. A., & McLaren, P. (1987). Teacher education as a counter-public sphere: Notes towards a redefinition. In T. Popkewitz (Ed.), Critical studies in teacher education: Its folklore, theory and practice (pp. 266-297). London: The Falmer Press. Giroux, H. A., & Penna, A. (1983). Social education in the classroom: The dynamics of hidden curriculum. In H. A. Giroux & D. Purpel (Eds.), The hidden curriculum and moral education: Deception or discovery? (pp. 100-121). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan. Giroux, H. A., & Simon, R. I. (1988). Schooling, popular culture, and a pedagogy of possibility. Journal of Education 170 (1), 9-26. Giroux, H. A., Shumway, D., Smith, P., & Sosnoski, J. (1996). The need for cultural studies: Resisting intellectuals and oppositional public spheres. http://eng.hss.cmu.edu/theory/need.html Glatthorn, A. A., & Coble, C. R. (1995). Leadership for effective teaching. In G. Appelt Slick (Ed.), The field experience: Creating successful programs for new teachers (pp. 20-34). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Goodlad, J. I. (1984). A place called school: Prospects for the future. New York: McGraw-Hill. Goodman, J. (1986). Teaching preservice teachers a critical approach to curriculum design: A descriptive account. Curriculum Inquiry 16 (2), 179-201 Goodman, J. (1988a). Constructing a practical philosophy of teaching: A study of preservice teachers' professional perspectives. Teaching and Teacher Education 4 (2), 121-137. Goodman, J. (1988b). The disenfranchisement of elementary teachers and strategies for resistance. Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 3 (3), 201-220. Goodman, J. (1992). Elementary schooling for critical democracy. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Goodman, J. (1998). Ideology and critical ethnography. In G. Shacklock & J. Smyth (Eds.), Being reflexive in critical educational and social research (pp. 50-66). London & Bristol, PA: Falmer Press. 320 Goodman, J., & Adler, S. (1985). Becoming an elementary social studies teacher: A study of perspectives. Theory and Research in Social Education 13,1-20. Goodman, J., & Fish, D. R. (1997). Against-the-grain teacher education: A study of coursework, field-experience, and perspectives. Journal of Teacher Education 48 (2), 96-107. Goodson, I. F. (1995). The story so far: Personal knowledge and the political. Qualitative Studies in Education 8 (1), 89-98. Goodwin, A. L. (1994). Making the transition from self to other: What do preservice teachers really think about multicultural education? Journal of Teacher Education 45 (2), 119-130. Goodwin, A. L. (1997). Historical and contemporary perspectives on multicultural teacher education: Past lessons, new directions. In J. E. King, E. R. Hollins, & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Preparing teachers for cultural diversity (pp. 5-22). New York & London: Teachers College Press. Gore, J. M. (1992). What can we do for you! What can "we" do for "you"?: Struggling over empowerment in critical and feminist pedagogy. In: C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.). Feminism and critical pedagogy (pp. 54-73). New York: Routledge. Gore, J. M. (1993). The struggle for pedagogies: Critical and feminist discourses as regimes of truth. New York: Routledge. Graddol, D. (1994). What is a text? In D. Graddol and O. Boyd-Barrett (Eds.), Media texts: Authors and readers (pp. 40-50). Clevedon, UK: The Open University. Greene, M. (1978). Landscapes of learning. New York & London: Teachers College Press. Greene, M. (1986a). In search of critical pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review 56 (4), 427-441. Greene, M. (1986b). Reflection and passion in teaching. Journal of curriculum and supervision 2 (9), 68-87. Greene, M. (1994). Postmodernism and the crisis of representation. English Education 26 (4), 206-219. Greene, S. (1994). The problems of learning to think like a historian: Writing history in the culture of the classroom. Educational Psychologist 29 (2), 89-96. Grossberg, L. (1994). Introduction. In H. A. Giroux & P. McLaren (Eds.), Between borders (pp. 1-28). New York: Routledge. 321 Grossberg, L. (1996). The circulation of cultural studies. In J. Storey (ED.), What is cultural studies? A reader (pp. 178-186). London: Arnold. Grossman, P. L. (1990). The making of a teacher: Teacher knowledge and teacher education. New York: Teachers College Press. Grossman, P. L., & Richert, A. E. (1988). Unacknowledged knowledge growth: A re-examination of the influence of teacher education. Teaching & Teacher Education 4, 53-62. Grossman, P. L., Wilson, S. M., & Shulman, L. S. (1989). Teachers of substance: Subject matter knowledge for teaching. In M. C. Reynolds (Ed.), Knowledge base for the beginning teacher (pp. 23-36). Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press. Grumet, M. R. (1992). Existential and phenomenblogical foundations of autobiographical methods. In W. F. Pinar & W. M. Reynolds (Eds.), Understanding curriculum as phenomenological and deconstructed text (pp. 28-43). New York: Teachers College Press. Gudmundsdottir, S., & Shulman, L. (1987). Pedagogical content knowledge in social studies. Scandinavian Journal of Education 31, 59-70. Hall, S. (1981) The Whites of their eyes: Racist ideologies and the media. In: G. Bridges & R. Brunt (Eds.), Silver linings: Some strategies for the eighties. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Hall, S. (1986). On postmodernism and articulation: An interview with Stuart Hall.; L. Grossberg (Ed.), Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (2), 45-60. Hamilton, P. (1996). Historicism: The new critical idiom. London: Routledge. Hammerberg, D. (1999). Autopoiesis and histories of literacy. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal. Hammersley, M. (1992). What's wrong with ethnography: Methodological explorations. London & New York: Routledge. Hammersley, M., & Atkinson, P. (1983). Ethnography: Principles in practice. London & New York: Tavistock/(1995): London & New York: Routledge. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest witness. New York: Routledge. Harding, S. (Ed.). (1987). Feminism and methodology. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. 322 Harlan, D. (1997). The degradation of American history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hartsock, N. (1987). Rethinking modernism: Minority vs. majority theories. Cultural Critique 7,187-206 Heath, S. (1982). Ethnography in education: Defining the essential. In P. Gilmore & A. Glatthorn (Eds.), Children in and out of school (pp. 33-58). Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Held, D. (1980). Introduction to critical theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. London: Hutchinson. Heller, A. (1993). A philosophy of history: In fragments. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Heyning, K. E. (1999). The construction of the autopoietic object through text. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal. Hicks, L. E. (1990). A feminist analysis of empowerment and community in art education. Studies in Art Education 32 (1), 36-46. Hollingsworth, S. (1989). Prior beliefs and cognitive change in learning to teach. American Educational Research Journal 26 (2), 160-189. Holstein, J. A., & Gubrium, J. F. (1995). The active interview. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Holt, T. (1990). Thinking historically: Narrative, imagination, and understanding. New York: College Entrance Examination Board. hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black. Boston, MA: South End Press. Huber, T., Kline, F. M, Bakken, L., & Clark, F. L. (1997). Transforming teacher education: Including culturally responsible pedagogy. In J. E. King, E. R. Hollins, & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Preparing teachers for cultural diversity (pp. 129-145). New York: Teachers College press. Hutcheon, L. (1989). The politics of postmodernism. New York: Routledge. Hvolbek, R. H. (1991). History and Humanities: Teaching as destructive of certainty. In R. Blackey (Ed.). (1993). History anew: Innovations in the teaching of history today (pp. 3-9). California State University, Long Beach, CA: The University Press. 323 Jackson Lears, T. J. (1985). The concept of cultural hegemony: Problems and possibilities. American Historical Review 90 (3), 567-593. Janesick, V. J. (1994). The dance of qualitative research design: Metaphor, methodology, and meaning. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 209-235). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Jenkins, K. (1991). Re-thinking History. London: Routledge. Jenkins, K. (1995). On what is history? From Carr and Elton to Rorty and White. London: Routledge Johnson, B. (1982). Teaching ignorance: L'ecole des femmes. Yale French Studies 63, 165-182. Johnson, R. (1996). What is cultural studies anyway? In J. Storey (ED.), What is cultural studies? A reader (pp. 75-114). London: Arnold. Joyce, J. (1947). A Portrait of the artist as a young man. New York: Viking Press. Judge, H. (1982). American graduate schools of education; A view from abroad. New York: Ford Foundation. Kanpol, B. (1998). Where was I? Or was I? In G. Shacklock & J. Smyth (Eds.), Being reflexive in critical educational and social research (pp. 191-201). London & Bristol, PA: Falmer Press. Kaye, H. (1991). The powers of the past: Reflections on the crisis and the promise of history. Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Kellner, H. (1989). Language and historical representation: Getting the story crooked. Madison, Wi.: University of Wisconsin Press. Kenway, J., & Modra, H. (1992). Feminist pedagogy and emancipatory possibilities. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminism and critical pedagogy (pp. 138-166). New York & London: Routledge. Kerrigan, W. (1979). Writing to the point (2nd Edition). New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich. Kersh, M. E. (1995). Coordmating theory with practice: The department chair's perspective. In G. Appelt Slick (Ed.), The field experience: Creating successful programs for new teachers (pp. 99-110). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. 324 Kickbusch, K. W. (1987). Civic education and preservice educators: extending the boundaries of discourse. Theory and Research in Social Education 15,173-188. Kidder, L. (1982). Face validity from multiple perspectives. In D. Brinberg & L. Kidder (Eds.), New directions for methodology of social and behavioral science: Forms of validity in research (pp. 41-57). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Kincheloe, J. L. (1993). Toward a critical politics of teacher thinking: Mapping the postmodern. Westport, Connecticut: Bergin & Garvey. Kincheloe, J. L. (1998). Getting beyond the limits in social studies: Reconceptualizing the methods course. In S. R. Steinberg & J. L. Kincheloe (Eds.), Students as researchers: Creating classrooms that matter (pp. 188-198). London & Bristol, PA: Falmer Press. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (1996). A tentative description of post-formal thinking: The critical confrontation with cognitive theory. In P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum, & A. Sherblom (Eds.), Breaking free: The transformative power of critical pedagogy (pp. 167-195). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Kincheloe, J. L., & Steinberg, S. R. (1997). Changing multiculturalism. Buckingham, UK & Philadelphia: Open University Press. Knoblauch, C. H., & Brannon, L. (1993). Critical Teaching and the Idea of Literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Kofman, S. (1993). Nietsche and metaphor. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kress, G. (1989). Linguistic processes in sociocultural practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kretovics, J. P. (1985). Critical literacy: Challenging the assumptions of mainstream educational theory. Journal of Education 167 (2), 50-62. Lacan, J. (1978). Le Seminaire, livre II: Le Moi dans la theorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil). LaCapra, D. (1985). History and criticism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. LaCapra, D. (1994). Canons, texts, and contexts. In L. Kramer, D. Reid & W. L. Barney (Eds.), Learning history in America (pp. 120-138). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lancy, D. F. (1993). Qualitative research in education: An introduction to the major traditions. New York: Longman. 325 Lanier, J., & Little, J. (1986). Research on teacher education. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 527-569). Oxford: Pergarnmon. Lankshear, C , Gee, J. P., Knobel, M., & Searle, C. (1997). Changing literacies. Buckingham, UK and Philadelphia: Open University Press. Lather, P. (1986). Research as praxis. Harvard Educational Review 56 (3), 257-277. Lather, P. (1990). Staying dumb? Student resistance to liberatory curriculum. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston. Lather, P. (1991a). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York & London: Routledge. Lather, P. (1991b). Deconstructing/deconstructive inquiry: The politics of knowing and being known. Educational Theory 41 (2), 153-173. Lather, P. (1992a). Critical frames in educational research: Feminist and post-structural perspectives. Theory into Practice 31 (2), 87-99. Lather, P. (1992b). Post-critical Pedagogies: A Feminist Reading. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminism and Critical Pedagogy (pp. 120-137). New York: Routledge. Lather, P. (1996). Troubling clarity: The politics of accessible language. Harvard Educational Review 66 (3), 525-545. Lather, P. (1997). Postbook: Working the ruins of feminist ethnography toward economies of responsibility and possibility. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago.. Lather, P. (1999). Hard questions about research on teaching. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal. Lather, P., & Smithies, C. (1995). Troubling angels: Women living with HIV/AIDS. Columbus, OH: Greyden Press. LeCompte, M. D. (1995). Some notes on power, agenda, and voice: A researcher's personal evolution toward critical collaborative research. In P. L. McLaren & J. M. Giarelli (Eds.), Critical theory and educational research (pp. 97-112). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Lee, R. L. M., & Ackerman, S. E. (1994). Farewell to ethnography? Global embourgeoisement and the disprivileging of the narrative. Critique of Anthropology 14,339-354. 326 Leistyna, P., Woodrum, A., & Sherblom, S. A. (Eds.). (1996). Breaking free: The transformative power of critical pedagogy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Leitch, V. (1986). Deconstruction and pedagogy. In C. Nelson (Ed.), Theory in the classroom (pp. 45-56). Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Lemke, J. L. (1995). Textual politics: Discourse and social dynamics. London and Bristol, PA: Taylor & Francis. Lewis, M. (1993). Without a word: Teaching beyond women's silence. New York & London: Routledge. Lewis, M., & Simon, R. I. (1996). A discourse not intended for her: Learning and teaching within patriarchy. In P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum, & A. Sherblom (Eds.), Breaking free: The transformative power of critical pedagogy (pp. 253-271). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review. Limerick, B., Burgess-Lomerick, T., & Grace, M. (1996). The politics of interviewing: Power relations and accepting the gift. Qualitative Studies in Education 9 (4), 449-460. Lincoln, Y. S., & Denzin, N. K. (1994). The fifth moment. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 575-586). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Liston, D. P., & Zeichner, K. M. (1991). Teacher education and the social conditions of schooling. New York: Routledge. Longstreet, W. S. (1990). The social studies: In search of an epistemology. The Social Studies 81 (6), 244-248. Longstreet, W. S. (1996). Alternative futures and the social studies. In R. W. Evans and D. W. Saxe (Eds.), Handbook on teaching social issues (pp. 317-326). Washington, D.C.: National Council for the Social Studies. Lortie, D. (1975). Schoolteacher. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lowenthal, D. (1985).The past is a foreign country. New York: Cambridge University Press. Luke, A. (1995). Text and discourse in education: An introduction to critical discourse analysis. Review of Research in Education 21,3-48). Washington D.C. AERA. 327 Luke, C , & Gore J. (1992a). Introduction. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminism and critical pedagogy (pp. 1-14). New York & London: Routledge. Luke C., & Gore, J. (1992b). Women in the academe: Strategy, struggle, and survival. In C. Luke & J. Gore (Eds.), Feminism and critical pedagogy (pp. 192-210). New York & London: Routledge. Lusted, D. (1986). Why pedagogy? In M. Alvarado & O. Boyd-Barrett (Eds.). (1992). Media education: An introduction (pp. 85-88). London: British Film Institute, (first published in Screen 27 (5), 7-10). Macherey, P. (1978). A theory of literary production (trans. G. Wall). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Maher, F. A., & Thompson Tetreault, M. K. (1997). Learning in the dark: How assumptions of Whiteness shape classroom knowledge. Harvard Educational Review 67 (2), 321-349. Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Marcus, G. E. (1986). Contemporary problems of ethnography in the modern world system. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus, (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 165-193). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Marcus, G. E. (1994). What comes (just) after "post"? The case of ethnography. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 563-574). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Mascia-Lees, F. E., Sharpe, P., & Cohen, C. B. (1989). The postmodernist turn in anthropology: Cautions from a feminist perspective. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15 (1), 7-33. Masterman, L. (1985). Teaching the media. London: Comedia. Masterman, L. (1993). The media education revolution. Canadian Journal of Educational Communication 22 (1), 5-14. McCarthy, C. (1993). After the canon: Knowledge and ideological representation in the multicultural discourse on curriculum reform. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race identity and representation in education (pp. 289-305). New York & London: Routledge. 328 McDiarmid, G. W. (1990). Challenging prospective teachers' beliefs during early field experience: A Quixotic undertaking? Journal of Teacher Education 41 (3), 12-20. McDiarmid, G. W., Ball, D. W., & Anderson, C. W. (1989). Why staying one chapter ahead doesn't really work: Subject-specific pedagogy. In M. C. Reynolds (Ed.), Knowledge base for the beginning teacher (pp. 193-205). Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press. McFarland, M. (1993). Reform, the social studies, and the fallacy of extremes. The International Journal of Social Education 8 (1), 77-85. McGinnis, J. D. (1995). Heritage minutes: Myth and history. Canadian Issues/Themes Canadiens 7, 25-36. McLaren, P. (1988). Broken dreams, false promises, and the decline of public schooling. Journal of Education.170 (1), 41-65. McLaren, P. (1989). Life in schools: An introduction to critical -pedagogy in the foundations of education. New York: Longman. McLaren, P. (1990). Field relations and the discourse of the other: Collaboration in our own ruin. In W. B. Shaffir & R. A. Stebbins (Eds.), Experiencing fieldwork: An inside view of qualitative research (pp. 149-163). Newbury Park, CA: Sage. McLaren, P. (1991). Decentering cultures: Postmodernism, resistance, and critical pedagogy. In N. B. Wyner (Ed.), Current perspectives on the culture of schools (pp. 231-258). Boston: Brookline Books. McLaren, P. (1994). Forward: Critical thinking as a political project. In K. S. Walters (Ed.), Re-thinking reason: New perspectives in critical thinking (pp. x-xv). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. McLaren, P. (1997). Critical pedagogy. Teaching Education 9 (1), 1 McLaren, P., & Giarelli, J. M. (1995). Introduction. In P. McLaren & J. M. Giarelli (Eds.), Critical theory and educational research (pp. 1-22). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. McLaren, P., & Giroux, H. A. (1995). Radical pedagogy as cultural politics: Beyond the discourse of critique and anti-utopianism. In P. McLaren, Critical pedagogy and predatory culture: Oppositional politics in a postmodern era (pp. 29-57). London & New York: Routledge. 329 McLaren, P., & Lankshear, C. (1993). Critical literacy and the postmodern turn. In C. Lankshear and P. McLaren (Eds.), Critical literacy: Politics, praxis, and the postmodern (pp. 379-419). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. McEwan, H., & Bull, B. (1991). The pedagogic nature of subject matter knowledge. American Educational Research Journal 28 (2), 316-334. McVicker Clinchy, B. (1989). On critical thinking and connected knowing. Liberal Education 75,14-19. Mc William, E. (1995). Performing the posts: Writing and speaking pomo-feminism. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco. McWilliam, E., & Taylor, P. G. (1996). Preface. In E. McWilliam & P. G. Taylor (Eds.), Pedagogy, technology, and the body (pp. vii-viii). New York: Peter Lang. Melnick, S. L., & Zeichner, K. M. (1997). Enhancing the capacity of teacher education institutions to address diversity issues. In J. E. King, E. R. Hollins & W. C. Hayman (Eds.), Preparing teachers for cultural diversity (pp. 23-39). New York & London: Teachers College Press. Minh-Ha, T. T. (1990). Documentary is not a name. October 52, 76-100. Mohanty, S. P. (1986). Radical teaching, radical theory: The ambiguous politics of meaning. In C. Nelson (Ed.), Theory in the classroom (pp. 149-176). Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Moore, H. (1993). Master narratives: Anthropology and writing. In M. Biriotti & N. Miller (Eds.), What is an author? (pp. 191-213). Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press. Nakayama, T. K., & Krizek, R.. L. (1995). Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech 81,291-309. National Commission on Social Studies in the Schools (1989). Charting a course: Social studies for the 21st century. Washington, D.C: National Council for the Social Studies. National Council for the Social Studies (1998). http://www.ncss.org/about/ background.html Nelson, C , Treichler, P. A., & Grossberg, L. (1992). Introduction. In L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, & P. A. Treichler (Eds.), Cultural studies (pp. 1-22). New York: Routledge. 330 Novick, P. (1988). That noble dream: The "objective question" and the American historical profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O'Brien, J. (1997). Preservice teachers' evolving conception of social studies education: Giving voice to their thinking. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Ochoa, A. (1981). The education of social studies teachers. In H. Mehlinger & O. Davis (Eds.), The social studies (pp. 151-169). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Olesen, V. (1994). Feminism and models of qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 158-174). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Oleson, V., & Whittaker, E. (1968). The silent dialogue: A study of the social psychology of professional education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Palonsky, S. B. (1993). A knowledge base for social studies teachers. The international Journal of Social Education 7 (3), 7-23. Palonsky, S. B., & Jacobson, M. G. (1989). Student teacher perceptions of elementary school social studies: The social construction of curriculum. Journal of Social Studies Research 13 (1), 28-33. Patton, M. Q. (1990). Qualitative evaluation and research methods. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Peters, M., & Lankshear, C. (1996). Postmodern counternarratives. In H. A. Giroux, C. Lankshear, P. McLaren, & M. Peters (Eds.), Counternarratives: Cultural studies and critical pedagogies in postmodern spaces (pp. 1-39). New York & London: Routledge. Phelan, A. M. (1994). Unmasking metaphors of management: A pedagogy of collaborative deconstruction. Teaching Education 6 (1), 101-111 Phalen, A. M., & Garrison, J. W. (1994). Toward a gender-sensitive ideal of critical thmking: A feminist poetic. In K. S. Walters (Ed.), Re-thinking reason: New perspectives in critical thinking (pp. 81-97). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Pinar, W. F., Reynolds, W. M., Slattery, P., & Taumman, P. M. (1996). Understanding curriculum: An introduction to the study of historical and contemporary curriculum discourse. New York: Peter Lang. 331 Polkinghorne, D. (1983). Methodology for the human sciences: Systems of inquiry. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Popkewitz, T. S. (1987). Knowledge and interest in curriculum studies. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Critical studies in teacher education: Its folklore, theory, and practice (pp. 335-354). London & New York: Falmer Press. Popkewitz, T. S. (1993). U.S. teacher education reforms: Regulatory practices of the state, university, and research. In T. S. Popkewitz (Ed.), Changing patterns of power: Social regulations and teacher education reform (pp. 263-301). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Postman, N., & Weingartner, C. (1969). Teaching as a subversive activity. New York: Delacorte Press. Rabinow, P. (1986). Representations are social facts: Modernity and post-modernity in anthropology. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus, (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 234-261). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ramsey, P. G. (1987). Teaching and learning in a diverse world. New York: Teachers College Press. Ranciere, J. (1994). The names of history: On the poetics of knowledge (trans. H. Melehy). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reason, P., & Rowan, J. (1981). Issues of validity in new paradigm research. In P. Reason & J. Rowan (Eds.), Human inquiry (pp. 239-252). New York: Wiley. Richardson, L. (1994). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 516-529). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Richardson, L. (1995). Narrative and sociology. In J. Van Maanen (Ed.), Representation in ethnography (pp. 198-221). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Richardson, V. (1996)., The role of attitudes and beliefs in learning to teach. In J. Sikula (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (second edition): A project of the Association of Teacher Educators (pp. 102-119). New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan. Roman, L. G. (1993). White is a color! White defensiveness, postmodernism, and anti-racist pedagogy. In C. McCarthy & W, Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity, and representation in education (pp. 71-88). New York & London: Routledge. 332 Rooney, E. (1996). Discipline and vanish: Feminism, the resistance to theory, and the politics of cultural studies. In J. Storey (Ed.), What is cultural studies? A reader (pp. 208-220). London: Arnold. Ropers-Huilman, B. (1997). Witnessing: Critical inquiry in a poststructural world. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Rosenstone, R. A. (1995). Visions of the past: The challenge of film to our idea of history. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Ross, W. (1987). Teacher perspective development: A study of preservice social studies teachers. Theory and Research in Social Education 15 (4), 225-243. Roth, M. S. (1995). The ironist's cage: Memory, trauma, and the construction of history. New York: Columbia University Press. Rudduck, J. (1984). Teaching as an art, teacher research, and research-based teacher education . Second annual Lawrence Stenhouse Memorial Lecture, University of East Anglia. Salter, D. (1997). Evaluation of evidence in historical texts and recognition of historical authorial intention. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Samuel, R. (1992). Reading the signs II. History Workshop Journal 33,220-251. Sarason, S., Davidson, K., & Blatt, B. (1986). The preparation of teachers: An unstudied problem in education. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books. Saveland, R. N. (1993). School geography. In V. S. Wilson, J. A. Little, & G. L. Wilson (Eds.), Teaching social studies: Handbook of trends, issues, and implications for the future (pp. 131-145). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Scheurich, J. J. (1995). A postmodernist critique of research interviewing. Qualitative Studies in Education 8 (3), 239-252. Scheurich, J. J. (1996). The masks of validity: A deconstructiye investigation. Qualitative Studies in Education 9 (1), 49-60. Schniedewind, N. (1987). Feminist values: Guidelines for teaching methodology in women's studies. In I. Shor (Ed.), Freirefor the classroom: A resourcebook for liberatory teaching (pp. 170-179). Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann. Scholes, R. (1985). Textual power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 333 Schon, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books. Schrag, P. (1967). Voices in the classroom: The emasculated voice of the textbook. Saturday Review, 21/ January. Schrijvers, J. (1991) Dialectics of a dialogical ideal: Studying down, studying sideways and studying up. In L. Nencel & P. Pels (Eds.), Constructing knowledge: Authority and critique in social science (pp. 162-179). London & Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Schug, M. (1989). Why teach social studies? Interviews with elementary teachers. The Social Studies 80 (2), 73-77. Schumacher, S., & Macmillan, J. M. (1993). Research in education: A conceptual introduction (3rd. ed.). New York: HarperCollins College Publishers Schwab, J. J. (1964). The structure of the disciplines: Meanings and significance. In G. W. Ford & L. Pugno (Eds.), The structure of knowledge and the curriculum. Chicago: Rand McNally. Schwartz, M. (1993). Voices in educational research: An introduction. In M. Schwartz (Ed.), Qualitative voices in educational research (pp. 1-6). London: The Falmer Press. Scott, J, W. (1988). Gender and the politics of history. New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, W. J. (1991a, September 11). Liberal historians: A unitary vision. Chronicle of Higher Education, XXXVIII (3),B1-B2. Scott, J. W. (1991b). The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry 17,773-779. Scott, J. W. (1996). After history? Paper presented at the History and the Limits of Interpretation Symposium, Rice University, TX. March 15-17. http:/ / www.ruf.rice.edu/~culture/papers/Scott.html Sears, A. (1990). Enriching social studies with interviews. The History and Social Science Teacher 25 (2), 95-98. Sears, A. (1997). Social studies in Canada. In I. Wright & A. Sears (Eds.), Trends and issues in Canadian social studies (pp. 18-38). Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press. Seixas, P. (1993a). The community of inquiry as a basis for knowledge and learning: The case of history. American Educational Research Journal 30 (2), 305-324. 334 Seixas, P. (1993b). Parallel crises: History and the social studies curriculum in the USA. Journal of Curriculum Studies 25 (3), 235-250. Seixas, P. (1994). When psychologists discuss historical thinking: A historian's perspective. Educational Psychologist 29 (2), 107-109. Seixas, P. (1996). The place of the disciplines within social studies. In I. Wright & A. Sears (Eds.), Trends ans issues in Canadian social studies (pp. 116-129). Vancouver, BC: Pacific Educational Press. Seixas, P. (1997). From social studies to cultural studies. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Seixas, P. (1998). Schweigen! die kinder! Or, does postmodern history have a place in the schools? Paper presented at the Pittsburgh Conference on Teaching, Learning, and Knowing History, Pittsburgh. Segall, A. (1997). Practicing what we preach: Bridging the theory-practice dichotomy in teacher education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Chicago. Segall, A. (1999). Postmodern history and social studies teacher education. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Montreal. Shannon, P. (1995). Text, lies, & videotape: Stories about life, literacy, & learning. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Shapiro, M. (1985-1986). Metaphor in the philosophy of the social sciences. Cultural Critique, Winter, 191-214. Sholle, D., & Denski, S. (1994). Media education and the (Re)Production of culture. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey. Shor, I. (1986). Equality is excellence: Transforming teacher education and the learning process. Harvard Educational Review. 56 (4), 406-426. Shor, I. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Shrewsbury, C. M. (1987). What is feminist pedagogy? Women's Studies Quarterly 15 (3 & 4), 6-13. Shulman, L. S. (1986). Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching. Educational Researcher 15 (2), 4-14. 335 Shulman, L. S. (1987). Knowledge and teaching: Foundations of the new reform. Harvard Educational Review 57 (1), 1-22. Sikes-Scering, G. E. (1997). Themes of a critical/feminist pedagogy: Teacher education for democracy. Journal of Teacher Education 48 (1), 62-68. Simon, R. I. (1992). Teaching against the grain: Texts for a pedagogy of possibility. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Sleeter, C. E. (1993). How white teachers construct race. In C. McCarthy & W, Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity, and representation in education (pp. 157-171). New York & London: Routledge. Sloterdijk, P. (1987). Critique of cynical reason (trans. M. Eldred). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smith, B. G. (1994). Gender and historical understanding. In L. Kramer, D. Reid & W. L. Barney (Eds.), Learning history in America: Schools, cultures, and politics (pp. 107-119). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Smyth, J. (1988). A critical pedagogy of teacher evaluation. Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press. Smyth, J. (1989). A critical pedagogy of classroom practice. Journal of Curriculum Studies. 21 (6), 483-502. Smyth, J. W. (1992). Teacher' work and the politics of reflection. American Educational Research Journal 29 (2), 267-300. Smyth, J, & Shacklock, G. (1998). Behind the 'cleansing' of socially critical research accounts. In G. Shacklock & J. Smyth (Eds.), Being reflexive in critical educational and social research (pp. 1-12). London & Bristol, PA: Falmer Press. Snyder, J., Bolin, F., & Zumwalt, K. (1992). Curriculum implementation. In P. W. Jackson (Ed.), Handbook of research on curriculum (pp. 402-435). New York: Macmillan. Sparks, A. (1998). Reciprocity in critical research? Some unsettling thoughts. In G. Shacklock & J. Smyth (Eds.), Being reflexive in critical educational and social research (pp. 67-82). London & Bristol, PA: Falmer Press. Sparks, C. (1996). The evolution of cultural studies. In J. Storey (ED.), What is cultural studies? A reader (pp. 14-30). London: Arnold. 336 Spiegel, G. (1990). history, historicism, and the social logic of the text in the Middle Ages. Speculum 65 (1), 59-86. Spina, S. U. (1997). Demythifying multicultural education: Social semiotics as a tool of critical pedagogy. Teaching Education 9 (1), 27-35. Spindler, G., & Spindler, L. (Eds.). (1987). Interpretive ethnography of education: At home and abroad. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Stables, A. (1996). Studying education as text: Parameters and implications. Westminster Studies in Education 19, 5-13. Stanley, W. B. (1991). Teacher competence for social studies. In J. P. Shaver (Ed.), Handbook of research on social studies teaching and learning (pp. 249-262). New York: Macmillan. Stanley, W. B. (1992). Curriculum for Utopia: Social reconstructionism and critical pedagogy in the postmodern era. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1994). Grounded theory methodology: An overview. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 273-285). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Street, A. (1998). m/forming inside nursing: Ethical dilemmas in critical research. In G. Shacklock & J. Smyth (Eds.), Being reflexive in critical educational and social research (pp. 146-158). London & Bristol, PA: Falmer Press. Sultana, R. G. (1995). Ethnography and the politics of absence. In P. L. McLaren & J. M. Giarelli (Eds.), Critical theory and educational research (pp. 113-125). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press Sumara, D. J., & Luce-Kapler, R. (1993). Action research as a writerly text: Locating co-labouring in collaboration. Educational Action Research 1 (3), 387-395. Szuberla, C. A. L. (1997). Learning theory and the preservice teacher. Education 117 (3), 381-385. Tabachnick, R., & Zeichner, K. (1984). The impact of the student teaching experience on the development of teacher perspectives. Journal of Teacher Education 35 (6), 28-35. Terdiman, R. (1982). Structures of initiation: On semiotic education and its contradictions in Balzac. Yale French Studies 63,198-226. 337 Thorndike, E. (1975). The psychology of the half-educated man. In Karier, C. (Ed.), Shaving the American educational state, 1900 to the present. New York: Free Press. Thornton, S. J. (1994). The social studies near century's end: Reconsidering patterns of curriculum arid instruction. Review of Research in Education 20,223-254. Thornton, S. J., & Wegner, R. N. (1990). Geography curriculum and instruction in three fourth-grade classes. Elementary School Journal 90 (5), 515-531. Treichler, P. A. (1986). Teaching feminist theory. In C. Nelson (Ed.), Theory in the classroom (pp. 57-128). Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Tyler, S. A. (1986). Post-modern ethnography: From document of the occult to occult document. In J. Clifford & G. E. Marcus (Eds.), Writing culture: The poetics and politics of ethnography (pp. 122-140). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tyler, S. A. (1987). The unspeakable: Discourse, dialogue, and rhetoric in the postmodern world. Madison, Wise: University of Wisconsin Press. Tyler, S. A. (1991). A post-modern in-stance. In L. Nencel & P. Pels (Eds.), Constructing knowledge: Authority and critique in social science (pp. 78-94). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications Ullrich, W. J. (1992). Preservice teachers reflect on the authority issue: A case study of a student teaching seminar. Teaching and Teacher Education 8 (4), 361-380. Ulmer, G. L. (1985). Applied grammatology: Post(e)-pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. University of British Columbia Registrar's Office. (1995/96). The University of British Columbia Calendar. Vancouver, BC: The University of British Columbia. Van Maanen, J. (1988). Tales of the field: On writing ethnography. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Van Maanen, J. (1995). An end to innocence: The ethnography of ethnography. In J. Van Maanen (Ed.), Representation in ethnography (pp. 1-35). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. van Reijen, W., & Veerman, D. (1988). An interview with Jean-Francois Lyotard. Theory, Culture and Society 7, 302. Walters, K. S. (1990). Critical thinking, rationality, and the vulcanization of students. Journal of Higher Education 61,448-467. 338 Walters, K. S. (1994). Introduction: Beyond logicism in critical thinking. In K. S. Walters (Ed.), Re-thinking reason: New perspectives in critical thinking (pp. 1-22). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Warren, K. J. (1994). Critical ticking and feminism. In K. S. Walters (Ed.), Re-thinking reason: New perspectives in critical thinking (pp. 155-176). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Weiler, K. (1988). Women teaching for change: Gender, class and power. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Weinstein, D., & Weinstein, M. A. (1991). Georg Simmel: Sociocultural flaneur bricoleur. Theory, Culture & Society 8,151-168. Werner, W. (1991). Curriculum integration and school cultures. In R. Case, L. Daniels, D. Court, & W. Werner (Eds.), FOCI: Forum on Curricular Integration. Tri-university Integration Project—Simon Fraser University, University of British Columbia, University of Victoria. Werner, W., & Nixon, K. (1990). The media and public issues: A guide for teaching critical mindedness. London, ON: University of Western Ontario Press. White, H. (1973). Metahistory. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. White, H. (1978). Tropics of discourse: Essays in cultural criticism. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Willinsky, J. (1998). Learning to divide the world: Education at empire's end. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press Wilson, E. K., Konopak, B. C , & Readence, J. E. (1994). Preservice teachers in secondary social studies: Examining conceptions and practices. Theory and Research in Social Education 22 (3), 364-379 Wilson, S. M., Shulman, L. S., & Richert, A. E. (1987). "150 different ways" of knowing: Representations of knowledge in teaching. In J. Calderhead (Ed.), Exploring teachers' thinking (pp. 104-124). London: Cassell. Wilson, S. M., & Wineburg, S. S. (1988). Peering at history from different lenses: The role of disciplinary perspectives in the teaching of American history. Teachers College Record 89 (4), 525-539. Wilson, S. M., & Wineburg, S. S. (1993). Wrinkles in time and space: Using performance assessment to understand the knowledge of history teachers. American Educational Research Journal 30 (4), 729-769. 339 Wilson, S. M., & McDiarmid, G. W. (1996). Something old, something new: What do social studies teachers need to know? In F. B. Murray (Ed.), The teacher educator's handbook: Building a knowledge base for the preparation of teachers (pp. 295-319). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers. Wineburg, S. S. (1991). On the reading of historical texts: Notes on the breach between school and academy. American Educational Research Journal 28 (3), 495-519. Wineburg, S. S., & Wilson, S. M. (1988). Models of wisdom in the teaching of history. Phi Delta Kappan 70 (1), 50-58. Wolcott, H. F. (1990). On seeking and rejecting validity in qualitative research. In E. W. Eisner & A. Peshkin (Eds.), Qualitative inquiry in education: The continuing debate (pp. 121-152). New York: Teachers College Press. Yerushalmi, Y. H. (1982). Zakhor: Jewish history and Jewish memory. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Yon, M., & Passe, J. (1993). The relationship between the elementary social studies methods course and the first year teachers' perspectives. Journal of Social Studies Research 16/17 (1), 33-42. Yonemura, M. (1986). Reflections on teacher empowerment and teacher education. Harvard Educational Review 56 (4), 473-480. Young, M. (1977). Curriculum change: Limits and possibilities. In M. Young & G. Whitty (Eds.), Society, state, and schooling. London: Falmer. Young, R. (1981). Poststructuralism: An introduction. In R. Young (Ed.),Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (pp. 1-28). London: Routledge. Zammito, J. H. (1993). Are we being theoretical yet? The new historicism, the new philosophy of history, and "practicing historians." Journal of Modern History 65 (4), 783-814. Zavarzadeh, M., & Morton, D. (1994). Theory as resistance: Politics and culture after (post) structuralism. New York and London: Guilford Press Zeichner, K. M. (1983). Alternative paradigms of teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education 34 (3), 3-9. Zeichner, K. M. (1986). Content and contexts: Neglected elements in studies of student teaching as an occasion for learning to teach. Journal of Education for Teaching 12 (l),5-24. 340 Zeichner, K. M. (1992). Rethinking the practicum in the professional development school partnership. Journal of Teacher Education 43 (4), 296-307. Zeichner, K. M., & Gore, J. (1990). Teacher socialization. In W. R. Houston (Ed.), Handbook of research on teacher education (pp. 329-348). New York: Macmillan. Zeichner, K. M., Grant, C., Gay, G., Gillette, M., VaUi, L., & Villegas, M. (1998). A research informed vision of good practice in multicultural teacher education: Design principles. Theory Into Practice 37 (2), 163-171. Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. P. (1987). Teaching student teachers to reflect. Harvard Educational Review 57 (1), 23-48. Zeichner, K. M., & Liston, D. P. (1996). Reflective teaching: An introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Zevin, J. (1990). Teachers in social studies education. The Social Studies 81 (6), 254-263. Zizek, S. (1989).. The sublime object of ideology. London & New York: Verso. 341 Subjecting the "Objective" Centre: Reading and Writing Texts in the Social Studies Classroom CONSENT T O RESEARCH PROJECT: PART ONE I have read the letter relating to the above titled project. I understand the section tided PART O N E of this research (which allows the researcher to observe the SSED 312 methods class) and all my questions have been answered satisfactorily. I understand that I have the right to refuse to participate or withdraw from the study at any time without incurring a penalty of any kind, and that the information collected is for research purposes only. I have received a copy of the Consent Form for my own records. I consent to participate in this study. I AGREE / DO NOT AGREE to the researcher tape-recording SSED 312 classes (Please circle your response) Name (please print) Signature _ • Date page 2 of 2 343 Subjecting the "Objective" Centre: Reading and Writing Texts in the Social Studies Classroom C O N S E N T T O P A R T T W O OF R E S E A R C H PROJECT I have read the letter relating to PART TWO of the above titled project. I understand this part of the proposed research and all my questions have been answered satisfactorily. I understand that I have the right to refuse to participate or withdraw from the study at any time without incurring a penalty of any kind, and that the information collected is for research purposes only. I have received a copy of the Consent Form for my own records. I consent to participate in PART TWO of this study. Name (please print) Signature Date. Telephone contact number (s) or e-mail address page 2 of 2 345 A p p e n d i x B Course outline/The social studies methods course Social Studies Curriculum and Instruction: Secondary SSED 312 Fall, 1996 Recommended for purchase: Tom Morton, Cooperative Learning and Social Studies (1996) Relevant Calendar information: Class begins, Wednesday, Sept 4 Practicum, Oct 21-Nov. 1 Last class, Friday, Nov. 29 1. Introduction: (Sept. 4,6,9,11,13) What is social studies about? Why are you doing social studies? Social studies as reading and writing texts. Overview of courses, units, lessons. The Provincial Social Studies Curriculum and the new IRPs. Readings Seixas, Peter. "Social studies as reading texts." Unpublished paper. Roland Case, LeRoi Daniels, and Phyllis Schwartz. Introduction to Critical Thinking. In Critical Challenges in Social Studies for Junior Ffigh Students. Unpublished paper. Ministry of Education, Social Studies Integrated Resource Package (Review Draft) 2. Historical texts (Sept, 16,18,20,23,25,27) What are the different kinds of historical texts? How does one read them? What is historical thinking? Readings Holt, Tom (1990). Thinking Historically: Narrative. Imagination, and Understanding. New York: College Entrance Examination Board, editors' introduction, and pp. 1-13. Seixas, Peter (1996). "The Place of the Disciplines Within Social Studies." In Ian Wright and Alan Sears, eds. Trends and Issues in Canadian Social Studies. Vancouver Pacific Educational Press. John Hennigar-Shuh, "Learn to Look," History and Social Science Teacher, pp. 141-146. Wineburg, Samuel (1991). "On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy." American Educational Research Journal 28, 3: 495-519. Moscovitch, Arlene (1993). Constructing Reality: Exploring Media Issues in Documentary. Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, pp. 180-189. ("The Ballad of Crowfoot") 346 3. Contemporary newspapers, print media, and TV as texts (Sept. 30, Oct. 2,5) Readings: Walter Werner and Kenneth Nixon, (1990). "What is a public issue" and "How are the arguments manipulated," The Media and Public Issues: A Guide for Teaching Critical Mindedncss. London, ON: University of Western Ontario Press, pp. 9-14 and 55-70. "Media as a social issue." BCATA Journal for Art Teachers INTERLUDE I: BUILDING UNITS (Oct 7) 4. Landscape, maps, and the built environment as texts. (Oct 9,11,16) (Note: Oct 14 is Thanksgiving, Oct 18 is Provincial PD Day) National Geography Standards, excerpts. Kimmel, James R (1996). "Using the National Geography Standards and Your Local River to Teach About Environmental Issues." Journal of Geography. (95, 2), pp. 66-72. Brodsky, Harold (1996). "Collecting Maps That Lie. Journal of Geography. 95, ? (May/June), pp. 136-140. Smith, Richard V. and Ann E. Brown. (1996). "Developing a Sense of Place." Journal of Geography (95, 2), pp. 86-89. Yee, Sze-onn. (1996). Ethnic Enclaves as Teaching and Learning Sites. The Social Studies (January/February), pp. 13-17. 5. Contemporary fiction as text (Nov. 6) Barb Bathgate, guest speaker Readings: Karen Cushman (1994). Catherine Called Birdy New York: Houghton Mifflin, (selection) Karleen Bradford (1992). There Will Be Wolves. Toronto: HarperCollins (selection). INTERLUDE II: UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS' UNDERSTANDING (Nov. 8,13,15) (Note: Nov. 11 is Remembrance Day) Readings: Lynn Archer, Criterion-based Assessment, Evaluation and Reporting. Surrey School District 347 Avery, Patricia G. and Gamradt, Jan A. et al. "Students' Geopolitical Perspectives," Social Education 55,5 (Sept,, 1991), pp.320-325. UNIT OVERVIEW DEFENSES (Nov. 18-23) 6. Reading and writing miscellaneous texts (Nov. 25,27, 29) Artifacts Sherry L. Held, Linda D. Labbo, Ron W. Wilhelm, and Alan W. Garrett (1996). To touch, to feel, to see: Artifact inquiry in the social studies classroom. Social Education 60. 3. 141-143. Oral testimony Sears, Alan, "Enriching Social Studies with Interviews," History and Social Science Teacher. 25,2 (Winter, 1990), pp.95-98. Quantitative data DuPlass, James A. (1996). Charts, tables, graphs, and diagrams: An approach for social studies teachers. The Social Studies (January/February), 32-38. 1991 Census Teacher's Kit "Women in the Labour Force" Activity 19: Roles in Transition. E-Stat Activity: Critical Analysis of Controversial Statements Other electronic resources: CD-ROM, Internet, the WWWeb ASSIGNMENTS: All students are expected to complete the regularly assigned readings. These are essential to effective participation in class. From time to time small assignments will be given that are designed to prepare for in-class activities and discussions. These will not be graded individually but, are essential for effective participation in the class. Primary Source Document Lesson Each student will design a lesson around the use of a primary historical source. Value: 20 marks Unit overview Students will be given an outline of key elements in planning a unit Using those elements, they will plan a social studies unit. In evaluating these assignments, special attention will be paid to consistency among rationale, objectives, resources, activities and assessment (See last year's evaluation comments in library) Value: 40 marks Weekly Assignments and Presentations, Class participation < • Value: 10 marks Final examination Value: 30 marks 348 A p p e n d i x C Unit Overview Assignment ASSESSING UNIT OVERVIEWS GENERAL GOALS: - Arc thay c l ear? (What exact ly is scant by each goal?) - Are they focussed? (Do the goals provide adequate d i r e c t i o n for the unit? - Do they f i t v i t h the prescribed curriculum? - Are they r e a l l y worth pursuing? (Why should students learn this?) SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES: - Are they consistent with the goals? (Are they o f f - top ic? ) • - Are they comprehensive? (Have any prerequ i s i t e object ives been omitted?) - Are any object ives i r r e l e v a n t ? (Are each of the s p e c i f i c objectives necessary to advance the general goals?) SEQUENCE OF LESSONS: - Does the opening lesson se.t the stage for the uni t? (Does i t create interes t and provide a mind set?) - Is there a l o g i c to the order of the lessons? ( W i l l students have a sense of where the uni t i s going? Are the p r e r e q u i s i t e understandings and s k i l l s taught at the appropriate times?) - Does the unit b u i l d to a conclusion? ACTIVITIES/RESOURCES: - Are the a c t i v i t i e s appropriate? (Are they the best means of achieving the lesson object ives?) - Are the a c t i v i t i e s r e a l i s t i c ? (Is success l i k e l y i f the methods are implemented as out l ined?) - Are the a c t i v i t i e s var ied and in teres t ing? - Are the resources appropriate? (Do the planned resources adequately the a c t i v i t i e s ? ) , - Is there any reason to suspect that the resources w i l l be an impediment/ ( e .g . / appropriate reading l eve l? l e g i b l e ? s u f f i c i e n t q u a n t i t i e s . ) EVALUATION STRATEGIES - Do they a c t u a l l y address the Intended objec t ive s? - Are they v a l i d measures? (Do they assess what students can r e a l i s t i c a l l y be expected to l earn for the lesson?) - Have we used a v a r i e t y of d i f f e r e n t s t r a t e g i e s ? - Have we gathered s u f f i c i e n t Information? (Do we have s u f f i c i e n t evide to accurate ly judge student achievement of the objectives?) - Is our evaluat ion formative? (How w i l l i t be used to help students 1 349 A p p e n d i x D F i n a l E x a m Final Examination SSED 312 Fall, 1996 Seixas/Trofanenko 1. The underlying approach to this course has been teaching social studies as teaching students to read and write texts. a. What does this mean? b. Do you think that it is an effective approach to social studies? Why or why not? What are its strengths and/or weaknesses? 2. Choose one of the attached documents. In one to three paragraphs, explain a teaching context (course, unit, place within the unit), where the document would be useful for achieving your goals and objectives. How would you use it? What questions would you have students consider, in order to help them to read it critically? a) Advertisement for Victory Bonds (Canada, February 28,1942). b) "Religious Schools, Public Funds." Toronto Globe and Mail, Nov. 23, 1996. c) US investment in highways. Testimony of Treasury Secretary George M. Humphrey before a Congressional Committee (1955). d) Excerpts from "An Act for the Better Order and Government of Negroes and Slaves," South Carolina (1712). e) Eaton's Fall and Winter Catalogue (1899-1900), with an inset photograph, from the same year of trappers with stretched beaver skins, Yukon. 0 Excerpt from Denise Chong, Concubine's Children, pp. 115-116, a memoir about a Chinese family in British Columbia. 3. Choose one of the following topics. Define four to seven student learning objectives that you would pursue in a unit on this topic. Then describe the way you would assess students' attainment of those objectives. The assessments) should include specific criteria, and should be directly linked to the objectives you def ned. A. a municipal election (Grade 11). B. early settlement in British Columbia (Grade 10) C. Pacific Rim trade (Grade 10) D. religions of the world (Grade 8) E. 19th century European imperialism in Africa and/or Asia (Grade 9) F. the Conquest of New France (Grade 9) G. Enlightenment thinkers (Grade 9) H. global migration and refugees (Grade 11) 350 A p p e n d i x E SCET Form STUDENT BACKGROUND INFORMATION We wish to collect the following data for research purposes. The data will be kept confidential and will not be given to the instructor. Your sex: Your age: O Female O Male O 24 or less O 35-39 O 25-29 O 40-44 O 30-34 O 45+ In your case the course is: O a requirement O an elective Are you a student in the Faculty of Education? O yes O no If yes, please indicate your Program of Studies: (Fill in only one bubble of the six below) O Elementary Teacher Certification (12 months) O Elementary Teacher Certification (2 years) O Secondary Teacher Certification O Diploma Program O Masters or Doctoral Program O Unclassified Student What grade do you expect to receive in this course? (Please indicate your best guess) O A+ (90-100) O A (85-89) O A-(80-84) OB+(76-79) O B (72-75) O B-(68-71) O C+ (64-67) O C (60-63) O C- (55-59) O D (59-54) O F (0-49) Please indicate the overall average of your undergraduate marks: (or your current average if you have not completed undergraduate studies) O A+(90-100) O A (85-89) O A- (80-84) OB+(76-79) O B (72-75) O B-(68-71) O C+ (64-67) O C (60-63) O C- (55-59) Form 1 Revised 26/01/94 The University recognizes the importance of high quality teaching for the academic preparation of its students and accordingly requires that instructors be annually evaluated by procedures which include provisions for assessments by students. In responding to the items, please keep in mind that you are asked to rate the quality of instruction and those aspects of the course over which the instructor clearly has control. OVERALL RATING Overall, I rate the quality of instruction in this course as: O Excellent O Very Good O Good O Adequate O Less than adequate O Poor O Very Poor Overall, I rate this course as: O Excellent O Very Good O Good O Adequate O Less than adequate • Poor O Very Poor t SCANTR0N CANADA FORM NO. F-6393-UBC SCWTRON CORPORATION • » « Al l RIGHTS RESERVED, PC 0694-C H9999-5 4 351 FOR THE REMAINING ITEMS, A SEVEN-POINT RATING SCALE IS PROVIDED FOR YOU TO RECORD YOUR RESPONSES. Please interpret it to have the following meaning: 0 1 J 3 4 5 6 7 Not Disagree Disagree Agree Agree Applicable Very Strongly Somewhat Somewhat Very Strongly If you feel that any item is totally irrelevant to the quality of the instruction in your course, completely fill the '0' (zero) bubble provided. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 o 0 0 0 0 0 . 0 0 1. My interest in this subject has increased because of the way it was taught. o o o o o o o o 2. The instructor was enthusiastic about the subject matter. o o o o o o o o 3. Class presentations were not well organized. o o o o o o o o 4. The instructor summarized important points and concepts. o o o o o o o o 5. The instructor demonstrated a comprehensive knowledge of the subject. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 o O O O O O O O 6. Course objectives were made clear. o o o o o o o o 7. Assignments required by the instructor were not useful teaming experiences. o o o o o o o o 8. Evaluation procedures were fair. o o o o o o o o 9. The instructor did not provide adequate class time for questions. o o o o o o o o 10. Evaluation procedures helped me to learn more about the subject. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 o O O O O O O O 11. The course challenged me intellectually. o o o o o o o o 12. The instructor was not considerate of students' needs. o o o o o o o o 13. The instructor was available for help outside of class. o o o o o o o o 14. This was an interesting course. o o o o o o o o 15. This instructor did not appear to enjoy teaching. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 o O O O O O O O 16. The instructor discussed current developments in the field. o o o o o o o o 17. The course was well organized. o o o o o o o o 18. The subject matter was not clearly explained. o o o o o o o o 19. The instructor's feedback on assignments was helpful. o o o o o o o o 20. Course requirements were unclear. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 o O O O O O O O 21. Reading materials were relevant to course objectives. o o o o o o o o 22. The instructor explained clearly the basis for evaluating students. o o o o o o o o 23. The instructor made good use of scheduled class time. o o o o o o o o 24. The instructor encouraged student participation in class. o o o o o o o o 25. Students were treated with respect. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 o O O O O O O O 26. The instructor spoke with expressiveness and variety in tone of voice. o o o o o o o o 27. The instructor presented thought-provoking ideas. o o o o o o o o 28. The instructor covered very little course content in class time. o o o o o o o o 29. The instructor communicated clearly. o o o o o o o o 30. The instructor demonstrated a tolerance of other points of view. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 o O O O O O O O Overall, I learned a great deal in this course. 352 A p p e n d i x F Third Text: The "Garbage Can" 353
Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Curriculum Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use.
Graduate
Disturbing practice : reading and writing (social studies) teacher education as text
Text