Student teaching is usually considered the ritual bridge between the student's world and the teacher's world. The dominant model of current teacher education is organized on the tacit theory of direct integration: the university provides the theories,...
Student teaching is usually considered the ritual bridge between the student's world and the teacher's world. The dominant model of current teacher education is organized on the tacit theory of direct integration: the university provides the theories, methods, and skills; schools provide the classroom, curriculum, and students.
This article explores what student teachers learn about the work of teachers as they combine their own experience in teacher education with their student teaching practice. Prospective teachers need to take part in developing critical ways of knowing which can interrogate school culture, the quality of students' and teachers' lives, school knowledge, and the particular role biography plays in understanding the dynamics.
Understanding the work of a teacher as transformative intellectual can empower prospective teachers to examine their own histories, those connections to the past which in part define who they are and how they mediate and function in the world. But for this reconception of the teacher to have any import in teacher education, we can no longer view it as a technical education producing technicians. In order for prospective teachers to experience becoming a teacher as an activity of human agency, the structure of teacher education must begin in a social environment which enables prospective teachers to engage in their professional development as students and teachers.
Three notions - wisdom, authenticity, and passion - related to professional practice that field-based teacher educators were perceived as particularly valuable in their work with student teachers were identified. Field-based teacher educators' work with student teachers constitutes a transformative pathway through which student teachers can come to understand and experience what it means to be a teacher.