Working through Whiteness by Fasching-Varner Kenneth J.;Dixson Adrienne D.;Mitchell Roland W.;

Author:Fasching-Varner, Kenneth J.;Dixson, Adrienne D.;Mitchell, Roland W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780739176870
Publisher: Lexington Books

Chapter 5

Naïveté in Rationales for Being Teachers

One of the greatest challenges in twenty-first century urban education is the recruitment and retention of highly qualified, effective, committed teachers who have well- developed rationales for entering the field. Throughout my professional career, I have witnessed the consequences to K–12 students when their teachers are able to generate only generic commitments to teaching and consequently possess under-developed rationales for doing the work. When the teacher has not thought about the why of the work in a meaningful way, she or he is likely to wander through the enterprise of education without deriving specific approaches to her or his craft that are consistent with why she or he does the work. That is to say, if my rationale for teaching is to prepare the democratic citizenry of the next generation, ideas of citizenship and democracy would permeate every aspect of my teaching; the teaching that occurs is for and with students, as opposed to being oriented by primarily content-driven considerations. In my own teaching, as when I worked with students on how to write letters in fourth grade, I had my students research a meaningful problem in our community, and we wrote letters to the elected leaders who could help to effect change. A teacher with a naïve or under-developed rationale is likely to teach letter writing to students as opposed to teaching students to write a letter, and she or he is also likely to orient the experience of writing the letter in decontextualized ways, such as writing to an imaginary friend. In such decontextualized learning situations, students are not meaningfully involved in an active and engaged set of experiences. While I am not suggesting that all teachers develop citizenship as their rationale, I am suggesting that having a developed, coherent, and informed rationale for doing the work of teaching can serve to help drive the instruction in meaningful ways. Unfortunately in education, we hear teachers often say, “I am teaching math” or “I am teaching Romeo and Juliet,” as if inanimate things can be taught. We rarely hear student-first language in the teaching enterprise.

The pre-service teacher participants in my research by and large did not articulate well-developed or complex rationales for their desire to be teachers. In fact, their rationales could be understood both as naïve and perhaps another semantic move around race. The pervasive and overwhelming number of white teachers, and the staggering statistics that children of color are most likely to be taught by white teachers in mostly (re)segregated schooling environments, makes the discussion of teacher rationale important from not merely an employment and training perspective but also from a racial perspective. The struggle to break from the historic, moral, socio-political, and economic debts (Ladson-Billings, 2006b) that have dominated the framing of current educational opportunities in school systems is particularly complicated given the importance of the intended role of teacher as an agent of change and socialization. Schools need teachers who are not only competently and thoughtfully prepared to teach

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.