Redesigning an ‘Urban’ Teacher Education Program: An Activity Theory Perspective

In this article, we use activity theory to frame the redesign of an urban teacher education program. Some of the contradictions that we had to deal with are endemic to traditional teacher education programs while others were particular to this program that has as its goal to prepare teachers to work in urban (inner city) schools. As a result of our intervention, the implementation of coteaching, the teacher education program became participatory and more democratic. Coteaching makes salient the social, collective, rather than individual, psychological dimensions of learning to teach. As a result of the redesign process, new forms of relations between preservice teachers and cooperative teachers and supervisors emerged that are more participatory and democratic than they had been in the past. Coteaching in teacher education 3 Teacher education is fraught with problems. Despite nearly a century of research since Dewey began to work towards a professionalization of teachers and teaching, there remains a fundamental gap between theory and praxis. In our research beginning and experienced teachers alike tell us time and again that what they learn in their university courses or during summer workshops for teacher enhancement has little to do with teaching praxis (e.g., Roth, 1998a; Roth, Masciotra, & Boyd, 1999; Tobin, Seiler, & Smith, 1999). It is true that teacher education programs include field experiences, which allow ‘future’ teachers to spend some time in a school. Teachers in training also teach some lessons. However, as the following comments show, tremendous difficulties of teaching and learning to teach can be encountered particularly by those teacher trainees who undertake their field experiences in urban schools that serve students from housing projects, poverty, and crime infested neighborhoods. Today was by far the worst day of my short teaching career. I’m hoping that the weapons check had something to do with it, but I’m not quite so sure about that. My class started on time but nothing was accomplished. I tried to introduce the lab, move the desks, get them into groups, and get them started on the lab. But no one would go with me. I had probably 5 or 6 kids out of the 25 in the class actually interested in doing what I wanted them to do. They were unruly. Totally disrespectful, loud and obnoxious! How do I get them to want to perform for me? Everyone says rapport, rapport, rapport and I understand it is important. But right now, the rapport that I am establishing is not the rapport between teacher and student BECAUSE I am not their teacher nor do I feel that I am qualified to be. Does anyone else feel this way? (Cam, teaching intern, 11/04/98) In these reflections of a teacher-to-be on a day at school, we recognize a lot of frustrations. In these and other reflections (e.g., Roth & Tobin, 2000), Cam articulates a number of possible causes for these frustrations. These causes include: (a) the differences Coteaching in teacher education 4 between the way these inner city students behave compared to students in the middle class school that he had attended, (b) pedagogies that do not work, (c) university lessons on ‘building rapport’ that do not work in praxis, and (d) a general lack of relevance of university training to the work in schools. We know that these problems are not singular but are experienced by new teachers in other parts of the continent, even when working in less challenging schools (Roth & Boyd, 1999). Some problems described by Cam and his peers clearly have to do with the gap between theory and praxis and are therefore endemic to traditional teacher education programs. Other problems are specific to a teacher education program that intends to prepare teachers for working in urban schools. Despite the persistence of the problems in teacher education, there is a lack of research that attempts to understand the situation in non-monocausal ways and to enact practices that lead to positive change. Furthermore, the traditional focus on the individual, psychological, rather than the social, collective dimensions of learning to teach tend to blame individual teachers. In this article, we describe and theorize one teacher education program before and after its change, which was to address the contradictions that existed in the way it intended to prepare the next generation of teachers. In our work, we follow the suggestion that only a rethinking of problems and contradictions (here in teaching) in terms of their collective societal rather than individualistic dimensions will make a difference in the way society is re/produced (Lave, 1996; Tolman, 1994). Because of the complexity of the problem, we sought an analytic tool that allowed us to address two concerns. First, the analytic tool should afford us to track multiple relations between individuals and institutions, and artifacts and rules that mediate relations between them. Second, the tool needed to be commensurable with our epistemology of praxis that appeared to us an essential commitment for overcoming the problems in the theory-praxis relation (e.g., Dreier, 1993; Holzkamp, 1991). Conscious of a fundamental contradiction in teaching—the chasm between educational theory that is inculcated to prospective teachers in university lectures and educational praxis Coteaching in teacher education 5 that constitutes teachers’ day-to-day experience on the job—our recent work has focused on developing an ‘understanding-from-praxis’ approach (Roth, Masciotra, & Boyd, 1999; Roth, Lawless, & Masciotra, in press; Roth, Lawless, & Tobin, in press; Roth & Tobin, in press). Our work is grounded in (sociological) phenomenology (e.g., Bourdieu, 1997) and critical psychology (e.g., Dreier, 1991), which has encouraged us to take account for the salient elements in our actors’ lifeworlds. The latter are characterized both by local contingency and structural hierarchical relations that make up objectively experienced social worlds, which, in the form of specific activity systems, evolve historically and reproduce themselves constantly (e.g., Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979). Because activity theory focuses on the complex, situated and distributed nature of ongoing activity it provides us with a lens that is consistent with our epistemological commitments to praxis (Cole & Engeström, 1993). Two studies in educational contexts, dealing with problems in an inner city school in Finland (Y. Engeström & R. Engeström, 2000) and school-workplace transitions (Williams, Wake, & Boreham, 2000), suggested to us the potential usefulness of activity theory in our situation.