Education

Education

In most higher education institutions today, teacher education remains uncomfortably situated. It is too often an embarrassing subject of academic discourse, reflecting unresolved dilemmas about its intellectual stature. Although colleges of education have obtained a foothold in higher education in the 20th century, they have often done so at the expense of teacher education, treating it as an awkward cousin and, usually, relegating it the lowest priority in their mission. We assert that this marginalization of teacher education, ironically, is the act that is most responsible for the low stature of colleges of education within the academy.

We argue here that the dominant strategy by which colleges of education sought to locate them in higher education, however appealing it might have seemed to its leaders at the beginning, misjudged the essential aim of the enterprise and thus led in the end to chronic weakness. To now make teacher education the centerpiece of academic interest will seem shocking to some. It is our contention that just such a bold reorientation will not only strengthen colleges of education, but will also be met with warmth and enthusiasm by the leaders of academic institutions today. In a knowledge-based economy, teacher education's moment has arrived. (Sue, 147)

Issues and Controversies

While criticism of teacher education has been a common practice throughout U.S. history, with virtually every decade of the 20th century seeing some report bemoaning the terrible state of the field, in the 1980s something new started to emerge. The pivotal work of Lee Shulman and his colleagues helped us understand the link between academic content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge partly learned in academic settings and partly acquired through guided clinical practice. The publication of this analysis, along with the introduction of a new concept, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), signaled a significant advance in the teacher education literature (Shulman, 1986a, 1986b, 1987a, 1987b). Thorough academic content knowledge was not displaced by PCK in this formulation. Quite the opposite, PCK was explicitly predicated upon solid deep knowledge of academic content. Although empirical study of PCK is difficult, it is not impossible (e g., Grossman, 1990), and the theory has proven robust in conveying a persuasive understanding of how content mastery can improve teaching. (Crystal, 214)

In Europe, one recent approach has been to market the advantages of bilingual education at the individual level. The reasoning behind this is partly that ideological and political arguments will always be present in debates ...