48.2 Teacher Education: Developing Teachers
in an Integrated and Holistic Manner
Since the time teacher education emerged as an identifiable activity, there have been few
periods when it was not being critiqued, studied, rethought, reformed, and, often, excori-
ated. (Cochran-Smith 2004 , p. 295)There is no shortage of criticism about teacher education—what it does, how it does
it and what it produces in terms of a‘teacher product’. Typically the theory-practice
gap comes into focus as a root cause of the‘ills of teacher education’as the nature
of what it means to learn theory is contrasted to the need to be able to do practice.
Therefore, the thoughtful interplay of theory and practice inevitably demands
careful consideration in shaping the thinking about, and practice of, students of
teaching. Hence, teacher education must be constructed as an integrated and holistic
venture in order to create opportunities for growth and development in education
rather than to maintain (or even reinforce) the status-quo.
It has been well-documented over the years how teacher education can be
viewed as a series of discrete and disjointed course work units (Darling-Hammond
2004 ) broken up by practice teaching opportunities in schools—with the practicum
typically being more highly valued by students of teaching—creating a fragmented
view of knowledge; a view that yet again plays out through notions of the
theory-practice divide:
Sometimes the divide appears in the prevailing curriculum of teacher education, separated
into domains of knowledge: educational psychology, sociology of education, foundations,
methods of teaching and the academic disciplines corresponding to school subjects. These
knowledge chunks are complemented by experience: supervised practice, student teaching
and practice itself. In all of these, the gap between theory and practice fragments teacher
education by fragmenting teaching. (Ball 2000 , p. 242)Addressing fragmentation is important, but not easy. For example, Mullen ( 2000 ),
in researching learning to teach through the experiences of a school-based teacher
education unit, found that the participating students of teaching did not view their
experience as‘learning to teach’, rather they were‘doing teaching’.
48.3 Learning to Teach
It is not unusual tofind teacher education programmes organized in ways that can
be interpreted as attempting to‘front load’students of teaching with as much as
possible in order to‘prepare’them for what it means to manage the initial expe-
riences associated with beginning to teach. Such structures bow to the somewhat
superficial expectation that teaching can be‘scripted’and that students of teaching
might best be prepared for practice if they are familiar with that script.
Teacher education should be structured and conducted in such a way as to
support a process of knowledge growth through practice and so learning from
714 A. Clemans et al.