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Chapter OneSTEPPING LIGHTLY, THINKING BOLDLY,LEARNING CONSTANTLY: COMMUNITYAND INQUIRY IN TEACHER EDUCATION
Linda Farr Darling, Gaalen Erickson and Anthony Clarke
University of British Columbia
1.
 
INTRODUCTION TO CITE: A COMMUNITYOF INQUIRY IN TEACHER EDUCATION
The stories told in the chapters in front of you represent a specialcollaboration between colleagues involved in teacher education. We hopethe curiosity that brought you to the book is further sparked by what you findin its pages. The collection is, as the title of the series says, a self-study withmultiple “selves” contributing to it. For over ten years, a small group of teacher educators at the University of British Columbia, along withnumerous school partners, has annually led a cohort of students in anongoing experiment and research agenda in teacher preparation. After 12-months of coursework and school experience, these post-baccalaureatestudents are awarded a Bachelor of Education degree, their entry toelementary teacher certification. The project is called CITE: A Communityof Inquiry in Teacher Education. As small-scale reform initiatives go, CITEhas had a relatively long and vibrant life, despite some inevitable setbacksand struggles. In fact, it is the longevity of CITE that prompted its foundersto focus our inquiries about teaching and learning on the challenges of sustaining our own project. The result is a collection that chronicles some of our experiments, our deliberations, and the lessons learned through theseexperiences. It would be accurate to say that
Collective Improvisation
ismany stories, not just one. That is because the book represents the perspectives of university-based instructors, school partners, former students, and graduate student researchers, each of whom contribute adifferent and valued voice to the whole composition.
 L. Farr Darling et al. (eds.), Collective Improvisation in a Teacher Education Community
, 1–6.© 2007
Springer 
.
 
 
Collective Improvisation
came about as most initiatives have in our groupsince the cohort’s inception in 1996. Someone has an idea or a question, andthe moment he or she voices it, other members of the team are off andrunning. Many creative and fruitful experiments in CITE have come fromour weekly meetings, and especially from our yearly retreats in which we tryto combine celebration with sincere introspection. For some time, we have been curious about the reasons CITE has lasted as long as it has, andinterested to see if by writing our own story, we could make better sense of  perennial questions about reform in teacher education. Even so, there aremore questions presented here than there are answers. As an introduction towhat lies ahead, we begin our story with two vignettes that take us back tothe first teacher education cohort we called CITE, and to several questionsthat have been with us ever since about the very meaning of our name.
2.
 
CONSIDERING A COMMUNITY OF INQUIRYIN 19972.1
 
Community
The two-day orientation with our first cohort of 36 aspiring teachers had justended. People packed up their belongings and casually collected in groups. Iwas pleased with the introductory words my colleagues had chosen todescribe our intentions for this budding community of inquirers. There weremurmurs of approval from students, and a visible eagerness to get startedthat reflected our own. It was a hopeful beginning for communal activity.Already I could imagine us working productively together over the year of teacher preparation, enthusiastically deliberating about what matters ineducation, collectively discovering what is truly important in learning toteach…Lost in musing, I failed to hear Sam shuffle up to me, a lankytwenty-one year old under a baseball cap. When I looked under its brim, Isaw Sam’s expression was one of a deer caught in the headlights.“There’s no place to hide here,” he said simply.
2.2
 
Inquiry
Wednesdays such as this one were set aside for community meetings. Withour avowed commitment to democratic participation, governance is ashared endeavor in CITE, and at each meeting, two elected studentsrepresent the rest. It was mid-October, just before the first three-week  practicum in elementary classrooms. Over brown bag lunches, instructorscheerfully tossed out project ideas, curricular themes, and thought
2
 ET AL.
 L. FARR DARLING
 
experiments for the year. We were an enthusiastic bunch, faculty withattitude, ready to take on teacher education and turn it on its head. We had ahundred questions, and a dozen research agendas. Now our community wasextending outward to embrace six schools that would share and extend our vision, adopt our student teachers like family, and help us bridge the culturegap between campus and elementary classroom with creativity andinnovation. The possibilities for full-blown inquiries into teaching andlearning were immense.“Student issues are next,” Heather said brightly. Nikko, the newly electedstudent representative cleared her throat. “Everybody wants to know…whendo we get lesson plans?”
3.
 
CONSIDERING THE STORY OF CITE IN 2006
The two vignettes illustrate part of what this book is about: community andinquiry in a teacher education initiative and how these two ideas haveevolved over time. In the first vignette, the teacher’s enthusiasm aboutcollectivity sharply contrasts with one student’s dread of the very samething. Community means different things to different people. In this case aCITE founder and a student member of the first CITE cohort express atension that has run through our project since the beginning. This tension hasseveral related strands including the pull between the public and privatework of learning to be a teacher, and the strain between competingexpectations of the form and content of teacher preparation. Sam’sundergraduate experience led him to believe that learning is a solitary,independent venture in which answers come through literature and lecture.He was unprepared for the high visibility that comes with membership in acohort, and he was unfamiliar with dialogue as a means for learning. Incontrast, CITE is committed to constructing understandings about teachingand learning through community deliberation in which everyone has a voice,and everyone participates.In the second vignette, it is clear that for the faculty involved, CITE hasmeant imagining possibilities for preparing teachers that can be enacted andthen examined. We share a belief that teaching, ours included, should becontinually informed by research and investigation. On this view, learning toteach is a less a matter of acquiring skills and content than cultivating certaindispositions toward understanding and knowledge. Among these dispositionsare intellectual curiosity and a spirit of discovery. The new students,understandably nervous about an upcoming school practicum, instead wantaccess to the toolbox of skills they believe their teachers and supervisors
STEPPING LIGHTLY, THINKING BOLDLY, LEARNING CONSTANTLY
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