Journal of Education for Teaching

International research and pedagogy

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Challenging Teacher Education as Training: four

propositions

Robert V. Bullough Jr & Andrew D. Gitlin

To cite this article: Robert V. Bullough Jr & Andrew D. Gitlin (1994) Challenging Teacher
Education as Training: four propositions, Journal of Education for Teaching, 20:1, 67-81, DOI:
10.1080/0260747940200109

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0260747940200109

Published online: 07 Jul 2006.

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 Journal of Education for Teaching, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1994 67

Challenging Teacher Education as

Training: four propositions
ROBERT V. BULLOUGH, JR & ANDREW D. GITLIN
307 Milton Bennion Hall, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA

ABSTRACT The authors examine two trends of thought central to much of the current
discussion on the reform of teacher education: (1) Increasing the time certification students
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spend in schools and assessing their performance in relation to a predetermined list of desirable
teaching skills; and (2) Developing preservice programs that require students to conform to a
model of good teaching derived from 'objective' empirical research. While these trends differ in
significant ways, the authors argue that both are inherently conservative, supporting the long
standing training orientation where the technical aspects of teaching are separated from
educational aims and purposes. To reform teacher education, the authors argue, requires
challenges to the assumptions of training. To begin to do so, they present four propositions that
in their view will make teacher education more educative: preservice teacher education must be
joined to inservice programs; work contexts need to be carefully studied and criticized; teacher
education must clarify and critique the personal theories perspective teachers bring with them;
and reflection, especially on the aims and purposes of education and schooling, needs to become
a central part of teacher education.

INTRODUCTION
We have been educators for over 20 years: First, as teachers; later as teacher
educators. The past 13 years we have worked together in teacher education
programs at the University of Utah. During this time we have sought to chal-
lenge traditional approaches to teacher education and sought to develop programs
and practices that maximize beginning teachers' control over their own professional
development. Given this work, we greet with mixed emotions the current
debate about educational policy in the US (National Commission on Excellence
in Education, 1983; Carnegie Report, 1986; National Governor's Association,
1986; Holmes Group, 1990). On the one hand, this increased attention holds
out the possibility for significant change in teacher education. This is so
because as educational policy is altered, inevitably, teacher education comes
under review as an avenue for implementing new policy. On the other hand,
much of the discussion has been disheartening because both educational policy
and the resulting teacher education proposals are grounded largely in a commit-
ment to training, which emphasizes the technical aspects of teaching practice
divorced from educational aims and purposes. For example, in the US the
 68 R. V. Bullough & A. D. Gitlin

influential governor's report advises state and local authorities to 'be explicit
about expected levels of academic performance and then allow teachers, administra-
tors and parents to devise ways to meet these levels' (National Governor's Associ-
ation, 1986 p. 39). The implicit teacher role in this document, and many others like
it, centers on the ability of teachers to use a variety of instructional approaches that
hopefully will achieve national standards for student performance, rather than their
ability to determine what is important to teach, or what are the appropriate aims for
education. The Holmes Group (1986) proposals for teacher education reform echo
similar assumptions and place hope for improved education on higher academic
standards for entry into teaching, codification of a knowledge base for teachers, and
a national standardized test for licensure. In education generally, and teacher
education specifically, much of the discussion is driven by the desire to identify and
test, for the purposes of summative evaluation, highly specific learning outcomes.
These ideas are put forth as though there was no competency movement of the
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1970s (Zeichner & Liston, 1990). It is as though little was learned from past failure.
Although some teacher education reform efforts appear to escape the pitfalls of
training by increasing teachers' control over the profession and giving them the
authority to approve teacher education programs (Grimmett, 1991), trainers
seem to be winning the debate. In the face of this very real possibility, teachers,
often having little or no influence over public policy, are likely to do what
they have often done: isolate themselves from the controversy and try to gain a
measure of satisfaction from their relationships with students while hoping for better
times. The problem is that this response only weakens what already is a divided and
isolated community of educators and teacher educators and forces the expenditure
of a tremendous amount of energy to maintain the appearance of compliance to
accreditation standards. Two alternatives present themselves: conformity, or more
active participation in the discourse about teacher education in the hope of
influencing that discourse. We chose the later and believe the place to begin is by
examining the assumptions underlying reform that are linked to training. Articulat-
ing these assumptions is an important first step toward generating alternative visions
of teacher education, ones that escape the pitfalls of training and are genuinely
educative.
Accordingly, the purpose of this article is two-fold: First, to share our journey
as teacher educators that has lead to a set of propositions that we use to guide our
work in program development and teacher education reform. Second, to invite
teacher educators to critically consider these propositions in relationship to the
assumptions underpinning their own thinking and programs.
The paper is divided into three sections. The first section argues that two
prominent and apparently contradictory approaches to teacher education reform,
those that are competency-based and those which are empirically research-based
often espouse the assumptions of training, which are fundamentally conserva-
tive.The second section chronicles our work as teacher educators to show how our
practice has led to an alternative view of reform grounded in four propositions which
we believe challenge training. The third section provides a brief rationale for, and
discussion of, the four propositions.
 Challenging Teacher Education as Training 69

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE TRAINING BUSINESS?

It is not surprising that the phrase, 'teacher training' flows so easily from the lips of
teacher educators as we describe our work. Training has long been our 'business'.
But, what may seem surprising is that when calls for reform in teacher education are
the loudest, both currently and historically, the strongest voices appear to belong to
champions of training. We need to carefully consider the assumptions underlying
this tradition, which have proven so seductive and powerful, and the way these
assumptions influence practice.
In the main, current proposals for reform seem to fall into two loose clusterings,
but each are grounded in training views of teacher education. The first cluster
emphasizes the development of competencies (we prefer to use the term competency
to remind ourselves of the past) and certification linked to the demonstration of a
predetermined set of discrete skills, and to extensive field work. Examples abound:
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in the US the National Association of State Directors of Teacher Education, for

example, is busily producing long lists of outcomes with the expectation that they
will serve as standards for judging institutions for accreditation (NASDTE, 1991).
State legislatures are also getting involved. Texas, for example, has placed an 18
credit hour cap on teacher education, including fieldwork, and New Jersey has
placed a 30 hour limit (Olsen, 1991). England is much further down this road than
is the US. There and in Wales, the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher
Education (CATE) is directly involved in content decisions and already teacher
education institutions have been forced to accommodate to these standards (Barton
et ah, 1992). CATE represents a dramatic devaluing of university work, of concep-
tual work, and instead emphasizes extensive field work, an apprenticeship, as the
most appropriate avenue for learning to teach (Barton et al., 1992). The aim is for
80% of the novice's time to be spent in the field. It is noteworthy that even teachers
are beginning to raise serious questions about this move and increasingly see value
in university courses (Gilroy, 1992). A similar trend is evident in the US where
internships are much in vogue (Zumwalt, 1991) even in Holmes Group institutions
(Yinger & Hendricks, 1990) and alternative certification that side-steps colleges of
education is sweeping the country.
At a glance, the second cluster appears fundamentally different from the first.
With some variations, the emphasis is to reform teacher education by linking it to
research and the work done in research universities. Based on an empirical-analytic
model of inquiry, researchers seek to develop a 'deductive system of propositions or
scientific laws, which [can] be used to predict and control teaching and learning'
(Diamond, 1991, p. 9). The challenge for reformers is to develop programs that
assure beginning teacher conformity to the model of good teaching supported by the
deductive system. To assure conformity, teacher trainers typically engage in an
analytic move, where teaching practices deemed desirable are reduced to lists of
discrete behaviors, stated in the form of behavioral or performance objectives, and
then practiced by the novice until an externally established standard is met. Sup-
ported by the research community, this standard becomes the basis for national
teacher certification. It is not without irony that we note the strong support that
 70 R. V. Bullough &A. D. Gitlin

National Board Certification has received in the US by the largest teachers' union,
the National Education Association, in its quest to elevate teaching to a profession
along the lines of law and medicine (Weiss, 1993) and seemingly unaware of the
dangers of such a move (Gottleib & Cornbleth, 1989).
The clusters differ in many ways, and a good many battles have taken place
between their champions particularly over determining what, precisely, beginning
teachers ought to know and be able to do. However, what binds them together is of
greater importance than what separates them. What binds them are these shared
assumptions: that learning to teach is primarily a matter of skill mastery, and skills
are identifiable in advance by experts and context independent; that teaching is
telling or 'delivering' content (Stones, 1992, chap. 1); that learning is behavioral
change; that beginning teachers are knowledge consumers and not producers; that
differences in biography or even culture are important in learning to teach only in so
far as they enable or inhibit skill acquisition; and that standardized content and
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criteria are essential to assure program quality and accountability. Speaking gener-
ally, these assumptions are fundamentally conservative, emphasizing fitting into
current institutional patterns and practices rather than thinking about and criticizing
them. Conformity is valued according to standards established outside of the
teachers' experience, whose energy and intelligence is directed toward thinking
about the means, not the aims of education. One implication of this emphasis is that
the political and moral consequence of teachers' practices tend to be overlooked. A
second implication is that beginning teacher biases, in general, are ignored or go
unexplored. This stance is especially troubling when viewed in the light of the
dramatic failure of schools to serve minorities, whose culture and whose experience
of schooling often differ in dramatic ways from those of dominant cultural groups.
One surface difference between the two groups of proposals that results in a
remarkable similarity, needs further attention. The first cluster privileges private or
personal theory over public theory (Griffiths & Tann, 1992), denying the latter value
as a means for making sense out of the experience of teaching and for framing and
responding to pedagogical problems. Yet, the private theory privileged is not the
beginning teacher's but the practicing or cooperating teacher's. The second cluster
privileges public theories, those produced by researchers in the quest for deductive
systems. Again, the beginning teacher's theories are ignored, or deemed illegitimate
or irrelevant to learning to teach. Although the assumptions differ, the outcome is
likely to be the same for beginning teachers: their experience is devalued, their
dependence accentuated, and public and private teaching theories separated.
Given the similar assumptions held by what appear to be warring camps, it is
little wonder there has been a lot of noise and comparatively little fundamental
change in teacher education. Now, in frustration, government leaders who are
dominated by business interests and distrustful of teachers and of those who teach
them, have entered the debate over teacher education with a vengeance. Ignorant of
the past and at home with the assumptions of training, they appear intent on
compelling reform, at least their version of it. Recognizing the fractious relationship
of schools and universities, apprenticeship models have been embraced that dramat-
ically weaken the position of universities and colleges in teacher education. At the
 Challenging Teacher Education as Training 71

same time they have drawn upon the expert role of researchers in education to
generate and justify standards of performance and to create systems for accountabil-
ity and control that narrowly define what it means to teach.
The assumptions of training are seductive and powerful. They also make
fundamental reform unlikely, perhaps impossible. Their seductiveness is partially the
result of their pervasiveness; they are part and parcel of the history and language of
teacher education and of how we frame and address problems. We have found that
the only way to challenge them is to constantly scrutinize our practice for their
influence. What follows is a brief recounting of our struggle to free ourselves from
training assumptions and to place teacher development within an educational
framework. As will be seen, our success escaping the influence of training has been
limited.
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STARTING THE JOURNEY

When we first began working together the secondary teacher education program at
the University of Utah was disjointed, fragmented and confusing. Training was the
program's aim: Based on a delivery conception of teaching, emphasis was placed on
learning and practicing discrete skills, and programmatically public and private
theories were clearly separated. Methods courses were disconnected from curricu-
lum courses; and both were disconnected from practice teaching. Similarly, founda-
tions courses, and their concern for the aims of education, were unrelated to
methods courses, and their emphasis on means. Moreover, students were strangers
to one another, and dropped in and out of the program at their convenience. Who
these people were as people was of no particular importance to the program or to
teaching. Like the students, professors drifted in and out of the courses, and felt
little connection to them.
Students complained loudly about content duplication and superficiality, about
the kind, quality, and quantity of field experiences offered, and, perhaps more than
anything, about not feeling cared for. No one was responsible for individual students
and for seeing that they were on track and making reasonable progress toward
certification. What mattered was accumulating the credits needed for certification.
Student complaints were hard to ignore especially since they were frequent enough
and loud enough to convince the dean's office that something was amiss and in need
of fixing. But, what to do about them? A change in the program would necessitate
a change in faculty roles, and under the best of circumstances this is difficult to
achieve even when there is widespread dissatisfaction. Program fragmentation plays
to professors' desires for autonomy and independence.
In response to growing dissatisfaction, the faculty began meeting to better
understand the problem in order to provide a solution. Some faculty members
understood the problem as simply a matter of providing better articulation of
methods courses with field work and of improving the quality of student advising; no
shift in orientation was required. From this view, all that was needed was for faculty
members to share course syllabuses and come to some agreement about who would
 72 R. V. Bullough & A. D. Gitlin

teach which topics and for the student advising office to shape up and do
a better job.
Others had a different view of the problem, a more structural and philosophical
view. Separate courses taught by faculty who rotated through them and felt no
ownership of them would inevitably give rise to problems of duplication and,
perhaps, of superficiality. From this viewpoint, occasional meetings within which
syllabuses were discussed would do little to change the situation and nothing to
bridge the separation of public and private theories about teaching. When both
students and faculty drop into and out of courses it is unreasonable to expect that
caring relationships would develop, and caring relationships, some thought, were
central to effective advising and teaching. Teaching is a relationship, a way of being
with and relating to others, and not merely an expression of having mastered a set
of delivery skills. And, advising is not just a matter of dispensing information in a
timely fashion, but of building trust, of talking and problem solving together. Some
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sort of fundamental change in program structure and orientation was needed.

Eventually, the faculty agreed to experiment with a cohort organization, an
attempt to create the 'shared ordeal' that Lortie (1975) observed was missing in
teacher education and that was seen as essential to identifying with the profession of
teaching. For a full academic year a team of two professors, later changed to a
professor and a teaching associate because of limited resources, would be respon-
sible for planning, teaching, and coordinating a large portion of the certification
work of a group of 25 students. This responsibility included general methods
courses and curriculum courses which met for 6 hours a week for the first two terms,
and student teaching which included a weekly seminar. Moreover, within the cohort
organization, professors would do much of the advising that had formerly been done
by the advising office. The courses leading up to practice teaching were to involve
significant field work, and to this end the students were to be placed in a school early
in the year and continue to work within it throughout the year. Eventually, these
schools became professional development sites (Holmes, 1990), places where prac-
ticing teachers are specially educated to serve as mentors for student and beginning
teachers. We discuss this later.
We supported this proposal and nudged it along, although we certainly had our
doubts about the significance of the change and worried about the amount of time
that the change would demand of us. Training teachers is less demanding than
educating them. Soon, we found ourselves assigned to our first group of students
and with this assignment we faced a daunting problem. Being responsible for such
a large portion of a program, and having students for an entire academic year, meant
that we would be teaching new courses that required of us the development of new
areas of expertise; and even when we had previously taught the content, a different
approach or organization was needed. As we discovered, our relationships to
students would also dramatically change. Despite these fears, however, we realized
that the structure would allow us to experiment with different approaches to teacher
education. For instance, for the first time in our careers it became possible, at least
in principle, for us to introduce a theoretical concept, such as the implicit or 'hidden
curriculum', have students work with the concept in a field site, return to campus
 Challenging Teacher Education as Training 73

for futher exploration of the concept and then as the students gained experience,
return to it later in the year and in different ways. We could, then, better link public
and private theories which training separates.

Critical Theory and Teacher Education

At this point it is necessary to provide some essential background. Although
attending different graduate schools, Ohio State and Wisconsin, we were both
deeply influenced by work being done in critical theory in education, a theory that
directed our attention to the relationship between schools and the social priorities
and inequalities that characterize capitalism. We thought of public education as an
extremely important avenue for furthering social and economic justice, but believed
the institution, it's organization and traditions, stunted this potential. We saw
schools as factories, driven by class interests and infused with the values of a
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technocracy, control and efficiency, the handmaidens of training. We thought of

teachers as oppressed workers, trapped, victims of an oppressive and alienating
system. Indeed, much of our early research reflects this view (Gitlin, 1983; Bullough
et al, 1984b).
Our focus, then, was solely on critique and not on relationship. We sought to
identify the ways in which schooling limited and constrained teachers' actions and
student learning, not the ways in which schools could enable their development or
the ways in which teachers could shape the institution to achieve their purposes and
build desired relationships with students. Not surprisingly, we often found the
beginning and practicing teachers we taught interested but largely disconnected
from our analysis of schooling. Our project, and the public theories we presented,
was not their project; being well-trained students they mastered our discourse to give
it back to us but, apparently unaffected, left us to engage in their lives' work as
though they have never been in our classes.

A Reconsideration
Imagine yourself for a moment in our shoes, and being assigned to work with a
group of 25 pre-service teacher education students for an entire academic year,
students who genuinely wanted to become teachers. Now, imagine having as your
central professional message that schools are lousy places to work, young people
alienated, and the curriculum fundamentally and perhaps fatally flawed! True or
not, a year is a long time to endure such fare, and perhaps even longer time to push
it. What the cohort organization did was force us to reconsider our political and
professional agendas, our theories, in relationship to our students' theories, and their
desire to become teachers and to succeed in the short run in practice teaching and
in the long run as teachers. The question for us was (and still is): How could we
develop encounters with teacher education content and theory that would help our
students achieve their goals and simultaneously enable us to maintain our intellec-
tual and personal integrity? Many a long and sometimes disheartening conversation
addressed this topic.
 74 R. V. Bullough & A. D. Gitlin

Our dilemma was softened, a bit, by developments within critical theory as

applied to education that led to an attack on correspondence theory (Apple, 1979).
Correspondence theory, representing a rather vulgar, deterministic Marxism, sug-
gested that schooling merely reproduced the inequalities of the larger society and, by
implication, persons do as contexts allow them to do; consciousness follows context
as day follows night. On this view, human agency was a delusion, a liberal's foolish
fantasy. The attack on correspondence theories brought with it a message of hope
that rang true to our experience; persons frequently resist pressures to conform and
with their resistance comes the possibility for institutional change, and therefore
hope for school reform. This turn was reflected in our own work as we conducted
studies and worked with teachers who in various ways resisted institutional pressures
to conform and seemed to make school a better place for their students as a result
(Bullough et al., 1984; Bullough & Gitlin, 1985). We came to recognize that
resistance is often grounded in private theory, and beliefs about self as teacher.
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Potentially, then, teacher education could play a part in school transformation, and
critical theory could serve as a lens for focusing our work so long as it was seen in
relation to the private theories held by students.
Our study of the writings of Jurgen Habermas (1970, 1971, 1975) also proved
important to our development. We found compelling his vigorous critique of
instrumental reason, the kind of reason that reduced human beings to numbers, the
universe to a giant, grinding machine, and education to training. But, unlike a good
many critical theorists Habermas moved beyond critique. He recognized in the
innate ability and desire of humans to relate to one another through language a
means for generating a social and political ideal worth striving for: communication
without domination. He explored the conditions needed for communication to
proceed fruitfully, and explicated some of the ways in which communication is
distorted, often intentionally for strategic reasons as when we manipulate our friends
to get our way and to set aside their own interests. His ideal—communication
without domination—got us thinking about teaching in ways we had never thought
of before and sharpened our awareness of the negative influence of the assumptions
of training on our students' development as teachers. We recognized that as a
relationship teaching always involved unequal distributions of power between teach-
ers and students, but began to explore the ways in which we might minimize
domination through dialogue (see Bullough, 1988; Gitlin, 1990). More broadly, we
began to think of learning to teach in terms of engaging our students in the critical
and communal study of their own thinking and practice and of linking this study to
public theories about institutional power and education.
Working with the cohort groups and getting to know, respect, and enjoy our
students also played an important part in nudging along our development. For the
most part, they were very able and interesting people, adults, who brought with
them a commitment to, as many of them often have said, 'make things better'. One
could not work with such people and still hold strongly to the view that their actions
were merely reproductive of social and economic inequalities, that they were only
pawns in a cruel social charade. To incorporate our growing appreciation of the
importance of agency in institutional life eventually we organized our practice within
 Challenging Teacher Education as Training 75

the cohort around the dialectical and dynamic relationship of self and context. We
focused on self because of its connection to knowledge production, private theories,
and agency. We came to think of our students as moral-political agents about to
assume positions of power and authority. We focused on context because critical
theory had helped us understand how contexts often direct teacher behavior in ways
that not only run counter to their intentions and aims but also discourage the
scrutinizing of institutionally accepted roles and relationships. Later, the building of
an educational community, both among teachers and in a wider sense, assumed a
central place in our thinking because of its potential for furthering collective action
as a means for challenging contextual limits.
As our thinking evolved, so did our practice; as our practice evolved, so did our
thinking about preservice teacher education. We encountered many frustrations.
Perhaps the most important frustration from the point of view of altering our
thinking came as a result of watching much of our work 'wash out' during student
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teaching and the first year of teaching. It appeared as though once our students
became 'real' teachers, they forgot or simply discarded much that we had 'taught'
them (Bullough, 1989). We wanted our students to become producers of knowledge
and through the process students of the politics of schooling. We saw too little
evidence to suggest that our aims were being met. Survival and the desire to obtain
a positive evaluation or to fit into a department consumed them during practice
teaching and during their first year of teaching. Recognizing this problem as partially
related to a student teaching format that was a hold-over from our program when
training was the central aim, we changed student teaching from full to half-time
teaching so that additional time was available for reflection. This helped, but the
problem persisted. We came to realize that no matter how hard we worked within
preservice teacher education or how many adjustments we made in practice teach-
ing, the problem would continue until preservice teacher education was linked to
inservice teacher education and both challenged training assumptions. Here we
encounter a serious limitation of training which permits the dropping off of newly
certified students at the school's doorstep as though the knowledge about teaching
that has been poured over their heads make them a teacher. Our students, we
realized, needed on-going support after certification to continue their exploration of
self and context, particularly when the results of this exploration produced tension
between institutionally favored roles and relationships and personally valued ones.
Thus, our initial vision of teacher education as a group enterprise defined by cohort
membership, expanded beyond the confines of preservice teacher education. We
seek to assist in the building of a professional community in recognition that teacher
education is never ending and that the creation of a vital community is central not
only to educational renewal but to individual teacher development. In this work,
public theory plays an important part.

FOUR PROPOSITIONS
Through these years of experimenting and testing our hunches we have learned
quite a bit about how to make teacher education, educative. We have also benefited
 76 R. V. Bullough & A. D. Gitlin

from the work of others who have also questioned the value of training. John Dewey,
for example, was one of the first educators to cogently argue that teachers need to
be viewed as knowing subjects not functionaries.
The remedy (for school failure) is not to have one expert dictating educa-
tional methods and subject-matter to a body of passive, recipient teachers,
but the adoption of intellectual initiative, discussion, and decision through-
out the entire school corps. (Dewey, 1903/1977, p. 232).
More recently, in his critique of a 'banking' view of pedagogy, Freire (1993)
challenged the assumption that teachers are empty vessels to be produced by
external experts. Instead, he suggested that the teacher/student relationship be
reconceptualized so that each become teacher/learners. Carr & Kemmis (1986) also
challenge training through their important work with action research. Each of these
researchers, and many more, has been troubled by the influence of training in
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teacher education. This body of research has profoundly influenced our thinking
about teacher education and is evident in the propositions that follow.
The propositions, when taken together, offer an alternative to training. The first
is that certification signals only the beginning of teacher education, not its ending.
Ultimately, preservice must be joined by ongoing inservice teacher education. The
second proposition is that because work contexts either enable or limit human
development, they need to be carefully studied and criticized. The third proposition
is that our conceptions of ourselves as teachers are grounded biographically. If
teacher education is to make a difference, it must start with biography and find ways
to identify, clarify, articulate, and critique the assumptions—the personal theories—
about teaching, learning, students, and education embedded within it. The fourth
proposition is that reflection, systematic inquiry, is a central and crucial element in
making teacher education educational. We will consider each in turn.

Certification
It is often assumed that the university experience represents a liberalizing influence
on the thinking of teacher education students that is crushed by the reality of school
practice during student teaching. Teacher education students become increasingly
conservative; and to many teacher educators, ourselves included, this has been cause
for lament. But, it is unlikely that with its grounding in the assumptions of training
teacher education has ever been as liberalizing as many professors assumed or
claimed. What is clear, is that the influence of teacher education will increase when
teacher education institutions and the public schools join together collaboratively,
not merely cooperatively, and jointly seek to produce conditions within which
reflection on public and private theories about teaching, and the aims and means of
education, may become common place and where shared action becomes the norm
rather than the exception.
Much needs to be done if these two very different institutions and cultures, the
schools and universities, are to work productively together. Resources are scarce,
and becoming more so, and the potential for exploitation is very real particularly as
 Challenging Teacher Education as Training 77

professors continue seeking sites to conduct their studies and to place students but
distance themselves from the school culture. Nevertheless, through sharing strengths
and resources and openly exploring and accepting differences there is the potential
to develop institutional structures and relationships that break the mold of the tried
and true and move us in the direction of enabling teachers to become more active
participants in the remaking of their educational world. Surely, such a project
promises significant benefits to teacher educators who honestly seek to provide a
better quality education for their students.
For this reason, among others, we have become increasingly involved over the
years in the effort to bring schools and colleges and universities committed to
teacher education together to explore ways of working to create the conditions
needed for beginning teachers to become students of their own thinking and
practice, not just student teachers. This is fundamentally important to distinguish
our work from training.
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Work Context
All social contexts, schools included, are defined and given their particular character
by the accepted and evolving roles, relationships, and rules that govern interaction.
There is no meaning without context, and context shapes what is perceived as
valued and valuable. In a myriad of ways, most of which are subtle and generally
taken for granted, newcomers to teaching are told what are and are not appropriate
actions and utterances and are encouraged and enticed to comply to expectations.
Contexts press conformity on the individual who may respond in any number of
ways including strategic compliance—doing what seems necessary (Lacey, 1977),
and open resistance. Thinking about schools as historical contexts within which
meaning is made, and that privilege some interests over others, presents a pressing
challenge to teachers and teacher educators. Part of the challenge is to provide
assistance to beginning teachers so they can examine and perhaps reconstruct
institutionally preferred roles in the quest for a place within the school that is
ethically defensible, morally and politically responsible, and personally satisfying.
Knowing about a context and how it defines what is reasonable and possible is
crucial to successful role negotiation, as it is to changing a role when change is seen
as desirable. Another part involves assisting the beginning teacher to understand
how local context is influenced by educational policies and practices at state and
national levels which underscores the importance of viewing teaching and learning
to teach communally.

Biography
Despite the assumptions of training, in a manner perhaps unlike any other pro-
fession, in teaching the medium is the message, and the medium is who and what
the beginning teacher is as a person. In good measure, it is through the beginning
teachers' values, beliefs, knowledge of young people, and about content and how to
teach it, that students will either engage or disengage from learning. Who the
 78 R. V. Bullough & A. D. Gitlin

beginning teacher is, is important in other ways as well. It is in large part, through
their prior experience that they make sense of teaching and of their students'
backgrounds and abilities, formulate a curriculum, frame problems for study, and
ultimately negotiate a teacher role.
From our viewpoint, teacher education should start with who the beginning
teacher is, and who they imagine themselves to be as teachers, and then assist them
to engage in the active exploration of the personal or 'implicit theories' Clark (1988)
they bring to teaching. It is through these biographically embedded private theories
which generally are taken for granted and assumed to be natural, that teachers make
sense of their teacher education programs and later the world of teaching. Through
them they either screen out, accept or adjust to what is taught. Like other learners,
beginning teachers first seek confirmation of their values and beliefs but if they are
to become educated what is taken as normal must be challenged and tested.
Masquerading as common sense, these theories need to be made explicit if they are
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to be criticized and when found wanting reconstructed. Long ago John Dewey
characterized education as a matter of 'reconstructing experience', and this is
precisely the aim of teacher education, to assist beginners to confront and in some
ways reconstruct themselves and the contexts in which they work.

Reflection
Currently much is being spoken and written about the value of reflection in teacher
education both as an aim and a means (Gift et al., 1990). The 'good teacher', it is
said, is a reflective teacher, one who inquires into his or her thinking and practice
with an eye toward making improvements. We too stand on the side of the angels
who are championing programs that will promote the development of reflective
teachers. We also want to encourage teachers to carefully consider the consequences
of their actions in the classroom and on others' development. But too often the calls
to get teachers to engage in reflection and to study their practice are only empty
slogans. And sometimes when the meaning of reflection is made explicit, hidden
away one discovers the assumptions of training.
Reflection involves more than getting beginning teachers to think hard about
what they are doing and whether or not a particular practice is 'working' or
consistent with a list of competencies. It involves giving careful attention to how
problems are framed, and the relationship between public and private theories.
Problem framing goes directly to the issue of what kinds of questions and issues
beginning teachers should be reflective about. In this regard, Zeichner and Liston
offer some help when they assert that teachers ought to inquire into:
(1) the pedagogical and curricular means used to attain education aims;
(2) the underlying assumptions and consequences of pedagogical action;
(3) the moral implications of pedagogical actions and the structure of
schooling. (1987, p. 2)
We agree, these are some of the issues that ought to be grappled with by beginning
 Challenging Teacher Education as Training 79

teachers. We would add, however, that in addition to these beginning teachers need
to be involved in ongoing reflection about self and about the context within which
they are working. These ought to be primary considerations, not merely after
thoughts.
The emphasis on self and context as well as politics and ethics suggests that the
view of accountability embodied in the training orientation, with its emphasis on
technical performance and conformity to external standards, needs to be expanded.
It is critically important that teachers should be accountable for the quality of their
work, but accountability must be tried to a significant increase in teachers' control
and responsibility over school aims as well as means.
With assistance, beginning teachers can frame problems in ways that expose the
relationships between the technical concerns of teachers and the personal, ethical,
and political dimensions of teaching which so often are neglected. Respecting the
later, beginning teachers need to understand that all that they do and say represents
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their vision of the good life, their social philosophy, and is therefore inherently
political. To be sure, teachers can be reflective about many things, silly and serious;
our wish is to encourage them to not forget that there is more to becoming a teacher
than the mastery of supposed proven techniques. They ought to be wary of the
common teacher pronouncement, 'it works', even though this is the outcome sought
within apprenticeship models of learning to teach. Many things work, but not
everything that 'works' is morally or educationally defensible. Thus, we seek to
influence what is seen by our students as a problem, in part through providing a
language useful for 'naming' the world and by providing a few means that we have
found to be useful for reflecting on how contexts both enable and limit meaning (see
Bullough & Gitlin, 1993).

CONCLUSION
Such is the outcome of our journey: four propositions that we believe challenge the
assumptions of training. Ultimately teacher educators cannot control or predict with
much accuracy the outcomes of teacher education, nor should we want to. Learning
to teach is an idiosyncratic process involving a complex interaction among persons
and between person and school context. The best that can be hoped for from
teacher education is that what is taught and how programs are organized will
influence the grounds upon which beginning teachers make their decisions and that
these decisions will be continuously examined to assure they are morally, politically
and educationally defensible.
Generating an alternative to teacher training is vitally important for teachers
and teacher educators; continuing to emphasize training is a certain road to irrel-
evance. For teachers, what is at stake is the kind of professional community they will
work in. Teacher education is the means by which that community is sustained or
reconstructed. But, it is not only the professional community that is affected by the
outcome. As fragmented at it is, the professional community has a responsibility for
building and shaping our collective social being as well. Like it or not, as John
Goodlad (1991) phrased it, teachers are 'moral stewards' of schooling, and as such
 80 R. V. Bullough &A. D. Gitlin

have responsibility to be engaged actively in the 'continuous renewal of the schools'

for the sake of children, themselves, and of our collective well being. As such, they
are charged with creating within schools the kind and quality of life that ought to be
lived without them, and teacher educators are obliged to share this responsibility
with them. It was for this reason that Boyd H. Bode argued many years ago that
'educational practice which avoids social theory is at best a trivial thing and at worst
a serious obstruction to progress' (1937, p. 74).
Standardization and the other outcomes that flow from the assumptions of
training will ultimately only produce mediocrity, which we believe is the most likely
outcome if current trends in teacher education reform, particularly government
sponsored trends, win the day. It is time to rethink the nature of teacher education,
but not as an attempt to further refine teacher training theory and practice. To do
that is to assist in our own professional demise as well as to help assure a type of
schooling that continues to fail a good many beginning teachers and in turn
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significant portions of the student population. To rethink teacher education means

putting forth for criticism and discussion alternative assumptions, while simul-
taneously exposing the roots of our practice in training, and of developing and
assessing programs based upon these assumptions. As teacher educators we need to
be actively involved in the study and criticism of our own practice. To this end we
invite criticism of the propositions presented and encourage greater involvement in
articulating positions that challenge training, not only from academics but from
those within the educational community who are often silenced: teachers, parents,
and students.

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