When Magic Becomes Art: Educating Teachers

Abstract

Metaphors representing the practice of teacher educators were the data for this collaborative self-study by a small group of teacher educators from across the USA. Seventy-five pre-service teachers and practicing teachers enrolled in teacher education courses were asked to create metaphors to represent the teaching practices of the authors, who were their professors at the time. Qualitative analysis of these data revealed that many of these students believed that effective teaching springs from a kind of teacher magic – a mysterious force arising from the personal characteristics of the teacher rather than from any purposeful selection from a repertoire of instructional strategies – developed over time. For the researchers, these results posed a challenge for reworking their teaching to make the art of teaching more visible and accessible.

Keywords::

• teacher educators
• metaphor
• teaching methods
• teaching as magic