To See is Not to Own: Child Study as a Practice of Attention for Beginning Teachers

Abstract

Prospective teachers are often found to have difficulty focusing their attention on students in sustained and constructive ways. Instead, in what is sometimes understood as a developmental matter, beginners may seem highly concerned with their own feelings and needs. This article offers a contrary finding. It examines two cases of prospective teachers' provision of sustained, generative attention not to self, but to other—to the child. An enabling structure appears to be “Child Study.” Drawing on Dewey and Benjamin, the “aesthetic impulse” is offered as an analytic construct useful in understanding how this pedagogical focus on the other may be elicited.

Acknowledgments

My thanks J. L. Levi and Allison Mandel, whose close attention to children, both vigorous and restrained, made this work possible; I hope I do your work justice. Thanks also to Helen Featherstone, Joseph Featherstone, and Steve Seidel for careful reading and helpful comments.

Notes

¹ Hammerness et al. (2005), however, are among those who argue, as do I, against a quiescent stance in this matter; also see Darling-Hammond and Hammerness (2005), in the same volume (Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005).

²I say “problematic” cautiously. While we can usefully frame the phenomenon of self-preoccupation as one or another sort of problem, we can also recognize certain affordances and necessities in prospective teachers' focus on self (see, for example, Jersild, 1955; Rodgers & Scott, 2008).

³As Cahan explains, “Between 1894 and 1903, Hall and his associates distributed 115 questionnaires on various aspects of child life and mentality to thousands of mothers, teachers, and others associated with children… . Hall and his colleagues published some two hundred research reports based on the results… . Hall began to build a new and public picture of what we might expect from a ‘typical' child.” (Cahan, 2006, pp. 18–19).

⁴See Transforming Teacher Education ( Carroll, Featherstone, Featherstone, Feiman-Nemser, & Roosevelt, 2007 ).

⁵A term seldom or never used at Prospect or by Carini (P. F. Carini, personal communication, August 20, 2007).

⁶The texts include Experience and Education (Dewey, 1938/1963), Huck's Raft: A History of Childhood in America (Mintz, 2004), Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963), “The Silenced Dialogue” (Delpit, 1988), “Encoding the Marvelous: Narrative Thought at Nine …” (Armstrong, 2006b), and Carini's (2000b) “Letter to Parents and Teachers.”

⁷References to “child case studies” can also be found in much of the teacher education literature, as indicated above (see e.g., Darling-Hammond, 2000; Darling-Hammond & Bransford, 2005; Pecheone & Chung, 2006; the Performance Assessment for California Teachers (PACT), www.pacttpa.org).

⁸ The larger body of work, of which the work just referenced is but one stream, is the work on teacher inquiry more generally; Zeichner & Nofke (2001) is the indispensable reference.

⁹All children's names are pseudonyms; adults' names are, unless otherwise indicated, real and used with permission.

¹⁰I have briefly discussed this piece, which I find to be a superb instance of careful, tactful, nuanced description based on alert and painstaking observation, elsewhere (see Roosevelt, 1998, 2007a).