Seeing teaching as a discipline in the context of preservice teacher education: insights, confounding issues, and fundamental questions

Abstract

Analysis of our own experiences teaching in preservice teacher education programs leads us to a range of insights, issues, and questions associated with the potential of seeing teaching as a discipline. We begin with the reality that teaching and teacher education appear to students as easy activities, while those who actually do them see them as quite complex. The unexamined influence of every student’s inadvertent apprenticeship of observation is explored as an obstacle to seeing teaching as a discipline. We also consider the influences of the history of schooling and the history of educational research. We close by considering the role of parody and paradox in making it difficult to see teaching as a discipline and by calling attention to the importance of interrogating our acts of teaching.

Keywords:

• teaching
• teacher education
• learning to teach
• discipline of teaching