‘Change based on what students say’: preparing teachers for a paradoxical model of leadership

Abstract

This article discusses how a radical approach to teacher education encourages both pre‐service teachers and high school students to embrace a paradoxical model of leadership. A project that positions high school students as teachers and learners in an undergraduate secondary teacher certification course challenges pre‐service teachers to learn to teach by listening to high school students, and it challenges students to learn to speak and take action within their school lives. As participant reflections illustrate, this project enacts the paradoxical model it advocates: it contradicts received notions of leadership as hierarchical, top‐down, and synonymous with a single person—in this case, the teacher—in a position of authority; it challenges both pre‐service teachers and students to embrace the seeming internal contradiction of being at once followers and leaders; and it represents, on a larger scale, resistance to the current climate and predominant acceptance in the USA of federally mandated standards and scripted approaches to teaching and learning.

Notes

1. The project is based in the penultimate course required to earn secondary teaching certification through the education programme I direct at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleages, two selective colleges in the northeastern USA. The project was begun in 1995 with support from the Ford Foundation, maintained between 1997 and 2000 with support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and has been supported since by Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges. See Cook‐Sather 2002a, 2002b, 2002c, 2006 for other discussions of this project.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison Cook‐Sather

Alison Cook‐Sather is Associate Professor of Education, Bryn Mawr College, 101 N. Merion Ave., Bryn Mawr, PA 19010, USA. Email: [email protected]. Her research focuses on student voice and participation in education and her most recent publication is Education is translation: A metaphor for change in learning and teaching (University of Pennsylvania Press 2006).