A Case of Learning to Teach Social Studies at the Prospect School Teacher Education Program

Abstract

In this case study, part of a larger study of the Prospect School Teacher Education Program, the author investigates the processes of descriptive inquiry by exploring a moment in their evolution and their effect on the learning of one teacher educator and his students (“interns”) as they investigated the teaching of social studies. She also explores the long-term impact of this approach to teacher education on one of these interns. Using descriptive inquiry processes, the author finds that the school under investigation cultivated an awareness of learners as complex, capable, emerging beings-in-process with a capacity for authority, agency, and voice.

Notes

¹Practitioner inquiry here is defined according to Cochran-Smith, Barnatt, Friedman, and Pine (2009) as inclusive of “action research, teacher research, self study, narrative inquiry, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and the use of teaching as a context for research” (p. 4).

²A limited number of empirical studies of the processes themselves exist (e.g., Abu El-Haj, 2003; Kesson, Traugh, & Perez, 2006, Rodgers (forthcoming), and the four articles in this issue by Raider-Roth, Rodgers, Roosevelt, and Schultz).

³When I collected the data, it was still housed in boxes and filing cabinets at the Prospect Center warehouse, a drafty nineteenth-century factory building in North Bennington, Vermont.

⁴The Teaching Fellows program funded teacher researchers to catalogue and do extensive descriptive reviews of 12 children and their work. This research was then compiled in what became The Reference Edition, available from www.prospect.org

⁵All names except David Carroll's are pseudonyms; his is used with permission.

⁶At the same time that these assignments were being carried out, interns were engaged in the daily work of Prospect's classrooms, both teaching children and assisting lead teachers, doing weekly descriptive reviews of children and children's work, engaging with lead teachers in “curriculum interviews” that traced, retrospectively, the “tree or spiral” of the emerging curriculum. They were also engaged in courses focusing on human development across the lifespan, philosophy (not limited to educational philosophies), and language development. Thus it is difficult, if not impossible, to isolate interns' learning or to attribute it to any one course.

⁷All quotes are from Carroll's notes in his teaching/planning notebook. They appear as handwritten clusters of quotes and themes.

⁸For a related and fascinating discussion of the difficulty of teaching the values of critical pedagogy in ways that are consistent with critical pedagogy but also aware of the dangers of indoctrination, see E. B. Freedman, (2007).

⁹Importantly, there was also trust in parents. Parents were frequently a part of descriptive reviews of their children, and participants in study groups like the Adults as Learners study group.