Teaching Practitioners about Theory and Practice: A Proposal to Recover Aristotle in Teacher Education

Abstract

Introduction Discussion of theory-practice relationships is important part of teaching and teacher education. It is especially germane in response to the inevitable concerns that practitioners (1) express when they perceive gap between the two and pronounce: That is alright in theory, but irrelevant in This disconnection between many pre-service teachers' and teacher educators' goals for high quality university course experiences stems from incongruence between pre-service teachers' focus on learning the technical skills required to transmit knowledge competently while efficiently managing the behaviors of the students in their charge and teacher educators' focus on teaching theoretical knowledge and critical skills. This disconnection also stems from candidates' genuine concern to satisfy their primary and immediate needs for professional safety, confidence, and competence in conventional contemporary school setting. Technical is therefore initially parallel to survival skill for the candidate with anxieties about the experience of beginning teaching, and presumably it later on evolves into kind of de-professionalized mindless servitude to procedural efficiency for those in-service teachers who unfortunately continue to see their assignment in merely technical terms. (2) As Virginia Richardson (1996) observes, practitioners are more predisposed toward acquiring and practicing procedural, managerial, and social skills that exhibit at least superficial competence (and which they have seen their own teachers demonstrate) than they are with understanding pedagogical and foundational theory. Teacher education literature shows that this theory-practice gap endures in pre-service teachers' mindsets largely due to the intractability of practitioners' beliefs regarding theory, several shortcomings in theory itself and how it is presented to non-theorists, and the ascendancy of technical-rational paradigm. Through no fault of their own, many candidates begin their professional preparation unaware of and ill-prepared to appreciate the proper scope and role of educational theory and its place in teacher training and the profession generally. These misconceptions are accompanied by narrow views about their own role in receiving, responding to, and using educational theory to inform their practice. In the short term these misconceptions constitute barrier to teacher candidates' learning about theories' underlying practices. Because the habit of ignoring the beliefs and values that ground practices develops early on, the longer term effect is limitation of in-service professionals' abilities to respond adequately to new needs of students because they are accustomed to implementing practices without considering the complex moral, social, and intellectual consequences of their pedagogy. While candidates have responsibility to inform themselves about what educational theory is and what it can do, teacher educators who design teacher education programs have the greater obligation to provide opportunities for candidates to perform this task. Given the importance of making theory-practice relationships clear and relevant to pre-service candidates, how should teacher educators and educational theorists respond? Teacher educators require theoretically and model for situating their work. Theoretically helpful here refers to a rigorous and defensible framework, and practically helpful means an approach to theory that understands and appreciates its role in informing In this article, I provide such model for making theory-practice relationships clear and of heuristic value to pre-service teachers and teacher educators. First, I contend that theorists and practitioners need to move beyond the current perceptual deficiencies that maintain the theory-practice gap, and I therefore begin this article by exposing those deficiencies as common theoretical obstructions which occlude candidates' understanding of theory and practice relationships. …