Our attempt to make such a contribution makes us humble and keeps our efforts tentative.
The classrooms that teaching interns inherit are most complex. Asked to dance between transmission and transformation, interns are expected to deliver the educational goods demanded by society as well as to develop citizens for democracy. The interns themselves are often obsessed with the mastery of technical skills for instruction and class management. Their main plea is: "Tell me how to do it." We believe we have a responsibility to do more. We, as teacher educators, need to lift interns beyond the necessary technical skills of instructional and management toward a process where they can feel safe to put their own work into a wider social, cultural, and political context. In a real sense this is what we, as teacher educators interested in a reflective practice, are all about.
Our collaboration with interns is delicate because often they are caught between strong words, direct suggestions and sacred traditions. Caught between what is considered the ideal and the reality, they face individually the challenge of figuring out what is ideal and what is real. Through the reflective internship we are trying to provide practical opportunities for interns. First, we help them to develop critical categories through which they can analyze their school sites. Next, we encourage them to examine their own educational goals and refine their own promise as teachers. They need to ask themselves what is needed for them to become their own best teachers. Our institution cannot give interns a personal philosophy, attitudes or values; these must be self-generated. One way of empowering interns is through our use of critical questions. These questions come out of our diverse backgrounds, goals, and ideological pools. The questions we ask interns are often aimed at helping them appreciate their own histories and cultural experiences. The reality is that they cannot but live out of their own history and culture if they are to find their own authentic voices. Furthermore, if teaching interns can appreciate their own backgrounds, they can better appreciate the heritage and culture of their own students.
Some of the burdens of a teaching internship are understanding the place of that borrowed classroom, the inherited curriculum, and the assumed methodology. These burdens can be lethal for pre-service teachers who direct too much attention and energy toward "doing the acceptable thing."
In fact it is often difficult to get time to reflect. Yet, we are convinced that unless we can help interns make real time for critical reflection, there is little hope for them to be professional or transformative.
We see little value in training educational technicians.
Interns themselves need to see the power built into their own knowledge and position. They have to be aware of how they use this real power in relation to their students. They, like all other teachers, have to deal with the question of being an authority while being in authority. This question, like many others posed in this monograph, forms part of the process of building up a reflective pre-service teacher program. We demand much from our interns. Therefore, we need to help them integrate theory and practice, critically analyze situations, and implement change. Simply putting the category of reflection into a handbook or evaluation form is not enough. In part, we want to help interns get into the habit of the critical reflection needed if they are to become educational professionals and transformative intellectuals.
In this reflective process we have constantly to ask what we, as teacher educators, bring to the internship table. The diversity of our reflective group, along with the variety of interns we work with helps keep us all honest. We do not have the luxury of limited ideologies. In our analyzing and discussing, the complexity of schooling is made more apparent. In this reflective process we have to work on our silence as well as our probing questions. We aid in giving interns voice through our listening. Like all teachers it is hard for us not to tell; we too are expected to know. In this reflective process with interns we have the opportunity to go beyond the general educational musings to probe specific sites and to examine sources of intern knowledge and pedagogical practice. Beyond this we have to help interns give themselves the power to teach what is needed. There is a culture of constraint that points to a hegemony of ritualized teacher expectations and practices. Interns can best learn how to understand and manage if they reflect and build on the concrete experiences of everyday life. The teaching internship is a safe place to confront that everyday life of schooling.
One of our plans is to help fill the
gaps in teacher knowledge and teacher research by using the
voices of interns. The critical analysis of the interviews done in the
internship program does contribute to how teachers view and transform their
own knowledge, practices, values, and work sites. In this way, interns may
better realize the need to build their own knowledge and participate in the
process of knowledge production.
Our group wants to offer far more than a craft model of teacher training. We try to see the teaching interns as intelligent practitioners capable of reflection and being able to take responsibility for their own professional development. For a long time we have known that our institution cannot simply be a dispenser of teacher education; it must be a conduit for professional development. An active reflective process, we believe, produces such a conduit. None of the work of teacher education, in its varied forms, is easy. We are certainly aware of the difficulties faced by interns who must confront the reality of opposing curricula, demanding administrators, special students, and the struggle for time, and identity. Interns have to "go gently into that good night" armed with confidence in their own abilities to learn from themselves as well as from their school circumstances.
It is our hope that we are helping in that process. We also realize that the interns we work with are often caught in the middle of conflicting demands. Sometimes interns feel powerless to do anything about the complex social and institutional issues they inherit. Yet they must become aware of such issues and be able to critically inform themselves in order to work within such reality. In fact there is little authentic choice. The alternative is to blindly apply techniques, skills, and cook-book remedies. In fact very few experienced teachers operate this way. Why would we expect any less from our interns? Throughout this monograph you will hear the voices of interns as they struggle to break the bonds of the taken-for-granted. The least we can do is help them in their struggle to form a reflective practice that is both critical and transformative.
This ongoing study would not be possible without the active support and participation of a large number of interns over several years. They have come to this process hesitant and questioning but full of pedagogical hope. These interns were willing to listen to our plans for work with them and for our research. In a short time they were adding to our structured procedures and adding critical questions of their own. As we expected, the interns were eager to probe their own mindsets and articulate their own belief systems. In time they did this with excitement and hope. In fact the interviews and focus groups became opportunities of learning and promise for us as well. It did not take us long to realize that our collaboration was much bigger and more complex than the sum total of our combined experience, reading, and expertise. Therefore, the work goes on. This publication is but one attempt to put some of this work in focus and on view.
We have to thank the Research Committee
and the Publication Committee of the Faculty of
Education, Memorial University of Newfoundland, for essential support with
this project. This type of research is rewarding but costly and time
consuming. We wish to thank the talented and patient people who transcribed
and packaged the volumes of interviews. We also wish to thank Ann Beresford
for her expert editing of the manuscript. We are grateful for the quiet but
direct help we have received from our colleagues in the faculty as well as
from the growing network of reflective researchers in various countries.