Teaching Education for Imperfect Contexts

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to serve as the Teacher Education Interest Section (TEIS) chair for 2013–2014 . Let me briefly introduce myself. I am an associate professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I teach ESOL courses to teacher learners and where I research teacher development, in particular the development of teachers who work with English learners. Prior to becoming a teacher educator and researcher, I taught English and ESOL in the United States, Japan, and South Korea, and I am keenly interested in how teachers think about their practice of teaching.

At a recent job talk at my university, a faculty member asked the job applicant if teacher education was actually useful. It seems as though, the faculty member asserted, we spend all of our time carefully crafting courses, designing program sequences, and lining up strong mentors for our teacher candidates, and then our teacher learners graduate and find a job where they are told what and how to teach. As a result, all of our careful teacher preparation is for naught.

Now it is spring and we are in the last exhausting weeks of the semester, and I can understand my colleague’s weariness. Despite my own familiarity with the magnetic pull of cynicism that accompanies this time of year, I think my colleague is entirely wrong. Teacher education is critically important for teacher learners, especially those going into these imperfect teaching contexts. Teacher education should provide the professional knowledge, resilience, and community that teacher learners will need not only for perfect teaching contexts but also for the imperfect, even deprofessionalizing contexts. I hope we can talk this year about just how teacher education might do that in all of the multiple contexts in which we teacher educators work.

I look forward to discussing the big and small issues of teacher education this year. Thank you for the opportunity to serve the TEIS community.

Jenelle Reeves