ED392 Redesign
In the fall of 2005, we convened the ED392 Taskforce to redesign and standardize ED 392, a core course in our teacher preparation program. Chaired by Carla O’Connor, the Taskforce is a team of faculty members (David Cohen and Shari Saunders) and graduate students (Jenny Demonte, Francesca Forzani, Brian Girard, Deborah Michaels, Christine Neumerski, Seneca Rosenberg, and Serena Salloum), whose redesign efforts are aimed at better preparing pre-service teachers to teach in an increasingly diverse and unequal society. The driving question for the Taskforce is how we can best prepare pre-service teachers to meet the challenge of teaching children who may be different from themselves on a variety of dimensions and who may be attending schools that struggle under a host of economic, political, and social constraints. Our work is funded by the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan. Please click here to view our proposal.
The Taskforce is also working to resolve pedagogical tensions that have arisen in recent years in the teaching of the course. Instructors for this course have found it difficult to establish an appropriate balance between the state of Michigan’s requirement that the course develop students’ understanding of the socio-historical, political, and economic contexts and dilemmas of U.S. schooling, and our own desire to help students understanding of how diversity and culture impact schools and schooling. Consequently, pre-service teachers have previously left the course either overwhelmed by the content (i.e., doubting their capacity to make a difference in the wake of these dilemmas) or unsure of how they might apply this new knowledge in their professional lives. Additionally, because instructors often struggled to meet these course objectives in isolation, course content was not standardized such that all students enrolled in the course were exposed to the same curriculum. That is, during any given semester there were as many versions of ED392 as there were sections of the course.
In redesigning ED392, then, the Taskforce is working to both standardize and redesign the course in order to better elucidate how socio-historical, political, economic, and multicultural dilemmas impact the work of teachers. Moreover, and in accordance with some of the guiding aims of the Teacher Education Initiative, the redesigned course will "ground" the aforementioned dilemmas in a professional context by having pre-service teachers contend with these dilemmas via "records" of practice (e.g., video records of teaching/instruction; case studies; instructional artifacts). The driving assumption is that by building these "virtual" experiences, pre-service teachers will develop a more cogent and tangible understanding of the said dilemmas and, moreover, the professional possibility of contending productively with these demands in their teaching practice.
The efforts of the Taskforce also speak to the SOE's interest in preparing future teacher educators. ED392 is routinely taught by a cadre of advanced graduate students as a means of preparing them to be teacher educators. Consequently, a secondary goal of the Taskforce is to develop and enact a protocol for working with and supervising the graduate student instructors of this course in ways that will enhance their pedagogical capacity.
For more information about the ED 392 Taskforce, please contact Carla O’Connor ( coconnor@umich.edu).
