Stranger Than Fiction: Arthur Levine's Educating School Teachers-The Basis for a Proposal

Levine, Arthur. 2006. Educating School Teachers. Washington, DC: Education Schools Project. 142 pages. While reading Educating School Teachers one of us had the odd and distinct feeling that she or he was "hearing" Emma Thompson's voice--the novelist and "narrator" in the recent comedic film Stranger Than Fiction (Forster & Helm, 2006). Well, almost. Admittedly, Arthur Levine doesn't really sound or look like Emma Thompson. However, there are parallels here. Levine, the former president of Teachers College--Columbia and now president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, wrote Educating School Teachers, a report on the dismal state of university-sponsored and alternative routes for teacher education. Among Levine's major recommendation are calls to dismantle many programs and to transform schools of education into professional schools focused on "the world of practice and practitioners" (p. 104). The report attempts to capture the professional "life" history of teacher education and points to a viable, albeit challenging, future. In many ways he is retelling and reshaping our narratives as teacher educators. In the film Stranger Than Fiction Thompson plays a novelist, Kay Eiffel, an idiosyncratic, reclusive writer who, by some strangely conceived design, happens to be narrating IRS auditor Harold Crick's unfolding and somewhat dismal life (played by Will Ferrell). Kay Eiffel describes the conflicts and forces operating in Harold's life and points to an ominous future. And so it was oh, so strange to be reading Art Levine, recalling Emma Thompson's narrative of Harold Crick's life, all the while thinking about the dire need for quality in what is currently the dismal state of teacher education. What could be stranger than fiction? Nonfiction, especially when the nonfiction appears to be a narration of our ongoing professional lives. Some might balk at the framing and parallels drawn here. Surely we need to approach this matter with due professional attention and diligence. Allusions to a comedic film starring the likes of naif Will Ferrell will not further the professional stature of teacher education. We disagree. The parallels and our further elaborations will, we think, provide a helpful framing for Levine's study. At the core of Zach Helm and Marc Forster's (writer and director, respectively) film are issues of meaning and control in our personal and professional lives. As we move through our lives, we are sometimes forced to examine our motivations and goals. Conflicts and contradictions abound in these narratives, sometimes resulting in resolutions, and at other times being left unresolved. At the heart of Levine's study are painful, nonfictional contradictions that confound the practice within, research on, and policy about teacher education. Levine, following numerous past critiques of teacher education, offers an analysis that looks back at the past, depicts the present, and poses serious questions about the future of teacher education. Teacher educators purportedly cannot decide whether they are preparing teachers for a craft or a profession, whether theory is more important than clinical practice, whether teacher educators should be university scholars or skilled practitioners. For those of us who have lived lives committed to the profession of teaching and teacher education, the conflicts that Levine underscores are felt with a degree of pain and met with a measure of humored discomfort. Humor can help make these reflections less stinging, more accepting, and possibly transformative. Without humor the contrasts between the facts of our lives and our idealized fictions cut painfully close to the core of our preferred narrative renditions. Levine, in his own quite public and academic way, asks us to examine our professional assumptions and practices. And the narrator, in this case Levine, is not without his own conflicted stances; none of us is. We'll point some of those out. …