Why Teach? Part II

A few issues ago we wrote an editorial titled "Why Teach?" (Whitcomb, Borko, & Liston, 2008). There we suggested that teacher education could facilitate teacher candidates' transformation. We explained that a transformative approach entailed an education that challenges students to consider their central or ultimate values by posing critical questions about what they value and how they ought to live. It does so in a way that: 1) fuses thinking and feeling; 2) posits the presence of, and faith in an inner self; and 3) points that self on a path to discovering truths that can guide this process of creating a life. (p. 5) We knew that such a framework might meet with some resistance. Academics tend to be wary of proposals that call for attention to emotion, talk of faith and an inner self, and point to a search for "inner truths." Such discourse tends to raise the fearful specter of unduly intermingling emotional, spiritual, and intellectual realms. For many academics, even in this postmodern, post-structural academic world, talk of emotion, faith, and inner truths tends to violate prevailing intellectual norms. Those norms maintain that in our professional lives faith, reason, and emotion, as well as professional role and personal soul, should be neatly compartmentalized and separated. An intellectual's life is ruled by, and the process of education operates through, reason. We don't agree with such a clean demarcation, and yet we also recognize that blending emotion, reason, and faith has had disastrous consequences. Richard Dawkins (2008), Sam Harris (2005), Christopher Hitchens (2007), in three separate and recently published books, have outlined the tendency toward and the costs of religious fanaticism. Religious movements have been a source and cause of enormous human suffering, and as a democracy we are wise to separate political and religious tenets. Furthermore, within the teaching profession it seems reasonable to respond with suspicion and concern to many of the varieties of so-called spiritually infused, educational discourses. Proselytizing and the preparation of public school teachers should not mix. But such concerns shouldn't lead us to disregard our teacher candidates' and our own larger searches for meaning, especially when this search for meaning traverses what traditionally has been deemed as the spiritual realm. (1) In our previous editorial we offered the contours of a transformative approach--building off the humanities work of Mark Edmundson (2004) and Martha Nussbaum (1998). There we delineated a view of transformative teacher education, relying in large part on Edmundson's elaboration of transformation. We maintained that a transformative education offers alternative narratives that challenge students' received views and enlarges or redirects students' circle of meaning. It does so in a manner that engages feeling and intellect, does not presuppose a particular answer, is frequently most powerful when it comes at a time when one is not sure of one's way, and relies on an inner eye, an inner self. What we did not do in that editorial was outline some of the spiritual, or what we will call the contemplative, features of such a transformative teacher education agenda. (2) We do that here. But first let us lay some of the ground work. Transformation and Reflection Transformative teacher education, if it is to be a defensible educational goal, must be an educational, not an indoctrinatory, process. (3) Our teacher education candidates and their future students live affectively and, for some, spiritually suffused lives. These features inform, motivate, and guide their teaching. We shouldn't ignore that fact. It does not seem advisable to treat the affective and spiritual realms as "out of bounds." Minimally, teacher educators need to be prepared to discuss matters of faith, reason, and belief with teacher candidates, what Ron Anderson (2007) calls their worldviews. …