Searching for Vitality in Teacher Education

The hopes and dreams for our shared JTE editorship began 6 years ago over three bowls of tortilla soup. During that lunchtime meeting, through deliberation and debate, we formed our editorial vision statement. Scanning the professional horizon in fall 2003, we characterized the teacher education landscape for our American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) editorship proposal in the following terms: Those committed to education share a historically unprecedented goal: To ensure all children will develop the knowledge, understandings, and competencies needed to reach their full potential and to contribute to our democratic society. Furthermore, most accept that quality teachers play a crucial role in realizing this aim. Yet, in the face of this common goal, different visions for how best to realize this aim compete in the marketplace of ideas. On the one hand, some reforms promote standards-based accountability systems, market-based approaches to public education, advocacy of direct instruction and prescribed curricula, and deregulation of teacher preparation and licensure. On the other hand, other reformers encourage a broader conception of the aims and purposes of education, a view of public schools as institutions uniquely charged with shaping and creating a fairer, equitable, and just society, a preference for pedagogies and assessments that focus on conceptual understanding, and the promotion of teaching as a profession. One thing is certain in all of this mix, a consensus about teaching, public schooling, and the role of teacher education does not exist. Add to these debates an increasing number of alternative and state-sanctioned routes to teacher certification, the changing cultural and class demographics of our public schools, the relatively stable white, middle-class pool of prospective and practicing teachers, and the decreasing state appropriations for higher education, and we end up with a terrain ripe for structural transformation. While we don't believe these changes will be designed or guided solely by rational deliberations, we do maintain that the Journal of Teacher Education has and should provide a scholarly forum for the dissemination and examination of teacher education research, policy, and practice. If we were chosen to guide the Journal in upcoming years we would provide a ... setting where distinct and varied scholarly approaches could explore, interrogate, and illuminate the contours of teacher education. (1) The guiding metaphor for our editorial vision was then and has continued to be a "conversation of many voices." We believe that rich conversational lines with many distinct participants allow us to crisscross the ill-structured landscape of teaching and learning to teach, to explore and thereby affirm its complexity (Lampert, 2001; Spiro, Coulson, Feltovich, & Anderson, 1988/2004). Although understanding complexity is a scholar's primary aim (and delight), such multi-vocal conversations offer those involved in the endeavor opportunities to see the terrain from different vantage points and to cross well trodden paths in new places. Out of these encounters, it was our hope that fresh ideas and practices would emerge. As we approached this, the final issue published under our editorship, we revisited our proposal statement. To some extent, we were discouraged. The statement written in 2003 could easily be written in 2009. The field continues to be in flux, and university-based teacher preparation is arguably more besieged today than when we began. We wondered about the vitality of our field: Is there any evidence or reason to believe that creative, vital, and powerful ideas and practices are being taken up in the field of teacher education? We asked individuals who hold diverse views to respond to the following question: Is there vitality in the field of teacher education? …