Foundations and teacher education: do we need a new metaphor?

Shulman (1990), in his provocative article, Reconnecting Foundations to the Substance of Teacher Education, recommends discarding the foundations metaphor and replacing it with scaffolding, meaning the steel skeleton or structural framework used to build skyscrapers. This method of construction was first used in 1883 to erect the Home Insurance Building, a 10-story skyscraper that graced Chicago's skyline until 1931, when it was leveled to make room for even taller buildings. Shulman states that the radically new form of support used in the construction of the Home Insurance Company skyscraper did away with the need for foundations. Thus, scaffolding suggests a new way of thinking about teacher education. It implies a Deweyan integrated model connecting the foundational disciplines to the subject matter that teachers teach. Shulman's ideas favor a withering away (p. 304) of the foundations field as currently known. In the following pages, I show that his proposal, although initially appealing, is problematic on closer analysis. Because foundations and scaffolding are terms from the world of construction, I draw on works in architecture as well as works in education to evaluate Shulman's arguments. I conclude that the scaffolding metaphor should be rejected, at least as far as social and psychological foundations are concerned. Teacher education programs, like skyscrapers, must rest on solid foundations. In this article, I use the term metaphor in its broadest sense. Metaphors are more than figures of speech or poetic expressions having little to do with everyday language or systematic thought. They are mappings across conceptual domains that are fundamentally conceptual, not linguistic, in nature (Lakoff, 1993, p. 239). Shulman's Position Shulman maintains that the foundations metaphor is misleading because it implies that the foundation disciplines--psychology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology of education--form a firm but separate base on which the edifice of teacher education is built. The scaffolding metaphor, on the other hand, suggests an integrated approach linking foundational perspectives to the subject matter that teachers teach; it connects foundations to the substance of teacher education. Shulman contends that the true foundation disciplines are the liberal arts and sciences themselves. Shulman traces the history of the discipline-based approach to foundations to the late 1800s when professional schools were trying to gain a foothold in academia. For example, in medicine, Flexner (1923) designed a program requiring 2 years of foundational studies in the basic sciences before clinical work. The Flexner curriculum quickly became the standard in the reform of medical education. Programs preparing educational practitioners on university campuses followed a similar pattern and soon required foundations courses. Shulman believes that a better model for professional schools in both medicine and education is in the progressive idea of an integrated curriculum. Dewey's Laboratory School at the University of Chicago and Flexner's Lincoln School at Teachers College, Columbia University, embodied this approach to education. Both schools were the antithesis of the discipline-based model of professional education because their curriculum was constructed around real events, real problems, real tasks, real projects that the students could engage in (Shulman, p. 303). An integrated approach to teacher education would similarly link theory to practice by integrating the teaching of foundations with the teaching of curriculum and pedagogy. To further illustrate his ideas, Shulman provides examples from Foundations of Learning for Teaching, a course he and a colleague teach to secondary education students at Stanford. Instead of beginning with the content of the foundations discipline, in this case psychology, they begin with selections from textbooks and other readings teachers and students use in schools. …