Toward a Renewed Framework for Teacher Preparation

Recent polarized battles over education draw attention to an underlying problem: the persistent orientation of teacher preparation programs toward relativism and away from truth. Teacher education should affirm objective reality and reject critical and relativist frameworks, including the Marxist-materialist worldviews that have been so rampant in recent decades. Personalist philosophy offers a compelling alternative to critical and subjectivist philosophies of education through its consistent articulation of the dignity and value of the human person.

Traditional preparation for teachers, who need state certification or licensure in most situations, generally involves university coursework and assessments like licensure examinations. This coursework should incorporate current theories of human development, family engagement, instruction, and pedagogy. Often, the coursework in such programs reproduces less rigorous versions of critical theory without encouraging or requiring future teachers to grapple with the philosophical implications of that theory. Treatment in education programs may lack the theoretical orientation of a true critical approach, replacing primary readings from Foucault and Fanon with classroom-based examples. But teacher candidates are still left to piece together on their own the relationship between critical approaches and generally accepted principles of logic and reason.

For example, putting Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a staple in teacher preparation programs, into practice does not simply mean that lessons must be relevant and fun. (That position, incidentally, is not supported by evidence.) Rather, truly operationalizing Pedagogy of the Oppressed would involve pushing students to question the foundations of the current social order, interrogate authority, and embrace liberation even when it leads to revolution. It would demand that teachers prioritize alternative ways of knowing over principles of reason or evidence. Does the average teacher candidate understand the implication of those ideas when Freirian pedagogy is referenced? To understand the full implications and context of this thought might require a semester in an advanced political science seminar or, at minimum, acknowledgment that critical consciousness cannot be neatly put on a bulletin board.

Further, such preparation encourages teacher candidates to prioritize perceptions and feelings over reality. For example, one recent monograph opposing evidence-based reading instruction absurdly  references the need for a “full and complementary satchel of . . . epistemologies.” Existing subjective paradigms emphasize the impossibility of consistent beliefs or truths. Such approaches reject the idea of evidence on which our scientific system is based, promoting “spiritual, social, and story-centered forms of knowledge” and “what Sandra Harding has called a strong objectivity that is reached with an eschewing of objectivity . . . and rather, a deep subjectivity.” 

If we pull any thread of this subjectivist tapestry, it becomes easy to unravel the idea of reality itself. If all knowledge is socially constructed, then on what basis or by what authority does a teacher claim to provide any direction? What is the consistent principle we can use to mark any answer wrong if the student’s interpretation already aligns with his or her “lived experience”? It is, of course, easy to overgeneralize; helping students understand the real world often involves pushing them to reflect on personal experience. But taken to extremes, this thinking makes it impossible to prioritize truth and objectivity over feelings and experience. We see real-life downsides of this approach in mathematics curricula that prioritize “equity” and making students “feel heard” as well as in the controversy over balanced literacy, which led to generations of children who thought they could read because they “felt like” readers. 

Critical theory–based approaches to teacher preparation are also rooted in materialist thinking, positioning students as cogs in a vast system of oppressive machinery that can be disrupted only through activism and political awakening. In this telling, the only way out is further adoption of a critical consciousness lens in order to organize and advocate social change to promote a specific ideological agenda. Social justice–oriented approaches feel helpful to educators insofar as they provide a vocabulary to discuss pressing problems such as poverty and discrimination. The worst excesses of industrialization and modernity—abuse of workers, world wars, and genocides—highlight shortcomings of our systems. But conceptualizing problems as political issues, rather than educational ones, leads us to search for political solutions in lieu of educational ones. Eliminating oppression necessarily requires “confronting the ideological frameworks, historical legacies, and institutional . . . practices” contributing to inequality.

According to one researcher, in social justice–oriented teacher preparation, teacher educators (that is, those who educate future teachers) 

actively interact with the local sociopolitical context, . . . [disrupt] power relations in the classroom, . . . [and] challenge Eurocentric epistemologies by valuing lived experience, bodies, and practitioner knowledge in constructing knowledge. 

Teacher educators prioritize this perspective, seeking a “shared, explicit, and consistent focus on teaching for social justice.” And teachers are further encouraged to move away from the objectivity required in scientific paradigms; according to one study, “[t]o teach for social justice involves shifting out of neutral, both in terms of a teacher’s orientation to social inequalities and of pedagogy.” There is little room in such framing for educators to seek truth through apolitical, ideologically neutral examination of achievement gaps and adoption of evidence-based practices. 

Given the shortcomings of these common approaches to educator preparation, how should we prepare teachers instead, and what are the appropriate philosophical starting points for educators who believe in any kind of objective reality? These are important questions for teacher education programs but also for the field at large. One place to start is with the belief that some things are true and some things can be known—in other words, with thoughtful assent to the idea of objective reality. This includes acknowledging the epistemological tensions involved in the embrace of critical theory. It also involves a robust review of theories of knowledge and epistemology rather than the surface-level treatment of Piaget and Dewey that “foundations of education” courses often involve.

This conceptual orientation can and should lead to a renewed emphasis on rigorous research, including cognitive theory, developmental psychology, and the nature of evidence. In education, it is no longer a given that a large experimental or quasi-experimental study is the best way to identify effective practices. Rather, many researchers give equal or greater primacy to subjective analysis, narrative, first-person accounts, and descriptions of phenomena. While valuable to frame initial questions and guide exploration, these methods, by definition, cannot provide widely generalizable information about techniques or interventions that are effective at scale. 

However, a renewed emphasis on objective reality and evidence may still suffer from a lack of a unifying philosophical framework. Teaching, a work that is deeply individual and relational, can best be understood in a framework that acknowledges the problems of our current society and bases solutions on individual dignity, more than conceptualization of overbearing and oppressive social structures. To meet this need, our field would be well served by a theoretical reorientation toward personalism, the philosophical movement oriented around the nature and dignity of the human person, rather than Marxism or a variant of critical materialism. Personalist thought has been around for centuries and was developed and expanded in the twentieth century. It is widely associated with Christian thinkers, including the late Pope John Paul II as well as Jacques Maritain, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others. But the core idea of personalism—an emphasis on the primacy, dignity, and integrity of the human person—has applicability and value in secular contexts as well, and serves as a coherent and valuable organizing principle for educational theory and teacher education in particular.

As scholar Bennet Gilbert writes: 

Personalism always begins its analysis of reality with the person at the centre of consciousness, to which it attaches the most profound worth. Some versions develop this through ontology or metaphysics; some, through theologies associated with most denominations of the Abrahamic religions; and some, through the intersubjective and communitarian nature of human life.

Personalist thought offers a powerful means of prioritizing humans’ well-being and development as a way to realize their authentic potential, based on their human nature. Scholars such as Margarita Mooney Clayton have explored the value of such approaches in education, in terms of both our relationships with students and our way of conceptualizing teaching. Personalist thought has relevance even beyond the religious, as there is value in starting with the student and family as the unit of analysis rather than an ideological construct or social class–related variable.  

In teaching, we should position the person, and his or her intrinsic value, at the center of any analysis, and the well-being and development of the person should be our aim from a practical as well as intellectual perspective. Critics of empiricism, and of the overly reductive reliance on metrics that sometimes accompanies empirical approaches, can find value in the idea that metrics and data themselves should not be the end. Rather, they have value because they help us reach an important goal: the well-being and development of our students. Personalism provides a powerful antidote, also, to critical, Marxist and materialist approaches, which reduce students’ individualism by focusing on slivers of identity or their membership in a collective class or identity-based group. Common educational practices, from student discipline and conduct proceedings to individualized special education planning, take on new significance when we place the dignity and integrity of the person at the center. In fact, in some educational fields, we already focus on the importance of the individual person; special educators routinely use a practice called person-centered planning in helping students with disabilities transition toward college, employment, or other adult services.

There is ample room in the field for both theoretical and practical work that explores the dignity and integrity of the human person as a foundational concept in teacher preparation. A foundation in human rights and the dignity of the person also allows for thoughtful consideration of how best to meet the needs of our increasingly diverse society, allowing for honest and thoughtful examination of our society’s shortcomings. Such an orientation allows for thoughtful treatment of disability rights, cultural and language diversity, and diversity of beliefs and viewpoints. It also allows educators to conceptualize human rights and dignity in a way that values individualism rather than defining the self through membership in various identity-based groups. 

This shift requires reorienting our teacher education curriculum away from critical pedagogies to provide a stronger foundation in philosophy and ethics, with an emphasis on the nature and value of the person. Continued reliance on data and evidence can ensure our pedagogy and interventions are grounded in reality and truth, geared toward human flourishing rather than ideological agendas. Family engagement, in a personalist paradigm, takes on new significance, as families play an important role in nurturing children and advocating for their needs. And a personalist perspective will push us to reimagine and improve many common “equity-based” practices, which risk reducing students to representatives of a given ethnic, language, ability-based or gender group rather than seeing them as unique individuals.

Reorienting our teacher education systems around personalism is no quick fix, given conflicts with existing licensure requirements, textbooks, professional development frameworks, P–12 curriculum and pedagogical approaches, and so on. But by doing so, we can reorient teachers and schools toward an authentic valuing of human dignity and relationships, justify and deepen our use of evidence, and continue to strengthen the way that teachers and schools engage with families, individuals, and society. We owe it to future and current teachers, and the students and families they serve, to begin such work. By doing so, we can equip them to navigate our era’s challenges and serve their students’ needs while grounding their practice in objective reality and discernible truth. 

Patricia Rice Doran is professor and chair of the special education department at Towson University and a parent of six. She writes in her personal capacity here; her views are her own. 

Image by littleny and licensed via Adobe Stock.