Teacher Education with an Attitude: Preparing Teachers to Educate Working-Class Students in Their Collective Self-Interest

9. Accessing Praxis: Practicing Theory, Theorizing Practice in Social Justice Teachers’ First Year of Teaching

9 Accessing Praxis: Practicing Theory, Theorizing Practice in Social Justice Teachers’ First Year of Teaching Peter Hoffman-Kipp and Brad Olsen PETER HOFFMAN-KIPP, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR of Education at Sonoma State University, and Brad Olsen, Assistant Professor of Education, University of California, Santa Cruz, describe the UCLA Center X teacher education program , where students have a Novice year of study and student teaching followed by a second Resident year as employed, full-time teachers in urban public schools. During the Resident teacher year, students meet weekly in a seminar to engage in praxis—to plan action in light of theory and examine theory in light of practice. This chapter details the ways that new teachers perceive the transition to teaching for social justice and suggests that teacher preparation may end too soon, leaving students with a body of theory but too few skills to put it into practice. ❖ Teacher education programs, both preservice and in-service, introduce theoretical concepts that practitioners must translate for use in their classrooms. But articulating and communicating a theoretical foundation that practitioners find consistently meaningful enough to engage with, and utilize in their work, has long been a challenge.Too often, teacher preparation programs do not provide the necessary space or opportunity for new teachers to develop the agency required to translate theory into practice. In addition, teacher education rarely values comments and vignettes about practitioners’ concrete experiences in schools as a doorway into conversation about how a theoretical concept might be translated for use in a classroom. In this chapter, we argue that theory can, in fact, be considered inside of practice—as praxis. Freire (1972) defines praxis as the dialectical union of reflection and action; it is the notion that theory and practice are inseparable. Interpretation, understanding, and application are in constant interplay as one pursues thoughtful action.1 The study that gives rise to this chapter demonstrated that, if given the opportunity through their teacher education program, teachers 141 142 TEACHER EDUCATION WITH AN ATTITUDE in the first year of teaching can develop a praxis which includes two different notions of how theory functions within practice. That is, beginning teachers can develop a praxis that both informs their practice with theory and, that leads them to realize a new understanding of theory as a result of engaging in their practice. In the first instance, the teacher begins with theory and moves to practice; in the second, the teacher begins with practice and comes to more fully understand theory. In both cases, the emphasis is on making continual moves (Hedegaard, 1990, 1998) between theory and practice through reflection (Hoffman-Kipp,Artiles, & Lopez-Torres, 2003) and action, the key components of praxis. A first year teacher’s view of the relationship of theory to practice reveals that many new teachers believe they ought to be perfect at the teaching performance from the start.The disjointed nature of their thinking about and reflecting on their teaching suggests to them that they are not good performers . Praxis solves that problem as it offers a reflection/action dialectic that incorporates the notion of “beginnings”; you learn to teach through practice,2 and learning to teach should be envisioned as occurring over time, as practice and theory meet in teacher reflection. Research suggests that praxis can also act as a tool for teacher educators who hope to affect teacher beliefs and practices, not just in the first years of teaching, but over the professional career of their graduates. Within teacher education programs, structures that offer chances for dialogue that encompasses both theory and practice appear to offer the most opportunities to develop moments of praxis. Most often, these structures appear during a graduate seminar or other small, weekly setting where new social justice teachers can return to the theoretical base established in their teacher preparation coursework. This chapter focuses on just such a setting in order to explore these moments of praxis within the UCLA TEP. Of particular importance in our study is a two-year social justice teacher education program, UCLA’s Center X, where students begin teaching full time in the second year.3 TEACHER EDUCATION AT UCLA: CENTER X The Teacher Education Program (TEP) at UCLA—part of Center X—provides urban teacher preparation in the form of a two-year, intensive, M.Ed. program in teaching for social justice in urban communities. During the first year students (who are called Novices) engage in inquiry-based courses, projects, and dialogues...