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Learning to Teach Against the (New) Grain

For a number of years, some of us involved in teacher education have been writing about the importance of learning to teach for social justice, social change, and social responsibility. Although these terms are not synonymous, they have generally been used to signify the idea that one important role of the college/university is to help prepare teachers to challenge the inequities that are deeply embedded in systems of schooling and in society. Underlying most versions of this argument is the assumption that teaching and teacher education are fundamentally political activities and that it is impossible to teach in ways that are neither political nor value-laden. The point, then, is not that teaching should be politicized but rather, as Bruner (1996) has suggested about education in general, that we recognize "that it is already politicized and that its political side needs finally to be taken into account more explicitly, not simply as though it were `public protest'" (p. 29). Over the years, I have had the opportunity to contribute to the concept of teacher education for social change by suggesting that it is not enough for beginning teachers to learn the basic skills of managing classrooms and constructing well-crafted lessons for all students. I have argued that even for the newest teachers--even for prospective teachers at the very beginning of the professional lifespan--part of the task is teaching "against the grain" by collaborating closely with both university- and school-based mentors to develop critique, challenge common practices, and engage in inquiry intended to alter the life chances of children. More than a decade ago, I opened an article entitled "Learning to Teach Against the Grain" (Cochran-Smith, 1991) by drawing on Antonio Gramsci's essay condemning political and social indifference in pre-World War I Italy. Asserting that indifference is often a mainspring of history, Gramsci argued that action had to be everyone's responsibility and that each individual, no matter how apparently powerless, had to be accountable for the role he or she played or failed to play in the larger struggles of the day. A major goal of the project of teacher education for social change has been helping prospective teachers think deeply about and deliberately claim the role of educator as well as activist based on political consciousness and on ideological commitment to combating the inequities of American life. Constructing actual preservice programs that provide the social, organizational, and intellectual contexts for learning to teach against the grain in the company of more experienced mentors has been a daunting challenge for teacher educators. And no small part of that challenge has been to clarify and wrestle with complex questions about the role the university ought to play in teacher education and the larger responsibility of teacher education to and for society. These questions have been intensified by the political climate that has evolved over the last several years. Animated by their twin commitments to privatization and deregulation, powerful conservative groups have asserted that colleges and universities ought to play virtually no role in teacher education other than to provide a basic liberal arts education. And in K-12 schools, where--regardless of political affiliation--raising students' scores on standardized tests has become the major and sometimes the only goal, teachers who work against the grain are hardly in demand. In fact, in school systems that are deeply entrenched in standardization and standardized testing as the mode of school reform, new teachers who are willing to work completely with the grain may well be the best prepared and the most in demand. Illustrations are plentiful on listservs, in the popular media, and in the political rhetoric of debates. Chicago's completely scripted lesson plans for each subject, each grade level, and each day of the school year, for example, are touted in Time Magazine as especially effective and appropriate for beginning teachers. …