A Case of Teacher Education for Democracy in a School-University Partnership
Open Access
- Author:
- Jang, Chiau Wen
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- February 14, 2025
- Committee Members:
- Rachel Wolkenhauer, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Anne Whitney, Major Field Member
Kimberly Powell, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Fran Arbaugh, Major Field Member
Natalie Rae, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- school-university partnership
teacher education
democratic professionalism
liberal democracy
populism
accountability - Abstract:
- Liberal democracy, embedded on the individual liberty and the rule of the law, morally and instrumentally guarantees popular sovereignty and citizens’ equality where the conversation between democracy and education has been explicitly centered in teaching practice. However, teacher education has long struggled with high-stakes testing, the narrowing of curricula, school privatization and current pushback against justice-oriented rhetoric. The fundamental and worthwhile purpose of teacher education for democracy is being marginalized with limited public support. One promising approach to addressing this challenge is to promote robust models of Professional Development Schools (PDSs), as one form of school-university partnerships. Such PDSs engage boundary-spanning practitioners in a sense of community and utilize the cyclical process of practitioner inquiry. Although teaching for democracy has become common sense in public education and teacher education, little is known about how teacher education programs prepare for a democratic profession and how the empirical dimensions of a democratic profession play out among teacher candidates, especially in current trends of accountability and polarization. In response, this case study was conducted in order to characterize democratic professionalism among teacher educators and teacher candidates who were engaged in teacher education in a yearlong clinical internship in the context of a PDS. This study utilized case study methodology to explore teacher education for democracy within a PDS in which both structure and value orientations were featured through the signature pedagogies of community building and practitioner inquiry. Teacher educators and teacher candidates participated in a series of semi-structured interviews as the study’s primary data source; surveys, documents and field notes from participant-observations served as secondary data sources. Interpreting these sources through the conceptual framework of teacher education for democracy, the data were analyzed through categorizing analyses, document analysis, and comparing the differences between pre- and post-surveys. This analysis led to the generation of themes and frameworks to describe the categories of teaching as a democratic profession as it played out in the study’s context. The study’s findings indicate that a PDS featuring both structure and value orientations might be a promising vehicle to facilitate the moral imperative of democracy, which extends the justice-oriented rhetoric toward democratic-oriented morality. Teacher candidates’ moral imperative for a democratic profession rested upon a sense of community and inquiry stance that facilitates the development of critical consciousness as well as the practice of participatory democracy and deliberative democracy. The findings suggest a comprehensive framework of teacher education for democracy is needed to understand the complex patterns of teacher educators’ democracy preparation for teacher candidates’ development of a democratic profession. The patterns of teacher education for democracy could be displayed in a four-dimensional framework, including implicit-micro, explicit-micro, implicit-macro and explicit-macro scenarios. In addition to suggesting avenues for future research about teacher preparation for a democratic profession, the study provides a warrant for expanded research on the development of solid school-university partnerships, ongoing professional preparation among teacher educators and schoolteachers, and the contributions of PDSs to the characteristics of teacher education for democracy. The study affirms the perennial relevance of promoting democracy as a worthy purpose of teacher education.