Title: Exploring Ethical Tensions on the Path to Becoming a Teacher
Abstract: Introduction Eliza's student teaching narrative reads: Jeff is a difficult child in the day care class where I am an assistant teacher. He is socially immature for his age and irritating--this means he always tells the joke at the wrong time, wants to talk when it's time to be quiet, begins the work just as they finish, hangs out by the bus all afternoon, and then runs away just when it's time to get on and go. In our class, the other teachers have devised a token economy system where the school tradition is to award tickets for good behavior and remove them for bad. I have talked to them about how this doesn't work but the other teachers still use this system. As a result, I always look for ways to subtly inflate the number of tickets kids who cause trouble have to work with. Jeff was a student who seldom had points to do anything. But I had been subtly working with him getting him to work with me. I would use key words to prompt him to do what he needed to and when he would follow those words, I would give him extra token economy points. Jeff was willing to do this, because we were planning projects he wanted to do. Although he wasn't perfect, I had worked with him until he had earned 1000 points. Last week, I walked into class just as Karen (the head teacher) was starting a craft project. Jeff was off by himself and I noticed that he was crying. Both of these things were unusual for him and so I went over and talked to him about why he was so sad. He told me that Karen had taken all of his points. Now, I totally understood why Karen was frustrated and why she had taken his points. But as Jeff talked he told me he wanted to do the project we were doing that day as a present for his mother. I didn't feel I could just over-ride Karen and so I sat down with Jeff. We talked about all his options for recovering enough tickets to be able to make the gift and then we practiced what he might do in this negotiation. (reconstructed field note, June 5, 2009) This narrative from Eliza's experience as a preservice teacher drew our attention to the ways she negotiated the relationships in this daycare class where she worked as a teacher assistant during her preservice education. We had been working with Eliza during this year in her program in order to understand more fully the ethical nature of preservice teaching work. An ethical stance is central in the writing by Eliza, not only in her work alongside Jeff, but also with Karen. It would be simple to dismiss Karen as out of relationship with Jeff and lend him our sympathies, but Eliza endeavours to stay in relationship with both of them, negotiating the tensions required to sustain relationships on the narrow ridge of knowing another (Buber, 2002). While we were interested in Eliza's skill in defusing challenging situations with both children and teachers we were more interested in the ethical tensions embedded in the story--tensions that confront most pre-service teachers--tensions of negotiating safe spaces for children, tensions of negotiating professional relationships, tensions of being fair, and others. This narrative inquiry emerged from wonders about ethical and moral obligations in teacher education and through Eliza's desire as a pre-service teacher to understand her own development more deeply. We wondered about moral authority as teachers in both grade schools and teacher education programs and what might this attention to moral authority, and its relation to ethics, mean for our practices. This inquiry takes up these wonders as we examine our own narratives alongside Eliza's. The Research Participants Eliza is being educated in teacher education at a small college in a medium sized community in the Western United States. The program has been in place for a few years but is the first four-year program at a school moving to four-year college status. In this program, from their admittance into the program, students spend one full-day a week working as an assistant to teachers in the public schools. …
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 13
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