IP 89-8 What do prospective teachers learn in their liberal arts courses?
Abstract
Teacher education reform policies and proposals--particularly those of the Holmes Group--call for fewer education courses and more liberal arts. This paper examines the assumptions that underlie such proposals. Specifically, the author questions the assumption that more subject matter courses produce greater knowledge of the kind that teachers need in order to help students understand the content. Reviewing recent research on teaching and learning in undergraduate physics and mathematics, the author raises questions about the effectiveness of undergraduate instruction in challenging fundamental ideas and beliefs and helping students develop meaningful, connected understandings. Such understandings are necessary if teachers are to help pupils in schools develop similar understandings of subject matter.
He further raises the questions about the role that recent ideas about cognition play in teaching the liberal arts. Recent reports on undergraduate education that portray teaching as frequently unchallenging offer little hope of change: The reward structure of higher education is unlikely to change to encourage more attention to teaching. The various liberal arts disciplines, moreover, provide scholars little incentive to think about, much less inquire into, teaching their field. Finally, in the culture of higher education, scholars' prerogative to teach what they individually consider important tends to take precedence over concerns for the perceived coherence of programs of study.
Given such conditions, the chances that the pedagogy of the liberal arts will change substantially seem slim. Without such changes, the hoped-for developments in prospective teachers' knowledge seem unlikely. By raising hopes that depend for their fulfillment in part on liberal arts faculty, reformers may be unwittingly setting themselves up for yet more criticism from policymakers if the reforms produce little change in what happens in school classrooms.