Qualitative Research in Education in Canada

Teacher Education Reform in Canada

Given the variety of provincial responses to change in teacher education, it is always difficult to establish watershed events and the geneses of new configurations. However, Grimmett, an authoritative commentator from the west coast, has judged that the report by Fullan, Connelly and Watson on Teacher Education on Ontario was an important watershed for events throughout Canada. This publication (Ministry of Education, 1990), funded by the Ministry of Education in Ontario, emerged in 1989 and the authors judged that the “pressures and needs for reform”in Ontario were substantial: “Questions have been increasingly raised about the quality of education in the schools, as witnessed by recent surveys of the public and of employers. Recent articles in a major Toronto newspaper noted many perceived difficulties. Increasing concern has also been expressed about the fact that approximately one-third of students entering Grade 9 leave without a diploma. The recent report of the Ontario Youth Commissioner is one of several documenting a growing crisis in education and society.” This crisis, the author argued, provides a context for re-thinking schooling and teacher education.

The opportunity for reform is timely. Never before have the conditions been more favourable: the knowledge both conceptually and practically of the nature of the changes needed; the elements and momentum already in place; the tremendous opportunity over the next five years for new leadership and renewal given the very high turnover in administrative positions at the school board level, in faculty positions at the university level, and in other educational organizations; the healthy financial situation in relation both to existing and new resources; and the likelihood of cooperation among the major educational partners: government, boards, teacher federations, administrative officials, universities (pp. 6-7).

These summary comments obviously touch on issues related to the forgoing devil’s bargain debate, but also associated question of the balance between theory and practice. The report draws upon a Deweyan position in this regard.

I shall assume without argument that adequate professional instruction of teachers is not exclusively theoretical, but involves a certain amount of practical work. The primary question as to the latter is the aim with which it shall be conducted. Two controlling purposes may be entertained so different from each other as radically to alter the amount, conditions, and methods of practice work. On one hand, we may carry on the practical work with the object of giving teachers in training working command of the necessary tools of their profession; control of the technique of class instruction and management; skill and proficiency in the work of teaching. With this aim in view, practice work is, as far as it goes, of the nature of apprenticeship. On the other hand, we may propose to use practice work as an instrument in making real and vital theoretical instruction; the knowledge of subject-matter and of principles of education. This is the laboratory point of view.

The contrast between the two points of view is obvious; and the two aims together give the limiting terms within which all practice work falls (Dewey, quoted in Ministry of Environment, 1990, pp. 53-54).

It is worth stressing then that this report takes a very balanced view of the theory practice continuum.

Teacher education scenarios that are merely practical are routine, dull, and mind-stifling. Programs that are merely theoretical are abstract, irrelevant and meaningless. Lively interactions of theory and practice are needed. Habits of mind need to be developed in which teachers and teacher educators are always searching for deeper reasons behind successful practices, and in which plans are developed and tried out for new ideas (Ministry of Education, 1990, p. 54).

Whilst these pieties about the need for contextual change and for balance between theory and practice are well expressed in the report, in my view, the genuinely innovative aspect of this opportunity for reform was the direction in which the quest for teacher knowledge was pursued. Going back to the previous discussion, it has been the case for some decades that Canadian Faculties of Education, because of the displacement of national policy concerns have been free to explore a number of very innovative and potentially generative qualitative methodologies for use in teacher education. Of these the use of narratives, storying and collaborative methodologies has been particularly central. Hence the Fullan, Connelly and Watson report had the following to say about the use of narrative methodologies in teacher education.

One way of developing an idea of teacher education which focuses on knowledge and knowing on a continuum is to focus on the life stories or narratives of teachers. “On becoming a teacher” is a matter of personal narrative. Everyone has a life story which makes them unique, and everyone has goals, aspirations and directions which are essential to an understanding of them as teachers. All of us, not only teachers, are what we are because of where we have been and where we are going. We cannot ask ourselves “what does it mean to be a teacher”without asking where we are headed and where we have been...

A narrative perspective detechnicalizes the study of education and links it with other aspects of the study of human experience. It has potential for freeing education from the language of the technical, for insuring that understandings link with fundamental qualities of human experience; and for establishing bonds in method between education and other fields of human endeavour (Quoting Clandinin, ibid, p. 56-57).

The genesis of the argument for the use of narrative in teacher education comes particularly from the work of Connelly and Clandinin (1989) on what they call the teacher’s personal practical knowledge. Here they are developing from the exciting work which Freema Elbaz undertook when she was studying teacher education in Ontario.