Recasting the Pitfalls of Experience in Teacher Preparation for the Current Context

Abstract

In 1985, Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Margret Buchmann published the foundational article, “The Pitfalls of Experience in Teacher Preparation,” describing three primary pitfalls in teacher learning: (1) familiarity, (2) two worlds, and (3) cross-purposes. As three teacher educators, we find that the pitfalls remain salient 40 years later, and we note both continuity and change. Here, we argue that revisiting these pitfalls 40 years later enables us to recast the enduring challenges in ways that better account for the current moment. For each pitfall, we offer questions to the field to consider how inherent tensions in learning might better support robust teacher learning and development.

In 1985, Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Margret Buchmann published the foundational article, “The Pitfalls of Experience in Teacher Preparation.” This piece situated teacher education as one point in a larger continuum of learning to teach and described three primary pitfalls in teacher learning: (1) familiarity, (2) two worlds, and (3) cross-purposes. In the 40 years since its publication, we note both continuity and change. Although the specifics may look different, 1985 and the current context have many similarities: multiple pathways into teaching, varied state licensure requirements and systems, funding inequalities that reinscribe educational inequities, and culture wars over content and pedagogy. In other ways, the context of schooling has changed significantly with the advent and rise of the internet and associated technological advances, a more robust field of teacher education research, and greater variation in P–12 school settings.

As three teacher educators, we have continued to assign this piece in our preparation of new teacher educators. The pitfalls remain salient. Here, we argue that revisiting these pitfalls 40 years later enables us to recast the enduring challenges in ways that better account for the current moment. For each pitfall, we offer questions to the field to consider how inherent tensions in learning might better support robust teacher learning and development.

Making the Familiar Unfamiliar

The familiarity pitfall highlights how “unquestioned familiarity” with the institution and experiences of schooling “hinder thought” and can “mislead” the novice teacher (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985, p. 56; see also Lortie, 1975). Novice teachers have experienced schooling as students and carry unquestioned assumptions, from how a day is structured to what content (and how) students learn to how a teacher should act. Without thoughtful mediation of learning experiences, the familiarity pitfall masks the central purpose of teaching—student learning—and allows novice teachers to reenact unquestioned ideas of schooling without attending to the complexities of the work.

The familiarity pitfall persists, but today we must broaden “the familiar” to include novices’ experiences with schooling and society. Questioning the familiar means exploring the practical knowledge of learning to teach as well as the symbolic practices embedded within cultural and social narratives around teaching (see Britzman, 2003). Novice teachers interrogate assumptions about schooling by examining how socially constructed identities (including their own) impact who, what, and how they teach.

We must consider the novice teacher’s identities, social positions, and relationship to schooling within the learning-to-teach process. Scholars have explored how to better prepare White teachers for increasingly Black and Brown schools, particularly through analyzing White identity and the Whiteness of schooling (e.g., Matias, 2016; Sleeter, 2008) and teacher education (e.g., Carter Andrews et al., 2021). Additionally, scholars have examined how the experiences of Teachers of Color can afford a more robust learning experience for Students of Color (e.g., Gist & Bristol, 2022). Questioning the familiar now includes curricula (the what) and pedagogy (the how). For example, critical theories push disciplines to question familiar narratives that shape standards and curricula; teacher education has been a primary space for novice teachers to encounter curricula that engage in critical questions (e.g., Salinas & Blevins, 2014).

Teacher education programs often examine social identities and their impact on teaching; currently, all three of the public universities we work at have coursework taken either before or alongside clinical field experiences that includes opportunities to examine social identities and prior experiences with disciplines. For example, at The University of Texas at Austin, to create more coherence across its teacher education programs, teacher educators developed a set of “cross-cutting themes” centered around identities, values, and practices that shape our “vision for teacher preparation” (CoE Field Experiences, The University of Texas, 2020). The cross-cutting themes about identities analyze how personal identities are connected to professional identities and how these facets of identity influence teachers’ work with various students, colleagues, and communities, as well as their engagement with various disciplines. For example, in the elementary social studies course, students examine how their social identities and experiences in P–12 social studies influence how they approach the discipline. In one activity, students create “identity eyeglasses” decorated with their most salient social identities; they then reflect on how those social identities may impact how they look at different historical or current events (see Payne & Green, 2018). The cross-cutting themes thread through coursework and field experience content, as well as shape our field supervisors’ coaching approach (e.g., Wetzel et al., 2023). This focus on identity makes what is most familiar, who we are in the world, at times unfamiliar as we examine how our social and professional identities impact our work as educators.

As the field has centered learning in and from practice (e.g., National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education [NCATE], 2010), questions about the familiar occur in the micro-individual and the macro-sociopolitical contexts. Novice teachers must learn to question the familiar accountability regimes in which their schooling experience was steeped to avoid reproducing technocratic behaviors such as attending to discrete classroom management moments rather than broad teaching goals that engage students intellectually and personally (see Apple, 2006; Ellis, 2010).

Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann (1985) argued for novice teachers to develop an “inquiring disposition” (p. 56). Teacher educators can center curiosity around the familiar in their work. How can the simple questions of “Why this and not that?” and “Who decides?” help novice teachers critique the familiar as it relates to schools and society? How can teacher educators help novice teachers decenter a teacher’s lived experience as the only and normed experience?

Expanding from Two Worlds to Many Worlds

The two-worlds pitfall describes the difficulty a novice teacher experiences mediating learning between “two distinct settings” for teacher education: universities and schools (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985, p. 63). Each setting has goals, rules, perspectives, and pressures (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985). The two-worlds pitfall contributes to the belabored theory-to-practice divide, wherein universities promote theory and schools champion practice, which has led to programs that singularly reify “teaching techniques” (e.g., Lemov, 2021) like Relay graduate school (e.g., Stitzlein & West, 2014). Teacher education has responded with various P–12–university partnerships intended to bridge the two-worlds divide, including professional development schools (e.g., Darling-Hammond, 1994), mediated methods courses (e.g., Payne & Zeichner, 2017), and residency programs (e.g., Gatti, 2019).

The two-worlds pitfall has helped researchers identify tensions in learning across settings, yet it creates a false binary. Novice teachers grapple with many worlds. Teacher education exists in broader sociopolitical contexts, which include health and poverty concerns, racism, cultural disconnections, and federal/state/district policies, as well as drastically different working conditions within stratified and diverse school systems (Kumashiro, 2015; Sutcher et al., 2016). Further, knowledge for teaching exists beyond these two worlds—community knowledge, for example, must inform teacher education (e.g., Murrell, 2001; Zeichner, 2023).

Teacher education needs to develop teachers who adeptly navigate the many worlds shaping teaching. A many-worlds frame encompasses the sociocultural contexts and identities of teachers and their students (e.g., immediate familial and community knowledges) and the shifting cultural landscape that shapes policy in official and unofficial ways. These many worlds are overlapping with blurred, often incomplete borders, creating opportunities (and constraints) for teacher candidates navigating this learning landscape. Although teacher education still needs to mediate learning among many worlds, we must also support novice teachers to develop the intellectual, socioemotional, and practice-based tools to learn from these worlds to see students from a holistic lens (e.g., Good, 2018; Seidl & Friend, 2008).

In each of our contexts as teacher educators, we work to engage preservice teachers in assignments and experiences that attempt to grapple with the many worlds that impact teaching. For example, to illuminate the many worlds of teaching, secondary English preservice teachers at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln engage in a mapping activity aimed at helping them see the sociohistorical nature of schooling. After students map where they were raised, they write a short “Where I Am from Geographically and Politically” poem, which invites them to think about where and how they were raised as well as how they were brought up to think about differences (religious, linguistic, racial, cultural, and/or political). Students study demographic data from the middle and high schools where they will do clinical placements in the district, looking specifically at race and ethnicity, free and reduced lunch, talented and gifted numbers, mobility, and the number of English language learners, and then input that demographic data onto each school’s pin on the map. The discussion that follows is one based on a single question: What do you notice about the data you are looking at in the district? Students highlight the inverse relationship between talented and gifted numbers and the percentage of students of color, for example. They observe that the schools with more talented and gifted students are on one clear side of the city.

Finally, we read about one city’s history of redlining from the Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America project, overlaying the redlining map with the map of schools that students have just studied. The writing, mapping, and discussion that students engage in are all geared toward helping them understand that every place is sociohistorical and that the schools they enter are part of that social history. No place is without history, and those histories matter when we think about entering that space. After this activity, students read Milner et al.’s These Kids Are Out of Control (2019) as a way to link conversations about identity, race, culture, and school to our understandings of “classroom management.”

We must begin with mapping (literally and figuratively) the many worlds impacting teacher candidates. We ask: Who are the teacher educators in each world? What knowledges constitute each world and whose are present/absent? How (and why) are some worlds more or less powerful? How can we draw on learning research (e.g., Valencia et al., 2009) to support teacher candidates as they maneuver through many worlds?

Shifting from Cross-Purposes to Shared Purposes

The cross-purposes pitfall in teacher education describes the inevitable tensions that emerge from the novice teacher and the cooperating teacher’s conflicting needs, experiences, and purposes for teaching and learning. Cooperating teachers’ central responsibility is to teach their K–12 students, and it takes place in classrooms that are “not designed as laboratories for learning to teach” (Feiman-Nemser & Buchmann, 1985, p. 62). The novice teacher learning to teach in this classroom occupies different, often liminal, pedagogical and developmental spaces. The novice cannot be solely focused on students’ growth because they are engaged in the complex and emotionally complicated work of learning to teach (i.e., Britzman, 2003).

Feiman-Nemser and Buchmann asserted that overcoming the cross-purposes pitfall requires “structural and normative changes in schools, including the expansion of the teacher’s role” (1985, p. 64). Today, the work of cooperating teachers is still not valued. Teachers face a complex and challenging landscape, and cooperating teachers who volunteer to mentor new teachers usually do so for little or no compensation or release time and with limited resources or preparation (e.g., Butler & Cuenca, 2012; Zeichner, 2005).

Changes in the larger education landscape exacerbate this pitfall. Accountability regimes (e.g., Cochran-Smith et al., 2018) shape teachers’ work, narrowing teaching to skills being tested and recasting the purpose of school through standards and tests. Teachers also experience “intensification” (Santoro, 2018) as they endure increased professional responsibilities without readjustment of expectations or responsibilities. And all of this takes place at a time of decreased budgets, diminished trust in public institutions, and evaporating resources (Cochran-Smith et al., 2018; Kumashiro, 2015). Teachers also face public scrutiny over curricular and pedagogical choices, especially when teachers commit to “racial truth-telling” (Harper, 2024), a pedagogical choice that can result in being called “woke” and accusations of teaching “critical race theory” (see Johnson & Harper, 2024).

These intensified conditions do not affect the cooperating teacher alone; the novice teacher who is learning to teach also experiences these challenges, all while considering what to teach, with what purpose, and with what consequence(s). For example, preservice teachers have shared their reluctance to burden their cooperating teachers with their concerns, needs, and questions because they understand how this particular moment, such as attacks on LGBTQAI+ students and critical race theory, affects teachers’ well-being and professional satisfaction. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, recruiting cooperating teachers has become more challenging at all three of our institutions. We see this as a moment of potential recasting of the cross-purposes pitfall. It can become a shared-purpose opportunity. Rather than acting at cross-purposes, we might approach novice teachers learning alongside mentors from a stance of shared inquiry (e.g., Wetzel et al., 2023). Teacher education offers many examples of ways K–12 and university-based teacher educators could approach this work with a shared purpose, including professional development schools and compensation structures for K–12 liaisons to the university. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison hires school-based coordinators, who are cooperating teachers or instructional coaches who support and recruit cooperating teachers, assist with placements, provide orientations and ongoing mentorship for preservice teachers in their building, and participate in workgroups with faculty to move forward teacher preparation initiatives and shifts (i.e., improving communication between teacher preparation programs and K–12). Yet those examples remain exceptions that are often tied to particular individuals or funding streams rather than systemwide structures that value the work of K–12 teacher educators.

We ask: How can we support mentor teachers (financially, intellectually, emotionally) as they both teach and mentor in the midst of these difficult conditions? How can mentor and novice teachers and teacher educators foster school cultures centered on curiosity and collaboration around studying teaching and learning? How can teacher educators support mentors and novice teachers as they identify opportunities to share a common purpose for pedagogical and curricular inventions?

Toward a Lens of Multidimensional Pitfalls

Forty years later, the three pitfalls not only persist, but also remain remarkably salient for teacher educators as they help novice educators navigate the experience of learning to teach. We have an opportunity to revisit and recast the pitfalls, enriched by 40 years of scholarship that helps us think about teacher preparation in nuanced and critical ways including how identity, race, power, social position, and the unequal educational opportunities are all important dimensions to learning to teach. We ask: What opportunities for new understandings of learning to teach are afforded by looking at novice teachers’ experiences through the lens of more multifaceted pitfalls? What might this lens reveal about learning to teach in today’s schools and society?