Educating Teachers: Disciplines vs. General Studies

Educating Teachers: Disciplines vs. General Studies

by T. MacNeill, PhD

The Problem

The age-old curriculum question, "What knowledge is of most worth?" is getting more and more difficult to answer. Consequently, there is renewed interest in the content of the public school curricula which are being developed across the country. At the same time, there is renewed interest in teacher education programs. The same age-old question is raised in this context: What should teachers have to know? What knowledge is of most worth to teachers? Unfortunately, the question is often asked of the wrong people. The question is not one for university professors who were hired into their positions because they have specialized to the extreme in a particular discipline. These disciplines, as delimited by most university departments, are not "subjects" in public school classrooms. In many ways, we are fortunate that most curricula are not so limited.

Few significant problems or issues in the real world can be adequately resolved by individual disciplines. One only needs to look at the huge disagreement over the Kyoto Protocol to understand that chemistry alone will not provide us with the much-needed solutions, nor will political science. We will need chemists, physicists, biologists, botanists, atmospheric scientists, political scientists, sociologists, teachers, etc. to work together in order to even make sense of the situation in which we find ourselves.

It is also abundantly clear that terrorism will not be eliminated without an understanding of concepts studied in history, sociology, political science, geography, law, and many other disciplines. The simplistic argument that the academic background study required of teachers is best ensured by having all prospective teachers complete majors and minors in disciplines as defined by universities clearly does not hold up to even limited scrutiny.

Documents produced by provincial departments of education acknowledge the problem. The Foundation Document for the Development of the Common Curriculum Frameworks emphasizes citizenship skills and the need to develop perspectives that take into account Aboriginal, English and French speaking citizens. It also indicates a need to consider multiple cultural perspectives. Social studies is defined in the Foundation Document as follows:

Social studies is the study of people in relation to each other and to their world. It is an interdisciplinary subject that draws upon many disciplines, including history, geography, economics, law, and political science. Social studies focuses on people's relationships with their social, physical, spiritual, cultural, economic, political, and technological environments. Social studies helps students become active and responsible citizens within their communities, locally, nationally, and globally, in a complex and changing world. (page 5)

It can be seen from the above definition that social studies is not meant to be the narrow purview of any single discipline specialist. Social studies is placed in our schools to help students understand their roles as citizens of Canada. It is also there to help develop positive attitudes toward minority groups and a respect for the many cultural groups that make up the population of Canada. The development of a sense of what it means to be a Canadian runs through the entire program. Embarrassingly enough, some universities in Manitoba do not require a Canadian history course for completion of a major or minor in History.

Science as a subject for K to S2 is not chemistry, or physics, or biology, or astronomy. It is a combination of all of these. The narrow, specialized disciplines comprising university majors and minors are not sufficient academic background for teaching the subject, "science" except in Senior 3 and Senior 4.

The same kinds of limitations will be found in other majors and minors that are proffered as the best academic background for teachers of the various public school subjects. It is clearly a mistake for the public education system to rely on the content of university majors and minors to ensure that prospective teachers have acquired the necessary background knowledge for teaching the various "subjects" that make up the public school curriculum. It is logically unacceptable for universities to attempt to impose their specialist model on public school teachers. Teaching is yet another instance where one discipline cannot provide an acceptable "solution".

The Brandon University Faculty of Education Solution

1. Senior Years

Let us first look at a solution for programs designed to educate prospective Senior Years teachers. The Faculty of Education at Brandon University has developed an alternative set of requirements which can be substituted for majors and minors. These are called "concentrations" and are designed to provide the necessary breadth of disciplinary coursework comprising the various school subjects. To use the examples above, a "major concentration" in social studies consists of 30 credit hours of coursework including at least 6 credit hours in geography and 12 credit hours in history, of which at least six shall be in Canadian history". The remaining 12 credit hours can be made up of history, geography, native studies, political science, sociology, or anthropology coursework. This set of courses is much more coincident with the content of the S1 - S4 social studies/history curricula.

A major concentration in Science comprises "30 credit hours of coursework with at least 18 in one area of chemistry, physics, or life science". There is also a major concentration in General Science which comprises "30 credit hours of course work in science including at least 6 credit hours in each of life, physical, and earth science. In any case, at least 12 credit hours must be in one science area". Again, this coursework is much more in line with the Manitoba curriculum content K to S2 than a disciplinary major or minor.

While the content in a three-year Mathematics major or minor is much better aligned with the mathematics curricula in Senior Years, often geometry study is missing. The Mathematics concentration requires "30 credit hours of course work in mathematics, including at least 3 credit hours in each of statistics, algebra, calculus, and geometry. This is designed to ensure that some study at the university level is completed by prospective Senior Years mathematics teachers.

In setting a major or major concentration and a minor or minor concentration as the requirement for Senior Years teachers, we believe that such teachers will have obtained a solid foundation in two subjects that are taught in Senior Years. Teachers who have only majors and minors in specific disciplines and are teaching in S1 and S2 classrooms should be considered deficient in background knowledge.

2. Middle Years

The second group of prospective teachers are those preparing for teaching in Middle Years, grade 5 to grade 8. Clearly, it is arguable that this group has more need for understanding adolescents and less need for intensive academic study in the disciplines. It is hard to imagine the reason for insisting that students study Shakespeare or calculus as preparation for a Middle Years classroom. Having said that, the faculty of Education has followed the recommendations of superintendents, principals, and teachers in setting the academic coursework for prospective Middle Years students. In classrooms at this level, none of the university defined disciplines are taught intact. Social Studies, Mathematics, Science, and English are all inclusive of inter-disciplinary material. The comments made about Science, Social Studies, and Mathematics, still obtain. To these, I want to add the English Language Arts. While some English Departments are beginning to accept some writing courses as part of majors and minors, very little else is considered appropriate. English majors and minors have tended to be English literature majors and minors. This is not the most useful study for a prospective teacher at any level of the public school system. When one considers that reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing, and representing are the six areas to be emphasized in the K - S4 curriculum, one would be considered unwise to require only literature study for academic background coursework.

We offer both an after-degree program and a Bachelor of General Studies/Bachelor of Education (concurrent)) program at the Middle Years level. In our BGS/BEd (Concurrent) program, where we have the opportunity to advise students from the time they enter the University, we require that students obtain significant background coursework in at least four subjects taught in the Middle Years classroom. Students must complete specified background coursework (15 credit hours each) in three of the four "core" subjects: math, science, social studies, and English language arts. The fourth subject can be the fourth "core" or another subject such as art, physical education, drama, etc. The coursework taken for each subject consists of the same mix as the concentrations mentioned above. This provides students with a reasonable amount of "content" while at the same time retaining the cross-disciplinary blend of knowledge that the public school subjects require.

The requirement for completing coursework for four subjects (not disciplines) is in keeping with the trend in Middle Years schools that sees teachers in grades 5 to 8 teaching more than just two subjects. Not only does this move to fewer teachers per student require a broader knowledge base than a major and minor in traditional disciplines will allow but it also encourages more involvement of these teachers with the students and the opportunity to provide much needed guidance and support.

3. Early Years

Over the years, faculty members have argued that a major in child development is of far more value than a major in Chemistry and a minor in Mathematics, which ignores all the other subject responsibilities. What knowledge is of most worth to a prospective Early Years teacher? Our BGS/BEd program has been structured to provide the necessary coursework needed to enable students to learn the broad-based multi-disciplinary knowledge required to teach at this level.

These courses have been carefully selected, so that while they do not provide as much in-depth study in each university discipline as do the Middle and Senior Years programs, they do provide the broad interdisciplinary expertise that majors and minors in traditional disciplines do not. Teaching almost all subjects at this level, a teacher needs some art, drama, English, composition, geography, chemistry, physics, biology, calculus, history, mathematics, political science, music, sociology, astronomy, etc. Our program requires a useful combination of courses in most of these disciplines which we think of as an "interdisciplinary major". One can think of it as comprising 6 credit hours of coursework for each of the "core" areas as well as 12 additional credit hours of study of complementary subject matter for other teachable subjects. In addition, each student must complete a minor or minor concentration in a teachable subject. It is very clear that, given the subject responsibilities of an Early Years teacher, this combination of courses provides preparation that is far superior to what one would achieve by insisting on a major and minor in traditional disciplines.

There is one other serious problem that is extremely likely to surface if the Province, in establishing certification requirements, were to move to the traditional university-defined majors and minors. That is that the vast majority of prospective teachers will take majors and minors in the humanities and social sciences while steering clear of the sciences and mathematics. The often-proffered solution to the "weak academic background" problem, major and minor completion, will prove to be the right answer to the wrong question.

Conclusion

It is quite clear, upon examining the preceding arguments, that the Early Years teacher needs a very broad background covering academic content for the many subjects taught at this level. It is also clear from Middle Years curricula that preparation must be more in-depth than is necessary for Early Years teachers. Just as evident is the need for teachers to acquire a more sophisticated knowledge of academic material for taking Senior Years students deep into a subject or its cognate disciplines.

The unfortunate aspect of this whole scenario is that many faculty members are so tied to their departmental discipline that they are reluctant to accept the obvious fact that some students attending their classes are not there to be chemists or physicists or historians but rather to learn enough to pass the knowledge and enthusiasm for the "subjects" on to their students. If teachers wanted to be chemists or physicists, or novelists, they would have majored or minored in the particular discipline. As this is not their purpose, and as it is unlikely that a program could be configured that would include majors in all the disciplines from which subject matter is added to the subject curricula, even if such a program were desirable, we must make the best use of the academic study that goes into our programs. We believe that in the creation of our BGS/BEd programs, that is exactly what we did and continue to do. The question to be answered is not what knowledge is of most worth to the scientist or historian, but rather what knowledge is of most worth to the Early, Middle, and Senior Years teachers in our public school classrooms.