Brock Education A Journal of Educational Research and Practice Volume 18 (2) Fall 2009 Faculty of Education Brock University Editorial: Continuity and Change: Inquiry into Teacher Education Practices Julian Kitchen and Darlene Ciuffetelli Parker Editors Brock University As new co-editors of Brock Education, we welcome you. We believe that this issue on teacher education practices, and our tenure as editors, represents both continuity and change. We are pleased to continue in the footsteps of founding editor Anthony Mollica, who developed Brock Education as a “Journal of General Inquiry” in 1991. He and the fine editors who nurtured the journal in subsequent years were committed to providing a forum for interesting and eclectic scholarship. Over the years, the journal narrowed its focus to become “A Journal of Educational Research and Practice”. The articles in this issue cover a wide range of topics from effective teaching practices to institutional program reform to teacher induction. While we continue to attract Canadian contributors, the journal also attracts a mix of international scholars. At the same time, we have shifted from a journal designed to seek a broad cross- section of education articles to one that focuses primarily on site-based and practitioner inquiry: research that delves deeply into the experiences of learners and educators in schools, universities and other educational settings. As academics interested in narrative inquiry, self-study of teacher education practices, and other forms of practitioner inquiry, we have observed that there are too few journals committed to supporting such work. As a result, much fine work in these areas, although presented at conferences, does not appear in peer-reviewed journals. We have noted that there is a particular lack of such publication opportunities in Canada. To that end, we placed a special call for manuscripts that focused on teacher education practices because we identified both an increasing richness in teacher education discourse and a need for greater sharing among teacher educators. We were delighted to receive many responses to our call. In reviewing the articles, we ultimately decided to spread the best of these articles over this spring issue and our next issue. We continue to be receptive to the work of new scholars and committed to enhancing the scholarship of all authors. For this issue, we were fortunate to find an excellent group of scholars for the double-blind review process. These individuals made considerable efforts to constructively critique manuscripts. We are also fortunate to have Catherine Longboat as our editorial assistant. Longboat, a doctoral student at Brock University, went beyond careful line-editing to sensitively offer suggestions for Kitchen and Ciuffetelli Parker Editorial improving the flow of words and ideas. The appreciation expressed by authors for the support we were able to offer was in no small measure due to her efforts. Moving forward involves change. The last issue under Tony DiPetta’s leadership was Brock Ed’s first online issue using Open Access. This innovation, and the transfer to Open Access of previous issues, makes the journal accessible to a much wider audience in Canada and around the world. This issue was the first for which articles were submitted using Open Access. In the future, we hope to conduct and track all our communication through Open Access. We also hope to widen our readership in Canada and around the world, thanks to these leaps in technology. In this issue, we offer a range of articles broadly related to teacher education practices. The first few articles focus on educational practices and self-studies by teacher educators. These are followed with articles by practitioners who extend their work outside the teacher education classroom. In the first article, Carmen Shields and Vicky Reid-Patton respectively recover stories of kindness from past experiences with teachers. Then, they reconstruct their narratives and use these story reconstructions in their own professional lives to show that the notion of kindness is the first step, and perhaps key factor, for entering into an emerging learning space. Mary Rice then highlights the importance of teacher educators’ studying both their identities and their practice. By exploring her personal practical knowledge through three “emblematic narratives”, one from each role, Rice highlights possibilities for understanding ourselves and our students more deeply. In the next article, Cindy Lassonde and her co-authors present a self-study on how they examine and assess teacher candidates’ writing in a teacher education program. They lead their reader through questions and reflective processes that they themselves used throughout this programmatic self-study. This article encourages teacher educators to be self-reflective of their own assessment expectations for teacher candidates. The activities we use in our teacher education courses can be powerful tools for self-discovery and social change. When Brown, Wiggins and Secord employed photo- elicitation as a tool for helping teacher candidates uncover their preconceived notions, they were simultaneously surprised at what both they and their students did not notice. This article introduces teacher educators to an effective teaching strategy and important insights into how we might heighten awareness of social issues among teacher candidates. Similarly, in Lynn Lemisko and Margaret Epp’s article, we view first-hand how teacher candidates and students formed “intergenerational literature circles” that captured deeper insights into how children read, learn concepts and respond to text. This article offers insight into how adult learners can work alongside young people in order to form a richer understanding of what it means to be a teacher. It is one thing to develop new teacher education practices or to critically examine a philosophy of education, but an even greater challenge is to conceptualize and implement large-scale teacher education reform. Hirshkorn and his team provide an account of the process of establishing a new teacher education program at University of New Brunswick. As teacher educators advocating for reforms in our own institution, we were very interested in the rich descriptions of the process from the perspective of the Brock Education, Volume 18, No. 2, Spring 2009, 1-3. 2 Kitchen and Ciuffetelli Parker Editorial teacher educators engaged in implementing the program. In the future, we look forward to subsequent articles that will provide more analysis of the new program’s impact. Educational partnerships are important in developing teacher education practices that prepare teacher candidates for the complexities of classroom practice. The article by Darlene Ciuffetelli Parker and her co-authors from the Ontario College of Teachers on the use of case studies in teacher education is an interesting account of effective collaboration and a rich description of a professional development process used with a team of teacher educators. In the final article, Christine Cho and her co-authors make it clear that teacher education does not end once teacher candidates become classroom teachers. This inquiry highlights the importance of partnerships while also challenging stakeholders to move beyond simply perpetuating the status quo. As these articles illustrate, inquiry into teacher education practices involves continuity—understanding ourselves, our practices and the contexts in which we work— and the willingness to change these practices to better serve our students and schools. Brock Education, Volume 18, No. 2, Spring 2009, 1-3. 3 A Curriculum of Kindness: (Re) Creating and Nurturing Heart and Mind through Teaching and Learning Carmen Shields Nipissing University Vicki Reid-Patton Top of the World Treatment Centre Abstract In this paper, we share stories of experience that focus on our belief that offering kindness as a key ingredient in teaching and learning provides a solid foundation for personal connection and sustained meaning-making. We highlight our past experience with teachers who provided us with caring and kindness and using a narrative process of recovering and reconstructing meaning, we move forward in time to describe how we now enact kindness in our own relationship and our work with students and clients in our present day practice as professor and counselor. Keywords: narrative, curriculum, personal experience, teacher education, higher education. Dr. Carmen Shields, Ed.D., is currently Associate Professor, Graduate Studies, in the Faculty of Education at Nipissing University, North Bay, Ontario. She teaches courses in Curriculum Leadership, Narrative Inquiry and Qualitative Research. Dr. Shield’s approach to teaching and research is based in narrative inquiry and her research interests are in the areas of self-study, narratives of experience, women’s perspectives, marginalization and belonging in institutional settings. Email: [email protected] Dr. Vicki Reid-Patton, Ph.D., is currently a clinical therapist at Top of the World Treatment Centre in Fort Steele, British Columbia. Her counseling and research interests are in the areas of addictions, narratives of experience, self-study and women and health. Brock Education, Volume 18, No. 2, Spring 2009, 4-15. 4 C. Shields and V. Reid-Patton Curriculum of Kindness Introduction The teacher is a mediator between the knower and the known, between the student and the subject to be learned. A teacher, not some theory, is the living link