It’s quite difficult to have an exact definition about teaching or about the role of teachers. They could be artists, scientist, mentors, managers …
Teacher as Passive Technicians
- Primary goal : maximizing content knowledge through prescribed activities.
- Professional experts create and contribute to the professional knowledge base that constitutes the cornerstone of teacher education programs. Classroom teachers are assigned the role of passive technicians who flow the information like a conduit to their students.
- Teachers as passive technicians are considered “so passive, so unchallenging, so boring that teachers often lose their sense of wonder and excitement about learning to teach” (Kincheloe, 1993, p.204).
Teachers as Reflective Practitioners
- Primary goal : maximizing learning potential through problem-solving activities.
- According to Dewey, teaching is seen not just a series of pre-determined and presequenced producers. Reflective teaching is a holistic approach that emphasizes creativity, artistry and context sensitivity.
- Don Schon expanded Dewey’s concept : “Teachers can bring perspectives to the complexities of teaching that cannot be matched by experts who are far removed from classroom realities.”
Teachers as Transformative Intellectuals
- Primary goal of teaching : maximizing sociopolitical awareness through problem-posing activities.
- The idea of teachers as transformative intellectuals is derived from a group of educationists called critical pedagogists, and they are influenced by the educational philosophy of Brazilian thinker Paulo Freire.
- For Freire, pedagogy is embedded in relations of power and dominance, and is employed to create and sustain social inequalities. For them, schools and colleges are not simply instructional site, they are, in fact, “cultural arenas where heterogeneous ideological, discurve, and social forms collide in an unremitting struggle for dominance” (McLaren, 1995, p.30).
- According to...