Professionalism of teachers and strategies for strengthening it: Interview with lee shulman

Abstract

The interview with Lee Shulman, professor emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, addresses the fundamental ideals of his career in the field of teacher education. Considering the need to rethink how pre-service teacher education is organized, this interview offers a deep immersion into Shulman's scholarship, particularly those pieces that tackle the centrality of schools and practice during pre-service training, the relationship between universities, public policies, and teaching, and also the professionalism involved in teaching. The starting point of this conversation is how this author defines teaching and which are the challenges of professionalism in this trade. Another core idea explored in the interview is the category of pedagogical content knowledge, a concept developed by Shulman in 1984 to define the knowledge grounds of teaching and how they make this profession different from other careers. Such a concept was profoundly influential in the field of teacher education. Throughout the conversation, Professor Shulman emphasizes that teaching requires more than only mastering the contents. A teacher needs to understand different ways of representing the content, a plethora of different interpretations that students can have of such content, as well as discrete teaching strategies that fit a variety of contexts. Besides, Shulman talks about the responsibilities of the universities in preparing professional teachers, as well as the foundations and strategies to make sure that teachers' learning experience is grounded in practice, focused on developing the novices to teach for equity, ensuring high-quality education. Finally, Shulman provides advices to three groups of core actors in this context: researchers and university-based teacher educators, policymakers, and teachers.