Learning to Teach against the Grain

Abstract

Can prospective teachers learn to be both educators and activists, to regard themselves as agents for change, and to regard reform as an integral part of the social, intellectual, ethical, and political activity of teaching? In this article, Marilyn Cochran-Smith argues that a powerful way for student teachers to learn to reform teaching, or what she refers to as teach­ ing against the grain, is to work in the company of experienced teachers who are themselves struggling to be reformers in their own classrooms, schools, and communities. Cochran-Smith analyzes two approaches to preparing preservice teachers to teach against the grain, proposing that differences between them can be understood as the result of different underlying assumptions about knowledge, power, and language in teaching. By analyzing conversations among student teachers and experienced teachers in four urban schools, the author explores the nature of reformers' intellectual perspectives on teaching and demonstrates that regular school-site discussions are an indispensable resource in the education of reformers. In an essay condemning political and social indifference in prewar Italy, Antonio Gramsci (1916/1977) forcefully argued that action was everyone's responsibility and that each individual, no matter how apparently powerless, was accountable for the role he [sic] played or failed to play in the larger political struggle. Gramsci particularly condemned those who blamed events on the "failure of ideas" or the "collapse of programmes" but at the same time failed to make their own voices heard and failed to lend their own moral and material resources to promote good and resist evil. If we accept Gramsci's notion that indifference is often a main­ spring of history, and if we substitute the word "teacher" for Gramsci's "man" and use the feminine pronoun, we have a powerful statement about the accountability of individual educators for their efforts to reform U.S. schools: Every [teacher] must be asked to account for the manner in which [she] has ful­ filled the task that life has set [her] and continues to set [her] day by day; [she] must be asked to account for what [she] has done, but especially for what [she] has not done.. .. It is time that events should be seen to be the intelligent work of [teachers] and not the products of chance or fatality. And so it is time to have done with the indifferent among us, the skeptics, the people who profit from the small good procured by the activity of a few, but who refuse to take responsibility for the great evil that is allowed to develop and come to pass because of their ab­ sence from the struggle.