Diversity in teacher education and special education: The issues that divide

Cochran-Smith, Marilyn, & Dudley-Marling, Curt. (2012). Diversity in teacher education and special education: The issues that divide. Journal of Teacher Education, 63(4), 237-244.



After reading this essay, I now understand why my special education colleagues and I often do not see eye to eye. We disagree because we view the world, learners, and the educational process through completely different lenses. I’ve always known that the mainstream special education community came from a behaviorist base, but Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling helped me think more clearly about how the worldview special educators embrace is different from the sociocultural, sociolinguistic worldview that is at the heart of my own theoretical orientation. Understanding what divides us could be a first step toward more meaningful dialogues. I want to work with my special education colleagues. It seems that underneath it all, we all want the same thing. We care about children, and we want them to be able to learn, and to realize their potential as literate citizens. Somehow, we need to get together and talk. Sitting in meetings and gritting my teeth in frustration will not make that possible.

Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling outline three basic areas where the behaviorist viewpoint of the current majority of special educators collides with the sociocultural viewpoint held by literacy educators from my end of the theoretical continuum. The first bone of contention deals with the nature of skills, in my case, reading skills. Special educators believe that a process like reading can be broken down into its smaller component skills. In the behaviorist mode, if one can identify the skills that comprise a process, and then break them down, one can then find out which ones a learner is “missing”, and supply those through direct instruction. This is the whole idea behind Response to Intervention (RTI). As a holistic literacy educator who believes that reading is an incredibly complex process in which multiple aspects are deeply intertwined, I cringe when I read or hear about RTI. The second, related bone of contention deals with the view of reading struggles as deficits, as is they were illnesses for which we have a magic pill. Again, RTI involves specifying what sound like “treatments” and running what look like “clinical trials.” This reminds me of the outdated but still ubiquitous term, “clinical experiences” used for practica where teachers work with struggling learners. “Learning disabilities” and “dyslexia” sound like illnesses that are located within the learner’s biology that need to be “cured.” The medical model may work when I have a bacterial infection and my internist prescribes an antibiotic, but I just don’t believe that reading, or learning anything for that matter, works quite so neatly. If it did, would we still have the many struggling readers we now have? Yet the medical model, which sees any difficulties with reading as deficits, still crops up everywhere. In my own professional context, I cringe when I hear people talking about two key courses in our undergraduate elementary education program, “Diagnosis and Remediation of Reading Difficulties,” and “Diagnosis and Remediation of Math Difficulties.” Thinking about learning problems as illnesses seems like a cleaner, less perplexing way than facing the possibility that society may in many ways create what we think of as disability. If reading problems are a natural, biological phenomenon, then why are minority children over-represented in the special education population? Are we saying that those children are somehow inherently deficient? Sociocultural theorists believe that our notions of what is “normal” or “abnormal” are shaped by what is valued and assessed by a culture’s dominant groups. Any difference from those culturally determined norms is seen as a weakness, and “interventions” are designed to make up for those “weaknesses.” I prefer a strength-based approach that builds on what learners CAN do, rather than focusing on what they CAN’T do. There’s a big gulf between those two ways of looking at learners.

The third bone of contention, related to the ways we think literacy instruction should be provided, is at the root of my own recent frustrations with the special educators I work with and respect but often disagree with. One ongoing conflict deals with the desire of some of my good colleagues to “standardize” a lesson plan format that would be used in all education courses in our education school. The movement to create this format has been surfacing and resurfacing for years, spearheaded by one of my special educator colleagues. Invariably, when drafts of such a format are presented, the categories on those formats are for direct instruction models, which I find unworkable for my literacy education courses. Let me say here that I do not oppose direct instruction per se. If one is teaching explicit skills, the model I see on these proposed formats, which is essentially Madeline Hunter’s antiquated “Seven Steps”, might be all right. If one is teaching using holistic models as I often advocate (for example, Russell Stauffer’s Directed Reading-Thinking Activity, aka DR-TA, which consists of a seamless predicting and proving cycle where learners unite clues from the text with their own prior knowledge), imposing the direct instruction sequence of Input, Modeling, Guided Practice, and Independent Practice feels like jamming one’s foot into shoes that do not fit. I tried to use the “Seven Steps” lesson plan for DR-TA with my students, but we found we were essentially just making things up to make the DR-TA mesh with the prescribed lesson plan format. It got in the way of learning instead of helping us think about instruction. I don’t believe direct instruction should go away, but I don’t believe it’s the only way. In fact, I teach my preservice students to distrust ANY model that is presented as the “only” or even the “best” way.

This article helped me understand some of the sources of the frustration I’ve encountered. Knowing where the view that opposes my own is rooted is a start toward bridging the gulf and finding ways to work together for the things we all want for learners. What makes this particular discussion difficult is that it often seems that the sociocultural viewpoint allows for multiple viewpoints, but the behavioral viewpoint seems to want there to be one right way. Reconciling differences will be difficult in a case like this, but Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling offer hope that maybe we CAN do it. Being willing to look at multiple research methods, doing research where diverse voices may be heard, and generally being open to the strengths that we all bring to our common endeavor may be places to begin.