Prelims

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The Peripatetic Journey of Teacher Preparation in Canada

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Emerald Studies in Teacher Preparation in National and Global Contexts

Series Editors:

Teresa O'Doherty, Marino Institute of Education, Dublin, Ireland

Judith Harford, University College Dublin, Ireland

Thomas O'Donoghue, University of Western Australia, Australia

Teacher preparation is currently one of the most pressing and topical issue in the field of education research. It deals with questions such as how teachers are prepared, what the content of their programmes of preparation is, how their effectiveness is assessed, and what the role of the ‘good’ teacher is in society. These questions are at the forefront of policy agendas around the world.

This series presents robust, critical research studies in the broad field of teacher preparation historically, with attention also being given to current policy and future directions. Most books in the series will focus on an individual country, providing a comprehensive overview of the history of teacher preparation in that country while also making connections between the past and present and informing discussions on possible future directions.

Previously published:

Forthcoming in this series:

Title Page

The Peripatetic Journey of Teacher Preparation in Canada

Rosa Bruno-Jofré

Queen's University, Canada

Joseph Stafford

Queen's University, Canada

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

Copyright Page

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2020

© 2020 Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Joseph Stafford. Published under exclusive licence by Emerald Publishing Limited.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-83982-239-1 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-238-4 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-83982-240-7 (Epub)

List of Figures and Tables

About the Authors

Dr Rosa Bruno-Jofré is a Professor and former Dean (2000–2010) of the Faculty of Education, cross-appointed to the Department of History, Faculty of Arts and Science, at Queen's University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the Humanities Division. Her research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her most recent book is Our Lady of the Missions: From Ultramontane Origins to a New Cosmology published by the University of Toronto Press, History Series. Her recent authored and co-authored articles have appeared in Educational Theory, Hispania Sacra, Journal of the History of Ideas, American Catholic Review, Historical Studies, Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge), among others. She has authored and edited books published by University of Toronto Press, McGill-Queen's University Press, Routledge and Wilfrid Laurier University Press. She has received the 2018 George Edward Clerk Award from the Canadian Catholic Historical Association and the 2017 Toronto Dominion Bank Award as one of the Top 10 Most Influential Hispanic Canadians.

https://queensu.academia.edu/RosaBrunoJofre/Profile

Dr Joseph Stafford is a retired high school history teacher and a Past President of the Ontario Historical Society. In 2008, he received a national Governor General's Award for Excellence in Teaching Canadian History. He completed his PhD in the history of education at Queen's University in 2018. His most recent publication is Vatican II and Catholic Religious Secondary Education in Ontario: Changes within a North American Context, the second volume in the Theory and History of Education Monograph Series (Faculty of Education, Queen's University). His other publications include “The Educationalization Process and the Roman Catholic Church in North America during the Long Nineteenth Century” in Educationalization and Its Complexities: Religion, Politics, and Technology and “The Conditions of Reception for the Declaration on Christian Education: Secularization and the Educational State of Ontario” in Catholic Education in the Wake of Vatican II. He is currently a member of the Theory and History of Education International Research Group, Faculty of Education, Queen's University.

Preface

The history of education has been a rich field of scholarship in Canada over the past 50 years. From the 1970s, research by Michael B. Katz, Alison Prentice, Susan Houston, Chad Gaffield, J.D. Wilson, Paul Stortz and others inspired scholars to understand the history of schools, teachers and the emerging educational state within the broad contours of social, economic, cultural and political change. Canadian historians of education cannot be accused of focusing narrowly on institutions. The Peripatetic Journey of Teacher Preparation in Canada by Rosa Bruno-Jofré and Joseph Stafford exemplifies the best of this tradition, bringing to the reader an underexplored area of history that deepens our understanding of both Canadian history and the history of education. In the process, the volume brings into sharp focus the centrality of education in not only promoting but also articulating deeply held and changing beliefs about what it means to be human and what society is for.

Writing a history of any aspect of Canadian educational history is complicated by the fact that education is a provincial, not a federal, jurisdiction, with the important exception of Indigenous schooling. Undaunted by the archival and research difficulties involved in providing a pan-Canadian overview, this volume situates teacher training, education and preparation within national and global histories, and particularly histories of education. The book provides important insights into the ways in which international discussions and ideas about education percolated through various elements in Canadian society, through the filter of regional, class, gender and racialized identities, influencing people and the structures within which they worked and lived. It provides, furthermore, an overview of the last four centuries of educational change, giving the reader a view that is not only geographically and sociopolitically broad but also that extends through the longue durée. Beginning with the traditional practices of families and communities in teacher preparation in Indigenous communities on the brink of colonization, the book goes on to trace the myriad changes associated with missionaries, colonization, the development of the educational state and the professionalization of teaching, ending with the revolutions of the long 1960s. The authors explore general educational trends, such as education's shift in focus from religious, moral and spiritual concerns to the secular, utilitarian and state-oriented ones, rooting these in the larger political and socioeconomic contours of Canadian history. The book adds a deep chronological perspective to its vast geographical reach.

While the focus on teacher training and preparation allows the authors to directly address and redress an underresearched area of educational history in Canada, the authors show us how the subject of teacher training provides an unusual and extremely fruitful perspective from which to explore the role and meaning of education within Canadian society and beyond. Teacher preparation was a discursive space where the promise and hopes for what education could and should accomplish were actively discussed and debated. From informal training to normal schools, teacher training was also a place where people – including teachers, community leaders, administrators, elected officials, local school boards, parents and even children – came together to mobilize those ideas into practice. The Peripatetic Journey fully realizes the potential of searching the spaces of teacher preparation for answers to questions about education's contested meanings and purposes – practical and aspirational, local and global.

For the book does much more than articulate a linear transitions of progress or decline. Each chapter includes abundant evidence of the fractured, fragmented and contested nature of educational stability and change of the multiple voices, motivations, beliefs, ideologies and interests that were worked out through the discussions about and practices of teacher preparation. The result is not a cacophony of discordant voices, in spite of the fragmentation and conflict the book reveals. In the skilled hands of these historians, the reader is able to see as well broad patterns of change over time, waves of action, interaction and response around a range of key issues identified, and disagreed about, by Canadians. In the process, this volume succeeds in articulating just how important education was to the social, cultural and political contours of the public as Canadians collectively remade their individual subjectivity and gradually imagined what it was to be modern. As the authors aptly succinctly sum up in their introduction, they not only aim at placing their analysis within “prevailing political and economic processes” in relation to overlapping discourses but also at “leading the reader to explore the objectives of schooling, the contextual role of teachers and the political intentionalities sustaining the various educational conceptions and policies.” In all this, and more, they have succeeded.

Ruth W. Sandwell

May 21, 2020

Kingston, Ontario