GATEways to Teacher Education A journal of the Georgia Association of Teacher Educators
dichotomies. Thus, developing pedagogies that call for the integration of art and science will advance candidates and prepare them for dealing with the complexity that is teaching; 4) In being “professionally transformed” candidates should be able to acknowledge the growth they have made, the mechanisms by which they underwent the growth, and make plans for permanent, deliberate transformation using the knowledge; 5) Advocacy: This focus speaks to our vision that professional educators have abilities to operate effectively in a world where disparities exist yet will be compelled as advocates to address inequity across multiple settings due to the ethical, cognitive, and social transformation they experienced in the TPP. The first three transitions enumerated above emphasize individual development while the final two incorporate an “other orientation” and anticipate candidates will move out into the world as professionals who can and do make change. The ongoing growth, increasing strength, and spiraling three-dimensional impact of the nautilus as it organically adds to its shell was an apt symbol and analogous to the intentions we had for candidates to undergo in our distinctive teacher preparation program. edTPA may embrace certain conceptions about “good teaching,” but we were committed to preparing educators who understood “good teaching” to be interactive, relative, and situated, and for them to be further committed to pushing back on conformity when it might result in inequity or diminishing of voice (Sato, 2014). Furthermore, the very process of discussing, locating, and agreeing to a nautilus shell as the image to represent the program suggests one of the ways we all undertook the responsibility to engage and inspire members of our organization as can be understood through Bolman and Deal’s (1991) symbolic frame. Valuing symbols is part of our organizational identity and it has become customary practice to refer to symbols while
VOLUME 26, ISSUE 2
making sense of events. Of the four perspectives it has most naturally become embedded in our collective actions. Artifact 2: Framing and Reframing Bolman and Deal’s model (1991) helped us frame our program and provide direction as to how we might operate effectively when faced with mandates that we feared could reduce the importance of our work as teacher educators and de-professionalize our efforts to elevate conversations about teaching. We learned of the model from one of our members who shared an article highlighting the metaphors and then used it to ascertain the roles and responsibilities each of us was fulfilling as we brought our program identify to life (Defoe, 2013). As a faculty, we reviewed information related to the frames and discussed how each of us saw the frames relative to our program. For example, in contemplating the structural frame we discussed the idea that structures can bureaucratize, inhibit, and depersonalize an organization, or they can be constructed in a manner that enables an organization to create efficiencies that provide more time to devote to priorities such as organizational missions, vision, and goals. Viewing our TPP through the structural frame provided us the opportunity to identify structures that were inefficient, such as assessment data collection methods, and, in turn, create structures that better served the needs of the teacher candidates and faculty. By using the structural lens, we discovered that much of our data analysis structures were built around assessment tools that did not inform. We discussed the other three frames in the same manner and looked for ways in which we could use the lens from each frame to better understand shifts that we needed to make in order to find common purpose. In seeking to apply this information in a more formal way, we agreed to develop a presentation for the 2014 Georgia Association Teacher Educators annual conference.
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