13
A further critical consideration, referring directly to pedagogy rather
than to content, concerns the ’’wider skills and understandings" (1983
Para 12) that the criteria indicate. The recommendation that "Opport-
unities should be provided for students to reflect on and learn from
their own classroom experience, and to place their role as a teacher
within the broader context of educational (1983 Para 12)
is one that probably receives general assent from those concerned
with teacher education. Yet such opportunities are not widespread
in the university courses which were the subject of the Leicester
research.
Taylor has drawn attention to the contradictions between exhortation,
accounts
and practices in
teacher education in his emp⅛∙sis upon the
place of rhetoric in the discourse of the subject.
Thus rhetoric inevitably plays an important part in
the discourse of our subject. A great deal of what
is written and said is not
to inform,
or to
facilitate analysis, or to encourage critical discri-
mination, but to exhort, to inspire, to motivate,
to enthuse. (1983)
Inspiration, motivation
enthusiasm
may
on occasion be in short supply
in teacher education but of equal
if not more importance teacher
educators require knowledge
on which to base changes and extensions
of their existing practices
And as Taylor suggests:
not only is our knowledge and understanding
of
what
can and should be
done
but we are
not terribly good at bringing what knowledge we
do
possess
to bear on the solution of problems.
(1983)
Considering that
the need for a better relation between training insti-
tutions and the schools has been ubiquitous in the
rhetoric of teacher education for as long as people
have been writing and uttering in this field (1983)