Grounds for Hope?

Grounds for hope toward understanding and improving teacher education emerge from taking advantage of opportunities and understanding constraints on teacher education and its reform in order to work around, over, through, against, or in spite of them. Such understanding may involve modifying or expanding the prevailing discourse in order to negotiate contextual constraints. Understanding also involves accepting the diversity of teacher preparation, modes, models, and programs; high standards do not necessitate standardization. Grounds for hope are acknowledgements that good intentions and efforts are insufficient to bring about desired change. Moreover, how hopeful one is depends in part on what is hoped for. The guiding questions I’ve raised in various forms throughout this volume now

can be recapitulated as follows:

If the mainstream culture of teacher education has been largely self-perpetuating as described earlier, what if anything has changed over the years with respect to diversity in state regulations, national accreditation standards, corporateinterest group advocacy, or reform discourse that might serve to break the cycle and change teacher education culture and practice in the best interests of an increasingly heterogeneous group of preK-12 students?