Today the Frontier Centre released In the Heart of Edu-Babble.
Anyone who wants to become a teacher in Canada must earn a bachelor of education degree from an education faculty. Their guaranteed clientele gives education faculties an incredible amount of influence over the public school system. Plus, teachers often go back to education faculties to complete more courses in order to move up their salary grids.
All too often, education faculties promote faulty theories of teaching and learning. To demonstrate this, Frontier’s education research fellows, Michael Zwaagstra and Rodney Clifton, recently collaborated on a new report that takes an in-depth look at what happens in education schools. This report chronicles the day-by-day events in an education foundations course at a Canadian education faculty from the perspective of a student who successfully completed the course.
Zwaagstra and Clifton highlight the weak academic standards, biased teaching, and nonsensical edu-babble found in this course. They also show how the problems with this course correlate well with concerns raised by other writers about education faculties over the years.
“The students spent more time navel-gazing and discussing irrelevant issues than they did studying effective ways of teaching and learning,” write Zwaagstra and Clifton. “If anything, students who complete this education foundations course will become worse teachers if they incorporate the edu-babble they used in the course into their teaching practices.”
View report here
