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GOVERNORS STATE UNIVERSITY
Professional Education Unit
Conceptual Framework
November 29, 2001
History of the University
Governors State University, chartered by the General Assembly in 1969, is Illinois’ only upper-division University. It is designed to serve undergraduate transfer students with at least 60 semester hours of earned credit and those seeking masters degrees.
The University’s main campus is located in University Park, 35 miles south of Chicago and easily accessible by car or commuter train. The campus is located on 750 acres of wooded landscape with several lakes and nature trails and includes the nationally renowned Nathan Manilow Sculpture Park. The curricula of the University are offered through four Colleges: the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Business, the College of Education, and the College of Health Professions.
Governance of the University
A seven-member board appointed by the Governor of Illinois governs the University. One student serves as a voting member of the Board of Trustees. The President of the Faculty Senate is invited to attend the Board meetings. The President of the University is responsible to the Board of Trustees for the operation and general welfare of the University; the Provost/Academic Vice President has general responsibility in the areas of academic personnel and programs. Governors State University’s four colleges are directly administered by their deans. Faculty and students participate in University affairs through membership in the Faculty Senate, Student Senate, and academic and administrative committees, groups which consider and recommend policies and procedures to the President of the University.
The Professional Education Unit
The Professional Education Unit is defined as all courses and programs that prepare P-12 school personnel and are primarily under the organization and administration of the College of Education. Undergraduate programs include Early Childhood Education, Elementary Education, Secondary Education (English, Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics-proposed, and Social Science-proposed) and an Alternative Certification program for elementary teachers. Graduate programs include Communication Disorders, Counseling, Early Childhood Education, Education (with various areas of specialization), Educational Administration, Reading, School Psychology, and Special Education.
The secondary programs are housed primarily in the College of Arts and Sciences; Communications Disorders is located in the College of Health Professions; all other programs are housed within the College of Education.
The Mission of the Institution and the Professional Education Unit
Governors State University’s mission is
· to offer a demonstrably excellent education that meets the demands of our region and state for engaged, knowledgeable citizens and highly skilled professional, and that is accessible to all including those traditionally underserved by higher education;
· to cultivate and enlarge a diverse and intellectually stimulating community of learners guided by a culture that embodies:
o openness of communication
o diversity of backgrounds, experiences and perspectives;
o mutual respect and cooperation;
o critical inquiry, constant questioning and continuing assessment; and on-going research and scholarship; and
· to strengthen and enhance the educational, cultural, social and economic development of the region through partnerships with government, business, educational, civic and other organizations.
Consistent with the university’s mission, the professional education unit is committed to preparing individuals to be successful in the professions of education, psychology and counseling.
The professional education unit seeks to offer the highest quality academic programs, balancing innovation and best practice, to meet the needs of adult lifelong learners. The faculty, staff and administration are committed to seeking and maintaining national accreditation of the unit and all of its programs; enhancing existing programs as well as creating new programs, including doctoral studies; integrating wide-spread use of technology into curricula and into content and modes of instruction; and fostering an understanding and appreciation of the significance of human diversity in ethnicity, socio-economic status, gender and learning styles.
Based on this shared vision, the professional education unit applies the following principles in the implementation of its mission:
1.) The learning environment should be safe, supporting, and challenging.
2.) The flexibility of and access to the learning environment are critical in educating lifelong learners.
3.) Experiential learning is an essential bridge between concepts/theories and practical problem solving.
4.) Providing professional development for all students includes nurturing social-emotional wellness in addition to promoting intellectual growth.
5.) The practice of the unit faculty is informed by its dedication to maintaining a current knowledge base, its commitment to high ethical and academic standards, its generous response to its civic and professional responsibilities, and an enthusiastic embrace of human diversity.
6.) Continual assessment of practices and performance results in the improvement of quality.
The Unit’s Philosophy, Purposes, Professional Commitments and Dispositions
The professional education unit at Governors State University is committed to preparing teachers and other school personnel who will take a reasoned eclectic approach in order to optimize complex teaching and learning environments to achieve student learning.
The unit’s members inform all of their practice with this key philosophical and pedagogical approach. Reasoned eclecticism is the harmonizing element in all of the unit’s activities and enables movement in the important direction identified by John Dewey when he asked,
What will happen if teachers become sufficiently courageous and
emancipated to insist that education means creation of a discriminating
mind, a mind that prefers not to dupe itself or to be the dupe of others?
Clearly they will have to cultivate the habit of suspended judgment, of
skepticism, of desire for evidence, of appeal to observation rather than
sentiment, discussion rather than bias, inquiry rather than conventional
idealizations. When this happens, schools will be the dangerous outposts
of human civilization. But they will also begin to be supremely interesting
places. (cited in Simpson & Jackson, 1997, p.117)
The unit envisions a service region in which each and every school is filled with teachers, counselors, psychologists and administrators who are “sufficiently courageous” and “emancipated” and who insist that schools be “dangerous outposts of human civilization” and “supremely interesting places.” Reasoned eclecticism emerges from the university’s and the professional education unit’s significant long-standing emphasis on the development of competent practitioners in every major field, operating at high cognitive levels, who attend primarily to the optimal application and testing of knowledge rather than to theoretical orthodoxy. As emphasis in teacher education has moved toward assessment of performance against accepted standards, the relevance of reasoned eclecticism has become increasingly apparent. Performance assessment asks teacher educators to redirect their focus from the theoretical into the environmental nexus where theory and performance meet in real and specific teaching/learning opportunities.
The central place occupied by reasoned eclecticism in the unit’s understanding of itself, its activities, and its role in the region arose when, in collaboration with its professional community, the unit found an intellectually substantive reference to and exploration of two different kinds of knowledge, “knowing that” (i.e. theory) and “knowing how” (i.e. practice). This helpful construction of these concepts was developed in the work of Gilbert Ryle, the twentieth century English philosopher. In his discussion of “knowing how” and “knowing that”, Ryle characterizes “knowing how” as follows:
Knowing how, then is a disposition, but not a single-track disposition like
a reflex or a habit. Its exercises are observances of rules or canons or the
application of criteria, but they are not tandem operations of theoretically
avowing maxims and putting them into practice. (p.46)
Ryle address the problematic connection between “knowing that” and “knowing how” with the following illustration and discussion:
A man knowing little or nothing of medical science could not be a good
surgeon, but excellence at surgery is not the same thing as knowledge of
medical science; nor is it a simple product of it. The surgeon must have
indeed learned from instruction, or by his own inductions or observations,
a great number of truths; but he must also have learned by practice a great
number of aptitudes. Even where efficient practice is the deliberate
application of considered prescriptions, the intelligence involved in putting
the prescriptions into practice is not identical with that involved in intellectually
grasping the prescriptions. There is no contradiction, or even paradox,
describing someone as bad at practicing what he is good at preaching. (p.49)
Reasoned eclecticism, then, might be well understood as an overarching habit of mind, or a meta-disposition that encompasses all other knowledge, skills and dispositions. The unit believes that reasoned eclecticism, when sufficiently developed through a combination of education, training, experience and assessment, produces desirable results and outcomes more frequently than any single, more purely theoretical approach. Reasoned eclecticism promises to achieve the desired goal: schools that will be the “supremely interesting places” for students as well as for teachers.
Though dependent upon a developed and yet ever-developing grasp of a wide range of current and historical theory, reasoned eclecticism is an intensely pragmatic process by which a professional educator makes decisions at particular times and in particular situations. It continually discerns the key features of its environment with an eye toward productive adjustments which can be made in accord with learner needs. The reasoned eclectic professional understands that s/he is situated in a particular real context with particular dispositions, predilections toward thinking or behaving in a certain way in similar situations, and a repertoire of theory and strategy and other ways of responding that have been developed a priori. This approach, although intensely focused on practice, requires the professional educator to possess a growing variety of ready and relevant theoretical constructs with which to posit and critique alternative paths as well as predict likely outcomes.
It is also important to note, as the unit’s members do, that by taking this stance of reasoned eclecticism, the unit optimizes its function as a learning community for the exchange of ideas, the integration and proper ordering of theory and practice, and the celebration of human diversity in all its variety of ideas and creations.
A vital characteristic of the successful reasoned eclectic practitioner is her high level of cognitive development. Teachers and other school personnel—for that matter, all adults—grow and develop in stages -- through a series of developmental domains that are connected to and interact with their environment. This development can be characterized as movement from simple to complex structures and is not automatic. To promote this development toward increasingly complex cognitive structures, research suggests that the learner become engaged in significant new “helping” experiences and then reflect appropriately on these experiences. The unit recognizes the critical relationship of cognitive development to professional success. Reiman & Thies-Sprinthall (1998) focused on three domains of teacher cognitive development. One of these domains explored David Hunt’s theory of conceptual complexity. Hunt and his associates at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education found that teachers at more complex conceptual levels could “read and flex” with students, and therefore were more effective teachers because they could adjust the learning environment to meet a variety of student needs. The unit is committed to moving candidates from lower pre-conventional levels of cognitive complexity to higher post-conventional cognitive levels in order to enable them to operate in a reasoned eclectic way. Graduates at higher stages have the knowledge, skills and dispositions to change the learning environment in accord with the diverse needs of diverse students.
What is common to the research of Hunt (1971,1976), Loevinger (1976), and Kohlberg (1969) is that learners move through distinct and qualitative stages of development. In the study of ego (personal) development, Loevinger found that people “move from symbiotic and impulsive ego levels (in which the person is dependent on others for decisions) to conformist ego levels (in which reasoning is framed by what is socially acceptable with little awareness of personal choice) to autonomous ego levels (in which the individual has a rich inner life, can reconcile conflicting or contrasting ideas, and has a high tolerance for ambiguity)”. Similarly, Kohlberg found that a person’s moral/ethical development moves from the “might makes right” and “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” mentality to “what the majority wants” to the post-conventional level of acting on principles.
How distinct and qualitative stages of development manifest themselves as behaviors depends upon environmental task demands. Hoestetler (1988) found that subjects whose assessments indicated higher levels of cognition were more efficient when solving complex problems, but less efficient at simpler tasks. It is because the professional education unit believes that professional school personnel are engaged in complex and diverse activities in complex and diverse settings requiring a reasoned eclectic approach, that it strives to move candidates to high levels of cognitive development and to a more preferred style of solving human interaction problems through providing environments and experiences that connect the missions/visions of the university and the unit with research, theory, and best practice.
The Unit’s Knowledge Bases
Although each program has a substantive knowledge base specific to its discipline, the unit’s knowledge base is prominently supported by the theories and research of David Hunt (1971, 1976), Jane Loevinger (1976), and Lawrence Kohlberg (1969). These studies prompted more recent studies by McKibbin & Joyce (1981) and Hopkins (1990) that supported and extended earlier findings related to cognitive development. These recent studies in turn show that teachers operating at higher cognitive levels employed innovative methods while lower cognitive-level teachers were unable to introduce innovative methods beyond the simplest and most concrete. Further, Hopkins’ major conclusion is that “the more abstract and cognitively complex teachers employed new models of teaching at a rate four times greater than their counterparts at concrete and less complex psychological stages” (Reiman & Thies-Sprinthall, 1998).
The knowledge bases for professional education programs are also shaped to a large extent and in an important way by the on-going collaborative efforts of the Unit’s on-campus faculty and school-based professional educators as well as those who provide learning environments for prospective counselors, school psychologists and school administrators. Through undergraduate teaching laboratory sites and graduate internships and practica in schools, the “wisdom of practice” from a variety of settings is added to the multiplicity of perspectives from which candidates develop their own repertoires of theory and practice.