Passionate Contracts by Ursula Kelly

This is a provocative article that many of us beginning teachers will be able to relate to. It discusses the pedagogies we are taught in our program and the conflicts we will (or already have) discovered in current secondary classrooms.

Some major points to think about and interesting excerpts:

• Education and change are political.
• "This chapter focuses on the contentious and deeply sedimented relationships of power, knowledge, desire, and identity, as they are constituted within beginning teachers themselves, as a means to examine how - and in what ways - change might be possible" (Kelly 57).
• "The dynamics of knowledge, power, desire, and identity [are] embodied relations" (58)
• Two current approaches to teacher education:
• A portfolio - "A technicist base and is developed to provide beginning teachers an array of 'methods' by which to implement the current curriculum" (58-59).
• An ideal - "Ignores the existence of curricular direction and professional practices, proceeding with advances in English as if the status quo did not exist" (59).
• Romanticized English:
• "How are such romanticized notions or 'impossible dreams' of English become ; dreams of the possible' within English" (60)?
• "We fall in and out of love with knowledge" (60).
• Geography of English
• The reasons we teach wanted to teach English - "rhetorical-functional, aesthetic-cultural, ethical-progressive, and political-critical" (61).
• "English is not a construct, not a given or an essence' and the construct of English is not monolithic" (62).
• "Contradiction is the fertile seedbed of change" (62).
• "These competing versions of English are deeply political; they are about relations of power and the extent to which they are sanctioned reiterated, and challenged through subject English" (63).
• Reconstituted English
• "Effectively sidelined by such foci, however, is a concern for what education is about and how its normative preoccupations and daily enactments, to the exclusion of other concerns, can be obstacles to visions and versions of change" (65).
• "Without the support to become the teachers they are learning they want to be, these beginning teachers of English may learn that there is little space in which to negotiate the differences such insights accrue for the classroom. In this lesson, desire begets vexation, and vexation erodes hope and curtains the spirit. No number of exciting new techniques for maintaining the very old status quo are of solace here" (65).
  

Finally, "Teacher education based on exploration, experimentation, and critical inquiry cannot flourish in such compromised circumstance - nor can the well-informed dreams of beginning teachers" (66).

I hope this article spoke to you and you could connect with the content of the article. How can we change our program (or simply our approach to the program) to brace us for the conflicting messages we will all encounter when we begin student teaching.