“Leap into the Boundless …”: Teacher Freedom and Philosophies of Teaching

Abstract

The ultimate goal of education is to help students develop the motivation as well as the conceptual, strategic, and metacognitive knowledge base that will enable them to pursue the goals that they set for themselves, effectively address the various challenges they will face in their lives, and in general, realize true freedom (e.g., Freiré, 1993;Giroux McLaren, 1992; Shor & Freiré, 1987;Szkudlarek, 1993). With regard to literacy, the goal is to produce students who can (a) effectively communicate with different audiences through different mediums for different purposes as well as (b) understand and critically analyze the communications of others across these variables. However, attaining these goals is a difficult task that is made even more challenging given that classrooms are complex environments consisting of students with a wide range of background experiences; beliefs; cultures; attitudes; interests; motivations; and academic, social, and emotional strengths and needs. This is particularly challenging because practices that work well with one student or group of students may not be as effective with others (e.g., Au, 1993;Delpit, 1988; Garcia, 1994;Gardner, 1987; Gollnick & Chin, 1990).In order to help all students move toward the aforementioned goals, teachers need to be flexible and creative thinkers with an underlying philosophy of teaching that provides them with the freedom to take stock of all of the variables that comprise the given situation and respond in such a way as to most effectively move the parties involved toward those ends. The question is, what philosophy of teaching is not only theoretically sound and grounded in research, 143 JLR