Bard's battle: know your subject or know how to teach?

The long running dispute whether prospective teachers should learn how to teach or be trained in what they will teach is being revived by a new program at Bard College.

In June, the upstate New York school is launching a master's degree program aimed at shoring up the expertise of prospective teachers in the subjects they will eventually teach. The program, in which students will learn as much English, history, physics or math as they will pedagogy, is the brainchild of Bard's president, Leon Botstein.

"If I had a nickel for every textbook or exercise whose purpose and foundation are not understood by both teacher and student, I'd be a billionaire," says Botstein, a vocal critic of cookie-cutter approaches such as standardized testing and generic textbooks. "The primacy of the subject matter has gotten lost and teachers simply don't know the subject matter well enough."

Botstein says thoroughly educating teachers about the subjects they will teach will equip them with new ways to help students solve problems and jump hurdles. That, he says, will help inspire students and keep teachers on the job longer by easing their frustration.

"Many people who spend a lot of time studying a subject develop a love of that subject and a deep sense of its importance," he says. "They're usually motivated by their own curiosity, It's that intuition and knowledge of why it's important to know how to do something that makes you an infectious teacher."

Ample student teaching is a key component of the Bard program. Bard experimented with adding more than field experience two years ago, when it began operating the Bard High School Early College in Manhattan with the blessing of New York City. The school gives high school students two years of college courses in a high school setting. As part of the master's program, Bard plans to work with public schools around its upstate New York campus.

The American Federation of Teachers advocated revamping teacher training as well in a report in 2000. This year, says Jamie Horwitz, an AFT spokesman, the union plans to "aggressively promote" models that better educate teachers in their subject areas and link their education to real experience in school districts.

Mary Dilworth, vice president for research at the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education in Washington, D.C., says the subject-immersion trend has been gaining ground for a decade. She cautions, however, that any programs that dismiss pedagogy too much "wouldn't fit into the scheme of what we understand to be good teacher preparation."