Teacher Education Programs as Complex Organizations

In “Reimagining Teacher Education” (RTE) Deborah Seltzer-Kelly and her co-authors bring a “complexity perspective” to teacher education, embracing a “complexity-based model” to “re-imagine the preparation of teachers” and to forestall deficit models of academic problems and oppositional attitudes of students. They also adopt a complexity-based method of inquiry, as Seltzer-Kelly, the lead author, preserves the “richness and variety of the multiple voices” of her co-authors while seeking to “draw them together” to “highlight some connections”. This method (quoting A. P. Bochner) “gives up the illusions of transcendental observation in favor of the possibilities of dialogue and collaboration.” In what follows I comment briefly upon this unconventional method, consider the “rhetoric of equity and meritocracy” its authors locate as a primary source of deficit models, and provide an additional perspective on complexity-based teacher education.