UC Berkeley

Teachers must mediate the persistent tension in American society and American education between individual freedoms and civic virtue. This creates philosophical and practical problems for teachers in classrooms who must make decisions that affect the experiences of individual students as well as the whole class. Teacher education unsuccessfully attempts to mediate this tension by conceptualizing the work of teaching as "caring" work, and in doing so, regularly obfuscates the role of teachers in constraining individual freedoms in their day-to-day work.

In an effort to better conceptualize preparation for the difficult work of mediating the tension between individual freedoms and civic virtue in teaching, this study looks at police training to see how police are prepared to mediate the same tensions. Police unapologetically prepare candidates to constrain individual freedoms and to enforce a particular vision of social order. In an attempt make the familiar world of teacher education strange, this is a case study that uses a grounded theory approach to examine a signature pedagogy of police preparation - scenario training.

An analysis of scenario training revealed three signature problems for which candidates were prepared: uncertainty, stress, and the high cost of error. Police were trained to contend with these problems through routines that caused them to draw on both explicit and tacit forms of knowledge. The framing of these problems, as well as the strategies that candidates were taught to contend with them, caused police preparation to privilege enforcement of social order over the protection of individual freedoms. This raises the hypothesis that teacher education, by invoking care as a framework for understanding teachers' work, privileges preparation for nurturing individual students over enforcing order in the classroom or for preparing a citizenry for the common good.