A study of the ideal teacher: Heroic metaphors of teacher in popular literature

摘要

One of the important problems teachers face today is an alienation that has developed from a loss of mythic grounding of the ideal. The dissertation focuses on the question of what is meant by the ideal teacher. The paper delineates three realms of the ideal teacher, a spiritual realm, a cultural realm, and a professional realm. These powerful images are examined against a backdrop of an ever expanding fourth realm, the bureaucratic or technocratic ideal which the author states can never be heroic.;Archetypes are examined for each realm and a category system is developed that envisions the three realms as linked by heroic purpose or activity. The effect of bureaucracy on those realms is then assessed. The author posits the belief that the bureaucratic mode and behaviorist evaluations of teachers have denied the possibility of teachers engaging in heroic action.;Images of heroic teacher are expressed in popular culture which also reflect images of the ideal. This idea is examined in three recent reflections of the teacher as hero. They are Pat Conroy's autobiography The Water Is Wide; the film Stand and Deliver, which centers on Jaime Escalante; and John Updike's The Centaur, the story of George Caldwell, a teacher whose persona is mythologically represented by Chiron, the wisest of the Centaurs.;The dissertation ends with a re-examination of the scheme of the ideal teacher placing it in a philosophical anthropological context and includes a review of new avenues of research. This is conceptualized by having the three realms of the ideal teacher linked around the concept of the reflexive voice. This voice is a mediation of the ideal between the inward sense of purpose and the outward sense of experience. The author believes this model more accurately reflects the ideal teacher and allows for continual reinterpretation of this concept situated in the cultural, historical, and ecological setting of the school and grounded in a common mythos of the heroic endeavors of the teacher profession.