Only the Educated are Free
Epictetus
Bridgewater College is an academic community with a distinctively Christian atmosphere. This liberal arts institution seeks to create in its students a balance of learning, service, and leisure by developing the total person. It refers to itself as a "college of character/community of excellence" (College Catalog).
The Teacher Education Program Conceptual Framework builds upon the mission of Bridgewater College and is supported by three pillars. The first pillar is the Christian atmosphere that grew from the basic beliefs of the Church of the Brethren; the second pillar is the education and the development of each student as a whole person; and the third pillar is composed of each student's classroom field experiences and introspective resilience as proposed by Donald Schon (1983) in The Reflective Practitioner.
Pillar One: The Christian Atmosphere
As previously stated, Bridgewater College was established in 1880 as Spring Creek Normal and Collegiate Institute by Daniel Christian Flory, an alumnus of the University of Virginia and a young progressive leader in the Church of the Brethren. In 1889, the school was named Bridgewater College and chartered by the Commonwealth of Virginia to grant undergraduate degrees. Bridgewater College became the first of the colleges having historic associations with the Church of the Brethren to grant degrees (College Catalog).
To understand the school, it is important to be acquainted with the basic beliefs within the Church of the Brethren as recorded by Harold S. Martin:
More than two centuries ago in Germany, a new fellowship of Christian believers was formed. The established churches had become rich, powerful, and corrupt. They no longer proclaimed the simple message of the New Testament. Alexander Mack and other Pietists set out to form a church as nearly like the First Century Church as possible, and they took the New Testament as their rule of faith and practice. The Church of the Brethren is the present name given to that new fellowship. Most of the Brethren migrated to America in the 1720s. In basic orientation and background, the Brethren are Anabaptist (reject infant baptism) and Pietist (emphasize holy living). Brethren have historically accepted the basic Christian doctrines along with practices sometimes neglected by major groups of Christians. These include a commitment to peace and reconciliation, an emphasis on simple living, an opposition to taking oaths, the maintenance of a strong and wholesome family life, service to neighbors, and the
practice of outward symbols taught in the New Testament (such as feetwashing and the sisters' veiling).
Pillar Two: The Development of the Whole Person
To develop the whole person, Bridgewater College integrates the liberal arts tradition with service learning through its PDP Program, which seeks to cultivate four dimensions of personal development: Citizenship and Community Responsibility, Intellectual Growth and Discovery, Emotional Maturation and Physical Health, and Ethical and Spiritual Growth. These four dimensions support and are supported by the liberal arts curriculum. The capstone of this four-year program to develop character in the individual and integration of the whole person is the senior portfolio, which consists of two parts. The first part is a reflective essay that requires the student to synthesize and provide documentation of the four dimensions of personal development and the service learning experiences at BC; the second, a reflection of the student's personal growth.
Pillar Three: Field Experiences and Introspective Resilience
According to Vijayalakshmi Srivatsan (2002, pp. 57-61):
. . . teaching is a highly complex, professional activity, rather than the mechanical communication of formal subject matter knowledge to students. Teachers . . . make their own decisions in complex, ever-changing circumstances . . . . They should be reflective and should constantly monitor and refine their practices. This means they should realize the need for change and should develop preparedness for continuous adaptations and innovations . . . .
Today's teaching professional has to deal with uncertainty; solve problems; and make decisions adaptively, flexibly, and creatively. The knowledge base one works with has become much more open, diffuse, and shifting. The relationship with clients has become interactive and negotiable. In this rapidly changing world of education, teachers have to be more versatile, resourceful, and responsive than before.
The Department of Education faculty at Bridgewater College teaches a coherent model of learning from experience, similar to that described by Kolb (1984) and as elaborated by Penny Ur (2000, p. 6):
- Concrete experience ("something happened to me in the classroom"), leads to
- Reflective observation ("let me step back and look at what took place"), followed by
- Abstract conceptualization ("what principle or concept can I formulate which will account for this event?"), leading to
- Active experimentation ("let me try to implement this idea in practice"), which, in turn, feeds further concrete experience.
Ur (2000) recommends that each of these stages can and should be enriched by external sources, e.g., the experience of other teachers and calls this "˜Enriched Reflection.'
Not only must the students in the Teacher Education Program have concrete experiences, reflect upon them, construct meaning from them, and then apply that meaning, they must also learn from the experiences and input of others (The Reflective Teacher, 2002). Teaching is not easy; great teachers make teaching look easy. It takes a tremendous amount of time to plan and reflect on what to teach and how to teach. It takes years of practice to become a "great" teacher. Our students have a minimum of 170 hours of experience in the schools before they begin their student teaching. We enhance those experiences with discussions, sharing, and group conceptualization. We believe that great teachers are not born but that they become great through enriched reflection.
References
Bridgewater College. (2005). Bridgewater College Catalog 2005-2006 (one hundred twenty-sixth session). Bridgewater, VA.
Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall.
Martin, H.S. Basic beliefs within the Church of the Brethren, Foreword. Retrieved June 2, 2005, from http://www.brfwitness.org/Articles/1968v3n2.htm
The Reflective Teacher (2002). International Outlook, 9, 12-15.
Schon, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner. Basic Books.
Ur, P. (2000). A course in language teaching. Cambridge University Press.
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