10363 Teaching: Art, Craft or Profession? 1

Credits: 6 advanced credits in Education

Prerequisites: 36 credits, including two of the following: Curriculum Design, Development and Implementation; Individualized Instruction; Challenges of School Management; Philosophy of Education; as well as Participation in Psychological and Educational Research. Students must also fulfill all English requirements and take bibliographic instruction in the Library.

The course is based on The Activist Teaching Profession, by J. Sachs; The Crisis of the Teaching Profession: Towards Improved Teacher Training, edited by D. Kfir and T. Ariav (in Hebrew); and two readers (in Hebrew and in English), edited by Sarah Guri-Rosenblit and Niva Wallenstein.

The course analyzes the essence of teaching from various perspectives, training for those who wish to enter the profession, and different teaching models. It compares teaching to other professions and examines its professional, apprenticeship and artistic aspects.

Objectives: To present a variety of educational philosophies underlying the teaching profession; To examine various models of teacher training throughout history, emphasizing the modern period and Israel; To examine the social-institutional context of teaching; To discuss the potential for in-service teachers’ professional development; To analyze the mutual relations between researchers of education and teachers in the field; To suggest alternative models for pre-service and in-service teacher training in the future; To encourage teachers to reflect on their actions and on the structure of their profession.

Topics: What is teaching?; The workforce in teaching; The social-institutional context of teaching; Researcher-teacher relations in education; Teaching – future trends.

1Students may write a seminar paper in this course, although it is not required.

The Open University of Israel

Course Catalog

10363 Teaching: Art, Craft or Profession? 1