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Preservice teachers, caringcommunities, and parentpartnerships: Challenges andpossibilities for early childhoodteacher educationLisa S. Goldstein aa University of Texas , 6404 Indian Canyon Dr., Austin, Austin,TX, 78746, USA Phone: +1–512–347–7244 Fax: +1–512–347–7244E-mail:Published online: 25 Apr 2008.

To cite this article: Lisa S. Goldstein (2003) Preservice teachers, caring communities, andparent partnerships: Challenges and possibilities for early childhood teacher education, Journalof Early Childhood Teacher Education, 24:1, 61-71, DOI: 10.1080/1090102030240109

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Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education 24 (2003) 61-71

Journal of y

ChildhoodTeacher

Education

Preservice teachers, caring communities, and parentpartnerships: challenges and possibilities for early

childhood teacher education

Lisa S. Goldstein*University of Texas at Austin, 6404 Indian Canyon Dr., Austin, TX 78746, USA

Received 7 June 2002; accepted 15 July 2003

Abstract

The creation of caring classroom communities and a heightened focus on the central importance of partner-ships between teachers and parents are two significant features of the revised guidelines for developmentallyappropriate practices [Developmentally Appropriate Practice in Early Childhood Programs, revised ed., NationalAssociation for the Education of Young Children, Washington, DC]. This article reports findings from a studyof preservice primary grade teachers' understandings of caring in which participants developed negative, adver-sarial beliefs about parents during their initial field placement period. The findings in this study indicate that inorder to prepare preservice teachers to meet our expectations for high quality early childhood teaching practices,we must create teacher education programs and coursework specifically aimed at developing commitments tocaring community and to parent partnership.© 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I recently took my dog for an unexpected visitto the animal hospital associated with a nearbyveterinary college. His intake interview and initialscreening were handled by a third-year veterinarystudent. Concerned that my encyclopedic knowledgeof every detail of my dog's medical history made meseem like a bit of a crackpot, I asked the preserviceveterinarian if I were the craziest owner she'd seenthat week. Her response took me by surprise. Afterreassuring me that there were lots of dog ownersmuch crazier than I, she shook her head and said,"You know, I went into veterinary medicine becauseI love being with animals. If I had known how muchof my job would involve dealing with humans Iprobably would have chosen a different career!"

In a recent study of preservice primary gradeteachers' understandings of caring I encountered a

*Tel.: +1-512-347-7244; fax: +1-512-471-4089.E-mail address: goldstein@mail.utexas.edu

(L.S. Goldstein).

very similar attitude: the preservice teachers lovedbeing with children, but found dealing with thechildren's parents to be difficult, unpleasant, andfrustrating. In this article I share some of the findingsof this study, focusing on the preservice teachers' de-velopment of negative, adversaria] beliefs about theparents of their students during the course of theirinitial field placement period.

The creation of caring classroom communitiesand a heightened focus on the central importance ofpartnerships between teachers and parents are twosignificant features of the revised guidelines for de-velopmentally appropriate practices (Bredekamp &Copple, 1997). The centrality of these two issues inthe "Green Bible" demonstrates their importance inthe field and in the field's current understandingsof good early childhood teaching. The findings inthis study indicate that in order to prepare preserviceteachers to meet our expectations for high qualityteaching practices, we must create teacher educationprograms and coursework specifically aimed at de-

1090-1027/$ - see front matter © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.jecte.2003.07.003

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62 L.S. Goldstein/Journal of Early Childhood Teacher Education 24 (2003) 61-71

veloping commitments to caring community and toparent partnership. I conclude this article with sug-gestions to this end drawn from the findings of thestudy presented here.

1. Caring communities and parent partnerships

The first goal mentioned in the 1997 revision ofthe NAEYC guidelines for developmentally appro-priate practice is the creation a caring community oflearners: "such a community reflects what is knownabout the social construction of knowledge and theimportance of establishing a caring, inclusive com-munity in which all children can develop and learn"(Bredekamp & Copple, 1997, p. 16). Because of thecentral role played by caring in our understandingof high-quality education for young children, caringhas become a common focus in educating teachersfor early childhood and primary grade settings. Forexample, there are a number of textbooks specifi-cally aimed at helping preservice teachers developcare-centered practices: Teaching Children to Care(Charney, 1992); Among Friends: Classrooms WhereCaring and Learning Prevail (Dalton & Watson,1997); Curriculum of Love (Daleo, 1996); and TheCaring Teacher's Guide to Discipline (Gootman,1997).

Unlike strategies for the establishment of car-ing classroom communities, however, strategies forcreating effective partnerships with parents are nota central focus of current teacher education pro-grams (de Acosta, 1996; Greenwood & Hickman,1991; McBride, 1991; Morris, Taylor, Knight, &Wasson, 1996). Although many textbooks discussthe importance of parent-teacher partnership orparent involvement, "teacher preparation programsoften present an unsystematic approach to preparingpreservice teachers to work with parents" (Foster &Loven, 1992, p. 14).

The lack of attention to parent-teacher partner-ships is curious. The list of goals highlighted in the1997 revision of the DAP guidelines concludes withthe establishment of reciprocal partnerships with par-ents (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997). According to theguidelines, to meet this goal early childhood teach-ers must work with families in an atmosphere of mu-tual respect, cooperation, and shared responsibility to-ward the achievement of shared goals (Bredekamp &Copple, 1997, p. 22). The National Association forthe Education of Young Children also asserts its com-mitment to parent-teacher partnership in its Code ofEthical Conduct: developing relationships of mutualtrust with our students' families and acknowledgingand building upon strengths and competencies as wesupport families in their task of nurturing children are

two of the ideals articulated in the code (NAEYC,1997, p. 2).

The absence of attention to the establishment ofrespectful, collaborative relationships with parents inearly childhood teacher education is particularly prob-lematic in light of the large body of research doc-umenting the tensions and challenges characterizingparent-teacher relations. Becker and Epstein (1982)note "the sense of distance felt by teachers and par-ents who may be strangers to one another but whoshare common interests in the same children" (Becker& Epstein, 1982, p. 88).

This distance is both caused and exacerbated bya range of tensions. Some of these tensions are cre-ated by the teachers: fearing and/or blaming parents,lack of training, lack of institutional support, andterritorial feelings are among the issues cited in theliterature (Coleman & Churchill, 1997; Epstein &Becker, 1982; Galinsky, 1988; Greenwood &Hickman, 1991; Moles, 1982; Power, 1985; Vernberg& Medway, 1981). Other tensions are caused mutu-ally by teachers and parents alike: communicationproblems, lack of trust, feelings of jealousy and/orpossessiveness, and issues of expertise, knowledge,and professionalism (Biklen, 1992; Epstein, 1986;Galinsky, 1988; Goldstein, 1998; Greenberg, 1989;Moles, 1982; Powell, 1978; Power, 1985; Vernberg& Medway, 1981). Attention to these charged issuesin teacher education coursework might serve to breakthese divisive cycles of fear, mistrust, and disrespect.Because partnership with parents can be difficult,this issue warrants direct, focused consideration ifwe are to prepare our preservice teachers well.

The DAP guidelines explicitly mention estab-lishing connection with families in the discus-sion of caring communities of learners, statingthat "[d]evelopmentally appropriate practices occurwithin a context that supports the development ofrelationships between adults and children, amongchildren, among teachers, and between teachers andfamilies" (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997, p. 16). Thisseems to suggest that early childhood teacher edu-cation programs with a strong focus on caring willprepare preservice teachers for the many relationalcontexts encountered in young children's classrooms.This assumption overlooks the strong influence ofpreservice teachers' prior knowledge and beliefs.

Thanks to the apprenticeship of observation(Lortie, 1975), preservice teachers bring images andunderstandings of caring teaching with them intotheir teacher education programs (Cole & Knowles,1993; McLaughlin, 1991; Rogers & Webb, 1991; We-instein, 1998). These images, rooted in the preserviceteachers' lived experiences as students, center aroundcaring teacher-child interactions. These preconceivedideas about caring teaching have also been shaped

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by pervasive cultural scripts which link women andcaring with the teaching profession (Acker, 1995;Biklen, 1992; Grumet, 1988) and by images ofteachers and teaching in popular culture (Freedman,1999; Joseph & Burnaford, 1994; Weber & Mitchell,1995). Called "the Mumsy discourse" by Burgessand Carter (1992), these images and representationsdepict teachers as women who care selflessly andlovingly for all of the children in their classes. Be-cause the teacher plays the role of mother in thisdiscourse the children's actual mothers are erasedand parent-teacher relationships are not considered.

Preservice teachers enter their field placement ex-periences with a simplistic picture of the stakeholdersin a caring classroom community: they focus onlyon themselves and the children rather than on theteacher-child-parent relationship (de Acosta, 1996).Early childhood teacher education's lack of focus onthe nuances of parent-teacher partnerships deprivespreservice teachers of the opportunity to think innew ways about their relationship and responsibilityto their students' parents.

Practice teaching experiences are often preserviceteachers' first opportunity to interact with parents in aprofessional domain. By extension, practice teachingexperiences are the preservice teachers' first opportu-nity to have their preconceptions about parents' rolesin caring teaching called into question. Once placed inclassroom contexts, preservice teachers see that theirprior notions of teaching—notions centered aroundimages of caring teachers working with children whohave no visible families—do not accurately capturethe interpersonal complexity of the profession.

During their field placements preservice teachersare poised at a threshold of professional possibility.They must come to terms with the role of parentsin teachers' work, but can do so in any number ofways. The ideal would be the development of inclu-sive, collaborative perspectives on parent relations.As this article will demonstrate, less-than-ideal out-comes are also a real possibility. In a recent studyexploring the ways that beliefs about caring held bya group of preservice primary grade teachers werechallenged, affirmed, or transformed during theirpractice teaching period, I found interaction withparents was a particularly difficult aspect of the pre-service teachers' field experiences. These findingsare the focus of this article.

2. Methodology

2.1. Setting

The data presented in this article are drawn from alarger study of caring in teacher education. The pur-

poses of this study were to develop baseline knowl-edge about preservice teachers' understandings of therelationship of caring and teaching and to documentthe ways those initial understandings were affectedby the preservice teachers' first field placement. Thisstudy took place within the context of a ClassroomOrganization and Management course at a large re-search university in the southwestern United States.

This course is a central requirement for the pre-service teachers' professional development sequence,and is linked to their first long-term field placement.In this placement, preservice teachers spent 20 h perweek in a primary grade classroom (grades 1^4) ina socio-culturally diverse urban school district fora period of 10 weeks. The Classroom Organiza-tion and Management practicum course met weekly,and covered topics such as classroom environments,discipline, lesson and unit planning, and profession-alism. Concurrent with enrollment in this course, thepreservice teachers were also enrolled in a course onlearning theory and in courses focused on teachingmethods for mathematics, social studies, and reading.In the semester following this practicum, the pre-service teachers complete their methods courseworkand engage in their student teaching.

Motivated by my belief that caring teaching-learning environments are the crucible of intellectualgrowth (Goldstein, 1999) and by my understandingthat a goal of teacher education is the preparation ofcaring teachers (Noddings, 1986), I created and envi-sioned my Classroom Organization and Managementclass in ways deliberately designed to be caring,to model caring, and to move my preservice teach-ers toward a commitment to care-centered teaching(Noddings, 1984, 1986). My focus on and commit-ment to the development of caring teachers and thecreation of caring classrooms were an integral part ofthe course and the study. I communicated these val-ues and goals to my preservice teachers through mychoice of reading materials; through the focus of myclassroom activities; through my attempts to modelcaring teaching practices and to discuss those prac-tices explicitly; and through the course assignments.

2.2. Data sources

In order to facilitate and support reflection, elec-tronic dialogue journals (nicknamed "ejournals")were a central requirement in the course (Mclntyre& Tlusty, 1995). Each preservice teacher in the classreflected and wrote on topics related to the role ofcaring in their classroom experiences and emailedtheir thoughts to me. I responded to each preserviceteacher's reflective writing individually in ways in-tended to encourage the preservice teacher to exploreand respond to the theme of caring in classrooms

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in a way that furthered his/her individual growth asa professional and deepened his/her thinking on therole of caring relationships in teaching.

Electronic dialogue journals—exchanged viaemail rather than in a notebook—function like tra-ditional paper-based dialogue journals and share thestrengths attributed to that activity (Cole & Knowles,1993; Schon, 1983). In addition, electronic dialoguejournals offer unique benefits. The research litera-ture on uses of electronic mail in teacher education(Mclntyre & Tlusty, 1995; Nicaise & Barnes, 1996;Schlagal, Trathen, & Blanton, 1996; Thomas, Clift,& Sugimoto, 1996) indicates that electronic dialoguejournal exchanges offer student teachers the conve-nience of quick feedback and relief from the feelingsof isolation and disconnection common to the fieldplacement period. Email also offers preservice teach-ers a less formal, more spontaneous medium than tra-ditional notebook-style journals, thereby eliminatingsome of the pressure and drudgery often associatedwith reflective journal writing (Maas, 1991).

2.3. Participants

In the Spring of 1998, a cohort of seventeen under-graduates and two post-baccalaureate students wereenrolled in my Classroom Organization and Man-agement course. Participation in this study of caringteaching was open to everyone in the class; data werecomprised of the weekly electronic dialogue jour-nal responses assigned as a course requirement. Ev-ery preservice teacher wrote these ejournal responses;only those who elected to participate in the study—16females and 1 male, with a range of ethnicities includ-ing Anglo, Asian, and Hispanic—had their responsesconsidered as data for this project. Participants wereassured that their decision to participate or to abstainfrom participation in this study would not affect theirworkload for the course, their grade, my evaluation oftheir work, or their future relationships with the uni-versity. The participants were aware that they wouldbe given pseudonyms and then their journal entrieswould be analyzed, interpreted, and, in all likelihood,made public in journal articles like this one; all par-ticipants gave their full written permission.

2.4. Data analysis

With the assistance of a graduate student who wasthe preservice teachers' field supervisor, manual andcomputer-assisted data analysis strategies were em-ployed to examine and code all of the electronic dia-logue journal exchanges. We worked independently,each approaching the data using the same procedures.The data set was approached in two different ways.First, we both read the full set of dialogue journal ex-

changes; this included the ten entries written by eachof the 17 participants and my responses to those en-tries. The goals were to develop an overall sense ofthe progression of the class's experiences, attitudes,and perceptions over the course of their field place-ment and to reveal general themes common to all theparticipants. During this reading my assistant and Iidentified the incoming assumptions, beliefs, and un-derstandings of the relationship between caring andteaching most commonly shared by the preserviceteachers in the class and tracked the changes that oc-curred over time.

Next, my assistant and I both read each preser-vice teacher's individual correspondence file, whichincluded 10 weekly entries and my responses. Thisanalysis strategy revealed the development of eachpreservice teacher's thoughts, concerns, and attitudesover the course of the field placement period andenabled us to engage in case and cross-case anal-ysis. When we completed our independent analy-ses of the data, we compared our results. Themesthat emerged both in my and my assistant's find-ings were highlighted, explored in greater depth, andinterpreted.

We found that the preservice teachers' initial un-derstandings of caring teaching were characterized byessentialism, idealism, and oversimplification: caringteachers only needed "love, love, and more love forchildren" to be successful in the profession (Goldstein& Lake, 2000, p. 861). As the preservice teach-ers spent time in their field placement classrooms,however, they realized that their initial preconcep-tions about caring and teaching were inadequate toexplain the complexity of what they were witness-ing and experiencing. Confronted by uncertainty,the preservice teachers were in a position to re-consider their initial beliefs and to develop newperspectives on the interaction of caring and teach-ing. Tension and concern relating to their students'parents were very visible themes in the preserviceteachers' ejournal entries; these data will be discussedbelow.

3. Preservice teachers' reflections on parentalcaring

Like my student veterinarian, the preservice teach-ers in this study quickly realized that teachers engagenot only with children, but also with the significantadults in those children's lives. Developing and ne-gotiating relationships with parents is a particularlysensitive and complex facet of an early childhoodteacher's professional responsibility (Bredekamp &Copple, 1997) and the preservice teachers struggledwith this challenge.

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3.1. "Good" and "bad" parents

The preservice teachers' ejournal entries revealeda tendency to group parents into two clear-cut cate-gories: good parents and bad parents. Barbie providesa sample of this attitude. Here she describes a "goodparent":

One little boy's father, Mr. Huang, comes in everyFriday and helps facilitate the computer hour. Healso participates in all their class parties and recentlytook a picture of the whole class and made copiesfor each child. I think he is a wonderful asset.

Now Barbie describes the plight of a child with a"bad parent:"

Richie is on free lunches and always comes to schoolextremely tired because his mother takes him toher office till 12:30 at night. She refuses to helphim with his work and he receives NO home sup-port with homework and/or TAAS [the statewidehigh-stakes standardized test] practice. She won'ttake him to the doctor even though he has a horribleinfection on his finger. The other day Richie came toschool bawling because he had a confrontation withhis mother that really upset him! His mother toldhim that his binder was too heavy, so she dumpedall of his papers onto the ground and wouldn't lethim have it back. Richie was distraught because myteacher, Mrs. Lesse, is extremely hard on the kidsabout organization and responsibility. It is a sadsituation.

Barbie does not give any consideration to thechallenges possibly facing Richie's mother and doesnot ask questions—Why might Mom have to takeRichie to the office with her? Why might Mom stillbe at work in the middle of the night? Why mightMom choose not to take Richie to the doctor?—thatwould enhance her understanding of Richie's homelife. Characterized by broad generalizations andgross oversimplifications, Barbie's ejournal entriesrepresent a common perspective among the preser-vice teachers: good parents make things easy for theteacher, bad parents make things hard.

As they encountered the value-laden complex-ity of parent-child-teacher relations my preserviceteachers appeared to cling more tightly than everto that good parent/bad parent binary. Rather thandeveloping more sophisticated insights into the chal-lenges and opportunities those relationships mightpose in their future careers, the preservice teachersseemed to be developing potentially troublesome un-derstandings of the boundaries of teacherly respon-sibility and showcasing unsettling attitudes towardparents.

3.2. Questioning parents' judgment

My preservice teachers understood caring for theirstudents to be one of their central responsibilities asteachers. Because of this, they felt a great deal of pro-tective loyalty toward the youngsters in their classes.As a result, the preservice teachers often questionedtheir students' parents' judgment, and even positionedthemselves in opposition to the parents on occasion.Vernberg and Medway (1981) found that teachersrarely blame themselves for children's troubles atschool, pointing instead to factors in the children'shome lives. Along similar lines, Galinsky quotes ateacher as saying, "I can't afford to get upset at thechildren. It's much easier to blame the parents be-cause I only see them for a few minutes" (Galinsky,1988, p. 9). The tensions between teachers and par-ents have been well documented; my preservice teach-ers appear to have been quick studies, learning these"typical" teacherly responses with ease (Greenberg,1989).

Often the preservice teachers were concerned thattheir students' parents were under-involved in thechildren's lives. Michelle, for example, worried abouta boy in her class who was having a great deal ofdifficulty staying on task and completing his work.As the research literature would predict (Galinsky,1988; Greenberg, 1989; Vernberg & Medway, 1981),Michelle's interpretation of the child's situation putthe responsibility and blame on the child's parents.Michelle reported that her cooperating teacher helpedthe boy as much as possible at school, but acknowl-edged that the teacher "can't do anything to help himat home and no one there seems to care. I feel horri-ble! I want to do something to help this poor child."

Frustrated by her apparent lack of power, Michellesaw the child's parents as negligent villains, and castherself and her cooperating teacher as this child'ssaviors (Ayers, 1994). Sensing a clear boundary linedrawn between home and school, Michelle felt thatthere was nothing she or her cooperating teacher coulddo to improve the child's situation. Partnership andcommunication with the boy's parents appeared to beout of the question: from Michelle's perspective noone at his home "seems to care."

I found these particular concerns and attitudesmost frequently expressed by those preservice teach-ers, like Michelle, whose placements were in schoolsenrolling high numbers of children of color living inpoverty. In her classic study of parent-teacher rela-tions, Lightfoot (1977) explains:

One of the predominant myths about black parentsand poor parents that surround inner-city schoolsis that they (1) do not care about the education oftheir children, (2) are passive and unresponsive to

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attempts by teachers and administrators to get theminvolved, and (3) are ignorant and naive about thecognitive and social needs of their children, (p. 400)

Maria was placed in a first grade classroom atGreen Oaks, a public school whose student popula-tion was comprised of entirely African American andHispanic children, most of whom receive free/reducedprice lunch. In an early ejournal entry that echoesLightfoot's (1977) argument, Maria contemplated thechallenges she faced regarding classroom manage-ment, and wrote:

I feel Green Oaks students require a firm hand be-cause they come from dysfunctional homes wherethere is no element of structured discipline. In manyinstances these children are literally on their ownand used to doing what they want to do.

Maria's emerging conception of the boundaries ofa teacher's responsibility allowed her to feel comfort-able offering a blanket indictment of the child-rearingstrategies practiced by her students' families. Un-concerned with the families' funds of knowledge orthe subtle challenges of cross-cultural communica-tion, Maria simply believed that the children's par-ents were not doing their job properly. As a caringteacher, Maria felt that she had no choice but to takeon the responsibility for providing the children withthe discipline and structure necessary to be successfulin school.

3.3. Teacher knows best

Many of Maria's classmates were placed inhigh-SES schools enrolling primarily Anglo children.In these particular schools, the parent communitytended to be highly visible and involved with theirchildren's education; underinvolvement and lackof structured discipline in the home were rarely aconcern of the preservice teachers placed in thoseschools. However, these preservice teachers werestill dissatisfied with their students' parents' abilityto do their job properly. For example, Kay felt thatthe parents of one of her students were being toohard on him. She wrote:

Bob's parents expect more out of him than he is ca-pable [of producing]. His father is a brain surgeon—brilliant—and cannot accept that Bob may not beon as high an academic level... Over spring break,Bob's father made him bring home his math bookso that they could drill fraction problems while Bobhad some "free time." This is exactly the WRONGkind of motivation Bob needs.

As in the "bad parent" scenarios spun by Mariaand Michelle, Kay told a story in which her effortsto do right by a child were thwarted by parental in-adequacies. Kay believed she knew the appropriate

motivational techniques to use with Bob and felt frus-trated by the decisions Bob's father was making onhis son's behalf. In Kay's growing understanding ofthe ways that caring manifests itself in a teacher'swork, a caring teacher knows her students better thantheir own parents do (Power, 1985).

Like Kay, many of the preservice teachers ap-peared to assume that "teacher knows best." In fact,some of my preservice teachers began to believe thatthey cared for and understood the children better thananyone else could (Greenberg, 1989). The followingquotes from Maria's and Mary's ejournals illustratethis phenomenon well:

I hope I have touched their lives to the point thatif they should ever feel unloved or alone, they willknow that I love them and as long as they have athought of me, they will never be alone. Once more,I can only hope this will fill them with a senseof happiness and a drive to continue for success!(Maria)

I know I care for students, even rotten ones, whenI can put their faults to the side and dig deep forone inkling of good spirit... Although it is morechallenging, it is also useful to the child. I keep inmind that others might not care, so it is left up tome to make a difference during the time they areunder my wings. (Mary)

This "teacher knows best" stance often surfacedas the preservice teachers questioned the motivations,feelings, and intent of their student's parents. Thiswas particularly apparent when children were experi-encing difficulties at school. For example, after learn-ing that one of his students would be receiving med-ication for a behavioral disorder, Mark wondered:

Are [his parents] really providing him the best carehe deserves? I believe if they truly care for this childthey should have exhausted all other options beforeplacing him on medication.

As a student teaching intern, Mark was not privyto conversations about the range of options these par-ents had pursued, nor was he aware of the emotionalenergy the parents had invested in their decision tomedicate their child. Mark simply assumed that theparents did not "truly care" for their son.

Knowles and Holt-Reynolds (1991) point out that"preservice teachers sometimes use alternate andpotentially dysfunctional rationales for interpretingclassroom events" (Knowles & Holt-Reynolds, 1991,p. 88). This appears to be true of the preserviceteachers participating in this study. As they struggledto make meaning out of what they were witnessingand experiencing in their field placement classrooms,many of these preservice teachers developed under-standings and explanations that were adversarial anddisrespectful toward their students' parents.

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4. Responding to the preservice teachers

During the course of the study, the electronicdialogue journals allowed me to engage with thepreservice teachers and offer responses, input, andfeedback on their reflections. Examination of myejournal entries reveals a range of strategies andapproaches for dealing with the preservice teachers'problematic beliefs about parents.

4.1. Challenging assumptions

As these troubling attitudes were developing andbeing expressed in the preservice teachers' ejournalentries, I often worked to challenge their assump-tions. Critical dialogue and questioning was one ofmy techniques to this end. For example, in response toMaria's entry about the children at Green Oaks who"require a firm hand because they come from dys-functional homes where there is no element of struc-tured discipline," I asked questions I thought wouldpush Maria's thinking about the issues she raised:

I have some big, serious questions for you . . . Howdo you know so much about the kids' home lives?If you heard this bit of information from Mrs. Ziffle[the cooperating teacher], how does she know? Also,what does "dysfunctional" mean and who gets todecide what is functional and what is not? I wantto call some of the assumptions underlying yourstatements into the open, and I want you to thinkabout what is behind them and underneath them . . .I want you to think deeply about the kids you areteaching, their families, and the media portrayalsof the "typical" Green Oaks population, and thenconsider the impact these beliefs, ideas, and imagesimpact your teaching practices.

Occasionally I was more direct and prescriptivein my feedback. In response to Mark's assertion thatparents who truly care for their child would exhaustall other options before placing the child on medica-tion, I eschewed critical dialogue and questioning andsimply offered a blunt directive:

You must work hard to remain non-judgmental aboutthe parents' choices [regarding medication], and toassume that they sweated blood over the decision,finally opting to do what they thought would be bestfor their kid.

Sometimes I took a more indirect approach, val-idating the preservice teachers' feelings of concern,sharing stories from my own teaching experience, en-couraging reflection or communication with the co-operating teacher. Michelle wanted to help the "poorchild" who she thought had no support at home; myresponse skirted the issue of home-school relationsentirely, instead asking Michelle what she would do

about the situation if she were the classroom teacher.This may be legitimate teacherly response, but it is nota response aimed at developing preservice teachers'commitment to building connections with and respectfor parents.

Looking back over these more conciliatory ejour-nal responses, I see my tendency to focus on thenature of the teacher-child relationship and the car-ing interactions within that dyad. This is not surpris-ing. My working understanding of caring is rootedin Nel Noddings's work; Noddings views caring asan encounter between two people, a one-caring anda cared-for (Noddings, 1984). However, it seems thatmy reliance on a view of caring that emphasizesa two-person relationship may have contributed tothe preservice teachers' unwillingness to engage withparents. A caring relation that requires a cared-forand a one-caring is whole and complete with justa teacher and a child; this plays into the preserviceteachers' incoming understandings of caring teaching(de Acosta, 1996) and allows them to conceptualizeparents as outsiders. This was a serious shortcomingin my thinking and in my interactions with the pre-service teachers in the study.

Because the preservice teachers were at the verybeginning stages of their professional lives, the im-ages, ideas, beliefs, and understandings documentedin this article are unlikely to be stable: this slow pro-cess of growth and change will continue throughoutthese preservice teachers' teaching careers. Neverthe-less, their development of such negative, disturbingopinions about parents warrants close examination.Was this a case of the impact of university course workbeing "washed out" by field experience (Zeichner &Tabachnick, 1981)? Perhaps the preservice teacherswere exposed to negative influences from cooperat-ing teachers or from other classroom or institutionalfactors (Zeichner & Grant, 1991)? Or might there beother external sources for the degeneration of theirattitudes (Zeichner, 1980)?

4.2. Stress and caring

Research has documented field placement as astressful experience for preservice teachers (Jelinek,1986; MacDonald, 1993). I can see a range of poten-tially stressful factors in my preservice teachers' ex-perience that might have led to poor decision-makingand lapses in judgment. During the course of thisstudy, my preservice teachers had their first opportu-nities to play the role of professional in interactionswith parents, and it is likely that they were fearfulparticipants in these interactions. Although generallyknown for his work as a Jedi master and not as ateacher educator, Yoda made a comment in the movieStar Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace that sue-

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cinctly summarizes my preservice teachers' experi-ence with their children's parents: "fear leads to anger,anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering" (Lucas,1999). Because my preservice teachers probably feltsomewhat afraid of interacting with the parents, theydeveloped negative attitudes and high levels of frus-tration and animosity.

Other potentially stressful factors were related tothe preservice teachers' social and cultural identitiesin contrast to those of their students. Most of mypreservice teachers came from white, middle classfamilies firmly rooted in mainstream US culture,and many were placed at schools in low-incomeneighborhoods that served communities of color.When white preservice teachers do field placementsin low-income schools with large populations of mi-nority students, they are often faced with a range ofchallenges (Ladson-Billings, 2002; Mclntyre, 1997;Sleeter, 2001). It seems, then, that those preserviceteachers who were operating beyond the borders oftheir own cultural contexts for the first time in theirlives had additional sources of stress to contend within their field placements.

Finally, I believe that the preservice teachers' in-coming view of the relationship between caring andteaching might have been a significant factor in theirexhaustion, stress, and the resultant negativity. At theoutset of the study, the preservice teachers' beliefsabout caring were idealistic and simplistic: for ex-ample, Ariel wrote that "a caring teacher is one whois truly devoted to improving and educating fellowmembers of the human race." Most believed, likeMary, that they could "care for all children for thespecial individuals they are and for what they have toshare with the world" and, like Mark, that they would"be available for the child in any capacity and shouldnever turn a deaf ear on a child's problem or concern."

For these preservice teachers, caring was a person-ality trait, a disposition, a set of behaviors. Maria'sdefinition captures this view well: "a caring teacherwas one who is kind, loving, patient and one whonever raises his/her voice at the students." Perhapsthe burden of living up to this impossibly unrealis-tic expectation for personal devotion was more thanmy preservice teachers could bear and contributed totheir difficulties.

The research literature supports this supposi-tion. Hargreaves and Tucker (1991) contend that "anarrow or exclusive orientation to care as personalcare can actually lead to less care rather than more"(Hargreaves & Tucker, 1991, p. 497). Weinstein(1998) points out that preservice teachers who seecaring "solely in terms of warmth and affection"(Weinstein, 1998, p. 155) might not see the connec-tions between caring and academic expectations, ormight be unwilling to exert the authority necessary

to maintain a productive learning environment. Itseems probable that the preservice teachers' incom-ing view of caring made their teaching experiencesmore difficult.

5. Implications for teacher education

Over the course of the semester, the preserviceteachers' stance regarding parent-teacher-child re-lationships reflected a move toward shortsightedarrogance rather than toward the openhearted com-mitment to partnership expected of responsibleprofessionals. The Classroom Organization andManagement course's focus on caring relationshipsin teaching and learning and the support of theelectronic dialogue journals did little to improvethe preservice teachers' understandings of parentpartnership. This leads me to believe that simplyfocusing on caring will not ensure that establishingproductive, positive relationships with parents willbe a priority for preservice teachers.

Because caring and parent-teacher relationshipsare so fundamentally important in the education ofyoung children, early childhood education programsmust prepare teachers committed to the establishmentand maintenance of caring classroom environmentsand to the creation and sustenance of respectful rela-tionships with the parents of their students. For this tooccur, early childhood teacher educators must createcurricula and preparation programs that pay specificand focused attention to those goals.

My findings in this study have two main implica-tions for early childhood teacher education. In orderto prepare preservice teachers to meet the guidelinesand standards for developmentally appropriate earlylearning environments (Bredekamp & Copple, 1997),early childhood teacher education must (1) make fo-cused efforts to shift preservice teachers' understand-ing of caring teaching from the one-on-one interac-tion of teacher and student toward a broader view ofcaring community, and (2) make a more active com-mitment to emphasizing parent partnerships and todeveloping parent-friendly professional dispositionsin our preservice teachers.

Caring has already taken hold as a founda-tional topic in many of our programs, but we mustreshape our working understandings of caring inteaching-learning contexts to focus less on indi-vidual relationships and more on the establishmentand maintenance of caring communities of learners.One-on-one caring teaching-learning encounters arestill a crucial aspect of early childhood educationalexperiences (Goldstein, 1999), but we must teachour preservice teachers that those encounters mustbe nested within larger caring contexts. Emphasis

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should be placed on the importance of membershipin a caring community in children's cognitive, social,and emotional development.

Broadening our understanding of caring to en-compass a community perspective in this way wouldalso serve to move parent partnership from the mar-gins of teacher education to the center. Parents andfamilies would be discussed within all conversa-tions of caring in early childhood; caring communitywould be discussed within all conversations aboutparent-teacher relationships. Parent partnerships—like caring, thoughtful professional decision-making,ethical interactions with children, and so on—wouldbecome a thread thoroughly woven through everyclass session in every early childhood preserviceteacher education course.

My experience with the preservice teachers inthis study demonstrates that we cannot expect thesechanges to happen without conscious commitmenton the part of teacher educators. Assuming a sharedunderstanding of the term caring (Rogers & Webb,1991) or believing that preservice teachers will natu-rally see the value in welcoming parents and familiesinto the classroom's caring community will likelylead to disastrous results—like those I had with mypreservice teachers.

de Acosta, taking note of the racial and ethnicmismatch between the predominantly Anglo preser-vice teaching force and the growing population ofchildren of color enrolled in public schools, raises anadditional concern regarding our current approachesto teaching about parent partnerships. She writes: "Ifwe proceed along the path of least resistance, mostof the family involvement practices that will be im-plemented will reinforce traditional norms of familyinvolvement preferred by middle-class families andwill continue to disenfranchise [working class, poor,and other non-mainstream] families" (de Acosta,1996, p. 14).

Given this, a solid first step in rethinking teachereducation to center around parents as members of thecaring classroom community would be to give preser-vice teachers the opportunity to explore their own as-sumptions and beliefs about families and family rolesin education. Because preservice teachers derive theirknowledge of family involvement from their own lifeexperiences (de Acosta, 1996), it would be beneficialfor them to examine their experiences critically andbecome aware of any biases or prejudices that mightbe informing their understandings of their students'families.

Along these lines, it would also be useful to talkwith preservice teachers about the range of familystructures in US society and to move them toward ac-ceptance of those structures. Furthermore, preserviceteachers need to interrogate constructs like broken

home, single parent, normal family, unwed mother,stepfather, live-in boyfriend, teen pregnancy, freelunch, and female-headed household, and come tosee the assumptions and judgments associated withthose terms.

Preservice teachers also need to develop a reper-toire of communication skills and strategies that willallow them to enter into conversation with familieswithout feeling uncomfortable or afraid (Morris &Taylor, 1988). Speaking with parents one-on-one,speaking with a group of parents, listening activelyto parent input, giving positive and negative feed-back, making suggestions, discussing sensitive is-sues, and other typical teacher responsibilities can berole-played in classes and then practiced with par-ents under the guidance and support of cooperatingteachers. We should also strive to envision new formsof communication in which teachers and studentsand families share their thoughts and perspectives inways that are helpful to everyone involved and thatserve to strengthen the community.

Preservice teachers report feeling under-preparedto implement parent involvement strategies (McBride,1991) and feeling uncertain about their ability to doso well (Morris & Taylor, 1988; Morris et al., 1996).As a field we must commit to graduating teachersready to engage in mutually respectful partnershipwith parents. Preparing preservice teachers to have aview of caring that encompasses not only children butalso parents, families, colleagues, and administratorswill go a long way in creating the kind of learningcommunity we know to be best for children and thekind of professional environment that we know to bebest for teachers.

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