Towards a Non-Managerial, Non-Helper Vision of Teaching: Documenting a Fusion of Horizons for Student Empowerment

Teacher educators have been investigating ways to rob the demographic mismatch of this disempowering history. How can white preservice teachers be prepared to do meaningful work with communities of color? Scholars have been skeptical of the ability of white teachers to become fully culturally relevant. Aaron Schutz worries when teachers with privilege in relation to their students seek to "help" their students, they necessarily formulate their students as having deficit knowledge. If this is true, then what are we to make of programs like Teach For America (TFA) that attempt to deal with problems stemming from the above demographic mismatch in education by paradoxically recruiting mostly white graduates from elite universities to teach in under-resourced communities? Does the willingness of these recruits to "help" communities of color necessarily make them oppressive in the way Schutz identifies? In this article, Spencer Smith theorizes an answer to this question as well as necessary components of the theory of emancipatory teacher education. Using interview data from a study of teachers trained by TFA, Smith argues training in culturally relevant teaching does little to prepare teachers to succeed in culturally diverse classrooms unless it includes some engagement with the cultural Other. Smith pairs these data with the work of Herbert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor who argue encounter with the Other can be a Gadamerian "fusion of horizons." Finally, Smith demonstrates how this fusion of horizons allows teachers to escape Schutz's worries and move closer to embodying culturally responsive teaching.