Although shifting modern conceptions of 'Teacher' may give the impression that teacher education is something less than a cohesive endeavor, these shifts have been a fundamental element of the history of American teacher education. Indeed, historians and teacher educators can easily carve out their field’s history, particularly if they begin cutting at the advent of state-sponsored teacher preparation programs, the earliest of which can be traced to the American adoption of normal schools. The purpose of this paper is to investigate two of the earliest shifts in these conceptions of Teacher, as present in the histories of the Framingham State Normal School of Massachusetts and the Oswego State Normal School of New York. These histories, starting within 25 years of one another and thus developing in similar contexts, foreshadow the elusive nature of Teacher, as well as the current volatility of teacher preparation programs. Like the ideological and theoretical gulfs separating many modern traditional and fast-track alternative preparation programs, the preparation of teachers at Framingham and Oswego developed from disparate foundations: the power and dynamism of principal Cyrus Peirce pushing the Framingham State Normal School from the brink of collapse, versus the so-called beginning of educational theory through the importation and adaptation of Pestalozzian learning principles by Oswego State Normal School’s founder, Edward A. Sheldon. Our document review and analysis of both primary and secondary sources related to each program will help tell the early stories of each program, and how the gulfs between them led to the cultivation among American normalites of very different conceptions of 'Teacher'.

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