Critical possibilities for teacher education

Abstract

This article reviews the limitations of critical pedagogy in programs of teacher education, as well as several approaches of critical pedagogy, and the author, to surpass these limitations. I ask: How can teacher education manifest as a radical force in the transformation of society and cultural relations in schools for the purpose of advancing social justice, the humanization of students, and the relevancy of education curriculum? Furthermore, how can teacher education do more to challenge the status quo of an uncritical, power-obsessed teaching force which reproduces relations of domination and subordination in school? Using historical as well as current research on the political developments influencing the role of critical pedagogy in programs of teacher education, I assert that although neoliberal mandates have restricted the prominence of this approach, teacher educators, teacher education program directors and administrators can exercise agency to promote critical pedagogical concepts for the humanization of student-teachers. I offer as an example the outline of a course designed to address these goals. Although the field of teacher education subsists in a neoliberal political climate, and remains beholden to uncritical funding sources, critical pedagogy, as an alternative paradigm, offers concrete steps programs and professors of teacher education can potentially take to act as critically transformative agents in education.

Keywords

Teacher education critical pedagogy sociology of education student-teachers teacher preparation

Critical pedagogy approaches teacher education through its theoretical and political orientation; as such, it is guided by immanent critique grounded in a non-sectarian rejection of neoliberal policies. It is concerned with the commodification of schooling (K–12 and higher) effected by neoliberalism in the areas of rationality, curriculum, and pedagogy, as well as the reproduction of dominant relations of power through the force of unexamined ideology. In response, critical pedagogy scholars theorize the role of ethics and normativity in the education of teachers; deinstitutionalization of teacher education composition, curriculum, and pedagogy through increased faculty and students of color; and ideology critique through critical reflection. While scholars vary in their approach to programs of teacher education and preparation, the field of teacher education is viewed by critical pedagogy as an area of unrealized potential for realizing schools and society as democratic. For this reason, theorizing teacher education within critical pedagogy produces a spectrum of possible horizons, from abolishing colleges of education altogether, to transforming them for the purpose of humanizing social reconstruction. Courses in the social foundations of education, as I describe here, provide the conditions for the latter approach, one where teachers can interrogate the social and political history of schooling and their role as teachers within it.

Concerns of critical pedagogy in teacher education

Scholars in the field of critical pedagogy writing about teacher education indict schools and programs of teacher education—steeped in neoliberal mandates and values—for buttressing inherently dehumanizing school practices, such as standardization, tracking, labeling, surveillance, and behavior management (Freire, 1998; Groenke and Hatch, 2009; Raible and Irizarry, 2017). Groenke and Hatch (2009) argue that neoliberalism has almost completely strangled critical possibilities in teacher education, and what remains are “small openings” through which those within teacher education can teach critically. Accreditation agencies (NCATE, TEAC, ABCTE) constrain teacher education programs into complicity with overly simplistic neoliberal mandates (Groenke, 2009; Kincheloe, 2009), and actually function to foster in new teachers’ counter-productive dispositions aligned with curricular control and standardized testing (Katz, 2008). Giroux (2009) argues that neoliberal reforms have de-valued teachers’ intellectual work, turning them instead into technicians. The uniformity of testing treats society as an undifferentiated mass, not taking class, race, culture, or gender into account (Giroux, 2009). The focus on measurement has quantified teaching in place of qualifying teaching. As values conducive to global capital are almost exclusively taught, teacher education focuses on “training” teachers to find a job, and sees the purpose of schooling generally as fitting into the job market. Lost are the aims of education around citizenship, personal fulfillment, and democracy (Giroux, 2009). This wider economic net has created a regulatory culture in colleges of teacher education that increasingly rely on teaching assistants to constrain the possibilities for critical resistance by faculty (Greenwood et al., 2009).

Colleges of teacher education cannot remain isolated from the forces of neoliberalism effected through globalization, which promote school choice, competition, performance, and risk management (Apple, 2011). Neoliberalism as a result of globalization is a global economic force, and colleges of education—like all University departments—beholden to funding from both public and private sources, cannot exist outside of the global economic framework. Granting that, to what extent can colleges of education not completely acquiesce to the values and demands of neoliberal policies, or even resist? As Apple (2011) argues, colleges of teacher education can acknowledge the reality of globalization while anchoring themselves in local needs through relational thinking, as opposed to completely acquiescing or resisting. Though constrained by historical forces manifest as neoliberal ideology, teacher education remains a site for potentially transformative work that rejects the epitome of capital.

Critical pedagogy scholars decry the trend (since at least the time of A Nation at Risk, 1980s) of schools as managerial–technical realms guided by strictly positivist rationality, obsessed with methods at the expense of theory (Giroux, 1988; Bartolome, 2007; Katz, 2008; Kincheloe, 2004). Historically, colleges of education—in this case the Harvard Graduate School of Education—have placed an “overemphasis on so-called scientific methods of analysis and absolute objectivity” favoring courses in technical and methods classes without ethics and ideology courses (Macedo, 1998: xi). The problem with teacher education programs is they present education as neutral, as opposed to deeply “involved in the production of subjectivities” (Giroux, 2009: 449). The concrete results of indoctrinating teachers into a managerial–technical paradigm are objectives without ethics, based on behavioral control, where future teachers are taught to see future students as problems needing management, or so-called at risk—without asking why they are at risk, or who put them at risk.

Within a managerial–technical paradigm, education is equated with discipline. Raible and Irizarry (2017) connect methods of surveillance and behavior management supported by courses in teacher education with the school-to-prison pipeline, which pushes students out of school through involvement with school police in classroom issues that are more connected to curriculum and pedagogy (areas of teacher development, not student conduct). Through these mechanisms, students are pushed out of school and onto the streets, leaving them more vulnerable to involvement in criminal activity, ultimately leading them into prisons with maximum sentences for misdemeanor crimes as profit-generating so-called bodies. Involving students in the child welfare and juvenile justice courts system from an early age initiates a self-fulfilling prophecy where children labeled as deviants become the essential clientele for the helping professions (Rist, 2007). Katz (2008) goes as far as to say that teacher education programs in the United States are among the primary causes of America’s decline, for their near total lack of critical consciousness resulting in “ideological blindness, without epistemic or epistemological moorings” (p. 45). Teacher education programs have responded to the neoliberal climate by adopting positivist methods of control and measurement in an attempt to maintain legitimacy in the face of the same forces seeking to commodify them. At what point can a teacher education program refuse to submit to measurements that seek to impale it? What is the resistive potential of teacher education programs to reject positivist, dehumanizing approaches to education promoted by neoliberalism in favor of ideological and historical ones; and what are the reasons given for not resisting? How can teacher education programs get beyond a predominance of methods courses disconnected from context, and steeped in neutrality, surveillance and behavior management, to embrace instead a study of education rooted in historical, cultural, and social concerns?

As the role of the hidden curriculum in producing hegemony in K–12 schools is discussed in critical pedagogy, so too critical pedagogy examines the rationale for the overt and hidden curriculum in teacher education. Those writing on teacher education from a critical pedagogy perspective lambast the shrinking role of foundations in education courses examining the role of school in society (Bartolome, 2007; Evans-Winters, 2009; Groenke, 2009; Katz, 2008; King, 1991); superficial and delayed field experiences (Kincheloe, 2004); “little insight into the forces that shape consciousness and identity” (Kincheloe, 2017: 511); and overall isolation from the community of the public schools to which they relate (Reed, 2004). By delaying students’ field experience to the final year(s) of a program in favor of disconnected methods and best practices courses early on, Kincheloe (2004) bluntly states, the curriculum of the typical teacher education program in the United States stupefies. He suggests field experiences occur at the beginning, reserving coursework for social and historical study of education. Giroux (1988) argues a stupefied teaching force (meaning student-teachers lacking in concepts on the historical and social study of schooling), reproduces the patterns of domination in the larger society. In this case, teacher education programs, in response to a neoliberal assault, contribute to the production of not only a dehumanized, positivist rationality with devastating effects on children and families, but dehumanized humans as well, oblivious to the role they play in the leviathan of public education.

From the view of critical pedagogy, the effect of neoliberalism on teacher education programs renders them complicit in reproducing relations of domination and subordination to white, capitalist, patriarchy through unexamined ideology (of both individuals and programs); an over-representation of whiteness (white ideology and white embodiment); and alignment with conservative recovery efforts that quash serious inquiry into issues of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and homophobia in public schools.

Bartolome (2007) and Douglass and Nganga (2017) extend the typical treatment of individualizing study of teacher dispositions to the larger social and historical structures they articulate. In the context of a majority white, female teaching force in the United States, Bartolome (2007) describes efforts aimed at ideological clarity with students in colleges of education, in which they compare their explanations for inequality, for example, with the explanations of the dominant society. Through comparison, they will see either alignment or contrast (or overlap) and then be enabled to proceed to examine the source(s) of their perhaps hidden assumptions. King (1991) describes the importance of ideological critique at addressing the cognitive dimensions of a distorted racial consciousness, what she calls “dysconscious racism.” Without achieving ideological clarity, Bartolome (2007) argues, teachers will continue to reproduce the existing social order (p. 266). Intentions of both King (1991) and Bartolome (2007) connect with Giroux’s (1988) critique of “the technocratic, sterile rationality that dominates the wider culture, as well as teacher education, [and] pays little attention to theoretical and ideological issues … [Students] are taught a form of conceptual and political illiteracy” (p. 8). For Giroux (1988), one of the many tragedies of the managerial–technical model of schooling is it suffocates examination of ideology, where teachers have the opportunity to ask: “What is it that this society has made of me that I no longer want to be?” (p. 8). This kind of self-interrogation benefits white teachers and teachers of color alike, as it should not be assumed teachers of color have realized critical consciousness or have mastered teaching in so-called diverse settings (Bartolome, 2007).

Interrogating the mechanisms that contribute to the reality of a teaching force that is 85% white is an important complement to theorizing the preparation of this disproportionately whitewashed teaching force (Picower, 2009). It is crucial to frame efforts to ameliorate an injustice with the forces that created it. One must ask not only how can all of these white teachers teach students of color in the least harmful way, but why are there so many white teachers to begin with? How do teacher preparation programs select for whiteness? The over-representation of white teachers in K–12 schools is mirrored in colleges of education, as programs have been slow to increase their faculty of color (Nieto, 2000; Raible & Irizarry, 2017). Not only this, but as Juarez and Hayes (2014) show, colleges of education enact various disciplinary measures on critical teacher educators (both white professors and professors of color) depending on the level of their interest convergence. Increasing faculty of color in colleges of education, examining disciplinary mechanisms, and coursework in cultural politics (Giroux, 1988) could begin to address some of the primary concerns of critical pedagogy about teacher preparation.

To move beyond the white machine of schooling (K–12 and University), colleges of education will have to resist the conservative recovery efforts of white supremacy, aimed at recovering a perceived loss of status to the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s (Kincheloe, 2004, 2009; Nieto, 2000). Such so-called recovery aims to silence issues of racism, feminism, and non-heterosexual expressions of identity, rendering colleges of education institutions of patriarchal control (Vavrus, 2009). To reverse this, Vavrus (2009) suggests programs in teacher preparation provide their students with opportunities to design lessons that explicitly connect their content to issues of sexuality, for example. While the value of incorporating issues of sexuality, gender, racism, and culture into teacher preparation programs cannot be denied, the extent to which this incorporation differs from hegemony is not clear. Baszile (2008) shows how reflection, with its potential for critical transformation, often becomes a race-neutral practice in teacher education. Many within teacher education have accommodated, and subsequently neutered critical pedagogy, or provided reasons why it cannot work in reality (ignoring Freire’s use of it with countless people in numerous countries) (Ellsworth, 1988; Neumann, 2013). Some within critical pedagogy have theorized minor opportunities for critical pedagogy in teacher education (Groenke and Hatch, 2009). Utopian visions of critical pedagogy to reverse the trend of positivism in teacher education vary to the degree teacher education is envisioned as a space for revolutionary praxis. After reviewing the approach to these problems within critical pedagogy, I provide an example of one such opportunity through which future teachers are encouraged to see their work historically within the larger political project of schooling in the United States, a project that has always been political and for the benefit of those in power.

Critical pedagogical approaches

As school came to be theorized by economic determinists in the sociology of education (Anyon, 1980; Bowles and Gintis, 1976), some called for a total rejection of the school as an institution (Illich, 1971). The overwhelming presence of inequality despite the equalizing rhetoric of school condemns schools—and the colleges of education that staff them—as complicit in reproducing teachers who do not function to bring about systemic change. To correct this, Aronowitz (2017) proposes subsuming colleges of teacher education within the general liberal arts departments, reasoning that this can improve the general education of the teacher:

[W]e need a new regime of teacher education founded on the idea that the educator must be educated well. It would surely entail abolishing the current curricula of education schools, if not the schools themselves. Teacher training should be embedded in general education, not in ‘methods’, many of which are useless; instruction should include knowledge other than credential and bring the union/movement/organic intellectuals into the classroom. (Aronowitz, 2017: 133)

Aronowitz first condemns the curricula of education schools, and then the schools themselves, suggesting that perhaps a radicalized curriculum may mitigate the problems of teacher education. Interestingly, neoliberal voices often likewise call for the abolition of colleges of education. Like other writers on the subject (Bartolome, 2007; Katz, 2008; Kincheloe, 2004), Aronowitz (2017) deplores the teaching of methods separated from practice. Like his peers (Apple, 2004), Aronowitz (2017) questions the official curriculum, and expresses concern about the definition of knowledge in teacher education, as limited to what is credentialed. Aronowitz (2017) calls for the separation of education from schooling, pointing to a time when education was not conceived as limited to the space-time of the school. Before compulsory education in the United States, Aronowitz (2017) shows that, through book clubs, lecture circuits, and literacy classes, unions played a significant role in non-work related educational pursuits. Aronowitz (2017) reasons that schools have monopolized education, and by breaking up schools of education, education in the anthropological sense can be recovered through locally organized interests and needs.

Kincheloe (2004) argues that colleges of arts and sciences, while not capable of replacing teacher education do have a role to play in the education of teachers, insofar as in many cases an undergraduate degree is sufficient to earn a teacher credential in many states. For all intents and purposes, liberal arts colleges are already educating teachers, though not explicitly, while teacher education institutions bear the brunt of the so-called failure of public school teachers to show adequate yearly progress on standardized tests. For Kincheloe (2004), as for Freire (1998), teacher education programs must be rooted in ethics, emphasizing the normative dimensions of schooling. Freire (1998) rails against teacher education as positivist-technical, calling for it to instead be grounded in specific forms of knowledge (similar to Kincheloe’s epistemological taxonomy). For Freire (1998), “Teacher preparation should never be reduced to a form of training. Rather, teacher preparation should go beyond the technical preparation of teachers and be rooted in the ethical formation both of selves and of history” (p. 23). Kincheloe (2004) calls the concept of an ethical teacher education critical complex teacher education, which refuses positivist trends of universal, abstract predictability and measurability, in favor of a stance which views teaching as an ever-changing, epistemological project concerned with power and social justice that

[o]penly embraces democratic values; healthy visions of race, class, gender, and sexual equality; and the necessity of exposing the effects of power in shaping individual identity and educational purpose…A central tenet of a critical complex pedagogy of teacher education…attempts to reclaim the cultural capital and critical knowledges of the oppressed. (pp. 35–37)

Critical pedagogy approaches the education of teachers through the critical spirit that is its theoretical foundation, perpetually interrogating mechanisms that devalue and degrade human life—socially, politically, and economically.

While Aronowitz (2017) theorizes the dissolution of formal teacher education programs into liberal arts programs, and Kincheloe (2004) sees a critical middle ground, Giroux (2009) argues that schools of education are needed for the humanization of society, though in a radically altered form. For Giroux (2009), liberal arts education cannot take the place of teacher education, but rather, more than teachers knowing their subject well, they need “a fundamental understanding of issues specific to the economic, political, and cultural nature of schooling … to learn an interdisciplinary language that focuses on the history, sociology, philosophy, political economy, and political science of schooling” (p. 446). Giroux’s (1988) language of critique and language of possibility embraces a normative-ethical approach to schooling, and provides students and teachers with a vocabulary to critique the ideological dimensions of schooling while at the same time proposing more just, humane, liberating alternatives. For Giroux (1988, 2009), as for Kincheloe (2004) and Freire (1998), teacher education, like schooling itself, is rooted in questions on the relationship between knowledge and power, in “the need for student teachers to recognize that power relations correspond to forms of school knowledge that both distort the truth and produce it” (Giroux, 2009: 449).

If teacher education programs are not abolished, but rather retained, re-formed, radicalized, what does that look like? How can teacher education programs be changed from within to embody an ethical orientation? Critical pedagogy scholars recommend an array of approaches at the institutional and curricular levels.

Institutional approach

Ladson-Billings (2009) and Nieto (2000), theorizing how colleges of education might progress toward more critical, systemic change, propose recruiting more faculty of color. Raible and Irizarry (2017) recommend that, for the teaching force to more closely “reflect U.S. society’s demographics, approximately 1 in 4 individuals participating in teacher education programs would be people of color, and one in five would come from a home where a language other than English is spoken” (p. 469). This landscape looks very different from current demographics in teacher education programs, where more than 90% of teachers are white females (https://www2.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf). The disparity between naturally occurring demographics and those seen in the composition of faculty in higher education connects to the disparity in white students and students of color attending college for 4-year undergraduate degrees (https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/data-mine/2016/03/23/study-college-graduation-gap-between-blacks-whites-still-growing). Addressing disproportionate faculty of color means inquiring into the racist sorting mechanisms of K–12 schools, which creates obstacles to equal education, as well as personal concepts of an academic identity. Everyday school practices such as tracking, ability grouping, resistance to bi-lingual education, surveillance, behaviorist control paradigms, the overt and hidden curriculum, and a racialized special education classification system (as well as the increasingly expensive cost of college, combined with shrinking federal and state funding) progressively filter students out of the culture of academia. Increasing faculty of color, then, implicates increasing equal educational opportunity for students of color as well; which, as in the case of students learning English in New Mexico, means increasing financial resources (Martinez Yazzie v State of NM).

Nieto (2000) suggests rethinking admissions requirements to reward bilingual applicants, and/or provide incentives for student-teachers to learn a second language spoken by a large segment of their students. Giroux (1988) describes specific steps colleges of education can take to re-work their admissions and pedagogy at a systemic level, i.e. co-teaching and co-authoring built into graduate studies. As one example, admissions criteria and curricula coursework, rather than being individually based and standardized, could be collaborative and located in the community context through group applications detailing a desired project on which to work together. Collaborative work in the community would help to bring research on education out of the private world of academia into the public sphere, helping to bridge the divide between public schools and teacher education programs (Giroux, 2009).

To strengthen the tenuous bonds between public schools, communities and colleges of education, Reed (2004) advises teacher education interrogate the concept of social capital in philosophy and practice. Recognizing and valuing social capital within teacher education as a resource frequently exchanged in urban communities of color reveals teachers disconnected from their school communities as socially impoverished, and culpable for the lack of relationships with parents and community stakeholders. Legitimating social capital in colleges of teacher education implies that teachers have an equal responsibility with parents to take part in the community of the school beyond their classroom, rather than scapegoating parents for their lack of involvement in their children’s education. Recognizing the value of social capital, Reed (2004) envisions the formation of “learning communities” to strengthen ties between students, teachers, colleges of education, and community. All of these, however, require that teachers have the spiritual, emotional, and mental energy to do so, as opposed to the intentional over-extending of teachers through large class sizes, before and after school duty, and multiple subjects and grade levels in a single day with little planning time.

Curricular approach

Greenwood et al. (2009) call for deinstitutionalizing teacher education within individual courses through several avenues: supplementing critical pedagogy with place-based education, encouraging risk-taking, and replacing the traditional teacher-driven grading process with self and peer evaluations. Using place-based education in tandem with critical pedagogy, Greenwood et al. (2009) aim to redefine learning as extending beyond the classroom.

Beyond extending an agreed-upon definition of learning outside of the institution, Freire (1998) and Kincheloe (2004) theorize the epistemological foundation of a critical pedagogy of teacher education as composed of multiple and interrelated forms of knowledge. For Freire (1998), this includes the conviction that “to teach is not to transfer knowledge but to create the possibilities for the production or construction of knowledge” (p. 30); methodological rigor (not accepting knowledge as closed or finished); epistemological curiosity; ethics and aesthetics; words incarnated in example; risk, acceptance of what is new; rejection of discrimination; and critical reflection on practice. Freire’s (1998) forms of teacher knowledge re-define the foundation of teacher knowledge. Like Freire (1998), Kincheloe (2004) theorizes how appreciation of new knowledge forms in teacher education can manifest the critical complex teacher education he envisages. Kincheloe’s (2004) forms of teacher knowledge are composed of empirical-situated, experiential, normative, critical, ontological, and reflective-synthetic. This meta-epistemology counters traditional teacher education typically conceived of as a set of skills rather than as bodies of knowledge (p. 27). While Kincheloe (2004) and Freire (1998) theorize a critical epistemology for teacher education, in no way are they doing so for the purpose of defining the field in advance, or creating a selective tradition. A critical epistemology precedes content and aims to show prospective teachers broader ways of thinking about school, knowledge, and themselves as teachers. Furthermore, it offers an example of what could potentially replace courses on abstract methods (lesson planning, classroom management, etc.) in colleges of teacher education, a replacement I describe in the following.

Opposed to the mistake of teaching systemic functioning of schools (Kincheloe, 2004) in teacher education programs, Giroux (1988) proposes reorganizing teacher education as cultural politics, organized around the concepts: history, language, culture, and power. For Giroux (1988, 2009), teacher education should encourage students to connect knowledge and power, that is, how certain forms of knowledge legitimate relations of power. Articulating the relation between knowledge and power would support student-teachers questioning the official history of their content, and perhaps provide them with a rationale (sadly needed) for validating knowledges of indigenous communities, women, and the knowledge of students and their families.

Nieto (2000, 2002) and Evans-Winters (2009) implore colleges of teacher education to “take a stand” on issues of social justice and diversity through infusing these topics in every course to “make [them] ubiquitous” (Nieto, 2000: 183). Macedo (1998) calls for a course on ideology as a requirement in programs of teacher education, while Katz (2008) states that it is only increased courses in educational foundations that can renew teacher education for democracy. King (1991), likewise, addresses the role that coursework on social foundations of education and ideology critique plays in revealing “dysconscious racism.”

Others (Bartolome, 2007; Douglass and Nganga, 2017; Giroux, 1988; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Nieto, 2009) have evaluated the role of critical reflection in coursework to denaturalize identity and interrogate ideological and pedagogical assumptions about students and families. Kincheloe (2004) calls this kind of work “ideological disembedding” (p. 39). Critical reflection, as an essential element of what Freire (1970, 1998) describes as praxis, can help student-teachers develop critical consciousness, and should also extend to professors of education as well. While reflection has been theorized as a critical intervention in teacher education, Baszile (2008) shows how reflection as practiced in teacher education is premised on a notion of the subjective self as unified and singular. From this premise, Baszile (2008) argues, reflection is used to neutralize examinations of race and ideology which direct attention to the discontinuities rather than the seamless, repressed consciousness.

Finally, to inspire leaders in the area of critical pedagogy in teacher education, Apple (2011) states, we need to use the media to widely circulate “compelling descriptions of existing critically democratic teacher education programs, and of their effects in creating deeply committed and successful teachers of all students” (p. 224). Doing so requires studying to what extent students of critically democratic teacher education programs have continued a critical practice after graduating. Finding these programs would constitute a first step toward documenting and publishing description of this kind of institutionalized resistance, or what Apple (2011) calls “nonreformist reforms,” and would perhaps provide incentive to radicalize more conformist teacher education curricula (p. 230).

Critical teacher education in context

As reviewed above, critical scholars provide an in-depth analysis of how teacher education programs function to preserve the status quo, as well as concrete steps programs and professors can take to resist trends favorable to neoliberalism and corporate capitalist interests. To illuminate one of these approaches, I offer the pillars of a critical social foundations in education course within teacher preparation.

Social foundations of education curriculum emerge from a need to contextualize teaching and school within social and political forces which create and sustain schooling. Rather than perpetuate the myth that schooling acts as an equalizing force—a sorting mechanism—through which everyone has an equal chance to succeed, this course presents the history of public school in the United States as steeped in political and ideological goals, goals that constantly shift as power shifts. Exploding the myth of schools as neutral places consequently leads teachers to interrogate their own role as teachers within the institution of schooling.

The first step in denaturalizing schooling with student-teachers involves presenting the history of public schooling as a contested space, a space historically tense with conflict. The four-part series, School: The story of American public education (Patton and Mondale, 2001) offers an overview of the political goals of public schooling in the United States from the 18th century to the present. The film documents the progressive challenges to the common school movement, as well as how the institution of schooling changed as society changed, especially as marginalized groups gained more political power in the 1960s, social gains often minimized in the neoliberal climate where these struggles are ostensibly over. When student-teachers learn about the racialized history of IQ testing, for example, they more readily question commonly accepted practices which abound in school settings today, such as standardized testing and traditional, anglocentric curriculum.

The use of documentary film on the history of public schooling provides a powerful medium through which student-teachers can situate their practice. Beyond the Mesas (Holzman et al., 2006) offers a vivid historical account of how boarding schools were explicitly and brutally used to deculturalize Native Americans in the United States. The history of forcing Native children to leave their homes, their families, their cultures and identities offers a foray into discussions of how schooling today functions to assimilate and or deculturalize people of color. What these films and the discussions they lead to demonstrate is that the political project of schooling is anything but over—it is in fact thriving.

A course designed to expose student teachers to a view of schooling grounded in social and political history avoids a pedantic approach to critical teacher education. Along with the historical context of schooling presented through film, Spring (2018) offers a textbook of this history and the current topics debated within schooling, such as sex and religious education, vouchers, ethnic studies and the gendered history of teaching. Students as future teachers are introduced to relevant topics which locate them at a crossroads of interests. No longer can they think of themselves as neutral, or their work as free of political ideology. Seeing teachers in film administer racist IQ tests to students in the early 20th century—tests which at the time teachers understood as scientific and objective—challenges student-teachers to be on the right side of history, to question commonly accepted practices neutralized in the so-called scientific objectivity. Rather than presenting a deterministic view, courses such as this in the social foundations of education communicate to student-teachers that, to truly help students as they want to, they cannot remain in the dark about the history and present-day impact of their choices as teachers.

Social foundations of education courses should proliferate in programs of teacher education. Future teachers cannot conceive of their work existing in a vacuum, disconnected from political forces. Teachers must come to see their work, every decision or lack of decision, as deeply political, always serving someone’s interests. The most empowering aspect of these courses is that while student-teachers accept their work as political, they can choose to serve their students and the role of social justice in society, rather than serve the powerful through ignorance.

Conclusion

With thousands of teacher education programs throughout the United States, the field of teacher education contains immense potential for social transformation. While this potential is promising, the converse is also true: that without explicit orientation to social justice, teacher education remains an area of study that serves the interests of the powerful and maintains the status quo. Critical pedagogy offers a language to critique teacher education for the purpose of realizing its humanizing potential—it challenges teachers to question commonsense assumptions and traditional ways of teaching. Promoting courses in the social foundations of education offers one approach to increase the criticality of teacher education (Kitts and Peele-Eady, 2019). Laying bare the inherent bias that permeates the history of schooling is one approach to help student-teachers contextualize their work in today’s political climate. This approach also de-personalizes the critical project insofar as the course is not about the predilections of the professor or a guilt trip for students, so to speak. Ironically, reviewing the history of public education is the most neutral way to present the total lack of neutrality involved in teaching. Teacher education administrators, department chairs and professors would move the field of teacher education forward by promoting, cross-listing, and creating courses such as these, for the benefit of students and teachers alike.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Hope Kitts

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