Abstract
The role education plays in society has been contested in the United States since the inception of public education. Historically this contention has produced a delicate balance between promoting the social justice concerns of educating democratic citizens and the disciplinary concerns of individual intellectual development. Teacher preparation programs in American normal schools, colleges, and universities have traditionally struck a similar balance between theory and practice. In the past several decades, however, the rise of neoliberalism in American politics has shifted the balance away from equity, diversity, and inclusivity. The purpose of this study is to provide an account of the lived experiences of teacher candidates with the phenomena of being and becoming “woke” within a teacher education program that reflects neoliberal values but maintains a stated commitment to social justice. This study includes narrative vignettes that explore the phenomenality of “wokeness” as it manifests in the public-school environment and the teacher education program. It also addresses the effects of neoliberalism on teacher candidates’ willingness and ability to take up social justice for themselves, their students, and society.
Highlights
As a teacher educator who has witnessed the neoliberal transformation of American public schools, I am interested in exploring the following question: How might being and becoming woke manifest in a neoliberal teacher education program that claims to value social justice?
One possible way to resolve the contradictions of American public education, in favor of social justice, is to require teacher candidates to become woke to the power-knowledge relations that shaped their learning, as well as the continuing biases that define the limits of their pedagogical imaginary
The neoliberal framework depends upon the existence of “lower orders” who receive a “bad education” from failing public schools; teacher candidates are likely to be woke to the idea of educational disparities even if they are personally ignorant of the specific causes and consequences social inequality
Summary
In the United States, teacher education has reached a pivotal moment. Devised for a monocultural agrarian society on the trailing cusp of the Enlightenment, American public education has routinely fallen short of meeting the needs of a student body whose diversity is increasingly intersectional and manifold (Taylor, 2010). Tribalism and corporatism, the commodification of knowledge and the commercialization of higher education has emerged as one of the most significant obstacles to a socially just education in the United States (Harkavy, 2006). In the past several years, woke has been appropriated by various individuals, commercial entities, and institutions throughout American society as a generally antiracist or anti-oppressive stance. Woke has become shorthand for a set of dispositions concerning equity, diversity, and inclusivity, regardless of whether candidates engage in any form of anti-oppressive praxis to address specific inequities, promote diversity, or meaningfully include marginalized individuals and communities. As a teacher educator who has witnessed the neoliberal transformation of American public schools, I am interested in exploring the following question: How might being and becoming woke manifest in a neoliberal teacher education program that claims to value social justice?
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