Beyond the limits of theoretical discourse in teacher education: Towards a critical pedagogy

Abstract

This paper argues for the development of a critical pedagogy through teacher education. Current theoretical discourse in teacher education, represented by radical, rationalist, and traditionalist perspectives, has failed to provide an adequate rationale for teacher education, given the multi-dimensionality of the teacher's task in contemporary schooling. Teacher education has failed to provide teachers with the critical capacities needed to guard mass schooling against political interference and its use as an agency of control rather than emancipation. The problem in part lies in the limitations of the ideological basis of each perspective, but more significantly in a common failure to account for a number of fundamental structures that constrain and contain teacher education. These structures are identified and discussed with a view to providing the context for an adequate rationale for teacher education. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of key issues, such as the nature of knowledge in teacher education programmes and the ‘problem’ of theory and practice, in an attempt to lay the ground for the development of a critical pedagogy through teacher education.