Collective criticality: towards sustainable socially just teacher education programmes

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teacher educators report preservice teachers often have difficulty understanding the structural nature of oppression in the United States. A common explanation for this disconnect is the lack of time reserved to discuss such issues within teacher education programmes. When teachers enter P-12 classrooms without an understanding of the ways inequities and oppression perpetuate systemically in the United States, they can act in ways detrimental to their students of colour. In this article, I hope to join the conversation being had by scholars in the field of teacher education who push for programmatic reforms to support preservice teachers in the development of criticality. To do so, I review and seek to reapply selected teacher education scholarship through a critique of neoliberalism. I end by advancing three areas for consideration in programmatic reform: developmentally designed cohorts; collective planning/sequencing and action-based research.