Explicit Goals, Implicit Values, and the Unintentional Stifling of Pluralism: An Examination of a Social Studies Teacher Education Vision Statement

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to evaluate a social studies teacher education vision statement as it relates to Parker's (2003) “advanced” conception of citizenship education for democratic society. The vision statement, titled “Powerful Vision of Social Studies,” was created by a group of practicing teachers and teacher educators as part of a seminar focusing on the effective mentoring of beginning teachers. It represents an attempt by the participants to answer the question of what sort of social studies practice is worth mentoring beginning teachers for. Using constructs of the “culturally acceptable self” derived from recent work in cultural psychology to guide our analysis, it is argued that the vision statement could unintentionally constrain understandings of democracy rooted in pluralism by inadvertently reflecting taken-for-granted cultural beliefs held as middle-class European-American.