Teacher Preparation and Corporate Education Reform: Learning from Conversations with Critical Teacher Educators

Open Access
- Author:
- Knotts, Michelle Renee
- Graduate Program:
- Curriculum and Instruction
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 09, 2015
- Committee Members:
- Kathleen Mary Collins, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Jacqueline Edmondson, Committee Member
Wanda Knight, Committee Member
Anne Whitney, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Teacher Education
Critical Pedagogy
Corporate Reform Paradigm of Education
Education Policy
Neoliberalism - Abstract:
- This qualitative inquiry explores the practices and lived experiences of critical teacher educators who have taken a stance against the corporate reform paradigm of education in their scholarship, activism, and teaching. Participants are leaders in the movement to resist corporate education reform and teacher educators who prepare preservice teachers for working in the current sociopolitical context; they include: Dr. Wayne Au, Dr. Julie Gorlewski, Dr. Denisha Jones, and Dr. P.L. Thomas. The study focuses on the challenges of preparing teacher candidates in the current sociopolitical context and examines how participants enact a critical pedagogy of teacher education that includes authentic writing, critical literacy, and student-centered approaches in order to meet these challenges. The researcher describes four commitments shared by participants: engagement, scholarship, advocacy, and reflection. Those shared commitments are explored through two themes in order to demonstrate how participants 1) politicize teacher education and 2) humanize teacher education. Data were collected through interviews and documents, and the researcher analyzed the data using an inductive, thematic analysis, guided by a critical theoretical framework and the tenets of critical pedagogy. Findings from this study reveal how critical teacher educators’ lived experiences influence their commitments and how their stances toward corporate education reform influence their pedagogy. The researcher makes recommendations for teacher educators and teacher education based on the findings – namely that critical teacher educators should do more to make sense of and engage with the movement to resist corporate education reform and that teacher education can better prepare teachers for the current sociopolitical context with explicit attention to the issues that contribute to schools as they are and by fostering hope and courage to see new possibilities for schools as they could be. Implications for preservice teachers and their experiences as beginning teachers are also discussed. This study reveals how efforts to politicize and humanize teacher education can better prepare teachers as empowered scholars and reflective practitioners who are able to make sense of the corporate reform paradigm and envision alternatives to it. This research challenges conceptions of teacher education that emphasize technical training and compliance in this era of neoliberalism.