This praxis article outlines the value of using a critical and dialogical model (CDM) to teach multicultural social justice education to preservice teachers. Based on practitioner research, the article draws on the author's own teaching experiences to highlight how key features of CDM can be used to help pre-service teachers move beyond thinking about multicultural education as ethnic tidbits. Illustrative examples of CDM-in-use demonstrate that learning about multicultural social justice education is a social and developmental process that requires teacher educators to scaffold complex ideas by using dialogical approaches to learning that incrementally build on emergent and shared knowledge.

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Educational policies across the globe reflect the ascendancy of neoliberalism. According to neoliberalism, the market represents a superior mechanism to govern (Peters, 2012), and thus, the role of the state is to enable the agency of the market (Rose, 1999). In the United States, the federal report A Nation at Risk (1983) formalized the direct influence of a neoliberal rationality on the formation of educational policies. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) (2001) and The Race to the Top (2010) represent successive assertions of market values on educational reform. At the same time, there is a fundamental contradiction within neoliberal logic: while the state is to refrain from interfering in the market, it must simultaneously intervene to govern schools (Hursh, 2005). Based on these trends, the articles in this special issue highlight critical tensions between public versus private values, practices, and discourses that emerge from the proliferation of a neoliberal logic into the educational sphere. In different ways, each of these articles map out a unique facet of neoliberalism in education to complicate the often totalizing critiques of marketbased logics in order to demonstrate the complex ways that people rearticulate and resist education policy in an era of neoliberal ascendancy.

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The purpose of this study was to develop an innovative addition to the curriculum to help preservice teachers cultivate an understanding of poverty. Using technology, an interdisciplinary team created two online learning modules entitled Teacher as Learning Facilitator and Teacher as Anthropologist. Preservice teachers valued the newly developed modules and the activities that accompanied them. In addition, preservice teachers demonstrated their knowledge and awareness of poverty as it relates to teaching and learning practices. Some preservice teachers viewed poverty as an asset but others viewed it as a deficit. A discussion of lessons learned about collaboration and curriculum development concludes the paper.