Status Quo or Innovation? Transforming Teacher Education in Hostile Times

Abstract

Teacher education is at a critical crossroads as colleges and schools of education contend with decreased student enrollment, legislative strategizing to limit what is taught, and general pushback regarding what teachers should learn about teaching and their students. As such, the field of teacher education must examine how to collectively rebuff the current movement by policy makers and elected officials who have formalized their desire to maintain the status quo in education. They continue to lobby against social justice in education, critical race theory, multicultural perspectives in teaching, and culturally responsive and relevant pedagogical approaches to classroom instruction, among others. This paper examines the current moment in educational history and highlights opportunities that may transform teacher education policy to become more justice centered.

Public discourse and wilful incommensurability: a case for attentive free speech

“…As discussed below, an equally legitimate concern is that certain speech can indeed cause harm to individuals who identify as minorities. This is buttressed by the fact that, recently, some politicians have undertaken to suppress freedom of speech by seeking to remove or whitewash the teaching of certain subjects to avoid dealing with narratives that highlight the painful history of slavery or the genocide of Indigenous populations ( Benson, 2022 ; Brown, 2024 ). For such reasons, if we, the authors, had to choose between the two forms of safetyism, we would readily make the case that expressive safetyism as manifested in universities and other institutions is far more understandable and less objectionable than totalizing safetyism.…”