The intersections of selves and policies: A poetic inquiry into the hydra of teacher education

Abstract

This article explores the intersection of selves and policies for teacher educators in an era of teacher education reform. Borne out of a promise to one another to write about our experiences navigating increasingly complex market-driven, neoliberal attacks on our work and world, we collected data across several years that documented our attempt to break our silence (Lorde, 1977) and explore how we, as teacher educators, make sense of neoliberal reforms and policies in teacher preparation. We draw specifically on Dunn’s theory of the Hydra of Teacher Education (2016), alongside literature on reforms and policies in teacher preparation and teacher educators’ forms of resistance to frame our work, and utilize arts-based poetic inquiry methodology (Prendergast, 2009; Rath, 2001) to explore the real, everyday implications of educational policy in our lives and in our careers. The poems we created as a “performative act” (Prendergast, 2009, p. xxiii) revealed that our experiences seemed to follow a cycle from hopelessness, to silence, to acquiescence, to collective resistance. We look carefully at this last portion of the cycle in our work, wondering how, if at all, teacher educators can resist the neoliberalization of teacher preparation. We conclude with implications for research, policy, and the practice of teacher education as we write to understand, write to resist, and write to survive.

“I Don’t Want to Come Off as Pushing an Agenda”: How Contexts Shaped Teachers’ Pedagogy in the Days After the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

“…For teacher educators, this should act as a renewed call for preparing preservice teachers to (a) consider the “ethics” of neutrality and of framing justice and equity issues as “polarizing” or “controversial”; (b) learn how to adapt curriculum to respond to, and create space for reflection about, current events and national crises or traumas (Simmons, Baggett, & Eggleton, 2014); and (c) work within and around policies that may limit their creativity, agency, and collaboration. Furthermore, teacher educators and colleges of education should work to adopt programming that is integrative and works against a technocratic orientation to teaching (Cross, Dunn, & Dotson, 2018; Dunn, 2016; Giroux, 1997; Mehta, 2013). That is, teacher preparation programs that focus solely on “strategies,” lesson planning, and classroom management, and that divorce pedagogical methods courses from foundations, educational history, and justice and equity courses, serve to reinforce and perpetuate a perspective that there is such a thing as “apolitical” teaching or “neutral” content.…”

‘Nice to Meet You Again’: When Heutagogy Met Blended Learning in Teacher Education, Post-Pandemic Era

“…Together with the curriculum and pedagogy facets in teachers' identity, the heutagogy approach considers the 'good teacher' as the humanist educator who acts on the basis of care and concern [16] and serves as an agent of norms and values [24]. Emotional and social aspects received prominence here and call for students' well-being.…”

Playing Chess When You Only Have a Couple of Pawns: Policy Advocacy in Teacher Education

“…American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) has offered advocacy training for teacher educators to engage in advocacy at the federal level (Aydarova et al, 2021; McLaughlin et al, 2016). Some teacher educators have documented their individual struggles to act counter to neoliberal policies and assessments at their own institutions (Cross et al, 2018; Henning et al, 2018). Others have shifted their advocacy and activism toward the critique of educators’ professional organizations—especially those coopted into neoliberal reforms of corporatizing teacher education and engaged in advancing agendas of their sponsors (Golden & Bieler, 2018, 2019).…”