The Cultural Work of Teacher Education

Engaging teacher education as cultural work positions teacher educators and pre-service teachers as cultural workers. Cultural workers foreground the cultural complexities of their situated experiences while aiming to produce cultures that transform prevailing inequalities and injustices in public education. Doctoral students are also cultural workers translating the world of academia and their role in it as they learn to educate teacher candidates. How doctoral candidates engage in this cultural work depends greatly on the degree to which their faculty mentors are able to reveal the contradictions and opportunities for expansive learning that co-exist within schools of education and individual departments such as curriculum and learning. This article looks at this conundrum from the perspectives of a doctoral student and a senior faculty member.