Teaching Preservice Teachers to Read the Discourse of School Reform

In this article, I argue for redesigned preservice teacher education courses that provide opportunities for teaching students to read the discourse of school reform, especially in terms of how that discourse both restricts and builds capacity for the kinds of teachers they want to become. Drawing from the experiences of three preservice teachers who opted out of teaching, I attempt to show how their experiences intersected with my own journey from experimentalist training into critical hermeneutic work and, more recently, into policy and editorial arenas to produce sites in which to explore the discourse of current reform efforts in literacy education in the United States.