Reflection: Moving From Activities to Activist

When people ask what I teach and I respond, “Education,” this is often followed up with, “I know you are at the university, but what do you teach?” This question implies, what subject area or field is my specialization. To which I explain that I teach teachers. Just as this can be a revelation to others that teaching is in itself a field of study, I too am surprised that others are unaware of the years of training, preparation, and schooling required to be a teacher—and that is before a teacher’s first year in the classroom.

As a critical theorist and educator, I am often caught in the ethical paradox of critiquing a historically marginalizing institution that perpetuates privilege and reifies structures of injustice, while preparing the next generation of teachers to participate in that system and doing so within the safety of the academy. Education has an additional layer of complexity due to the fact that most of our teacher candidates have already participated in the same institution of schooling for their formative years. Therefore, teacher education is the simultaneous peeling away of layers of misinformation, a series of activities to make the implicit explicit, and calling into question fictional truths.