Chapter 1: Unsettling Beliefs: A Cultural Studies Approach to Teacher Education

This chapter deals with how people become teachers, how they take up that new identity of teacher. By using examples from student work in teacher education courses in urban settings, the chapter argues that students doing cultural studies work themselves on the representations of teachers and education in general leads to critical and reflective identity work. In this way, the hope is to both deal with unsettling beliefs that we all bring to new situations and to explicitly unsettle beliefs as we pursue teacher education in the transformative tradition.