Critical Pedagogy and Teacher Education: Radicalizing Prospective Teachers

Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Bartolome, Lilia I

The task of successfully preparing teachers in the United State to effectively work with an ever-increasing culturally and linguistically diverse student body represents a pressing challenge for teacher educators. Unfortunately, much of this practice of equipping prospective teachers for working with learners from different backgrounds revolves around exposing these future educators to what are perceived as the best practical strategies to ensure the academic and linguistic development of their students. Gaining access to and actively creating methods and materials for the classroom is certainly an important step towards effective teaching. However, this practical focus far too often occurs without examining teachers' own assumptions, values, and beliefs and how this ideological posture informs, often unconsciously, their perceptions and actions when working with linguistic-minority and other politically, socially, and economically subordinated students.

"Ideology" is used here to refer to the framework of thought constructed and held by members of a society to justify or rationalize an existing social order. As Antonia Darder, Rodolfo Torres and Marta Baltodano (2002) point out, what is important is

that ideology be understood as existing at the deep, embedded psychological structures of the personal ity. Ideology more often than not manifests itself in the inner histories and experiences that give rise to questions of subjectivity as they are constructed by individual needs, drives, and passions, as well as the changing material conditions and social foundations of a society, (p. 13)

In this paper, I discuss the importance of infusing teacher education curricula with critical pedagogical principles in order to prepare educators to aggressively name and interrogate potentially harmful ideologies and practices in the schools and classrooms where they work. I maintain that teachers need to develop political and ideological clarity in order to increase the chances of academic success for all students. I also argue that it is imperative that these educators instill in their students in K-12 public schools the same kind of critical consciousness that enables them to read and act upon the world around them.

"Political clarity" refers to the ongoing process by which individuals achieve ever-deepening consciousness of the sociopolitical and economic realities that shape their lives and their capacity to transform such material and symbolic conditions. It also refers to the process by which individuals come to understand the possible linkages between macro-level political, economic, and social variables and subordinated groups' academic performance in the micro-level classroom (Bartolome, 1994). "Ideological clarity" refers to the process by which individuals struggle to identify and compare their own explanations for the existing socioeconomic and political hierarchy with the dominant society's. The juxtaposing of ideologies should help teachers to better understand if, when, and how their belief systems uncritically reflect those of the dominant society and thus maintain unequal and what should be unacceptable conditions that so many students experience on a daily basis (Bartolome, 2000).

One effective way to ensure that pre-service teachers begin to develop and increase their political and ideological clarity is by having teacher education classrooms explicitly explore how ideology functions as it relates to power. It is also important for prospective teachers to examine the political and cultural role that counter-hegemonic resistance can serve to contest and transform the exclusionary, harmful, and fundamentally undemocratic values and beliefs that inform dominant educational practices in the United States. In what follows, I first explain why it is necessary for teacher educators to recognize, better understand, and challenge the ideological dimensions of prospective teachers' beliefs and attitudes toward subordinated students. Next, I share research results from my work at Riverview High School that illustrate the powerful potential of teachers' who critically understand the ideological and material obstacles faced by youth in schools, and their proactive responses as defenders of their students. Finally, I identify key critical pedagogical principles that, interwoven into teacher education coursework and field experiences, have the potential to help develop in prospective teachers, much like the teachers in my research study, the ability to assume counter-hegemonic stances so as to create a "more equal playing field" for all students.

Changing Demographics and the Clashing of Ideologies

The dramatic increase in low-income, non-White and linguistic-minority students in U.S. public schools signals the urgent need to understand and challenge the ideological orientations of prospective teachers in teacher education programs. One current challenge is to adequately prepare the overwhelmingly White, female, and middle-class pre-service teacher population to work with these students as they are quickly becoming the majority in many of the largest urban public schools in the country (Gomez, 1994). While the nation's school population is made up of approximately 40 percent minority children, nearly 90 percent of teachers are White (National Center for Education Statistics, 1992). In addition, the social class differences between teachers and students continue to grow. For example, 44 percent of African-American children and 36 percent of Latino children live in poverty, and yet increasingly teachers are coming from White lower-middle and middle-class homes and have been raised in rural and suburban communities (Zimpher, 1989). There are also significant differences in teacher-student language backgrounds. Despite the fact that by 1994 there were already approximately 5 to 7.5 million non-native English-speaking students in public schools around the country-a number that has continued to rise-the maj ority of teachers in the U.S. are monolingual English speakers.