ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses a major aspect of teacher education that can realistically be strengthened across all programs and become one of its defining features. It describes the central process of this latter progressive tradition whereby all participants submit their practice and comprehensions to not only their own critique, but to the ongoing critique of colleagues, the literature and the integrity of social and professional practice. As with education itself, teacher education under capitalism will exist to support the philosophical, economic and cultural dictates of capitalism. Conservative critics of teacher education argue that programs should be more closely related to the reality of schools and that more time for pre-service teachers should be spent in school classrooms rather than remote university lecture theatres. The notion that learning is a social practice comprising the experience of internal goods or properties as the basis of personal learning and understanding struggles to survive.