ABSTRACT
How far this transformative potential can be realized is the subject of considerable debate, for contemporary theory as well as practice. The autonomy and agency available to individual teachers, teacher educators, schools and departments of education has been brutally curtailed-though not obliterated-in the face of the structures of capital and its current neoliberal project for education (Hill, 2001d, 2004a, 2004b, 2005b, 2007a). It is necessary to highlight the phrase “potential to fuel the fl ames of resistance” in Allman’s quote above. One of the greatest structural blocks on the development of cadres of “teacher-intellectuals” willing and able to develop and ultimately lead counterhegemonic action is the political neutralization of potentially resistant professionals at the earliest stages of their induction into the mechanisms of schooling and teaching as governmentally proscribed ritual. Hence the main focus of what follows represents an attack on the ideological functioning of bourgeois initial teacher education/“teacher training.”
