ABSTRACT
For many years, I have been responding on a regular basis to the criticism that it is inappropriate for teacher educators to encourage their students to think about the social and political dimensions of their work, the various contexts in which their teaching is embedded, and how their everyday teaching practice is connected to issues of social continuity, change, equity, and social justice. My response to critics has always been that in this unequal and unjust society that is stratified by race, language, ethnicity, gender, etc., teacher educators are morally obligated not only to pay attention to social and political issues in the education of teachers, but to make them central concerns in teacher education curriculum from the very beginning (Liston & Zeichner, 1991). The goals of preparing teachers to be advocates for social justice and providing a high quality education for everyone’s children (e.g. Oakes & Lipton, 1999) should be top priorities in U.S. teacher education, given the large gaps in achievement that continue to exist in U.S. public schools (Lee, 2002) and the lack of the social preconditions that are needed for educational equity to become a reality (Children’s Defense Fund, 2001).2
