ABSTRACT
As the climate of educational reform and politics turns again to teacher-proof pedagogies, high-stakes testing, and uniform curricula, our students may be all the more likely to dismiss courses in their teacher education programs that don't seem directly applicable to the K–12 classroom. These students (and some of their future employers) may ignore theoretical ideas that do not appear to lead directly to a technique of teaching. In this environment, it's all too easy for teacher education programs to avoid theory in the name of being relevant and practical. But as foundationists as well as teacher educators, we know that to claim to ignore theory is only to reproduce the status quo, because our lives are lived in a context of theory. Most of that theory, of course, is taken for granted, assumed subconsciously as “just the way things are” (see, e.g, Berger & Luckmann, 1966). When teachers carry what are in fact theoretical assumptions into the classroom, they reproduce social inequality and also reproduce the cultural assumptions underlying the ecological crisis.
