ABSTRACT
As a beginning teacher educator, the author found it difficult to disrupt traditional classroom identities and expectations of authority constructed through years of personal history and centuries of cultural expectations. Despite his ideological resistance to standardized reform in teacher education, the author began to recognize in his teaching practical signs of what Linda McNeil called defensive teaching. Defensive teaching constructs a dichotomous relationship between teacher and students and normalizes a monologic transfer of knowledge from one to the others that "reinforces certainty, conformity, and technical control of knowledge and power". Critical pedagogies that disrupt the dichotomy invite students to narrate their own learning, drawing from lived experiences augmented by reflection. The author understand the democratic syllabus as a pedagogical choice embedded within a larger framework for a course that supports students' inquiries into relationships among power, language, economics, sociocultural subjectivities, and learning and teaching in schools.
