ABSTRACT
One of the bigger challenges facing critical teacher educators is not only having students explore the relationship between the existing manifestations of education and the broader political, social, and economic realms that give rise and meaning to them, but to also implicate themselves in those very systems and the discourses they do and do not make possible. By implication I mean having students examine their own relationships to those systems and discourses; that is, the degree to which they are, personally, a product of such systems, how they might have benefi ted from them, and how their own practices as teachers might, oft en unintentionally, perpetuate them. Th is means encouraging students to “see” what they have oft en not seen, have not been invited to see in their prior education, or have refused to see, oft en in spite of educational invitations to do so. Th ese diff erent forms of not seeing fall under what Felman (1982) calls ignorance. Ignorance, according to Felman, is not simply a passive state of absence-a simple lack of information: “it is an active dynamic of negation, an active refusal of information…. the incapacity-or the refusal-to acknowledge one’s own implication in the information” (p. 26). Anyone working in teacher education has, no doubt, experienced this notion of ignorance, whereby students either actively avoid issues or avoid implicating themselves and their teaching contexts in issues that are discussed, especially when the latter are issues raised by critical social theory, such as equity, social justice, race, and gender that require students to implicate education, and themselves as agents in or of the existing system of education, in broader societal contexts.
