ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the concepts of pedagogic authority and pedagogic work in an analysis of the historical trajectory of teacher education within South Africa. The concepts of pedagogic authority and pedagogic work demonstrate how, in a postcolonial context, they are harnessed by neo-liberalism and continue as tools for generating discourses of inequality. The structure and nature of teacher education has never allowed for the engagement of equality, and hence contributes to the reproduction of exclusionary values rather than a disruption thereof. Consequently, the analysis in this chapter demonstrates that the process of learning to teach in a neo-liberal era is more likely to contribute to a lack of transformation in society rather than the opposite. However, the implications are not inevitable and teacher education could disrupt exclusionary values but this is a challenge, given the impotence of developing states within the neo-liberal global political economy. Alternative discourses and practices are needed in teacher education which involve giving student teachers the tools to engage in a collective dialectic process wherein they could confront the empirical reality on deep personal moral grounds
