ABSTRACT
One way to understand the crisis facing teacher education and the solutions that are proliferating in response to it, is to locate its problems in a sociohistorical context; to investigate the purposes, interests, and assumptions that have come to be embedded and ingrained in the teacher education enterprise. This chapter outlines a number of broad, baseline principles that comprise a social-geographical approach and draw some implications for how people might understand teacher education and approach teacher education reforms. It discusses the three promising starting points for a social-geographical analysis of teacher education. The starting points includes: spatial marginalization, deinstitutionalization and symbolic encapsulation. The modern problem of teacher education has been its social, geographical, and professional marginality. One response to this has been to develop a new scientific knowledge base, a new canon for teacher education, thereby elevating its claims for acceptance and recognition within the discourse and community of university life.
