Sustaining Critical Practice in Contested Spaces: Teacher Educators Resist Narrowing Definitions of Curriculum

• Published in: Palgrave Studies on Leadership and Learning in Teacher Education
• Main Authors: Cooper, Jane McIntosh, Gauna, Leslie M, Beaudry, Christine E, Curtis, Gayle A
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Palgrave Macmillan 2020
• Subjects: Communities of Practice; Curriculum; Doctoral Programs; Peer Relationship; Resistance (Psychology); Self Evaluation (Individuals); Teacher Collaboration; Teacher Education Programs; Teacher Educators; Teacher Evaluation; Teacher Researchers; Values; Women Faculty
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-56674-6_18

This chapter investigates the ways members of the Faculty Academy learn through research investigations about how their unique educational values are enacted in their practice. During doctoral studies at the same university, the authors formed a peer support group dubbed "Las Chicas Críticas" (The Critical Girls), reflecting their common critical approach to education and, in particular, their own individual practices. Now situated in the academy but at different universities, and supported by a critical friend/mentor, Las Chicas Críticas continue their collaborative examination of practice, reflecting both inward and outward, seeing big and seeing small, and looking across content areas and institutions in their efforts to resist narrowing definitions of curriculum. The study decomposes how their process of collaboration on highlighting values in practice has helped teacher education classrooms become places where identity, mastery, and creativity are cornerstones. Offering implications for today's educational context of constrained curriculum, this study showcases research and classroom practices of radical resistances against the relentless pressures for outcomes-based evidence in teacher education programs. [For the complete volume, "Cross-Disciplinary, Cross-Institutional Collaboration in Teacher Education: Cases of Learning and Leading. Palgrave Studies on Leadership and Learning in Teacher Education," see ED616372.]