Preservice Teachers Position Educational Agency Opportunities as Positively Contributing to the Facilitation of Critical Consciousness

• In Event: 45.093 - MTCC Roundtable Session 18
  In Roundtable Session: 45.093-4 - Undoing Deficit Discourses in Teacher Education: Troubling Notions of Student Engagement and Success

Abstract

Do preservice teachers graduate with some level of further developed critical consciousness, and if so, what can we attribute this to? This study utilized grounded theory to explore how critical pedagogy influences the development of a critical consciousness among preservice teacher candidates. The emerging grounded theory explains that facilitating critical consciousness is positively mediated by the agency opportunities created by the educational institution and the professors teaching the courses.The preservice teachers reported several “consciousness raising” learning experiences when administrators and professors thoughtfully navigated the traditional hierarchical power relations and provided more space for agency and dialogical learning environments. Within these educational contexts, preservice teachers were doing and making education, rather than having education done to them and made for them.

Author

• Barb Anne Pollard, University of Windsor