The Paradox of Inequality as Equality in Teaching/Teacher Education: “The Super-Massive Black Hole”

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium approaches the Super Massive Black Hole of teacher education (SMBH-TE) through three papers. We draw on this concept of physics to visualize different layers, densities and intensities of the politics of knowledge involved in teacher education reforms and its research. It seeks to explore the “backstage”—the infrastructure that is not seen but which gives intelligibility and the conditions of possibilities for “telling the truth” about children and communities in the acting of being a teacher. By examining the SMBH-TE, we aim at making visible how the principles to improve the quality and correcting social wrongs in teacher education, paradoxically, engage in a comparative reasoning about inequality that reinscribes that inequality as the exercise of equality.

Sub Unit

• Division B - Curriculum Studies / Division B - Section 4: Policies and the Politics of Curriculum

Chair

• Erika C. Bullock, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Papers

• Phantasmagrams of Equitable Future That Exclude: The Impracticality of Teacher Education Research - Thomas S. Popkewitz, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Mindfulness: The Making of Teachers’ Full Awareness and Metaphysical Competencies to Correct Onto-Epistemic Violence - Melissa Andrade-Molina, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso

• Considering the Equity-Oriented Mathematics Teacher via the Super Massive Black Hole - Erika C. Bullock, University of Wisconsin - Madison

Discussants

• Roland Sintos Coloma, Wayne State University

• Elizabeth De Freitas, Adelphi University