Ideological Clarity as Protest in Teacher Preparation Programs: The Social Imperative to Radicalize Teachers in the United States, Japan, and Chile

Group Submission Type: Formal Panel Session

Proposal

In global contexts, protest in education has frequently been publicly enacted in stunning displays of direct action. For example, in the United States, the Red for Ed movement brought hundreds of thousands of teachers and students into the streets in school strikes in Arizona, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and Kentucky as well as in the cities of Chicago, Oakland, Los Angeles, Denver, Nashville, and Little Rock (Blanc, 2019). Teachers protested for higher pay and more funding for public schools. In Chile, a robust student movement took to the streets in recent years to protest the privatization of education, deteriorating school buildings, teacher shortages and nonsecular influences on school curriculum. Despite media portrayals of Japan as a more or less depoliticized society, with a long streak of leadership by one party (broken only twice in the past 65 years) activists and young people have publicly protested about climate change and nuclear power, among other salient social and contemporary issues (Brown, 2018; Cassegard, 2020; Falch and Hammond, 2020; Hasegawa, 2014,). In addition, pressure from the Japanese Business Federation (Keidanren) and political and bureaucratic conservative policy makers to focus teacher education on social change defined largely through economic imperatives has led to neoliberal reforms (Ogisu & Kitamura, 2022; Smith, 2022) which are having deleterious effects on teachers in K-12 schools as well in higher education.
These developments present important obligations for teacher preparation programs in all three countries, particularly, how programs prepare teachers to work effectively and sympathetically with minoritized groups, including students of color, impoverished immigrant and refugee children, and English learners.
Each of the presenters in this session are long-time teacher educators who have built their theoretical and pedagogy approaches around principles of social and racial justice. We argue that in addition to the need for content area knowledge and associated pedagogical approaches, teacher preparation programs should be anchored within the theoretical principles of Paulo Freire: that education is not a neutral endeavor but based on the need for learners and educators alike to engage in reflection and action (praxis), problem-posing methodologies, and collective dialogue to “read the word and the world” (Freire, 2000).
Although our international working contexts are different, each of us embeds into our teaching Freire’s theory of “political clarity,” which he defined as the process individuals undergo to deepen their consciousness about the ways in which socio-political structures, including education, work to either oppress or emancipate them. Bartolomé (2004) reworked political clarity as “ideological clarity, a similar process through which “individuals struggle to identify and compare their own explanations for the existing socioeconomic and political hierarchy with the dominant society’s” (p. 98).
In teacher education classrooms, developing ideological clarity is a form of public protest against top-down and undemocratic efforts to oppress and deskill teachers. We see it as a foundational principle in teacher preparation programs and a collaborative way to “name the moment” (Cavanagh, 2000), that is, make visible the racist and dominant economistic foundations of repressive legislation and policies that deny students of color, immigrant and refugee children, and English learners a just and equitable education. Given the aggressive anti-intellectual rhetoric of the political hierarchy in Arizona, class disparities in Chile, and neoliberal reforms in Japan, helping teachers develop an ideological stance of understanding and opposition to discriminatory laws and policies is a public act. Because of the potential for consequences of activism (criticism, isolation, employment sanctions and even dismissal from one’s teaching position), engaging in dialogue with students about ideological clarity is also an important form of public protest.
In this interactive session, we spotlight the current political conflicts and tensions in teacher education in each country and discuss how we use ideological clarity in our courses, program curricula and in wider discussions with faculty and administrators in our departments and colleges. We discuss the pedagogical strategies we deploy to facilitate dialogic spaces of critical consciousness, and hope to explore the following questions with members of the audience (adapted from the CIES 2024 call for proposals):
•How can Freirean theories provide a humanizing, emancipatory lens for teacher education, particularly in contemporary neoliberal contexts?
•What are the implications – and consequences – of intentionally embedding ideological clarity into teacher education programs?
•How does ideological clarity reflect radical praxis, politics, protest, and hope?
•How do we share the pedagogical insights from storytelling and testimony as authentic counter narratives in teacher education?
•What are the ways that teachers and learners alike can leverage our developing ideological clarity as a catalyst for change?

Sub Unit

• Teacher Education and the Teaching Profession SIG

Chair

• Mary Carol Combs, University of Arizona

Individual Presentations

• “Ideologically motivated professors oblivious to real world data”: State sponsored repression against bilingual education in Arizona - Mary Carol Combs, University of Arizona

• Challenging the Framework of Education Focused on Global Human Resource Development in Japan - William Bradley, Ryukoku University