Reclaiming the Pedagogical Imagination in a Preservice Teachers' Social Foundations Course

• In Event: Exploring Pedagogies for Developing a Critical Inquiry Stance to Teaching

Abstract

As social justice teacher educators we take up the question of the content and pedagogy
of a social foundations course in a preservice teacher education program. Drawing from our action research studies about our teacher educator pedagogy, we argue that social foundations courses need to be reinvented to stay relevant and central to the development of a teacher. We argue that developing and enacting a curriculum and pedagogy for social foundations courses requires a bifocal lens: one focus on preservice teachers’ critical sociocultural consciousness, and the other on the development of their pedagogical frameworks. With this focus, we begin to reimagine the possibilities for social foundations courses as preservice teachers construct their future role as teachers in a multicultural democracy.

Authors

• Jeremy N. Price, Montclair State University

• Brian Ford, Montclair High School