Call for Articles
Reclaiming (Re-envisioning) Teacher Education
Wanying Wang & Daniel Ness, Editors
Teacher education has, to a large extent, continued to center on the issue of teacher subjectivity. Educational standardization—aiming toward measurable outcomes by following certain procedures—has stripped teacher’s autonomy, making teacher a subjugated subject (Pinar, 2011). The turn to teaching standards represents a withdrawal into a firmly modernist worldview in which instrumentalism dominates (Clarke & Phelan, 2017). Such instrumentalism marginalizes the teacher, separating knowledge from the idiosyncrasy of particular teaching situations, from the everyday experience, and from teachers who employ it. This dilemma thus compels us to consider the following questions:
- Where does the teacher’s freedom lie during their teaching and being a teacher when confronted with required protocols and standardization?
- Can teachers “become more than they have been conceived and conditioned to be” (Pinar, 1992, p. 232)?
- If the answer of second question is yes, then how can teachers engage in transformative development?
These questions require reflection into the challenges that face teacher education, into the emerging situations that are filled with uncertainty, (un)expectation and possibilities. While attending to given conditions and future possibilities, we expect “a terrain of freedom” in which the teacher lingers, contemplates and reflects.
For Pinar (2015), teaching is not a collective, but finally an individual matter that is intellectual, ethical, and political, enacted and revealed through daily classroom practice by teachers. “Like artwork, teaching is a form of self-expression that becomes, in its subjective meaning and social significance, ‘self-overcoming’ in its ‘self-critical’ (inter)disciplinarity” (Pinar, 2009, p. 46). Subjective reconstruction—inner reform—is the site of teacher development (Pinar, 2015), enabled through autobiography and both academic and everyday study. Through such a teacher education, a dynamic, unfinished rendering of the self as the subject in teaching emerges. This teacher education embraces “teacher understanding…emphasizing teacher subjectivity at the core, characterized by historically embodied, temporally and spatially entwined, meaningfully constellated, ontological disclosure of the teacher’s being in the world” (Wang, 2023, p.1). Such an understanding establishes itself between theory and practice, the personal and social, past and present, rational thinking and feeling, feeling and imagining, toward constituting an intellectual, ethical, aesthetic, and spontaneous grasp of self, students, and teaching. It allows teachers to engage in a pedagogy of passion, spontaneity, and authenticity.
This special issue reconsiders the issue of teacher identity (subjectivity) in teacher education, providing “a lived tour” to support an extended, deepened, enlivened conversation among teachers, teacher educators, and policymakers, leading to a realm of transcendence underscoring a critical, creative, and aesthetic teacher education.
We welcome submissions that examine how teachers have grappled with various constraints, such as restrictions regarding education standards and normative assessment imposed upon them, as well as possibilities for teachers to transcend beyond the encumbrances of conditioned educational audit. While reclaiming and re-envisioning teacher education, we work toward reconceptualizing teacher knowledge and teacher praxis. We highly encourage submissions that address or emphasize these issues from multiple theoretical perspectives and positions.
Please submit your proposed paper to the Northwest Journal of Teacher Education website and click “Submit Article.” When providing information during the submission process, please indicate that your paper submission is in response to the Call for Papers for the special issue “Reclaiming (Re-envisioning) Teacher Education.”
The deadline for manuscript submissions is Sunday, December 15, 2024.
Tentative Manuscript Timeline:
Proposal submission deadline: December 15, 2024
First decisions regarding submitted manuscripts: January 10, 2025
Final revised manuscript submission deadline: March 10, 2025
Publication: April 2025
References
Clarke, M. & Phelan, A. (2017). Teacher education and the political: The power of negative thinking. Routledge.
Pinar, W. (1992). “Dreamt into existence by others”: Curriculum theory and school reform. Theory into Practice, 31(3), 228-235.
Pinar, W. (2009). The worldliness of a cosmopolitan education: Passionate lives in public service. Routledge.
Pinar, W. (2015). Without experience is teacher development possible? In H. Zhuang & W. F. Pinar (Eds). Autobiography and teacher development in China: Subjectivity and culture in curriculum reform (pp. 179-192). Palgrave Macmillan.
Wang, W. (2023). Teacher knowledge and Currere. New Waves—Educational Research & Development, 26(2), 1-24. Retrieved from: https://www.viethconsulting.com/members/proposals/view_file.php?md=VIEW&file_id=9708469