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In the face of standardization and rationalization, the language of the expected, the predictable and the planned has enveloped teaching and teacher education worldwide. However, in a recent study about the emotional toll of teaching in two Canadian provinces, teachers’ stories overflowed with allusions to the unexpected, the unplanned, and the unforeseeable. We explore those stories, and in the company of John Caputo’s writing about teaching and ethics, we speculate what they suggest about a life lived in teaching. We posit that obligation is the insistent ghost that haunts teaching in the midst of the machinery of schooling.

Over the past 25 years, Canadian teacher education has been characterized by a trend towards professionalization of teaching. A concern, however, is that in the absence of a federal education system, the trend has not served to integrate teacher education programs within and across provinces. A Canadian compromise has been achieved by the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE) committed to creating and fostering a pan-Canadian space for dialogue on issues important to the provision of public (teacher) education. Against this backdrop, we examine a recent position paper titled, “Teaching and Teacher Education for a Post-pandemic Canada” issued by ACDE (2020) and calling for investment in and reimagining of teaching and teacher education. Our Foucauldian analysis of the document reveals that rather than unsettle prevailing educational discourses and disturb existing power relations in the name of transformation, the position paper offers Canadians ‘more of the same but worse’. We identify and examine four key power relations (global–local; school–society; research–practice; and centre–margin) that structure the document, arguing that they reflect the imminent capture of teaching and teacher education in Canada by instrumentalism—the pervasive view that the main purpose of teacher education is to serve the needs of the economy—and consensualism—the unifying of multiple points of view into a single perspective. We conclude by speculating about how acknowledgement of a multiplicity of conflicting relations and positions—via a process of ‘disidentification’—might be more conducive to Canadian efforts to re-imagine teaching and teacher education for our times.

The Covid-19 pandemic has changed our way of life temporarily and perhaps forever. As such, how educators respond to the contemporary situation is not without consequence. Inspired by the writings of Giorgio Agamben, this article argues that, while the way forward is not unambiguous, the Covid-19 situation offers educators an unanticipated opportunity to pause; to reconsider our aspirations; and, ultimately, to reclaim education as an ethico-political activity. To embrace this opportunity requires the interpretation of our current situation as a real state of exception in which the neoliberal order and its utopian-learning culture can be suspended. In a state of suspension, one can begin thinking afresh about the Covid-19 pandemic and what reactions to and conversations about the event reveal about (more desirable) ways of learning and living together in schools and society.

Classrooms are complex spaces. These complexities magnify the teacher’s sense of obligation to children and the subsequent experiences of being overwhelmed, which can influence the teacher’s decisi...

In this article we argue for the need to rethink the crisis of democracy both within and beyond education (Toft and Rüsselbæk Hansen, 2017). This crisis can be explained variously, depending on how it is understood and on what basis. From our point of view, and with inspiration from thinkers as Nietzsche, Arendt, Agamben and Rancière, we argue that the crisis of democracy in today’s schools is related in part to the weak form of authority ascribed to certain individual and collective aesthetic experiences. The scientific experience has been assigned a strong form of ‘evidenced based authority’. As a result of a powerful belief that not all forms of experiences, for instance the aesthetical ones, which are not based on a mechanical logic, are worth paying attention to and are of value, scientific experience has gained hegemonic status. Illustrated by several examples, which stem from both Danish and Canadian educational contexts, we show how aesthetic experiences have the potential to revitalize democratic practices and undermine tyrannical regimes of technocracy in education. We recommend that the concept of Bildung (self-cultivation), which is orientated towards vertical (Apollonian) as well as horizontal (Dionysian) transcending processes, must be given renewed attention. Opportunities for students to play with and suspend the social order, even temporarily, are important if students are to experience themselves, others and the world in new ways. By engaging students’ aesthetic sensibilities in multiple ways, playful schools both produce and provoke the dominant social order thereby fostering students’ taste for democracy.

Historically, research in teacher education has played a practical role deriving its questions directly either from ‘the doing’ of teacher education and/or having sought to directly improve ‘the doing’ of teacher education. As a result, a tendency towards moral, intellectual and institutional parochialism has confined both the promise and purpose of research. It is argued that the field of teacher education might look towards curriculum theory as a possible antidote to parochialism. Curriculum theorising invites consideration of teacher education as a cultural object, nested in layers of meaning that require interpretation and critique. Drawing inspiration from the few scholars whose work is located at the interstices of teacher education and curriculum theory, this article suggests that a curriculum turn is characterised by (1) an attention to language, what it is up to and what it makes of aspiring teachers and their teacher educators; (2) a focus on the fragility of human experience as it is lived in t...

A recent move in the effort to professionalize teaching has been a call for a professional designation for teachers in some Canadian jurisdictions. While teacher certification or licensure seeks to protect public interest and is concerned about professionalism – the quality of teachers' work – professional designation is concerned with public recognition of teachers' professional status, that is, acknowledgement of the legitimacy of the intellectual and ethical location from which teachers act – teachers' identities. While not wishing to argue for or against professional designation per se, I do want to reveal a certain predicament that results when the teaching profession becomes ‘bound by recognition’ (Markell, 2003). The predicament relates to the limits of identity: in the context of recognitive encounters with others, human beings constantly exceed and frustrate prior identifications, often contradicting their own expressed and deepest commitments. What then, one may ask, is the use value of recognit...

Practical reasoning refers to a teacher's capacity to discern particulars and make wise judgements about how to act in pedagogical situations. But how do teachers know what is right? How are teachers' preferences to be grounded and their choices justified? I explore the disciplines as one source of moral perception. Assuming that narrative unities underscore the coherence and continuity of an individual's experience, I generated data in the context of a 2‐year teacher education programme. The case study of an aspiring teacher of secondary school language arts illustrates how the intellectual virtues of a discipline can influence a student teacher's practical reasoning. I conclude that teacher educators must attend to the complex ways in which a prospective teacher's prior discipline may influence aspiring teachers' orientations to experience, their consideration of educational ends, and, finally, their characters.

This article is situated within an experience of conflict for Tina, a social work student, who is caught between her beliefs about the virtues of social work practice, and her disillusioning encounter with the school's administration. In this paper, we interpret Tina's experience of conflict by drawing on the central concepts of liminality and natality, and how she moves through disillusionment to illumination, thereby generating new self-understandings and meanings of social work practice. We conclude with the pedagogical implications for students, and educators, and that as messy and complex as the liminal is, it is also vital to the creation of new understandings and regeneration of meaning in professional education.

Stories of origin are notoriously incomplete, inaccurate or beside the point, often all three. One event stands out for us, however, as a point of reference for our thoughts on what it means to ent...

This article considers the case of Virginia, a social work practicum student who experienced conflict in her field placement, in light of Heilbrun's notion of liminality—that is, being poised on uncertain ground, leaving one condition or self and entering another. In addition, Virginia's experience is explored within the complex web of power and resistance that characterized her relationship with the field instructor, the agency director, and the school.

Caught between the demands of the normative (what they believe they ought to be and value) and normalisation (what professional others tell them that they should be and value), teacher candidates often experience themselves as belated even though they are newcomers to the profession—simultaneously heirs to a history and new to it. In this paper we illustrate and explore the tensions that result between ‘new’ and ‘old’ in teacher education. Drawing on Lyotard's concept of the differend, we examine the narratives of a practicum triad—one student teacher and his two mentors—as they each attempt to make sense of their irreconcilable differences. We conclude by discussing how the profession might fulfill its obligation to judge the adequacy of new teachers while remaining hospitable to the difference they introduce.

In this paper we examine the nature of our self-study practices in an elementary teacher education cohort called CITE (Community and Inquiry in Teacher Education). We argue that self-study is not only important to our continued work in CITE but also a critical feature of professional practice in general. Two general questions frame our analysis: (1) What is significant about cohorts in teacher education? (2) How might complexity science inform our understanding of cohorts in particular and of teacher education programs in general? We argue in the paper that the use of a cohort-type structure in a teacher education program provided us with flexibility and potential for improvisation to address the perennial problems of program fragmentation. To better understand our own teaching and learning practices in this community setting, we sought an analytic framework that emphasized the importance of the learning potential of the collective as opposed to just the learning potential of the individual. We argue that...

This article examines how a research partnership between a university‐based research centre and a regional health authority operated as a context for promoting and examining continuous learning in the workplace. The article identifies and explores the issues and questions that emerged in the effort to establish a stable and supportive research environment that made use of others' talents and insights while attempting to flatten knowledge bases and to sustain critical dialogue. The article concludes that while the research partnership between university and workplace can operate effectively, those embarking on such partnerships might well consider the following questions. How does one cultivate shared ownership? How does one create and sustain communities of inquiry? How does one work difference? How does one maintain a sense of partnership beyond individual projects?

This paper explores the thesis that teacher education prepares teachers to fit into existing patterns and structures of teaching, schooling and society. The key questions explored are: (1) How have some discourses emerged as privileged, as others have been eclipsed? (2) What do these processes reveal about the relationship of power and place in teacher education? The case examined is Northern Ireland. The author concludes that if teacher education is to be one of the means by which educators learn new ways of seeing within a deep sense of tradition, then teacher education itself needs to become a discursive project.

This paper explores the notion of practical wisdom asan alternative to current formulations of criticalthinking. The practical realm is that ofill-structured problems that emerge from life aslived; it is a realm of legitimate uncertainty andambiguity that requires an ethical responsiveness orpractical wisdom. The death of a child is a case inpoint. The author identifies and examines threeaspects of practical wisdom – the ethical claims ofpartiality, a yielding responsiveness and the play ofthought – and juxtaposes them with aspects of criticalthinking. The work of Martha Nussbaum and RichardPaul are interwoven throughout the discussion. Theauthor concludes that the discourse of criticalthinking is in danger of lapsing into a form of moralescapism wherein all we are rationally responsible foris thinking correctly. Practical wisdom, on theother hand, recognizes that thinking is not simply anintellectual cognitive act of an individual but adance between the life of a child and the love of anelder, a conversation between what is and what couldbe, an openness to passionate sorrow and surprise, aplay between understanding and perception. As such,practical wisdom provides a more likely account ofliving in good faith with oneself and others.

The first task on our pilgrimage is to make a distinction between questions of governance which administrators ask and pedagogical questions which are the teacher's. To date policy initiatives have been directed by the governance questions such as: Under what regime will students learn more? Predictably, this has led to the answer “better teachers” which has led us to describe what teachers do so that we can make them accountable. Accountability of public servants is not the sin; rather it is the description of teaching that has been problematic because it has been construed as an unproblematic and relatively straightforward affair. Certainly, teachers plan, instruct, and assess but each of those visible behaviours is embedded in a kind of moral evaluative deliberation that is not easily discernible. Teachers ask pedagogical questions such as “What ought I do to help students learn?” “What experiences are most worthwhile?” “What might be the long-term social consequences of a particular mode of instruction?” The questions are not procedurally resolvable; these are the normative questions of teaching ignored in the governance mode.

The paper represents a study of a project designed to rethink the student teaching practicum. The “collaborative model” encourages teaming between teachers and student-teachers and creates opportunities for them to create new curriculum and explore new methods of instruction. The major portion of the paper describes the research project that we devised to study and evaluate our collaborative model and also offers two case studies that describe the processes at work in two of the teams. One study describes a team who established a collaborative relationship; the other, illustrates some of the difficulties with this approach. Finally, we offer conclusions and recommendations based on our findings.