Unsettling teacher preparation: cultivating liminality and remaking space

In the USA, university-situated teacher education programmes are hierarchical, with tiers of students and faculty progressing through ranks that structurally confer power. Teacher education programmes purporting to engender democratic ideals must remake teaching and learning spaces to encourage the teachers that they prepare to do the same in their pre-school through to twelfth-grade classrooms and schools. In this article, we explore social pedagogy in a US context, describing the work of a tenured teacher educator, two graduate students and more than 40 undergraduate students as they experimented with practices of democratic education in a midwestern US land-grant university elementary literacy methods course. We centre our analysis on three questions: How do efforts to democratise a teacher education literacy course influence teaching and learning? What is the nature of those efforts? How do different social actors in the course make and remake space? We then present three findings that speak to the work of unlearning institutionalised norms that sustain hierarchical teaching and learning relationships and that demonstrate the nature of a maieutic disposition in bringing to life more democratic conceptions of teaching and learning. We illustrate throughout the overlaps between democratic education and social pedagogy.