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The purpose of this paper is to relay and discuss the experiences of a teacher educator teaching critical literacy to preservice teacher candidates immediately following the US presidential election in 2016. In a time of increasing polarization in the USA, teachers and teacher educators have unique opportunities to create honest spaces for dialogue, but developing classrooms that can serve as these spaces is not an easy task.

This paper is a self-study practitioner narrative of a teacher educator teaching a secondary literacy course.

The paper discusses the importance of addressing critical literacy in the context of particular historical moments and as more sustained, engaged work that makes room for minority voices that may not be heard across particular settings. The findings prompt teachers and teacher educators to consider whose voices are present, absent and valued during difficult conversations.

Making room for uncomfortable dialogues in preservice teacher education classrooms can transform the ways in which teacher candidates (and their future students) engage with written and non-traditional texts in the world around them. Promoting spaces for critical, authentic and honest dialogue requires teacher educators to model the willingness to move beyond their own comfort zones and interrogate their own deeply help beliefs. This paper is evidence of engaged self-reflection, a necessary part of transformative practice related to critical literacy.

This study aims to draw from overlapping scholarship in critical policy studies and governmentality studies to examine how recent standards-based education policies mark a pivotal shift in the aims and governance of English education.

The author traces this shift through a comparative analysis of the past two standards projects in the USA: the 1996 IRA/NCTE Standards for the English Language Arts and the 2010 Common Core State Standards.

An analysis of the standards’ comparative development processes, educational aims and governmentalities exemplifies a global shift toward new policy networks, neoliberal imaginaries and the interrelated policy technologies of managerialism, performativity and free markets.

This paper hopes to prompt more critical, reflexive and strategic stances towards standardization and the ways in which global education policies seek to reshape subject English and the future of teaching and teacher education.

The article aims at analyzing narratives discourses to project dialogic storying as relevant in a mode of narrative research in English language education.

As an English language teacher and researcher, the author adopts narrative analysis as the research method for doctoral study, so this article delves into narrative research methods, especially in the context of English language education. The author found various existing notions on narrative research from Clandinin and Connelly (2000) and Barkhuizen et al. (2014), who contend that narrative is a mode of processing experiences and events in the form of a story. The author corroborated various notions on narrative research in English language education as an argument that narratives can be a strong data source in English language educational research. Since it has been a research focus for English language educators, the author explored seven dissertations that were submitted to a Nepalese university in 2017, 2018 and 2019.

The article aims at analyzing narratives discourses to project dialogic storying as relevant in a mode of narrative research in English language education. While examining the dissertations, the author found that the subjective and ideological exploration of narratives is in practice; however, they need further in-depth analysis under a specific framing. The author argues that the concept of dialogic storying can be strong narrative research in English language education.

It has examined prospective applications of the dialogic storying process using dissertations submitted to a University in Nepal. In terms of conceptual discussions on narratives and narrative analysis, it is more interpretive.

It provides an initial framing to get into narrative research in English language education. It allows academics to go further into subjective and ideological inquiries in order to discuss more categorical elements in narrative research.

It is a more thematic and interpretive discussion so it discusses existing and appropriate practices in narrative research methods to defend the dialogic storying approach. It has not counter argued the existing knowledge; however, it provides insights to clarify dialogic storying as a research approach.

The purpose of this paper is to examine multiple dimensions of reflexive and reciprocal mentorship as they work through the fear of teaching challenging and politically charged ideas.

This piece is a case study of the complex instances of reciprocal mentorship within a teacher education program. Objects of analysis included the informal educational experiences from the bi-monthly meetings and student-teaching experiences. Semi-structured interviews, field notes, interpersonal discussion and the authors’ own reflections were used as data sources.

The authors found that having difficult conversations in informal spaces provided social studies teacher candidates with the opportunity to get more comfortable with challenging conversations; that mentorship is helpful when shifting context between formal and informal spaces; and that once these teachers grew more comfortable, they moved from mentee to mentor with support and guidance from their own mentors. The authors conclude by providing several implications for pre-service teachers, teacher and teacher educators, as they help social studies practitioners work with and beyond the politics of fear.

Limitations such as subjectivity, generalizability and implementation exist. Factors such as personality, program, cultural background, lived experience and other elements played a role in the findings. Therefore, the authors do not suggest these are monolithic claims about the nature of mentorship, teacher education or teaching, but rather the authors wish to share these findings and recommendations.

The authors argue that three major findings emerged from the data. First, informal spaces are valuable for initiating difficult conversations among mentors and mentees. Second, shifting between formal and informal spaces can be uncomfortable, but allow for mentoring opportunities during these challenging instances of becoming. Third, moving from mentee to mentor includes valuable reciprocal mentorship within a learning community.

This research project is grounded in the needs of the participants and researchers. To the authors’ knowledge, a project of this type with similar participants has not been done.

Research reveals very little about how the supervision of social studies student teachers ought to be enacted. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Based on the broader arguments for the democratic purposes of social studies, the author argues for the development of the democratic capacities of teacher citizens by creating deliberative and dialogic spaces in social studies field-based teacher education.

Four conceptual dimensions of dialogic pedagogy in the supervision of social studies student teachers are explored: questioning, listening, negotiation, and self-critique.

Because supervision of student teachers is a pedagogical interaction, a pedagogy of social studies field-based teacher education must be grounded in dialogue and deliberation.

This article aims to report on the findings from a research project that explored a school’s changing ideological storyline with the appointment of a new Principal and the Board of Trustees’ intention to move towards a strengths-based approach to education. Following the school’s dialogue and decision-making over a three-year period enabled the identification of a range of competitive processes between the dominant and an emergent ideology within the school.

Using an ideological framework proposed by Meighan et al. (2007), the research focussed on the development and maintenance of shared understandings within each ideology. For the purpose of this article, the participants have been limited to those in school governance, the school’s senior leadership team and some teachers across a three-year period. Data were gathered through semi-structured interviews, online surveys and informal observations and analysed through interpretive and hermeneutic processes.

The findings show the subtleties and nuances of two dominant and competing ideologies that represented different philosophies for education: a deficit discourse of progressive ideals and a strengths-based ideology of education. The existing and dominant ideology is challenged by the determination and moral purpose of the principal with the unanimous support from those in governance. In due process, the school emerged into a creative enterprise through the adoption of shared understandings that were underscored by a strengths-based ideology.

It is incumbent upon school principals to notice the shifting organisational storylines within their schools and communities and act in a manner that realises the moral imperative of schooling for the students (Fullan, 2011). This article opens specific ideological processes that have appreciatively moved a school towards pedagogical excellence and a repurposing of the organisation for the students’ sake.

Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and violence. This paper aims to engage the consequences of these shifts for the ways that racism works in university-based classrooms and, more specifically, through the authors’ own teaching as White language and literacy educators.

This teacher narrative reconceptualizes moments of racialized violence in the courses, as constructed via circulating discourses of racism. The authors draw attention to the ways that we, as White educators, authorize and are complicit in this violence.

This paper explicates a praxis of questioning, developed through efforts to reflect on our complicity in and responsibility for racial violence in our classrooms. The authors offer this praxis of questioning to other White language and literacy teachers as a heuristic for sensemaking with regard to racism in classrooms.

The authors situate this paper within a broader struggle to engage themselves and other White educators in work for racial justice and invite others to take up this praxis of questioning as an initial step toward examining the authors’ complicity in – and authorization of – discourses of racism.

The puposes of this study is to examine the impact of primarily bureaucratic socialization; and demographic, experiential, and philosophical orientations (beliefs about key educational concepts) variables on teacher candidates' pupil control ideology (PCI) during a pre‐service teacher education program. The relationship between philosophical orientations and changes to PCI is of particular interest.

Data collected at the beginning and end of their teacher education program from 474 teacher candidates were analysed using multivariate analyses.

Practicum socialization experiences were more closely associated with participants' PCI at the end of the teacher education program than any of the demographic, experiential, or philosophical orientation variables.

An examination of interaction effects among the variables revealed a limited number of situations where the interaction of particular beliefs, demographic, and experience variables appear to minimize the shift to a more custodial PCI. Specific implications are identified in relation to males and elementary teaching, urban practicum placements, and pre‐service teacher education curriculum units pertaining to authenticity of beginning teacher practices.

The study provides a framework within which educators may examine the authenticity of beginning teachers' practice. In particular, educators may wish to carefully consider the evidence suggesting that pre‐service teachers practice may be inauthentic, that is, primarily imitative as a result of custodializing socialization factors, but only in particular circumstances associated with their predominantly humanistic beliefs about education.

There have been increasing calls for social studies educators to engage issues of sustainability. Proponents argue that the very survival of the planet depends on the degree to which teachers can move learners away from unsustainable beliefs and behaviors to those grounded in interdisciplinary approaches to solving community and global challenges. How to implement this vision of sustainability education? The purpose of the paper is to report the results of teacher-educators' curriculum and pedagogical approaches to implement the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS) C3 framework to engage and empower prospective and practicing teachers to teach for a sustainable future.

The study is guided by the growing field of self-study in teacher education, a type of research undertaken by teacher-educators with the dual purpose of personal professional development and a deep understanding of teacher-education practices. Most data were derived from multiple, recursive conversations (both formal and informal) around curriculum decisions and pedagogical choices to integrate sustainability issues into teacher-education courses. Additional data sources include classroom lecture notes and PowerPoint presentations, course readings and resources.

The authors' three years of collaborative work has shown that an issues-centered, interdisciplinary approach to select and integrate global issues, the current event article analysis, young adult literature and discussion and deliberation of local sustainable development issues that are some of the most effective pedagogical tools to engage and empower teacher candidates in learning about issues that affect the sustainable development of global community. The NCSS C3 provides a powerful framework to scaffold the process of analyzing sustainable issues while also teaching social studies curriculum and standards and skills.

Scholars of global education have called for shifting from an anthropocentric philosophy to a bio-centric worldview emphasizing the embeddedness of humans within the environment. How can social studies teacher-educators implement this vision of global education What instructional resources strategies and learning activities can be effectively integrated into existing courses to help candidates develop competences and commitment to teaching for global sustainability The study examines the innovative approaches to addressing these critical topics in teacher education.

This study aims to explore the conception and construct of ideological leadership (IL) as it relates to public organizations, such as public schools, and to validate a tool for its measurement in this setting.

Data was collected from 633 teachers working at 69 randomly-sampled Israeli public schools. In each school, an average of nine (SD = 2) randomly-sampled teachers completed questionnaires that measure IL, transformational leadership, organizational commitment, leader-member exchange and motivational factors. The data underwent validity and hypotheses tests.

The hypothesized presence of the personalized and socialized IL orientations among public-school principals has been confirmed. Only personalized IL predicted teachers' outcomes above and beyond transformational leadership, affecting measures of organizational commitment, leader-member exchange and controlled motivation.

New evidence supports the validity of this proposed measurement tool. New evidence also suggests that although ideology has been known to be a factor of charismatic leadership, IL in close public-school settings accentuates practices of control, rather than proselytizing coherent worldviews to teachers. This, in turn, may have a deleterious influence on work outcomes and outweigh the possible benefits of IL. Accordingly, it is suggested that school leaders should critically consider the desirability of embracing ideological zeal as part of their leadership tools.