A Turning Point in Teacher Education: A Time for Resistance, Reflection, and Change

(Hardback)

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Since teacher education looked to become a formal field of study in the 1800s, it has historically contended with competing forces in the effort to solidify its professional identity. Currently, that contention is juxtaposed with those external forces that look to promote fast-track teacher training, with its ultimate goal to dismantle traditional teacher education programs, and those internal forces, whereby teacher education within itself continues to struggle with its own identity, power, and influence. To that end, this book, A Turning Point in Teacher Education: A Time for Resistance, Reflection, and Change, suggests we have reached a climax point, a turning point in teacher education, meaning we must work to resist and denounce those external forces that are laboring to undermine the professionalization of what it means to be a teacher. Simultaneously, we must also deeply reflect and be clear about those internal forces at work when it comes to solidifying the place, power, and necessity of traditional teacher education programs, ultimately announcing the furthering of what should be.

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A Turning Point in Teacher Education: A Time for Resistance, Reflection, and Changereminds us to be thoughtfully engaged,realizing that teacher education is a complex enterprise that demands concentrated attention to maintain its educative focus and at the same time to be critically aware of the multiple forces that are at play to undermine the professionalization of teaching.Indeed, this text is a call to action to resist those forces in an effort that works to elevate the status and honor of what it takes and means to be a professional educator. -- Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, PhD, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, Arizona State University
Kirylo and Aldridge manage to pull off two impressive accomplishments here: reclaiming the narrative of teacher education that has been hijacked by the neoliberal market-based reform movement, and issuing a call to arms for teacher educatorsand teachersto make the pivot from advocates to activists. Teachers, by their very nature, are too often loathe to engage in the politics of the policy debateand as the authors point out so convincingly, the time to get off the bench is long past. -- Mitchell Robinson, PhD, Associate Professor and Chair, Music Education, Michigan State University

Author Bio

James D. Kirylo is associate professor of education at the University of South Carolina. Among other books, he is author of Teaching with Purpose: The Who, Why, and How We Teach (2016) and Paulo Freire: The Man from Recife (2011). Jerry Aldridge is professor emeritus of early childhood education at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is author of numerous books, including Rowman & Littlefields Stealing from the Mother: The Marginalization of Women in Education and Psychology from 1900-2010 (2013) with Lois M. Christensen.