Reproduction, Contradictions, and Conceptions of Curriculum in Preservice Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

Two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a teacher preparation program are drawn upon to explore the contradictions relevant to conceptions of curriculum which preservice teachers encounter. Their resolutions of the given-problematical, public-personal, and molecular-holistic dilemmas or contradictions are shown to inform our understanding of the correspondence and contradictions between teacher education, schooling, the state, and the economy. Implications for mediating the deskilling/reskilling contradiction are discussed with reference to preservice teachers, who experience “anticipatory deskilling,” and those who resist the separation of responsibilities for conceptualizing and executing/delivering the curriculum.