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ABSTRACT
Based on Ken’s keynote address at the 2021 Australian Teacher Education Association conference, in this interview, Ken outlines his arguments on the current challenges and possibilities for teacher education, especially in the United States. Significant challenges include funding constraints and structural reconfigurations in teacher education courses as well as schools, and the implications for students from non-dominant communities who comprise significant cohorts in American schools. To address the inequities and assert the “rightful presence” of communities in the education of their children, Ken calls for a democratising of education and provides persuasive examples of how this approach has been actioned.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. The Teach for All network is an example of the international nature of these problems. https://teachforall.org
2. Currently in the US, family and community members in some communities and sometimes members of hate groups in the area often identify themselves as “culture warriors” and are putting pressure on schools not to teach an accurate history of the US and the role of the US in the world. In some communities, teachers and administrators are being harassed and sometimes fired for teaching about slavery, racism, and anything that the culture warriors consider to show the US in a negative light. (Frenkel, Citation20210; Natanson, Citation2021). In one state, Florida, the governor has proposed legislation that would empower anyone to sue teachers for teaching about race (Marcotte, Citation2021). As I noted above, My work has focused on the nondominant communities that have been marginalised because of race, language, religion, or immigrant status and where the caregivers of students have often lacked a voice in the education of their children in public schools. I have many ideas about how to prepare teachers to teach in the communities where culture warriors live, and how to deal with and resolve the tensions between schools, communities and universities in deliberations about preparing teachers, but they are beyond the scope of this brief interview.
3. See Larry Cuban’s (Citation1969) thoughtful essay on the importance of teachers seeing their work as teaching students within communities and what needs to be done by school systems to support this work.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ken Zeichner
Ken Zeichner is a former public school teacher and teacher educator in the National Teacher Corps at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and at the University of Washington. He is currently the Boeing Professor of Teacher Education Emeritus at the University of Washington. Ken’s research has examined different aspects of teacher education in the U.S.A. and beyond, in earlier years focusing on understanding the historical trajectories of different approaches to improving teacher education and on elaborating the underlying assumptions, program elements, and consequences of different approaches to preparing teachers. Recently, Ken has also focused on policies related to teacher education and specifically on the role of venture philanthropy and the misrepresentation of educational research in shaping policies and practices in teacher education in ways that undermine the democratic process of deliberation and decision making and the largely public system of teacher education.