Learning to “Sit in the Messiness”: Leveraging Critical and Queer Pedagogies in Teacher Educator Development

Background: This paper grows from two premises: (1) teacher education often perpetuates racism and other forms of oppression, and (2) available pathways into teacher educating likely underequip teacher educators to provoke equity- and justice-centered transformation of the field. Focus of Study: Building on scholarship that offers teacher educator development as a lever for improving teacher education, this article explores how a doctoral course, grounded in critical and queer pedagogies and practitioner inquiry, contributed to new teacher educators’ (NTEs’) sensemaking around disrupting oppression in teacher education. Two questions guided our inquiry: How did doctoral students/NTEs take up critical and queer framings in their inquiries into their own teacher educating? How did these framings help NTEs make sense of and/or trouble their understandings of transforming teacher education? Research Design: Embracing a critical stance and our understanding “that at the core of expert practice is not the strict implementation of evidence-based practices, but the need to make subtle judgments in unique situations” (Korthagen, 2020, p. 333), we completed a qualitative, collaborative self-study. Anchored in critical and queer traditions, we engaged in a dialogical process of analysis. Conclusions: Our analysis revealed that critical and queer pedagogies contributed to NTEs’ propensities to surface and dig deeply into the struggle they faced as NTEs working toward equity and justice, as well as to their sense that struggle could represent and be leveraged as occasions for expansive learning. Three interconnected approaches emerged as central to this work: (1) embracing an explicitly critical stance that centered implicating themselves in teacher education’s perpetuation of injustice, (2) noticing and questioning binaries in their sensemaking about justice-centered teacher educating, and (3) treating uncomfortable emotion as a fertile source of inquiry for becoming a justice-centered TEs. The study has implications for researchers and practitioners committed to making teacher education more equitable and just.