Teacher preparation needs critical consciousness

Teaching is a challenging profession, let alone the additional hurdles placed on educators to overcome systemic barriers to close opportunity gaps and fill in missing education from the COVID-19 pandemic years. Teacher preparation programs are therefore tasked with upskilling future teachers with not only content knowledge and pedagogy, but also with a barrage of skills to understand and address the various needs of diverse learners. An underrepresented skill in teacher preparation programs is critical consciousness, defined as a critical awareness of systemic inequity, efficacy or agency to work for change, and taking action for social justice. From the perspective of two former classroom teachers with over 20 years of experience, this article presents the need for teacher preparation programs to incorporate critical consciousness as a crucial factor for well-equipped teachers to enter the profession. We present five key features of preservice teacher preparation and how to incorporate critical consciousness into each: (1) Developing preservice teacher’s own critical consciousness; (2) Applying critical consciousness to student teaching field experience; (3) Explicit instruction of pedagogy; (4) Applying critical consciousness to active learning methods; (5) Modeling critical consciousness through faculty mentoring. Integrating critical consciousness into these elements that we know to be best practices in teacher preparation, can support preservice teachers with a cohesive understanding and skillset to begin to address systemic inequity in schools.

Impact Statement

Critical consciousness (awareness and efficacy to enact change for social justice) in teacher preparation programs is essential for teachers to be prepared to teach students from diverse ethnic-racial backgrounds and to cultivate critical consciousness among all students. Much of what we know about best practices in education and teacher preparation cannot come to fruition without critically conscious educators (e.g., building supportive relationships with and among students, preparing students to think critically about real world issues). This article presents practical and concrete suggestions for integrating critical consciousness development into five key features of teacher preparation programs.