Critically-Oriented Pedagogical Tact: Learning about and through our Compulsions as Teacher Educators

Source: Teaching Education, Volume 22, Issue 4, 2011, pages 413-426.

The work of critical teacher education centers on making sure future teachers learn to be critically-oriented practitioners.

In this article, the author asserts that this sort of learning must first begin with the critical teacher educators themselves, and that much of the most fruitful learning manifests itself in the teacher educator’s compulsions.

Drawing on a key finding from a phenomenological study that focused on cultivating pedagogical tact in teaching, the author suggests that the ways in which he compulsively strategized at times limited what he could accomplish as a critically-oriented teacher educator; that each of us as teacher educators have compulsions that limit just as much as they make possible; and that our examinations of these compulsions are important for our students’ growth as critically-oriented practitioners.