"It's Dangerous to Be a Scholar Activist These Days" Becoming a Teacher Educator amidst the Hydra of Teacher Education.
When I first met Jamie, she was a student in a curriculum and instruction doctoral program with a focus on mathematics education. Jamie was also wrestling with how to infuse her interests in social justice, feminist theory, and Latin@ education into a traditionally male dominated, White, and quantitative field like mathematics. "Some days I know what I want to do," she told me during an interview, "and other days, I have no idea what the hell I'm doing or want to do or how to do it, actually." One of Jamie's struggles was that, as a doctoral student at a public institution, she saw firsthand how federal and state policies for teacher preparation impacted her professors and their programs. "What I don't understand is how you do everything," she continued, "how you manage to be a scholar activist and how you also write reports and crunch numbers and make sure they don't take your funding away. And, at the same time as all this, do research that you feel like matters to you and to the world. That's what I need help figuring out." Novice teacher educators like Jamie are coming of age professionally in a complex time, a time of "lethal threats" (Weiner, 2007, p. 274) and "assaults" on teacher preparation (Sleeter, 2008, p. 1947) In the era of standardization and accountability, colleges of education are no longer immune to the influence of policies and practices that have been affecting PK 12 instruction and assessment for decades (CochranSmith, Piazza, Power, 2013; Groenke Hatch, 2009; Kumashiro, 2010; Sleeter, 2008; Weiner, 2007; Zeichner, 2010) In fact, "movements to end teacher education by framing it as irrelevant have deep historical roots and, in recent years, have become quite commonsensical, so much so that even teacher educators struggle to reframe the debate" (Kumashiro, 2010, p. 56) These threats or movements, in practice, look like the establishment of strict accountability roles, new value added measures that tie funding for teacher education programs to the eventual test scores of graduates' PK 12 students, and public critiques to teacher education from well funded and well connected organizations like the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) Other threats come in the form of growing alternative certification programs, like Teach For America, or even the closing of reputable traditional teacher preparation programs (Dunn Faison, 2015) Zeichner (2014) sees such reforms as evidence of a "deregulation and privatisation agenda" (p. 551) Amid this climate, what does it mean to prepare the next generation of teacher educators when so many professors are feeling the same stifling pressures as PK 12 teachers? Does the climate affect their morale or commitments? What of the teacher educators who consider themselves social justice advocates? Does such a climate hinder or enhance their commitment to educational equity and justice? These are the questions that led me to study current graduate students and recent graduates (whom I term teacher educators for social justice) of two education doctoral programs, both with a stated commitment to equity. In this qualitative case study of novice teacher educators in the southeastern United States, I investigated the following research questions: (a) What are the experiences of new teacher educators for social justice, as they relate to their doctoral preparation? and (b) What is the relationship between new teacher educator development and the current landscape of teacher education? In what follows, I contextualize this inquiry within the literature on the preparation of teacher educators and a theoretical framework of teacher educator development. Literature Review Research has continuously shown how important it is for new teachers to be able to work with diverse student populations (Banks, 2015; Nieto, 1992) finding that their preparation should include a focus on social justice pedagogies and dispositions (Irvine, 2003; Ladson Billings, 2000; McAllister Irvine, 2000; Sleeter, 2001; Villegas Lucas, 2002)