Background: We build on participatory and critical understandings of democracy to analyze a two-and-a-half-year collaborative redesign of our teacher education program. Purpose: To theorize and design for the seemingly everyday, ordinary, and unremarkable work it takes for teacher education programs to embody democratic principles and…

Background/Context: Almost 100 years ago, John Dewey advocated for a democratic U.S. educational system, one that echoed the tenets of the U.S. Constitution and achieved an ethical ideal by inviting participation of all students. Yet the U.S. educational system continues to stop short of this goal insofar as students of Color--especially those in…

Background/Context: Scholars have long critiqued the antidemocratic forces at work in education, advocating for a more equitable, liberating, and democratic vision of schooling, with teacher education taking on a central role. Mainstream teacher preparation obstructs democratic education, as evidenced by the failure to disavow and dismantle white…

Background/Context: In this article, we draw on Villegas's explanations of beliefs as precursors to social justice dispositions and Mills et al.'s Australian research about social justice dispositions as either affirmative or transformative. These conceptual positions assist us in understanding the beliefs that are derived from applicants'…

Background/Context: Prison settings present some of the deepest democratic contradictions in the United States. Purpose/Objective: In this study, we investigate how and what teacher education programs can learn from and support teaching practices in prison settings and pre-K-12 contexts. Population/Participants: This study draws from interview…

Background: There is scant research on whether or how special education teacher preparation plays a role in shaping, maintaining, or perpetuating ableism and oppression for disabled students, which the author proposes is "structural ableism." This conceptual article argues that special education teacher preparation programs' systems and…

Background/Context: Social scientists, policymakers, and commentators have long assumed that Western democracies enjoy relative stability because of deep commitments to a culture of democratic governance. But those commitments are quickly fading in almost every developed and developing democracy around the globe. In the same period in which…