This paper discusses the development of a U.S.-based undergraduate senior seminar that fosters a conflict-centered perspective of change in education. As practitioner researchers, we analyze student writing from the course to elucidate the concepts of change, both explicit and tacit, that students draw on to understand the complexities inherent in educational work. Some student writing demonstrates a discourse of control that oversimplifies and promotes despair about the challenges at stake. By contrast, some student writing evinces an orientation toward struggle which emerges as a more generative stance toward recognizing and responding to the structural violence in which education work is fully implicated. This perspective opens the analysis and the education course to understandings that situate power relationships more historically than order-centered formulations of hope and change allow. Finally, we discuss the implications of this shift in perspective for instruction, course content, and education programs in general.