Idealism and Materialism in the Culture of Teacher Education: The Mythopoetic Significance of Things

Abstract

The culture of faculties of education has been transformed in the last thirty years. In teacher education we still operate on construction sites at the intersection between symbolic forms and material necessities of schooling. While teacher education remains both intimate and technical, the material necessities have been themselves reduced to, or reified to, symbolic forms. The argument in this chapter is that at this time the rehabilitation of the cultural significance of “things” in our representation of teaching is central to any re-imagining of curriculum and learning. Such a mythopoetic turn in research and teaching may help students who feel they are failing the cultural agency of teaching and those, including ourselves in teacher education, who would assist them.