Exposing the intricacies of pre‐service teacher education: Incorporating the insights of Freire and Bourdieu

All education proceeds within a complex array of epistemological and ontological factors that constitute a shifting and intricate learning environment for teachers, pre‐service teachers and school students alike. We have expanded a ‘praxis inquiry’ protocol into a ‘critical praxis’ protocol for use in pre‐service programs. A framework of collaborative practitioner research beginning with the community and cultural understandings of Freire has drawn us to the work of Bourdieu. Accordingly, we have introduced a process with pre‐service teachers of constructing a collaborative habitus–field analysis throughout the year. This tracks and details the changing experience of participants as they come to grips with their new world of classrooms and teacher education and provides a fertile delta of ideas, uncertainties and possibilities for continuing discourse. Based on this reflexive process, members of the research team have written brief ‘vignettes’ of their own changing understanding, following which other team members have written brief ‘commentaries’ as ongoing professional dialogue. Preliminary analysis of our own reflexive understanding suggests that specific characteristics of the critical praxis protocol such as practice imagined and practice re‐imagined are significant and that the complex mix of ideology critique, self‐reflexive consciousness and emancipatory action may only receive superficial consideration by teacher educators.