Modeling Compassion in Critical, Justice-Oriented Teacher Education

As the work of teacher education becomes increasingly focused on the challenges of helping mostly white, monolingual, middle-class prospective teachers become compassionate,successful teachers of racially, culturally, linguistically, economically, and academically diverse students, some teacher educators struggle to find compassion for the prospective teachers they teach. Motivated by this concern and drawing on feminist and Buddhist theories, Hilary Conklin argues that many teacher educators would benefit from a renewed consideration of modeling the pedagogy they hope prospective teachers will employ. In this article, she analyzes and brings together the work on critical, justice-oriented approaches to teacher education, relationships in teaching, modeling as pedagogy, and the Buddhist notion of compassion to articulate a pedagogy of modeling in critical, justice-oriented teacher education. Conklin proposes that such a pedagogy has the potential to move us closer to transformative teacher education.