The work of History: Professing teacher education

Working in teacher education can be challenging. There is always too much to do, in far too little time. And when they leave us, our students, and move out from their preservice programs, they are all too often disappointed, sometimes angry. The world 'out there', the world of teaching, is overwhelming in its urgency, its drama, its excess, its sheer difficulty. Why weren't we prepared properly, or at least adequately? We hear them, and hear ourselves, in our own histories'The chapter itself is testimony to a struggle to articulate and to understand what is described as 'the qualities of the historical'. One participant (Tower) describes her own trajectory through the program, from her arrival and induction, working within and guiding its development, eventually chairing it and now overseeing its (fatal) restructure. Another (Lund) recalls its commitment to understanding social, cultural and linguistic diversity and challenging their associated and compound forms of disadvantage, and its efforts to engage with 'the complex ways in which our racialized past intersects with our present', re-affirming the importance of 'embracing our place within the moving stream of history'. A third (Panayotidis) focuses specifically on the question of history, seeking to 'deepen our thinking around how we currently attend to Canada's educational past, and what effects this has on teacher education'. The challenge is therefore: How to think historically?