Neoliberal teacher preparation: Conceptualising a response in the US borderlands

Abstract

The current era of neoliberal capitalism has witnessed the domination of public education by business interests which openly promote the spirit of competition among schools, educators and students through a policy of high stakes accountability for immediately measurable educational outcomes. In the USA, this policy proposes to make teacher educator programmes accountable for the impact of their programme completers on student achievement, namely standardised test scores. Consequently, some programmes have begun to rethink their practices in an effort to avoid negative sanctions. Unfortunately, little empirical evidence of improvement is available to teacher educators, particularly those committed to the preparation of working class Mexican-origin bilingual education teachers who are victims of a weak K-12 public school system. Drawing on various sources from the research literature, this paper describes the creation of a context-specific signature border pedagogy aimed at preparing effective bilingual teachers in a majority Latino public university in the South Texas Borderlands.