Journal website: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/   Manuscript received: 1/11/2016 
Facebook: /EPAAA  Revisions received: 20/7/2017 
Twitter: @epaa_aape  Accepted: 21/9/2017 

SPECIAL ISSUE                                                                                                                            

Navigating the Contested Terrain of   
Teacher Education Policy and Practice 

 

education policy analysis 
archives 
A peer-reviewed, independent,  
open access, multilingual journal  
 
 
 
 
 
  

 Arizona State University 

 

Volume 26 Number 29       March 5, 2018 ISSN 1068-2341 

 

 

The Intersections of Selves and Policies: A Poetic Inquiry 
into the Hydra of Teacher Education 

 
Stephanie Behm Cross 

Georgia State University 
 

Alyssa Hadley Dunn 
Michigan State University 

 

& 
Erica K. Dotson 

Clayton State University 
United States 

 
Citation: Cross, S. B., Dunn, A. H., & Dotson, E. K. (2018). The intersections of selves and 
policies: A poetic inquiry into the hydra of teacher education. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 
26(29). http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.26.2813 This article is part of the Special Issue, Navigating 
the Contested Terrain of Teacher Education Policy and Practice, guest edited by Elena Aydarova and David 
Berliner.  
 
Abstract: This article explores the intersection of selves and policies for teacher educators 
in an era of teacher education reform. Borne out of a promise to one another to write 

http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/
http://dx.doi.org/10.14507/epaa.26.2813


Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 2 

 
about our experiences navigating increasingly complex market-driven, neoliberal attacks on 
our work and world, we collected data across several years that documented our attempt to 
break our silence (Lorde, 1977) and explore how we, as teacher educators, make sense of 
neoliberal reforms and policies in teacher preparation.  We draw specifically on Dunn’s theory of 
the Hydra of Teacher Education (2016), alongside literature on reforms and policies in 
teacher preparation and teacher educators’ forms of resistance to frame our work, and 
utilize arts-based poetic inquiry methodology (Prendergast, 2009; Rath, 2001) to explore 
the real, everyday implications of educational policy in our lives and in our careers. The 
poems we created as a “performative act” (Prendergast, 2009, p. xxiii) revealed that our 
experiences seemed to follow a cycle from hopelessness, to silence, to acquiescence, to 
collective resistance. We look carefully at this last portion of the cycle in our work, 
wondering how, if at all, teacher educators can resist the neoliberalization of teacher preparation . We 
conclude with implications for research, policy, and the practice of teacher education as we 
write to understand, write to resist, and write to survive.  
Keywords: neoliberal reforms; teacher educator identity; teacher preparation; poetic  
inquiry 
 
Las intersecciones del yo y las políticas: Una investigación poética sobre la complexidad de 
la formación docente 
Resumen: Este artículo explora la intersección del yo y las políticas para la educación del 
profesorado en una era de reforma de la formación docente. Nacidos de una promesa mutua de 
escribir sobre nuestras experiencias navegando cada vez más complejos ataques neoliberales 
impulsados por el mercado en nuestro trabajo y en el mundo, recopilamos datos durante varios años 
que documentaban nuestro intento de romper nuestro silencio (Lorde, 1977) y exploramos cómo 
nosotros damos sentido a las reformas y políticas neoliberales en la preparación de los docentes, 
como formadores de docentes. Nos referimos específicamente a la teoría de Dunn en Hydra of 
Teacher Education (2016), junto con la literatura sobre reformas y políticas de preparación docente 
y las formas de resistencia de los formadores de docentes para enmarcar nuestro trabajo, y utilizar 
una metodología de investigación poética basada en las artes (Prendergast, 2009; Rath, 2001) para 
explorar las implicaciones reales y cotidianas de la política educativa en nuestras vidas y en nuestras 
carreras. Los poemas que creamos como un “acto performativo” (Prendergast, 2009, p. Xxiii) 
revelaron que nuestras experiencias parecían seguir un ciclo desde la desesperanza, al silencio, a la 
aquiescencia, a la resistencia colectiva. Miramos detenidamente esta última parte del ciclo en nuestro 
trabajo, preguntándonos cómo, si es que lo hacen, los formadores de docentes pueden resistir la 
neoliberalización de la preparación del maestro. Concluimos con implicaciones para la investigación, 
las políticas y la práctica de la formación docente mientras escribimos para comprender, escribimos 
para resistir y escribimos para sobrevivir. 
Palabras clave: reformas neoliberales; identidad del educador docente; preparación del maestro; 
investigación poética 
 
As interseções do self e as políticas: Uma pesquisa poética sobre a complexidade 
da formação de professores 
Resumo: Este artigo explora a interseção do eu e das políticas para a formação de 
professores em uma era de reforma da formação docente. Nascido de uma promessa 
mútua de escrever sobre nossas experiências explorando ataques neoliberais cada vez mais 
complexos, impulsionados pelo mercado em nosso trabalho e no mundo, recolhemos 
dados por vários anos documentando nossa tentativa de romper nosso silêncio (Lorde, 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  3 

 
1977) e nós exploramos nós damos sentido às reformas e políticas neoliberais na 
preparação de professores como como educadores de professores. Referimo-nos 
especificamente à teoria de Dunn na Hydra of Teacher Education (2016), juntamente com 
a literatura sobre reformas e políticas de preparação de professores e as formas de 
resistência dos educadores de professores para enquadrar nosso trabalho e usar uma 
metodologia de pesquisa poética com base nas artes (Prendergast, 2009; Rath, 2001) para 
explorar as implicações reais e diárias da política educacional em nossas vidas e carreiras. 
Os poemas que criamos como um “ato performativo” (Prendergast, 2009, p. x xiii) 
revelaram que nossas experiências pareciam acompanhar o ciclo do desespero, do silêncio, 
da aquiescência, da resistência coletiva. Observamos atentamente esta última parte do ciclo 
em nosso trabalho, perguntando-nos como, se o fizerem, educadores de professores 
podem resistir à neoliberalização da preparação de professores. Concluímos com 
implicações para a pesquisa, políticas e práticas de formação de professores à medida que 
escrevemos para compreender, escrever para resistir e escrever para sobreviver.  
Palavras-chave: reformas neoliberais; identidade do professor educador; preparação de 
professores; pesquisa poética 
 

Introduction 

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made 
verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. 

Audre Lorde, 1977 
 
In 2010, harkening Dickens, Darling-Hammond described the heightened attention to 

teacher preparation: “It may be the best of times because so much hard work has been done by many 
teacher educators over the past two decades to develop more successful program models… It may 
equally be the worst of times because there are so many forces in the environment that conspire to 
undermine these efforts” (p. 35, emphasis added). Eight years later, teacher educators—
conceptualized here as faculty members at institutes of higher education—are facing increasingly 
polarizing and problematic neoliberal reforms that impact their sense of well-being and morale, their 
professional practice, and their working and students’ learning conditions (Banks [Roberts], 2017; 
Dunn, 2016). Yet many of these policies, like those that have been part of K-12 schools since the 
advent of No Child Left Behind (2001), are rarely informed by scholarship and often include the 
voices of policymakers but not teacher educators themselves. In fact, the term “teacher educator” 
has largely been co-opted. Our roles as university teacher educators stand in stark contrast to 
politicians, big business interests, and decontextualized curriculum scriptors who feign the role of 
teacher educator by lobbying for the creation of policies and philosophies that influence the teaching 
practice of preservice teachers. 

Indeed, as we were writing this manuscript, new Federal regulations for teacher preparation 
were announced. As described by the American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education in a 
statement signed by a coalition of professional unions and educational organizations (2016):  

On October 12, the U.S. Department of Education released final regulations for 
teacher preparation programs. While the regulations have been changed in minor 
ways from the proposed rule, they retain the basic structure of evaluating teacher 
preparation programs based on a federally mandated framework that requires student 
learning outcomes measurement and linking such performance to Title IV federal 
student aid eligibility.   



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 4 

 
 

Such regulations are merely the latest evidence of myriad reforms and policies that are handed down 
to teacher preparation programs (TPPs) and enacted by teacher educators—willingly or not—every 
day.   

This research is borne out of our work as teacher educators in the age of accountability. Just 
as we are now teaching preservice educators who know no other public education system than one 
embedded with standards and high-stakes testing (Dunn & Certo, 2015), we have only been teacher 
educators in a climate where we are asked to document and report our adherence to state guidelines, 
fill out benchmarks and rubrics in online databases, and tailor our curriculum to meet the needs of 
external accrediting bodies. This work was first conceptualized when, at meetings of the American 
Association for Colleges of Teacher Education (AACTE) and the American Educational Research 
Association (AERA), we noticed the increasing number of sessions about alternative teacher 
certification programs, program reporting, high-stakes testing and assessment for both K-12 and 
higher education, and other looming mandates for TPPs. At the same time, there were also sessions 
that offered alternative ways of thinking, knowing, and being in the world as teacher educators, yet 
they were few and far between. Thus, we left one AERA conference with a commitment to 
ourselves and each other: we would write about our experiences navigating increasingly complex and 
suffocating market-driven, neoliberal attacks on our work and world. Breaking our silence, we would 
write to understand, write to resist, and write to survive.  

Considering Lorde’s (1977) call for transforming silence into language and action, we ask 
ourselves and other teacher educators: “What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need 
to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own?” (p. 42). This 
manuscript focuses on a particular set of tyrannies that face TPPs today: neoliberal reforms. In this 
article, we examine the intersections of teacher educators’ selves with neoliberal policies. Specifically, 
we investigate: (1) How do we, as teacher educators, make sense of neoliberal reforms and policies 
in teacher preparation? (2) How, if at all, can we as teacher educators resist the neoliberalization of 
teacher preparation? In our analysis, we attempt to both consider and resist the notion that “the 
risks are too great” (Cole & Knowles, 1996) for teacher educators to engage in local, programmatic, 
and systemic reform within and beyond their own institutions.  

Review of the Literature 

This work explores the intersection of selves and policies for teacher educators in the era of 
teacher education reform. To help contextualize our poetic inquiry, we review three bodies of 
literature. First, we examine neoliberalism from the statehouse to the schoolhouse to the university, 
and focus in detail on neoliberal reforms and policies in teacher preparation. Second, we highlight 
scholarship on teacher educators’ identities, paying particular attention to literature on the meanings 
of agency and resistance for this group. Finally, given our chosen methodology, we review studies in 
educational policy that have utilized arts-based methods to further situate our study in the important 
push for alternative and more humanizing approaches to research. Throughout our review of 
literature, we note the importance of our work in contributing to all of these fields.  

Neoliberalism: From the Statehouse to the Schoolhouse to the Univ ersity 

Neoliberalism emphasizes the role of private interests and free markets over public interests 
and social policies (Harvey, 2005). That is, “the individual entrepreneur seeking to improve his or 
her own economic situation replaces deliberation over our values and societal goals” (Hursch, 2011, 
p. 39). Neoliberalism suggests that “economic inequality does not result from unequal social 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  5 

 
structures that privilege the already advantaged but, instead, from differences in individual choices 
and efforts. Inequality, therefore, is deserved and should not be a concern of government” (Hursh, 
2011, p. 35). Yet neoliberalism is more than a set of economic principles and market-based reforms. 
It has become part of the social imaginary, a “symbolic force” and “an immense political project” 
(Bourdieu, 1998). Bourdieu (1998) argues that neoliberalism “is desocialised and dehistoricised at its 
roots [and] has, today more than ever, the means of making itself true and empirically verifiable.” On 
the whole, neoliberal ideology is “a programme of the methodical destruction of collectives” 
(Bourdieu, 1998, emphasis in original) that “values profit over people” (Chomsky, 1999). Similarly, 
Wacquant (2010) explains that viewing neoliberal ideology as solely about economics is “thin and 
incomplete, as well as too closely bound up with the sermonizing discourse of the advocates of 
neoliberalism” (p. 213). In his analysis of this “transnational political project,” Wacquant distills “a 
thicker notion that identifies the institutional machinery and symbolic frames through which 
neoliberal tenets are being actualized,” including “economic deregulation”; “welfare state devolution, 
retraction, and recomposition” to support the “intensification of commodification and to discipline 
labour”; “an expansive, intrusive, and proactive penal apparatus”; and the “cultural trope of 
individual responsibility” (p. 213). As Brown (2015) cogently describes, neoliberalism has become 
the all-encompassing ideology through which the world is viewed and shaped, a “normative order of 
reason [that has become] a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality” (p. 9). To live in a 
neoliberal world means that it “transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with 
humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic” (Brown, p. 10). Ong (2007) 
argues for conceiving of neoliberalism with a “small n,” that we “view neoliberalism not as a system 
but a migratory set of practices” (p. 4). In this way, “neoliberal logic is best conceptualized not as a 
standardized universal apparatus, but a migratory technology of governing that interacts with 
situated sets of elements and circumstances” (p. 5). For the purposes of this manuscript, the 
“situated sets of elements and circumstances” are those that brought—and continue to bring—
neoliberal logic to school.  

 

Neoliberalism and K-12 schooling. A specific neoliberal image has shaped, and continues 
to shape, K-12 schools and universities around the world. Following the release of A Nation at Risk 
(NCEE, 1983) and the subsequent passage of the No Child Left Behind Legislation, policy actors 
began articulating an agenda for professionalization that emphasized “market reform ideologies such 
as competition, high stakes testing, standardization, vouchers, and school choice” (Mungal, 2016, p. 
6). We see “the transformation of educational values into business values” (Tuchman, 2009, p. 7), 
meaning that “the conversations about schooling and the expectations of teachers have 
fundamentally changed” (Bullough, 2016, p. 63). That is, “education discourse is now dominated by 
human capital theory and neoliberalism… and has become a major tool in what might be thought of 
as perpetual global economic warfare” (p. 63). This manifests in school settings in increasingly 
problematic ways; as Bullough (2016) argues, neoliberalism in schools relies upon “building 
competition among providers and the privatization of public services…; deregulation and 
devolution of control and oversight of schooling; emphasis on standardized tests…; and weakening 
of teacher unions” (Bullough, 2016, p. 64). It might also look like, as Kavanagh & Dunn (2013) 
explain, for-profit charter management groups, online classes, voucher systems, and continued 
recruitment of under-prepared and under-qualified teachers through programs like Teach For 
America.  

 

The neoliberal university. In higher education, neoliberalism is reflected in the “changing 
priorities of universities … that raise disturbing questions about what parents and students are 
getting in return for the increasingly steep tuitions they pay” (Washburn, 2005, p. xiii). Indeed, the 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 6 

 
market’s influence on higher education is not a new phenomenon, and research has demonstrated a 
long history of such involvement in universities around the country (i.e. Bok, 2003; Newfield, 2008; 
Washburn, 2005). However, the “size and scope” of market ideology has expanded since the rise of 
neoliberal public policies (Bok, 2003, p. 2). In the academy, neoliberalism governs interactions 
between colleagues and administration, among colleagues, and between students and faculty. Our 
universities have succumbed to pressures of capitalism, corporatization, privatization, and 
commercialization (Saunders, 2010). As a result, the ethos and language of the neoliberal market 
infiltrates all aspects of university life, from testing college graduates on what they’ve learned in 
college courses, to naming endowed Chairs for private philanthropists who then seek to influence 
the type of discourse happening in certain departments. It looks like considering ‘impact’ at the 
scholarly level to be only those things that can be measured with impact factors, to valuing measures 
that quantify rather than measures that matter (Levin, 2006). Amidst this transformation, the 
neoliberal university is built on silence and surveillance, assuming that faculty will passively acquiesce 
to neoliberal reforms, subsist in silence, or become indoctrinated to neoliberal reforms and govern 
themselves and others in this way (Cross, 2017). Framing students (and their parents) as consumers, 
faculty labor is commodified (Saunders, 2010).  

 

Neoliberalization of teacher education. University-based teacher education has also been 
infiltrated with neoliberal policies and practices, in part related to continued critiques of teacher 
preparation programs; as Cochran-Smith, Piazza, & Power (2013) suggest, “amid many contentious 
debates about teacher education policy in the United States, a single consensus resounds among its 
critics: ‘Teacher education is broken and needs to be fixed’” (p. 7). For example, a common refrain 
is that teacher education programs have low standards and do not prepare students well enough in 
areas like classroom management. Ongoing critiques, and continued support for charter schools as a 
tool for reform in the reauthorized ESEA bill (Every Student Succeed Act; ESSA), have led to an 
increase in acceptance of and funding for alternative teacher recruitment and preparation programs, 
such as Teach For America, the Relay Graduate School of Education, and others (Zeichner & Peña-
Sandoval, 2015). Many of these institutions partner with for-profit charter schools for “teacher 
training” or run their own charter organizations. According to Mungal (2016), “a common narrative 
of market-based reform is that public goods such as education institutions are viewed as 
bureaucratic monopolies and that deregulation opens the market to more agile, efficient, and less 
costly organizations” (p. 7). A push to break “the university monopoly on teacher education” has led 
to alternative teacher certification programs absent of much of the foundational, theoretical, and 
pedagogical coursework that is commonly found in university teacher education programs (Mungal, 
2016, p. 8). Though such models emerged during a period where market reform was taking hold to 
address teacher shortages, they appear to be here to stay; as Mungal suggests, Relay and TFA (and 
other similar models) “represented a mechanism that reformers were able to use to open up the field 
of education to marketization” (p. 14). 

In addition to widespread alternative models, other initiatives have centered on increased 
accountability for K-12 teachers and teacher educators, with student outcomes as a primary 
indicator for teacher effectiveness (American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education, 2016; 
Cochran-Smith, Piazza, & Power, 2013; Lewis & Young, 2013). Zeichner (2010) writes often about 
increased accountability and hyperrationality in teacher education programs in the US: “By hyper-
rationality, I mean extreme pressure on teacher education institutions to rationalize their programs 
and student assessment systems to a point where the demands for accountability and compliance 
begin to interfere with and undermine the accomplishment of the goal of educating teachers” (p. 
1547). He cites the emergence of electronic portfolio tracking systems (e.g., LiveText and Chalk & 
Wire) as one example of increased rationalization and suggests that these companies “aggressively 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  7 

 
market portfolio systems to colleges and universities so that they can provide the necessary data to 
gain approval for their programs” (p. 1548). According to Zeichner, “these portfolio systems have 
emphasized the bureaucratic aspects of keeping track of student teachers’ performance on standards 
and for the most part have failed to take advantage of the potential in portfolios to deepen teacher 
learning” (p. 1548). In short, the amount of detail teacher educators are required to produce for local 
accreditation interferes with their more authentic work of educating teachers. As Zeichner (2010) 
suggests, there is a clash between “authenticity (doing what one knows is in the best interest of the 
learning of one’s students) and performativity (doing what one needs to do to meet accountability 
demands even when one knows it is not in the best interest of one’s students)” (p. 1548).  

Similar concerns about missed opportunities for learning connected to neoliberal agendas 
arise as teacher educators in many states are forced to comply with state mandates related to 
externally evaluated teacher performance assessments. One such assessment is the Educator Teacher 
Performance Assessment, or edTPA. These portfolios, originally developed by Stanford to serve as a 
learning tool for new teachers, have recently been rolled out in many states as a way to assess 
preservice teachers’ instructional planning, lesson implementation, and student assessment. The 
edTPA carries extremely high stakes for teacher candidates. The portfolios are externally graded by 
Pearson, an international for-profit educational corporation, and are tied to teacher certification in 
most states. As described by Tuck and Gorlewski (2016), “wrapped in the rhetoric of 
professionalism and quality, edTPA represents the normalization of teaching as a technical and 
apolitical act, of examinations as meaningful measures of complex acts and useful instruments for 
surveillance and discipline, and of relationships and local contexts as subordinate to distant, 
objective expertise” (p. 203). Sato (2014), in her research designed to examine the underlying 
conceptions of the edTPA, outlines several arguments against a common assessment for teacher 
candidates’ performance. Particularly relevant to individual schools/colleges of education is the idea 
that including a common assessment will likely produce standardization of the teacher preparation 
process and therefore not account for distinct approaches to preparing teachers valued by individual 
teacher preparation programs. As she describes, “if a program has a mission to prepare teachers for 
urban contexts, then an assessment that is designed to apply across multiple types of contexts may 
miss some of the deeply nuanced aspects of that program’s candidate performance” (Sato, 2014, p. 
423).  

Amidst these contextual factors and forces, explicit naming of neoliberal agendas and 
accountability practices remains critical. As Richmond, Bartell, and Dunn (2016) ask, “how do we, as 
a field, move beyond ‘tinkering’ around the edges of our programs and move toward systemically 
addressing the influence of neoliberalism and accountability in teacher preparation?” (p. 103). Our 
work in this manuscript distills specific ways that neoliberal policies and reforms have influenced 
teacher educators, in particular in relation to notions of self and identity. We believe that our explicit 
naming of these neoliberal policies and their impact is a first step on the road to addressing the 
influence of neoliberalism in teacher preparation programs.  
 

Teacher Educators’ Roles in a Neoliberal Context 
 

As the national accountability movement plays out, teacher educators are working to make 
sense of their local contexts within this reform agenda, a context that according to Cochran-Smith 
and Zeichner (2005), is “enormously complex” (p. 465). Richmond, Bartell, and Dunn (2016) 
suggest that part of this complexity lies in teacher educators’ “search for equilibrium between the 
world that currently exists and the world that we wish existed, between the world of neoliberal 
accountability pressures and the world that recognizes the importance of coursework on justice, 
equity, diversity, and sociocultural contexts of teaching and learning” (p. 103). In fact, Curtis, 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 8 

 
Bordelon and Teitelbaum (2010) argue that teacher educators must make sense of the “wide array of 
remedies” suggested by “eager reformers” and suggest the challenges that teacher educators face as 
they undertake reforms while monitoring “the quality and credibility of input that might impact our 
schools and the children who attend them” (p. 134). This complexity is magnified, especially when, 
as Sleeter (2008) suggests, “generally teacher educators have only a vague idea (or no idea) of what 
neoliberalism is, not recognizing it as a project for restoring class power by dismantling public 
services” (p. 1955). We argue that teacher educators want to better understand and engage in this 
work: debate the overall purposes of schooling, examine the meaning of justice within their own 
local context, and consider best practices and pedagogies amidst neoliberal assaults on teacher 
education. Yet despite, and oftentimes in light of, these efforts teacher educators must do this work 
within a culture and climate not necessarily set up to support or reward those who participate in the 
debate. First, as Dunn (2016) points out in her study of doctoral students preparing to become 
teacher educators, there is little to no “explicit instruction in and dialogue around the politics of 
teacher preparation itself” (p. 23). There is also little support for teacher educators who engage in 
this work once hired as faculty. For example, Massachusetts teacher educator Madeloni received a 
letter of non-renewal terminating her contract after she supported her students in resisting the 
edTPA (Madeloni, 2014). Faculty have also been penalized when they engage in resistance work as 
part of their own scholarship; Knowles (in Cole & Knowles, 1996) writes about the process of being 
denied tenure and suggests that his use of self-study methodology, documenting the messy work of 
engaging in and resisting educational reform movements, likely had a major impact on his tenure 
decision.  

As Cole and Knowles (1996) point out, there is a mismatch between what faculty members 
are hired to do and how they are judged and promoted: 

The further one’s work is removed from the field (or the swamp) and located on the 
high ground, the more highly regarded and valued it is…. Those who are most 
interested in programmatic and systemic reform can’t afford to invest their time or 
energy in that work—the risks are too great. So, what does that say about the 
possibilities for sustained, informed reform measures in teacher education and 
beyond? (p. 117) 
 

This dichotomy between what is valued and what many teacher educators seek to do is also 
highlighted in Bullough’s (2014) rhetorical analysis of language in the neoliberal-laden Preparing 
Teachers (2010) report. Through the use of cluster analysis, Bullough found that word clusters around 
“science” and “researcher” valued large randomized trials and generalizable results that would 
provide more effective pathways to quality teaching and teacher education. As the term ‘researcher’ 
was associated with these large-scale studies, it excluded those “whose work or professional 
commitments reflect a different subject position and professional identity—field supervisor, mentor, 
methods course instructor, and case or narrative inquirer” (p. 188). Small scale studies were 
criticized; they could not “provide answers to questions about how teachers might best be prepared 
(NRC, 2010, as cited in Bullough, 2016, p. 191). Bullough argues, however, that “among the virtues 
of well-conceived small-scale studies, ones that make persons “big” and populations “small,” is that 
they can and often do provide answers to how teacher education students are faring within specific 
contexts” (p. 191).  

We agree, and further argue that these “small-scale” studies can have significant impact on 
how we reimagine teacher educators’ experiences in these settings. For example, Tuck and 
Gorlewski (2016) formed a teacher educator collective in New York to create localized edTPA 
scoring rubrics focused explicitly on issues of race and equity. The authors stressed that, although 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  9 

 
they developed an alternative scoring tool, they never “sought to create a replacement for a 
standardized performance assessment; instead, we aimed to investigate how a research collective 
composed of teacher educators might evaluate materials submitted in responses to a policy tool such 
as edTPA” and positioned their project as an example of participatory policy analysis designed to 
“understand and intervene upon policy by those most impacted” (p. 207). They call others to 
participate in this work, and suggest that “more is to come, always” (p. 208). Sleeter (2008), in her 
discussion of broad strands of teacher education for equity and democracy, points out that certain 
subfields of research—for example, studies focused on cross-cultural and community-based field 
experiences—are based largely on “small-scale case studies [that] illustrate powerfully” their overall 
message of what it looks like when teacher educators engage in localized program redesign (p. 1950). 
Alongside these authors, we are engaging in scholarly self-study at the micro, vernacular, and local 
levels as we consider how neoliberal policies and practices impact our work. As we do this, we are 
answering Bullough’s (2014) call: “rather than quietly going about our business and complaining 
behind closed doors and feeling forced to respond to yet another mandate or critic, we need to push 
back and aggressively engage our critics. Moping will not do” (p. 193). Similar to the recent call for 
preservice teachers to be prepared not only to know about the political contexts of K-12 schooling, 
but also to engage in those politics (Marchant, 2012), we argue that teacher educators, too, must be 
informed about and engaged in the political agenda surrounding teacher education.  

 

Arts-Based Responses to Neoliberal Contexts in Teacher Preparation Policy  
 

As we reviewed literature on teacher educators’ efforts to engage in this political work, we 
found some scholars writing about increasingly neoliberal contexts in non-traditional ways. For 
example, Morrison (2016) was interested in how teacher educators might design courses that help 
preservice teachers understand the complexities of schooling amidst increasingly complicated and 
layered neoliberal discourses. She engaged in a recursive action research project on her own teaching 
and shared suggestions on how to “introduce students to the concepts of and issues surrounding 
educational privatization and market-based de/reforms in America’s public school context” (p. 13). 
Morrison argues that her “path on this yellow brick road of self-study” illustrated the vital 
importance of self-study to developing nuanced awareness of neoliberalism is schools and teacher 
education (p. 13). Stern and Brown (2016) engaged in a form of participatory action research as well, 
as they joined their research participants in several activist teacher groups. Initially motivated by 
their own and their participants’ trends of depression brought on by critical analysis of neoliberalism 
is school settings, they found that activist educators  

express the possibility of oscillation from a hopeless place to another place, a place 
where people feel supported to dream and think otherwise, a place where heartbeats 
and minds pulse toward love, healing and the strength to create structural and 
systemic change. (p. 351) 
 

Connected to our work within the realm of arts-based poetic inquiry, we found researchers also 
experimenting with the use of poetry in self-study, though not necessarily in studies explicitly tied to 
examining policy or neoliberal constructs. For example, through an autobiographical lens, Sullivan 
(2000) uses poetry and stanzaic prose to examine the various meanings of attention; as she explains, 
her work is “largely an autobiography of attention—learning it, teaching it, discovering its role in 
research” (p. 212). Sullivan argues that her use of poems “constitute a political statement on behalf 
of the enfranchisement of artists, whose voices have been marginalized in the academy” (p. 220). 
Grimmett (2016) similarly utilized self-study and poem writing in her quest to better understand her 
own teaching and how preservice teachers struggle with adapting to and advocating for co-



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 10 

 
construction of understandings in classroom spaces. She suggests her use of poetic inquiry helped 
her to “think creatively with data, to create holistic interpretations and empathic connections 
between researcher, participants, and readers” but cautions that the poems presented in her article 
“do not seek to be regarded as great examples of poetry...These poems were written as part of the 
inquiry process, and are shared...so that readers can understand how poetry was used as a stimulus 
for understanding new ‘ways of being’” (Grimmitt, 2016, p. 43-44).  

As we considered our own work in these spaces, we found that there was a dearth of 
published research that utilized arts-based, self-study methods to better understand teacher 
educators’ experiences in neoliberal contexts. According to Weber and Mitchell (2004), scholars are 
increasingly utilizing photography, creative writing, drawings, and performance in self-study research 
to “hold up another mirror to facilitate self-reflection, and force critical consideration of the social 
and cultural dimensions of personal experience” (p. 980). Further, Dewey argued (as cited in 
Sullivan, 2000) that “production of a work of genuine art probably demands more intelligence than 
does most of the so called thinking that goes on among those who pride themselves on being 
‘intellectual”’ (1934/1980, p. 46). We were surprised, then, to find limited research that combined 
these two areas. One good example, however, is Dowling, Fitzgerald, and Flintoff’s (2015) narrative 
approach to examining dilemmas that teacher educators face when trying to implement critical 
pedagogies and social justice curriculums in the current neoliberal climate in higher education. The 
authors share a “narrative constructed from memories” that draws on collective “fragments of 
truths” about the challenges teacher educators face when they engage in innovative work in teacher 
education. As they worked to construct these collective fictions, the authors found that their 
“biographical tales have revealed discourses saturated in a sense of swimming against the tide” (p. 
1037), oftentimes alone, as they “recognize the effects of neoliberalism on [their] own professional 
identities and lives” (p. 1041). Their use of narrative arts-based methods, and collective memory 
work in particular, reminded them that “being an educator is always about becoming in the 
world…[and that] knowing where we come from, and recognising the tortuous paths we travel, 
would appear to be a valuable part of this embodied and cognitive work” (p. 1043). Our study, 
utilizing self-study and poetic inquiry to better understand how neoliberalism operates on and 
through the acts of teacher educators, adds to this growing body of research. This work fills an 
important gap in the literature as we “think creatively with data” (Grimmett, 2016, p. 43) to 
“constitute a political statement” (Sullivan, 2000, p. 220) as we continue to wonder together about 
the ways neoliberalism operates in our teacher educator worlds. We explore further rationale for 
specific use of poetic inquiry in the methodology section below.  

Theoretical Framework 

Dunn’s theory of the Hydra of Teacher Education (2016), based on an empirical study of 
new teacher educators, provides an initial framework for our study. Dunn’s theory is adapted from 
the work of Picower & Mayorga (2015), in which the authors compared reforms in K-12 schools to 
the myth of the multi-headed Hydra monster whose heads emanate from a strong body. They argue:   

Those who are familiar with Greek mythology know that the Hydra was an immortal    
multi-headed creature. Any attempt to slay the Hydra was a struggle in futility and 
hopelessness, because if one head were removed, the Hydra would grow back two 
more in its place… The Hydra was only finally able to be slain by Heracles because 
he worked together with an ally, his nephew, to remove all the heads at once, making 
it impossible for the decapitated heads to grow back. (p. 4) 
 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  11 

 
Just as Picower & Mayorga argue that “each of these Hydra heads was analogous to one of the 
market-based reforms unfolding in our city,” Dunn also asserts that the metaphorical Hydra can 
represent policies in teacher preparation that challenge teacher educators’ abilities to enact social 
justice. In her study, Dunn found that all of the contextual factors that novice teacher educators 
found most challenging were reforms and policies undergirded by the same neoliberal base. That is, 
while each “head” might seem disconnected from the others, they are, in fact, held up by the same 
“body” of neoliberal ideology: capitalism, commodification, and competition. In particular, 
participants pointed to the following reforms and policies as Hydra heads: (1) edTPA, or the 
Educator Teacher Performance assessment, an assessment designed for preservice teachers to 
outline their planning, instruction, and assessment for one unit of instruction in their field 
placements and that is currently administered by Pearson, Inc.; (2) Teach For America, a recruitment 
agency that brings recent college graduates into urban schools for two year teaching stints; (3) Race 
To the Top, which required states to compete for federal funding by committing to value-added 
measures that attempt to quantify the individual growth that a teacher contributes to students over 
time and which are now being rolled out to tie student test scores to the preparation programs from 
which their teachers came; (5) National Council on Teacher Quality, an organization that collects 
data about teacher preparation programs and puts out public reports on the status of teacher 
preparation field; (6) the Department of Education, the state-level authority for curriculum, 
certification, and budgeting; (7) the state’s Professional Standards Commission, which serves as the 
regulating body for teacher certification and which requires many reports at the institutional and 
program level; (8) InTASC, the Interstate Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, which 
distributes and measures standards by which teacher education programs are frequently evaluated; 
and (9) NCATE/CAEP, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education/ the 
Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, the national accrediting body for teacher 
preparation programs. Dunn found that this Hydra of Teacher Education lurks menacingly over the 
possibilities for teacher educators to enact social justice and equity. As one participant recalled, “it’s 
dangerous to be a scholar-activist these days” amidst such an environment. How, then, do teacher 
educators respond to the Hydra?  

According to Picower & Mayorga (2015), when teachers and activists attempted to respond 
to reforms at the K-12 level in New York City, “the initial response by those concerned with 
educational justice was to furiously address each individual head by focusing time and energy on one 
after another… The group realized that focusing on one head meant that our attention was often 
drawn away from the larger forces, or Hydra body, driving reform—namely, the form of capitalism 
that some describe as neoliberalism” (p. 4). 

Extending Dunn’s initial inquiry where novice teacher educators were the focus, we turn to 
our own practice as mid-career teacher educators who “came of age” in the academy as neoliberal 
reforms were becoming increasingly present in higher education. To do so, we pay particular 
attention to four of the neoliberal reforms suggested by Dunn (2016) in an analysis of our 
experiences in three different teacher preparation programs. For the purposes of this manuscript, we 
have chosen to focus on a subset of the Hydra elements so that we can more fully explore each of 
them. The four that we chose are those that appeared most often within and across our data sources. 
While the other elements were surely present in the profession and in our own practices, in the 
period for which we are analyzing data, the four highlighted elements played the biggest role in 
shaping our contexts.  

Specifically, we investigate: (1) How do we as teacher educators make sense of neoliberal 
reforms and policies in teacher preparation? (2) How, if at all, can we as teacher educators resist the 
neoliberalization of teacher preparation? 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 12 

 

Arts-Based Methodology 

To do this work, we draw on arts-based research methods, and poetic inquiry in particular. 
Below we offer definitions of and rationale for the use of arts-based poetic inquiry, followed by a 
description of our context. We then offer a detailed description of our data and methods as it relates 
specifically to poetic inquiry. 
 
 

Definition of and Rationalization for Arts-Based and Poetic Inquiry 
 

According to Barone and Eisner (1997), arts-based research is defined by “the presence of 
certain aesthetic qualities or design elements that infuse the inquiry process and the research ‘text’” 
(p. 95). It is judged, in part, by its illuminating effect—its ability to reveal what had not been noticed” 
(Barone & Eisner, 1997, p. 102). Arts-based inquirers are oftentimes positioned as “researcher-
storytellers” who do not “seek certainty about correct perspectives on educational phenomena” but 
instead use art to “raise significant questions about prevailing policy and practice that enrich ongoing 
conversation” (Barone, 2007, p. 466). More specifically, in our work we make use of poetic inquiry 
(Prendergast, 2009; Rath, 2001), an arts-based methodology that, while growing in popularity in 
qualitative studies, has not been used in educational policy research. As suggested by Prendergast 
(2009), “the potential power of poetic inquiry is to do as poetry does, that is to synthesize experience 
in a direct and affective way” (p. xxii). 

We argue that this move to arts-based, poetic inquiry in educational policy research, and for 
studies focused on neoliberalism in particular, is important for at least three reasons. First, we argue 
that art helps us see and respond to seemingly regular happenings in new ways. As Eisner (1995) 
contends, “artistically crafted novels, poems, films and paintings, and photography have the capacity 
to awaken us from our stock responses” (p. 2), and we argue this is particularly important when 
considering how neoliberalism operates in school and university spaces. As Lipman (2011) reminds 
us,  

neoliberalism is not just “out there” as a set of policies and explicit ideologies. It has 
developed a new social imaginary, a common sense about how we think about society and 
our place in it…. In this sense, the power of neoliberalism lies in its saturation of social 
practices and consciousness, making it difficult to think otherwise. (p. 6) 
 

Utilizing arts-based inquiry, and poetic inquiry in particular, “makes the ordinary seem extraordinary. 
It provokes, innovates, and breaks through common resistance, forcing us to consider new ways of 
seeing or doing things” (Weber & Mitchell, 2004, p. 985). In this way, the creation of our poetry is a 
“performative act” where we use the poetry to explore the real, everyday implications of educational 
policy in our lives and careers (Prendergast, p. xxiii, 2009). We, like Faulkner (2009), “often don’t 
know what [we are] trying to say until the poem is written… We discover much of what we mean to 
say as we write” (p. 3).  

Second, an arts-based approach allows us to represent the complex, oftentimes silenced, 
emotions related to making sense of the ways in which neoliberal reforms have affected our practice 
as teacher educators. As described by Butler-Kisber (2002): “these nontraditional forms help disrupt 
the hegemony inherent in traditional texts and evoke emotional responses that bring the 
reader/viewer closer to the work, permitting otherwise silenced voices to be heard” (p. 230). Barone 
(2007) suggests similar motivations for the use of arts-based research; there is “long overdue 
recognition of the sound of silence, a sudden painful awareness of the extent to which human voices 
have been systematically excluded from traditional research texts” (p. 463). We agree with Görlich 
(2016) that poetic inquiry, in particular, broadens understanding and provokes an affective response. 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  13 

 
For example, as we consider how we experience and resist neoliberal reforms in teacher preparation, 
we remember that traditional methods of research oftentimes focus on the interventions or reforms 
themselves. While we find value in work that looks at how neoliberalism operates in teacher 
preparation spaces, we also strive to find methodologies that shift the focus toward teacher 
educators’ voices and emotional experiences within these neoliberal spaces. As Görlich (2016) 
suggests, the use of poetic inquiry “forces us, academics, professionals and decision-makers to 
acknowledge the profound impact political interventions have on [our] lives” (p. 533).  

Finally, like Rancière (2015), we believe that “art compels us to revolt when it shows us 
revolting things” (p. 135), especially in the realm of policy and politics in schooling. According to 
Rancière (2015), “if there exists a connection between art and politics, it should be cast in terms of 
dissensus, the very kernel of the aesthetic regime: artworks can produce effects of dissensus precisely 
because they neither give lessons nor have any destination” (p. 140). Instead, critical art aims to 
produce “a new perception of the world, and therefore to create a commitment to its 
transformation” (Rancière, 2015, p. 142). This form of resistance—aiming to question continually 
our world through emotionally charged arts-based scholarship—is different from resistance that 
might occur on the ground. For example, many teacher educators join professional organizations 
and subcommittees within those organizations charged with making sense of or engaging in policy 
debates. While this work is worthwhile, it generally has an end-goal, a question to be answered, or a 
task to complete. This stands in contrast to the use of poetry, in particular, in scholarly inquiry—
poetry that makes use of blank spaces on the page and invites those who choose to engage to bring 
more to the reading of the manuscript. As suggested by Faulkner (2009),  

Poetry questions, 
rages against. 
Poetry is political, 
risky, 
unleashes secrets. (para. 34) 

 
Used within educational policy research, art can be effective politically especially when it “leaves the 
spaces reserved for it and becomes a social practice” (Rancière, 2015, p. 134-135). It becomes a 
space to unleash secrets—for us as writers and for our audience as readers.  

 

Context 
 

In poetic inquiry, instead of traditional data reporting mechanisms, scholars craft data 
into poetry. Our poems are written as vox autoethnographia, or in the researchers’ personal voices. 
Such a crafting of our experiences in poetic form represents an attempt to “do something with 
the data, rather than saying something about it” (Rath, 2001, p. 117). As implied in the term vox 
autoethnographia, we are our own participants. In this way, this type of poetic  inquiry is similar to 
autoethnography or self-studies, whereby the researchers are themselves the subjects of the 
inquiry and the data sources are ones we produced. We each self -identify as university teacher 
educators for social justice and/or scholar-activists, though our specific areas of expertise, 
research, and teaching vary. We view teacher educators as those expert faculty who have years of 
research and teaching experience through the preparation of preservice teachers at the 
undergraduate and graduate levels. We believe teacher educators’ direct, sustained course - and 
field-based experiences with preservice teachers and K-12 schools allows them to have 
specialized and nuanced understandings of teacher candidates’ abilities, needs, strengths and 
capabilities that enables them to apply their scholarship to address the changing needs of the 
classrooms and schools preservice teachers will someday serve.  



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 14 

 
The three institutions discussed in this article are all public, state universities of various 

sizes. All prepare preservice teachers at the undergraduate and master’s level. As public 
institutions, they are subject to additional guidelines from their state governments, in addition to 
those mandated by national accrediting bodies like CAEP. Taken together , these three 
universities represent much of the diversity of institutional contexts in which preservice teachers 
are prepared. Stephanie is an assistant professor of education at a medium-sized doctoral-degree 
granting university in the southeastern United States. Located in a major urban city, its College 
of Education serves a large proportion of students of color. A former middle school math 
teacher, Stephanie’s areas of research include preservice teacher education, school -university 
partnerships, and the examination of whiteness in university and school spaces. At the time of 
writing, Stephanie had been a professor for seven years, three years as a clinical assistant 
professor followed by four years in a tenure-track position. Alyssa is an assistant professor of 
teacher education at a large, midwestern doctoral-degree granting university with national land 
grant status. Serving over 2,500 students, its College of Education is nationally ranked and is a 
predominantly white institution (PWI). Prior to this, she worked at the same institution as 
Stephanie. A former high school English teacher, Alyssa’s areas of research include urban and 
multicultural education, educational policy, and the sociocultural contexts of urban schools and 
teacher preparation. At the time of writing, Alyssa had been a professor for six years. Erica is an 
associate professor of education and French at a small regional teaching institution in the 
southeastern US. Located on the outskirts of a metropolitan area, it is designated as a 
predominantly Black institution (PBI) and houses its Department of Education within a College 
of Arts and Sciences. A former French and ESL community college instructor, Erica’s areas of 
research include preparation of multicultural and ESL teachers, study abroad, and second and 
foreign language pedagogy. At the time of writing, Erica was in her seventh year as a professor.  
 

Data and Methods 
 

For the purposes of this manuscript, our data include five years (2011 -2016) of written 
data across three researchers. Data sources include personal reflections, electronic 
communications, programmatic documents, and social media postings. Each author collected 
her own data from across this period. First, we identified any sources that related to our 
research questions, literature review, and/or theoretical framework. We searched through 
emails, student assignments, and files that were related to key policies and reforms. We combed 
through personal notes and handwritten files from the time period, inc luding meeting minutes 
or any other documents that seemed related to reforms in teacher education. Electronically, our 
search terms including things like “edTPA,” “TFA,” “BOE,” and “NCATE.”  We also searched 
for by sender, choosing senders who we knew were involved in implementing reforms, such as 
program coordinators or department chairs. This meant, for example, that Alyssa identified 224 
emails about topics such as the edTPA, Teach For America, NCATE, and related policies. She 
also collected 15 personal reflections or written memos, 35 social media postings, and several 
programmatic documents. Similarly, Stephanie identified 96 emails about topics such as the 
edTPA, Teach For America, NCATE, and related policies. She also collected eight personal 
reflections or written memos and several programmatic documents. Additionally, Erica primarily 
targeted emails related to edTPA, NCATE and collected 12 handwritten notes from faculty 
meetings, edTPA local scoring trainings, and other programmatic documents. This re troactive 
search meant that, perhaps, there were things we might have discarded or deleted that would 
have been helpful as additional data sources. However, because many of the documents were 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  15 

 
electronic and searchable, we were able to find them easily. We also found documents about 
which we had previously forgotten that proved to be useful in our analysis. 

Once we had gathered all of the data sources, we each selected relevant quotations, 
words, and phrases from our individual sources. In this way, no priva te communications were 
revealed to other authors if they were not the original intended recipients. We included 
quotations that were memorable and by a variety of senders in order to show both breadth and 
depth. Quotations were chosen to highlight different types of reforms, poetic/metaphorical 
writing, student comments that were so memorable that we were still thinking about them, or 
comments that compelled us to change our thinking or our practice. We listed these selected 
quotations in a shared virtual chart and attributed them to each author.  

A note about trustworthiness and credibility of this research: Even though technically 
poetic inquiry could be considered as a type of qualitative research where the concern is to 
achieve data saturation or crystallization, we sought primarily to achieve the aims of arts -based 
research, a field that relies upon different criteria for judging its relevance and “rigor.” 
According to Barone & Eisner (1997), arts-based research is determined to be “good” if it works 
to  

enhance meanings, to broaden and deepen ongoing conversations about 
educational policy and practice… First, the merits of the research are to be 
judged by its illuminating effect—its ability to reveal what had not been 
noticed…. Arts-based research, in this sense, culminates in work that is 
referentially adequate. By referentially adequate we mean that it enables the 
reader to notice what the researcher through his or her work clai ms to be 
there…. Second, the research should be judged also by its generativity —its ability 
to promote new questions. One of the most important functions of ABER is that 
it raises more questions than answers…. A third feature that can be used to 
appraise arts-based research is its incisiveness; that is, its ability to focus tightly 
on educationally salient issues and questions. Does the research address what is 
educational significant in a school, a classroom, or in the lives of school people? 
Does the material get to the heart of the matter, persuading readers of the 
educational importance of the events portrayed? Another feature of arts -based 
research is its generalizability; that is, its relevance to phenomena outside of the 
research text. Does the research text have legs? Does it enable to reader to make 
connections that had not been made before?... Once again, the foregoing features 
require the use of judgment to determine their presence. They cannot be applied 
as formulaic criteria. (Barone & Eisner, 1997, p. 102) 
 

Once all of the data were included in the chart, we read within and across data sources and 
participants. We identified patterns in thoughts, words and ideas, a process in poetic inquiry 
called “sifting” (Prendergast, 2009, p. xxiii). These patterns became our first themes, which were 
then refined into the themes reflected in the Findings section below. This process of sorting 
words, synthesizing meaning, and combining data sources with other ideas is known in poetic 
inquiry as creating found poems, an established practice in literature where writers borrow 
passages, words, or phrases from any variety of sources outside of themselves. The sampled 
words remain grouped as they were found and the researchers modify, juxta pose, adapt and 
adjust the rhythm, phrasing, and breaks of the sample. Researchers then add context through the 
use of various literary devices and poetic creativity (Butler -Kisber, 2002, McCullis, 2013; 
Prendergast, 2009). The found poems are a new representation of reality that allow readers to 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 16 

 
experience a familiar event or idea in a new way. Unique to our manuscript, as it is co -authored, 
the resulting poems are composed of a mix of data from all sources and each of the three 
researchers. Interspersed with these data points are words, phrases, and notions that extend and 
connect the primary themes to blend the data into a poem. As in arts -based research, “the 
literary text will sometimes—usually for the purpose of educating readers about the value of the 
textual experiment—be accompanied by descriptions of (or stories about) the research process, 
or analysis of themes embodied within it” (Barone & Eisner, 1997, p. 97).  

Based on what our data analysis revealed, we explore the following findings below: (1) 
the initial hopelessness and confusion upon introduction to neoliberal policies, (2) the safety and 
danger of silence in the face of neoliberal reforms, (3) the tension between acquiescing to and 
resisting neoliberal policies in teacher education, and (4) the promise and possibility of collective 
organizing against such reforms. In this way, we explore the cycle of our sense making from 
initial despair and resignation to agency and empowerment. As we move forward in this work, 
however, we heed Barone’s (2007) warning that a “tension is...felt in attempts to blend the 
political and the aesthetic in narrative constructions” and continue to consider how we might 
“reconcile the opposing tendencies of political substance and aesthetic form in emancipatory -
minded storytelling” (p. 458).  

Findings & Discussion 

From the study of our experiences across program contexts, we found that there is both a 
unique nature of some policy problems, as well as a remarkable and troubling similarity of reform 
efforts across (yet often without regard to) contexts. First, we asked How do teacher educators make sense 
of neoliberal reforms and policies in teacher preparation? Our findings revealed that our experiences seemed 
to cycle from hopelessness to resistance. The diagram below illustrates this cycle as we observed in 
our data and as it is explored in our poetic inquiry:  

 

 
 
It is in this final theme that we answer the second research question of this study: how, if at 

all, can teacher educators resist the neoliberalization of teacher preparation? In the sections below, organized by 
theme, we first share our data in poetic form. Each poem is made up of a mix of data from all three 
researchers, as well as additional “connective” words and ideas that we incorporated to mesh the 
data into a poem. We have italicized the portions of each poem that use verbatim data. Then, we 
include a brief narrative after each poem in which we expand upon the poems’ data and discuss the 
connections of these data points to our theoretical framework and previous literature.  

 

Hopelessness and Confusion 
 

 The poem below is a collection of public and personal writing at the time new neoliberal 
policies were introduced into our teacher preparation programs. As noted above, direct 
quotations from our data are italicized. The poem illustrates, first, preservice teachers’ confusion 
and concern about the policies, especially the edTPA and other requirements for which they a re 
financially responsible. It also foregrounds our own hopelessness and unease about being asked 
to implement these policies, counter to our social justice orientations, in our roles as teacher 
educators and program coordinators.  
 

Hopelessness/ Confusion
Safety/Danger in 

Silence

Individual 
Acquiescence/ 

Resistance

Collective 
Resistance



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  17 

 
Full Circle: Who’s Speaking? 
 

Supposedly we are the “experts,” 
the ones to whom students look  
with pleading eyes, questioning tones, hope in their voice… 
We see they are  
struggling, 
discouraged, 
so tired, 
trying really hard to do all of this at once. 
 
They, who we teach to push back against 
injustice in schools and communities, 
are told to be  
complicit in injustice  
in their own programs.  
 
They look at us defiantly, daring us to  
push back now,  
now that we know the stark reality:  
“If it’s not about edTPA, I will not be listening.” 
“I think I’ll just go do crack.” 
“It won’t make me a better teacher.  
It just makes them richer.”  
  
But how do we give hope when 
we have none? 
We, too, look at the world around us with 
little understanding, despondency.  
We lock eyes across meeting tables,  
when we get far too frustrated, when 
this makes no sense, when 
the amount of work is truly oppressive, when 
our responsibilities are in  
direct conflict with our stated program goals 
and values. 
  
Values that are  
Buried underneath  
Piles of paperwork,  
edTPA workshops,  
Livetext manuals, 
Board reports.  
Hidden behind   
assignments that cannot be modified 
and evaluation training.  
Neglected when  
we have to ask if they feel financially prepared 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 18 

 
to be student teachers.  
Pushed aside when  
we wonder if we did more harm than good.  
If she is ready to be a teacher. 
 
Please tell me this is all a joke. 
If the biggest universities in the system won’t resist this,  
how can our small program? 
What has this done to us?  
  
And when a student writes: 
I feel like I can’t do this. I don’t know why they’re making us do this.  
When a student stands up in front of her peers, 
and says: 
This test, this test,  
this thing that I have to do, that I don’t want to do,  
the thing that’s taking my time and my soul.  
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do…. 
It could just as easily be us,  
Speaking our hopelessness  
into existence.  
 

As we organized our data for this poem, we found that themes of our own helplessness and 
confusion oftentimes mirrored those of our students. This poem helps magnify the initial confusion 
we felt alongside our students, as we were introduced to new neoliberal reforms such as edTPA. We 
immediately recognized these “reforms” as contrary to our personal commitments to social justice 
and equity, and found many of our students reacting in similar ways. Striking to us as we reviewed 
our data was the seemingly parallel emotional reaction to this work—our students trying really hard to 
do all of this [edTPA and program portfolio work] at once while we emailed one another about the amount of 
work [that] is truly oppressive. We were overwhelmed, stressed, and feeling like we were barely surviving 
under piles of paperwork, LiveText sessions, and edTPA workshops. The hopelessness that we felt derived 
from the tensions inherent in teacher education at the moment, between value-driven work and 
task-driven work, between conformity or automation and individuality and humanity. Indeed, many 
of the reasons that we were drawn to teacher education in the first place were being challenged, 
making these tensions ripe for hopelessness.  

We also came to understand how our lack of agency and autonomy in curriculum-making 
mirrored that of our preservice teachers. As we taught our preservice teachers not to “teach to the 
test,” we were forced to standardize and narrow our own curriculum in response to the high-stakes 
nature of edTPA. We struggled as we felt complicit in injustice, at times implementing measures that 
Madeloni (2014) warned against, at times “complicit in the production of compliant educators for a 
compliant workforce” (p. 84). As our students remind us, It won’t make me a better teacher. It just makes 
them richer. We struggled with the fact that some of the skills required by the edTPA are, in fact, 
valuable and may, if truly learned and implemented well, improve teaching and learning. Yet, the 
method of decontextualized evaluation and the high-stakes nature of the assessment renders these 
skills nearly moot.  

Just between the chosen words of this poem, inherent in the line and paragraph breaks, we 
find the other Hydra heads—those that represent state and federal requirements like accreditation 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  19 

 
reports and LiveText portfolios in our teacher preparation programs. As we discussed in the 
literature review, we observed that such portfolio systems “emphasized the bureaucratic aspects” of 
teacher preparation and, instead of advancing our program missions and visions, occupied much of 
our and our students’ time on endless paperwork and repetitive reporting. Part of the sense of 
hopelessness and confusion we reflect in this poem relates to our dismay that the new assessments 
and measures “failed to take advantage of the potential in portfolios to deepen teacher learning” 
(Zeichner, 2010, p. 1548). We wonder what impact these policies have on our TPPs’ curricular 
choices. For example, to meet reporting requirements, our programs have created or revised 
assignments; as a result, LiveText portfolios and other assignments directly tied to program reports 
have a significant effect on our teacher candidates, and on us. Due to these program requirements, 
we all experience professional dissonance; we are not providing to our students what we believe they 
need to be good teachers in these moments and they would likely agree. Our responsibilities are in direct 
conflict with our stated program goals and values as we feed the head of the Hydra that’s taking [our student’s] 
time and soul. What happens when we do not speak our hopelessness into existence? In what ways 
does this null curriculum— what we are not teaching—communicate to our teacher candidates what 
is just and ethical amidst neoliberal and market-driven forces in education? We investigate below the 
ways that this hopelessness moves us to and through the safety and dangers of silence.   
 

The Safety and Danger in Silences 
 

What were we to do with this hopelessness and confusion? Once we understood our new 
contexts well enough to be able to make cogent arguments that the individual policies were part 
of a larger neoliberal narrative and agenda in teacher preparation, we wondered how to move 
forward amidst and beyond our feelings of hopelessness. Our data revealed that, in many 
instances, we found ourselves silent. In the poem below, we explore both the stated and tacit 
rationales behind this silence. 
 

Silence(d)(ing) 
 

Silence has a sound, or so 
Simon and Garfunkel tell us.  
 
We look around the room— 
It doesn’t matter what room,  
because though in different places, the conversations are the same.  
 
Mouths slightly agape but bodies stiff and still, 
eyes wide...or darting… or wondering… or quiet. 
Here, silence sounds like waiting  
for someone else to speak.  
Someone who  
 Has tenure 
 Is male 
 Is in power 
 
Faculty pass a new GRE policy  
with no discussion, no dissent, 
just the noiseless acceptance that moving up in  
U.S. News rankings is even 



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a laudable goal.  
Here, silence sounds like tired sighs and  
our steady and resigned click clack of nails on keys:  
“dear prospective student [of color]” 
“thank you again for meeting with us last week” 
“we were impressed with your background and your passion” 
“we cannot accept you this fall because of our new guidelines”  
“would you be willing to retake the GREs?”  
 
edTPA is driving all of our assignments 
“let’s remove the reflections; they already do those for edTPA” 
“they need more practice with lesson plans; we really need to get them ready for edTPA”  
Here, silence sounds like paying Pearson to 
Capitalize on students’ dreams.  
 
It won’t hurt to partner with TFA, we’re told, 
because we can help them get better.  
And they can help us… what?  
design snazzy websites and flyers?  
recruit more White savior teachers?  
(We have enough of those.)  
Here, silence sounds like closing my laptop,  
standing up, and walking out.  
 
But who or what are we waiting for?  
Our silence can’t protect us.  
Or our students.  
Here, silence sounds like an illusion of safety. 
 
So sometimes, we speak... 
“but what if we just submit the application to the dean?” 
“it will just be rejected; the top floor does not care about anything else besides GPA,” they 
say… 
  
“they need more edTPA practice,  
they’ve already had enough of that social justice stuff,”  
So I say 
“but that should always be our focus”  
my silent voice now loud,  
shaky. 
  
Sometimes this transition from silence to speaking works.  
That student? He got in.  
Because I submitted the application  
and it slipped through. I found a way,  
a silent way,  
to resist the neoliberal positioning of university rankings. 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  21 

 
 
But, other times, our speaking up seems not to matter, 
as if we were silent all along. 
That syllabus? It’s all edTPA. 
A senior faculty member stood up, pointed, and interrupted.  
I cannot tell you what was said, 
But the words matter less than the outcome of 
More silence.  
Maybe it was something about trying to include more social justice next year.  
Next year. 
Next year… 
Next year?  
  
That meeting when we railed against the silence? We apologized after…  
“Please accept my apologies for my comments to you…” 
“Know that my frustration was in  
no way directed to you individually…” 
 
Because 
as Simon and Garfunkel explain 
no one dare disturb  
the sound of silence.  
 

This poem reflects our use of silence to understand and survive the market -driven and 
neoliberal reform agendas in teacher education, and offers smaller moments of resistance when 
we do speak up. To make sense of our silence across the multiple heads of the Hydra of Teacher 
Education, we draw on Lorde’s (1977) writings on breaking silence. As Lorde sugg ests, we 
understand that we are “never really a whole person if [we] remain silent, because there’s always 
that one little piece inside of [us] that wants to be spoken out” (p. 42). We draw heavily here on 
her voice, and we are thankful for a scholar who helped us think through our silence in the 
midst of fighting the Hydra of Teacher Education.  

Lorde (1977) suggests that “on the cause of silence, each one of us draws her own fear —
fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge , of annihilation” 
(p. 42). The causes of our silence were all of these things, and our silence was borne out of a 
desire for protection and professional survival. The poem above reveals that we oftentimes use 
silence, first, to understand who we are standing with and who (or what) we might need to push 
against. We realize, quickly, that faculty come from different ideological and philosophical 
standpoints on reforms such as edTPA, portfolio assessments, the use of GREs and university 
ranking requirements, and more. What results is silence for protection. Indeed, as many 
untenured faculty are counseled, we sometimes found ourselves thinking we would “just wait 
until we have tenure” to speak up and speak out. We rationalized our silence even as we kn ew 
that “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will 
choke us” (Lorde, 1977, p. 44).  

As we developed an understanding of who is standing with us, we moved to consider our 
silence as an act of protest. We stood up and walked out, or we shut our laptops, folded our 
arms, and disengaged from the discussion. We feared the words we want to say and hoped that 
our silent objections will be enough. We thought, like Lorde (1977), that “the machine will try to 



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grind us into dust anyway, whether or not we speak” (p. 42). But we walked away from those 
meetings carrying disappointment and feared that our silence was insignificant and an easy way 
out. As Lorde suggests,  

we can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while 
our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our 
safe corners as mute as bottles, and still we will be no less afraid . (p. 42) 
 

Finally, we acknowledge that our silence is sometimes about survival. Even in healthy work 
environments, it is tied to survival as we look around the room, wondering who on the 
promotion and tenure committee might disagree with what we say. We have been soc ialized as 
academics to think this way. But more often it is tied to surviving the workweek that already 
exceeds the 40 hours we are (under)paid for. We hear our mentors, our deans, and our faculty 
support groups tell us to skip those meetings, disengage f rom the “swamp” of teacher education 
(Cole & Knowles, 1996), and instead focus on writing for publication and submitting grant 
applications that requires the use of those value-added test scores and university reports of high 
edTPA pass rates that we just (silently) rejected. How do we engage in this work of resistance 
when we are supposed to publish? How do we apply for grants that require the use of measures 
designed by and for the neoliberal agenda in education? We are afraid we will not survive, so we 
draw on Lorde’s (1977) writings on silence once again: “Of course I am afraid —you can hear it 
in my voice—because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self -
revelation and that always seems fraught with danger” (p. 42).  
 

Tension between Acquiescence and Resistance 
 

Moving from silence to action (or purposeful non-action) is always a complicated step. In 
our next poem, we share our lived tension between acquiescing to and resisting neoliberal policies in 
teacher education. The poem reflects this constant tension by conceptualizing it as a game of tug of 
war. The tug of war reflects the back and forth pushes and pulls, the starts and stops of our being 
complicit in neoliberal ideology and resisting it, or wanting to resist it, through various means. The 
title of this poem illustrates that this contest is dirty business with painful and scarring consequences.  
 

The Blood on Our Hands 
 

Today, I sat in a meeting 
and suggested I could do a seminar on Creative Insubordination for teachers,  
But then, in another meeting, 
 I did not push through a Black male PhD applicant’s file 
because of GRE scores below the threshold now suggested by the president. 
 
Today, I sat in a workshop 
and asked that we put up a website link that says “Why NOT edTPA” 
But then, in another workshop,  
I quietly took notes and learned the rules, and only wrote that 
this is not what I want my role to be. 
 
Today, I sat with my students 
and created one slide explaining edTPA,  
followed by 5 slides pushing back against it. 
But then wondered if I only made it worse for my students. 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  23 

 
 
Today, I sat at my desk  
and wrote to my students  
If you choose not to complete the assessment, I will support you. 
You know that I am fighting for you. 
But then emailed the program director  
and agreed to review more portfolios.   
 
Today, I sat with my sister scholars 
And wondered If we don’t speak up now, then who will?  
Or when will they?  
Should we do something before it’s too late? 
And they held my hands and, together,  
we envisioned standing up.  
  
Today, I stood up when 
I literally could not bring myself to engage in  
implementing this program at our institution. 
 
Today, I said  
I will not do this. I’m not going to score it,  
I won’t teach about it in my classes,  
I won’t attend the training sessions.  
I just flat out won’t do it.  
This is against everything I believe in. 
  
Today, I played tug of war  
because   
My chosen route of resistance has consequences  
and I worry about them. 
My lack of involvement has implications for my colleagues. 
And now, I’m not “at the table”  
to help others stop sitting, to hold their hands, 
And stand up. Together.  
 
Children don’t always notice 
the blisters, the calluses,  
the blood on their hands 
After a tough game of  
tug of war.  
It’s easy to concentrate 
on the game,  
the potential for victory, the swaying 
back and forth of  
your body and the feeling of the  
rope in your hands.  
 



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As adults,  
after we stop sitting 
and stand up to resist, 
we lay down the rope, 
look at our bloody hands, and 
feel the tension in our backs and 
Our hearts.  
 
 This poem reflects the challenges we faced in responding to neoliberal reforms in teacher 
education. This tug of war was a constant struggle between what we wanted to do (resist) and what 
we felt we had to do (acquiesce) in order to keep our jobs. We understand fully the danger of our 
choices; as we described above, Madeloni (2014) received a letter of non-renewal terminating her 
contract after she supported her students in resisting the edTPA and Knowles (Cole & Knowles, 
1996) writes about being denied tenure for work “in the swamp” of teacher education. As 
Richmond, Bartell, and Dunn (2016) suggest, we must “search for equilibrium between the world 
that currently exists and the world that we wish existed” (p. 103); we worry, often, that our 
disengagement could be a form of injustice for our colleagues and our students. 

We recognized that some resistance on our part meant that our colleagues may shoulder 
more burden if our resistance takes the form of opting—as we refuse to administer the edTPA or 
attend partnership meetings with TFA. Ultimately this meant that our colleagues—colleagues with 
less power or privilege or those who may support the use of edTPA or partnership opportunities 
with TFA—were left to do the work. This poem demonstrates how we grappled with these choices. 
As teacher educators committed to continual debate about the overall purposes of schooling, we 
wanted to be at those meetings. We understand through writing this poem what Cochran-Smith and 
colleagues (2009) suggest—current discussions around a “culture of evidence” are simply the “latest 
technique for reaching goals that are already clearly established and squarely located within the 
current accountability regime” (p. 465). Our resistance makes us absent from opportunities to 
engage in true scholarly debate when discussions around a culture of evidence drives the 
conversations in our TPPs. We agree with Dover, Shultz, Smith, and Duggan (2015b) that debate on 
the neoliberal policies and practices in teacher education should continue and “teacher educators will 
not—and we believe should not—always agree regarding the best approach to new policies, the best 
means of assessing their candidates, or the contextually-specific needs of their school communities” 
(p. 1). We worry, however, that the dialogue, at times, is halted as we complain, disagree, disengage, 
and then (oftentimes) comply.  

Even as we resisted in small ways, such as by telling our students that we would support 
them if they chose not to complete standardized assessments or by leading workshops on creative 
insubordination for teachers, we still felt—and feel—complicit in a broken system. Our hands are 
bloody because institutions, as they are designed to do, institutionalize. And, as part of those 
institutions, we, too, have become institutionalized. We realize that part of the struggle with these 
small-scale efforts illustrate what Picower and Mayorga (2015) explain happened in response to K-12 
education reforms in New York City: our efforts are often piecemeal. They respond to one reform 
at a time, rather than fighting the neoliberal body undergirding each of the Hydra heads. This 
constant battle with multiple reforms never actually addresses the greater neoliberal attack on our 
profession and serves to deplete teacher educators and can lead to burnout (Banks [Roberts], 2017). 
This burnout is evident in our poems as we work to engage in research that examines the impact of 
neoliberal policies and practices on teacher candidates, their students, and on us as teacher 
educators. Until we know more about these impacts, we must “collectively resist policies that are 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  25 

 
more responsive to the politics of privatization than our profession itself” (Dover, Shultz, Smith, & 
Duggan, 2015b, p. 3). We can only do this, we think, with collective resistance.  
 

Collective Resistance 
 

The final finding from our analysis was our emergence from silence and acquiescence to 
collective resistance. Harkening back to the Hydra mythology, it is important to consider that 
Hercules is unable to defeat the Hydra alone. He calls out to his nephew for help. Together the 
two develop a strategy and then work together to defeat the seemingly undefeatable Hydra 
(Picower & Mayorga, 2015). Similarly, we united with others to make sense of the realities of the 
neoliberal reforms we were facing and then strategized ways to dismantle them. Unique to this 
portion of our data was the use of collective pronouns and ideas, rather than imagining or 
surmising our efforts as solitary. In contrast to the darker themes (literally and figuratively) of 
the previous poems, this poem uses the metaphor and symbol of light to express hopefulness in 
this hard work as we unite with others to resist the effects of the reforms. 
 

Light Can Lead to Bonds 
 

A bright unity has the power 
To shine, show the injustice, 
Illuminate the reality behind 
The clouds of the neoliberal spectacle. 
  
Can the light lead us to others, working 
Toiling, laboring though weary, 
To fight, to resist, to say “NO”? 
Can the light guide us to 
coalesce, 
co-author, coordinate, co-plan, co-create 
Action steps to 
discuss, disrupt, discredit, disavow, diss 
Those policies that destroy.  
  
And through the clouds, we see 
Others who want to know how to fight back. 
No one is talking about it, everyone here has caved 
Or they’re being drowned out by Pearson’s machine. 
Instead we look to Massachusetts, Seattle, anywhere, 
for examples of how this is done. 
  
We use our oneness of purpose to push back 
and poke holes in the cumulus masses of 
busted theory and rhetoric of the takeover of teacher education.  
  
We plan teach-ins so our students can teach out. 
And when they come for us, 
for our emails, 
With accusations of 
“Indoctrination,” “political campaigning,” and “hate speech” 



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for talking about racism and White supremacy and 
the corporate destruction of public education, 
We help each other remember the light, the unity, the 
darkness that comes before dawn. 
  
With our pens and our bodies and our students as proxies, 
we teach and we write and we organize, 
fight in the light assiduously or behind closed doors surreptitiously  
  
When the Hydra rears its ugly heads 
One by one, 
Producing veil-like clouds 
We are not the only ones to see it, 
We call out, there will be no echo—instead others join us and step into the light. 
 
 This final poem, focused on light and unity, highlights our early attempts at collective 
resistance. Though oftentimes difficult, we did engage in participatory policy analysis (Tuck &  
Gorlewski, 2016) as we organized events around and co -authored this and other manuscripts on 
the impact of several neoliberal Hydra heads in teacher education. We supported one another 
even as our collective resistance was clandestinely recorded, question ed, and investigated. As 
discussed abstractly in the poem, one illustrative example of our collective resistance is a teach -
in that we planned in 2013. This event was inspired by our feelings of hopelessness and outrage 
related to yet another neoliberal manifestation of the standardization of curricula in the ban on 
Ethnic Studies curriculum and texts in Tucson, Arizona. Our frustration first and then our 
commitment to social justice inspired us to organized a day -long event with guest speakers from 
Tucson, workshops on liberatory pedagogy and curriculum analysis, and scholarly presentations 
on ethnic studies. We joined with other faculty, students, activists, and community members 
with the explicit goal of resisting the neoliberal and neoconservative censor ship of texts in favor 
of more standardized curriculum. With over 150 attendees in person and another 150 who 
joined our online real-time streaming, we pledged for more collective efforts on this topic. 
Shortly after what we perceived as a successful event and what, as one participant wrote “made 
[me] remember why I want to be a teacher,” we received notice that someone had been in the 
audience and had recorded our presentations and conversations. Though as organizers we were 
pleased with the results of the teach-in, we soon discovered that there are risks to our acts of 
resistance. The recording of the teach-in had been shared as part of a public testimony at a state 
hearing about another educational matter, and legislators pledged to investigate the 
“indoctrination” that was happening at our universities. Among other fall-outs, Alyssa, as the 
leader of the event, was requested to turn over any and all emails relating to the event, so they 
could be investigated for such claims. We were all untenured at the t ime, as were most of the 
other faculty who helped plan and execute the teach-in, and such harsh and unfounded rhetoric 
shook us to our core. The confusion, hopelessness, silence, and acquiescence that followed was 
clear and, most likely, expected. It is only now, years later, that we are finally able to reflect on 
this experience and to talk about both our resisting and our being resisted.  
 The writing of this poem has helped us remember that it is this collective work, these 
defining moments, that brought us together as colleagues, sister scholars, and friends. Yet what 
also surfaced during the collection of data for and subsequent writing of this poem was a 
distinct difference between this poem and the other three; this poem has fewer words, fewer 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  27 

 
lines, and was written out of a data set much smaller than the others. While we are heartened 
that this last poem is filled with light, togetherness, and support for resistance, we are concerned 
when we consider the statistics of this poem in contrast to the othe r three. We wonder why, for 
example, this poem on collective resistance is less than half the length of Poem 3 focused on the 
safety and danger of silence. We worry when we realize that this poem has the smallest ratio of 
italicized words to total words; only about two in every seven words come directly from our data 
set (or about 30%) in contrast to the other poems that were made up of an average of 50% 
italics. This may mean that we simply spoke and wrote more about the topi cs in those first three 
poems—about hopelessness, silence, and acquiescence—and therefore had more data to pull 
from. It would not be surprising that our minds and hearts were focus on the turmoil felt in 
those poems. Alternatively, and more troubling to us, is that our collective resis tance poem is 
shorter, with few data chunks to draw on, because we are, sadly, doing much less of this work. 
Also troubling is the underlying theme in our data—and in this poem—that collective action 
may oftentimes push us back to spaces of confusion, hope lessness, silence, or acquiescence. We 
see this and other smaller acts of collective resistance as prompting us to represent our work as 
cyclical in nature.  

On one hand we have wondered if our collective resistance is a form of protection as 
scholars. After all, this is what we are paid to do, isn’t it? We, particularly as social justice -
focused teacher educators, ascribe to a critical research framework where our work and 
scholarship critique and challenge the status quo (Picower, 2012). To borrow from Lo rde (1984) 
where she critiques white feminists’ privileging of heterosexuality and excluding and 
marginalizing black and/or lesbian women, we see ourselves as using “the master’s tools to 
dismantle the master’s house” (p. 101). Though we believe Lorde to b e asserting that it is 
impossible to enact real, lasting change in society through feminist ideology by using the very 
same forms of oppression or “master’s tools” (racism and homophobia) that the patriarchy had 
been using for centuries, in the “safety” of our roles as university professors we have reclaimed 
and appropriated the tools of the academy in our critique of it. We have collectively joined with 
other scholars to use our research agendas, teaching practice, and university service —in essence 
our day jobs—to work to eliminate the neoliberal reforms set to infiltrate teacher education by 
critiquing our TPPs. 

On the other hand, resistance is perilous and we have felt the sting of being silenced in 
many forms. Any safety we might think we have—individually or collectively—is a mirage, fully 
out of reach. Instead we have been warned that though resistance work yields results to raise 
awareness of injustice with our students or in the school communities where they will someday 
teach, or with legislators or policymakers, this activism and resistance does not have an “impact 
factor” and it will not help junior scholars earn tenure. Methodologies and qualitative work that 
privileges the voices and experiences of teacher educators and their students often raise 
questions about rigor. We have received questions from administrators regarding whether we are 
publishing our scholarship about resistance in the “right” journals, with the primary question 
being about impact factor and not whether or not the work is far -reaching enough or accessible 
to those who can really benefit from it. 

It was not until writing these poems—engaging in the performative act of poetic 
inquiry—that we could see how this cycle of hopelessness, silence, and individual acquiescence 
and resistance might have led to less collective resistance. We continue to embark on this 
journey per hydra head; it is, in short, an exercise in futility to go through this journey with each 
new policy. As we write about multiple heads of the hydra in each poem, we  realize there was 
little effort in those moments—in those emails, those comments, those written reflections—to 



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make sense of how these reforms interacted with and fed the heads of others. This might be 
related, in part, to where we are in our careers. Erica is tenured and wrote more often about 
resistance across these heads of the hydra. As we considered our data, we realized too that each 
of us can pinpoint a policy that started us on this journey. For example, for Stephanie it was 
most certainly experiences with edTPA—when neoliberalism came forcefully into the academy 
and into her daily work—that pushed her to engage individually and collectively in this journey. 
She finally, like the others, had no choice but to engage the fight. We see, in writing thes e 
poems, how entering at different times—consumed more fully by one head or another—makes 
it difficult to come together in collective resistance. This helps us to see the importance of 
deeply reflective and creative self-study, especially when engaging in work that we know needs 
to be grounded in the collective. How can we engage with others in this work without first 
understanding our own motivations, hesitations, and individual acts? We wonder, now, how our 
collective resistance might look different moving forward. Are we now more poised to attack 
the hydra at its base? Are we ready to attack the multiple facets of neoliberalism as one looming, 
scary, and rapidly growing beast? We continue to grapple with this together, and wonder if this 
is possible.  

Implications and Conclusion 

 This poetic inquiry has explored the intersections of policy reforms in teacher preparation 
and our identities as teacher educators, as we attempt to reconcile the current policy environment 
with the significant effects it has on our students and our profession. In particular, we have explored 
the trajectory of our understanding of and resistance to certain reforms, conceptualized here as the 
Hydra of Teacher Education. Though these are individual reforms at the local, state and national 
level, they are all heads spouting off a larger, stronger singular body of neoliberal ideology. In 
conclusion, we outline this study’s implications for research, policy, and the practice of teacher 
education. 
 

Implications for Research 
 

There is a burgeoning body of critical research on the effects of neoliberal policy on TPPs 
and teacher educators (e.g. Berlak, 2010; Madeloni & Gorlewski, 2013). To contribute to this area of 
research, we propose that teacher educators should continue to investigate the ways in which 
neoliberal policies influence their identities as teacher educators at all stages of the career span. 
Additionally, research with preservice teachers to determine how the Hydra of Teacher Education 
impacts their learning and teacher identity development would fill an important gap in the literature 
and be of value to faculty looking to support their students in meaningful ways. This inquiry could 
also support teacher educators’ ability to refine their teaching practice to resist neoliberal policies in 
their classrooms as they would be knowledgeable of the supports their candidates need. This could 
lead to increased agency among both teacher educators and teacher candidates where both groups 
explore research and pedagogy as a means of resistance. In fact, this work might aim to extend the 
collection of essays found in Diamond and Mullen’s (1999) book on arts-based inquiries and teacher 
development by focusing on teachers’ and teacher educators’ artistic and analytical resistance 
practices in neoliberal settings.  
 

Implications for Policy  
 

 Our study connects to other scholarship that demonstrates the harmful effects of neoliberal 
policymaking and the Hydra of teacher education. However, the federal government recently 



The Intersections of Selves and Policies  29 

 
proposed regulations for teacher preparation that seemed to dismiss such scholarship. A coalition 
statement written in late 2016, signed by 29 professional organizations, highlights what was 
problematic in the proposed regulations: “We are particularly concerned about a federal higher 
education regulation placing unfunded mandates on PK-12 schools, districts, tribes, states, and 
institutions of higher education. The regulation encroaches on local, tribal, and state decision 
making, as well as on the academic autonomy of higher education” (p. 1). The statement went on to 
argue that such regulations that link the success and funding of TPPs to the scores of students of 
TPP program graduates would have a negative effect on many elements of the educational process, 
including universities that serve high-needs communities, on the diversity of the teaching profession, 
and on programs that are struggling for funding. And while these proposed federal regulations were 
ultimately struck down in March 2017, other organizations—like the Council for the Accreditation 
of Education Preparation (CAEP)—continue to lead efforts to evaluate the ‘effectiveness’ of teacher 
preparation programs through the use of value-added measures, student-growth percentiles, and 
student learning and development objectives required by the state. Though the jurisdiction and 
control (CAEP vs. federal) has shifted momentarily, the results—market-based reforms that assume 
raising and/or standardizing quantifiable criteria will produce better teachers—are the same.  We 
wholeheartedly supported (and still support) the coalition statement shared above and would add to 
it that such proposed regulations, and any similar regulations to come, threaten to sustain and even 
embolden the Hydra of Teacher Education, shoring up its core of neoliberalism and making room 
for other neoliberal reforms to push their way into our colleges and universities.  
 If we were to create policy related to teacher education, we would envision something to 
support programs for increasing the length of teacher preparation; providing funding for grow-your-
own programs and other programs designed in partnership with local communities with local 
contexts in mind (see, e.g. Cross & Thomas, 2017), supporting financially students enrolled in 
student teaching who would normally be prevented from leaving full-time employment; and 
challenging high-stakes entrance and certification exams that disproportionately disenfranchise 
preservice teachers of color (Cross, 2017; Petchauer, 2014). At present, each of these initiatives are 
happening in individual programs and spaces, but they have to garner support from grants or local 
resources. Were such endeavors supported through state or federal funding plans, they could be 
more sustainable and effective.   
 

Implications for Teacher Education and Teacher Educators 
 

Our study highlighted the stark reality that teacher educators face today as we try to engage 
with our colleagues and students in meaningful ways. We must realize that our pre-service teachers 
are watching us and considering the ways that we are, or are not, modeling the practices we say we 
want them to embody in the future. The way we—as teacher educators—live out our professional 
commitments has the opportunity to advance the experience of pre-service teachers if we can give 
them honest, clear examples of how we struggle for justice in both K-12 schools and our own 
current work environments.  

As we try to determine the most effective ways to have significant impact in our field, we ask 
ourselves, should we engage in small acts of resistance across multiple heads of the Hydra, or should 
we aim for a massive blow to the body? It seems logical that a severe blow at the very root of 
neoliberal policy that would shift the course of its effects on teacher education would be the ideal 
solution. This massive blow would need coordinated efforts—both individual and collective acts of 
resistance from teachers, teacher educators, students, school leaders, policy actors, and many others. 
Yet we, as individual teacher educators must consider our personal circumstances, such as tenure 
status, teaching load, and positionality in the TPP, to determine if this is viable. We wonder, then, 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 30 

 
how teacher educators can manage their fear of speaking out, understanding that overcoming this 
fear—or working through it—is a process. As Lorde (1977) writes, “We can learn to work and speak 
when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired” (p. 43). 
There are many considerations that determine the magnitude of the resistance teacher educators can 
enact. Thus, even as we call for continued collective resistance, we do not wish to minimize the 
significance of individual acts of resistance.  

Another part of this questioning lies in the cyclical nature of our own (and other) teacher 
educators’ experiences within the market-driven agendas in teacher education. At times we feel bold 
and energetic and resist these policies with great force and agency. At other times, our energy wanes, 
the anxiety builds in the face of multiple assaults on our professional agency, and our silence 
encompasses us for a season. In this way, we must find meaningful ways to resist, and they do not 
always have to be couched in “traditional” forms of resistance. Many teacher educators could use 
scholarship itself as resistance, as we have attempted to do here and in our other work. We can also 
connect with other scholars and activists who are resisting these policies, learn what works best at 
their institutions, and determine if and how similar efforts could be made within and across 
contexts. As much as is possible, teacher educators can also choose teaching, service, and 
scholarship opportunities that support their philosophies and that, implicitly or explicitly, rejects 
neoliberal ideology. Amidst this resistance, it is also important to remember that activist and 
educator burnout is real, and we must engage in self-care in order to be able to be of most use to our 
students and our colleagues. We do this, however, with Lorde’s (1997) words in mind: 
 
My silences had not protected me.  
Your silence will not protect you.  
But for every real word spoken,  
for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking,  
I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all 
believed… (p. 41) 

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About the Authors 

Stephanie Behm Cross 
Georgia State University 
scross@gsu.edu 
Stephanie Behm Cross is an Assistant Professor of Urban Teacher Education at Georgia State 
University. Her research interests include teacher preparation, school-university partnerships, 
and the examination of whiteness in university and school spaces.  
 
Alyssa Hadley Dunn 
Michigan State University 
ahdunn@msu.edu 
Alyssa Hadley Dunn is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University. Her areas of 
research include urban and multicultural education, educational policy, and the sociocultural 
contexts of urban schools and teacher preparation. 
 
Erica K. Dotson 
Clayton State University 
ericadotson@clayton.edu 
Erica Dotson is an Associate Professor of Teacher Education at Clayton State University in 
Morrow, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. Her research agenda has combined her interests in 
second and foreign language pedagogy, multicultural curriculum, and social justice.    
 

About the Guest Editors 
 
Elena Aydarova 
Auburn University 
eza0029@auburn.edu  
Website: https://elenaaydarova.com 
Elena Aydarova is Assistant Professor of Social Foundations at the Department of Educational 
Foundations, Leadership, and Technology at Auburn University. Her interdisciplinary research 
examines the interactions between global social change and the work of  teachers, teaching, and 
teacher education through the lens of equity and social justice. Her projects have explored 
teacher education reforms in Russia and the US, internationalization of education, teacher 
retention, as well as privatization of teacher preparation. She has recently completed a book 
manuscript “Teacher Education Reforms as Political Theater: Policy Dramas in Neoliberal 

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2010.06.004
mailto:scross@gsu.edu
mailto:ahdunn@msu.edu
mailto:scross@gsu.edu
mailto:eza0029@auburn.edu
https://elenaaydarova.com/


The Intersections of Selves and Policies  35 

 
Contexts.” Throughout her career, Dr. Aydarova has taught in the United States, Ukraine, 
China, and the United Arab Emirates. 
 
David C. Berliner 
Arizona State University 
berliner@asu.edu 
David C. Berliner is Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Education at Arizona State University. Dr. 
Berliner is a member of the National Academy of Educatio n (NEA), the International 
Education Academy (IEA), a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral 
Sciences, and a past president of both the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 
and the Division of Educational Psychology of the American Psychological Association (APA). 
He is the recipient of awards for distinguished contributions from APA, AERA, and the 
National Education Association (NEA). Dr. Berliner is co -author (with B. J. Biddle) of the best 
seller The Manufactured Crisis, co-author (with Ursula Casanova) of Putting Research to Work, co-
author (with Gene Glass) of 50 Myths and Lies that Threaten America's Public Schools, and co-author 
(with N. L. Gage) of six editions of the textbook Educational Psychology. He is co-editor of the 
first Handbook of Educational Psychology and the books Talks to Teachers, and Perspectives on 
Instructional Time. Professor Berliner has also authored more than 200 published articles, 
technical reports, and book chapters. He has taught at the Universi ty of Arizona, University of 
Massachusetts, Teachers College and Stanford University, as well as universities in Australia, 
Canada, The Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. 
  

mailto:berliner@asu.edu


Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 36 

 
 

SPECIAL ISSUE                                                                                                                            

Navigating the Contested Terrain of   
Teacher Education Policy and Practice 

 

education policy analysis archives 
 

Volume 26 Number 29       March 5, 2018 ISSN 1068-2341 

 

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education policy analysis archives 

editorial board  

Lead Editor: Audrey Amrein-Beardsley (Arizona State University) 
Editor Consultor: Gustavo E. Fischman (Arizona State University) 

Associate Editors: David Carlson, Lauren Harris, Eugene Judson, Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, Scott Marley, Iveta 
Silova, Maria Teresa Tatto (Arizona State University) 

Cristina Alfaro San Diego State 
University 

Gene V Glass  Arizona 
State University 

Susan L. Robertson  Bristol 
University, UK  

Gary Anderson New York  
       University  

Ronald Glass  University of 
California, Santa Cruz 

Gloria M. Rodriguez 
University of California, Davis 

Michael W. Apple University of 
Wisconsin, Madison  

Jacob P. K. Gross  University of 
Louisville 

R. Anthony Rolle University of  
Houston 

Jeff Bale OISE, University of 
Toronto, Canada 

Eric M. Haas WestEd A. G. Rud Washington State 
University  

Aaron Bevanot SUNY Albany  Julian Vasquez Heilig California 
State University, Sacramento 

Patricia Sánchez University of 
University of Texas, San Antonio 

David C. Berliner  Arizona 
State University  

Kimberly Kappler Hewitt University 
of North Carolina Greensboro 

Janelle Scott  University of 
California, Berkeley  

Henry Braun Boston College  Aimee Howley  Ohio University  Jack Schneider College of the Holy 
Cross 

Casey Cobb  University of 
Connecticut  

Steve Klees  University of Maryland  Noah Sobe  Loyola University 

Arnold Danzig  San Jose State 
University  

Jaekyung Lee  
SUNY Buffalo  

Nelly P. Stromquist  University of 
Maryland 

Linda Darling-Hammond  
Stanford University  

Jessica Nina Lester 
Indiana University 

Benjamin Superfine University of  
Illinois, Chicago 

Elizabeth H. DeBray University of 
Georgia 

Amanda E. Lewis  University of 
 Illinois, Chicago      

Adai Tefera Virginia  
Commonwealth University 

Chad d'Entremont  Rennie Center 
for Education Research & Policy 

Chad R. Lochmiller Indiana 
University 

Tina Trujillo    University of  
California, Berkeley 

John Diamond University of 
Wisconsin, Madison 

Christopher Lubienski  Indiana 
University  

Federico R. Waitoller University of 
Illinois, Chicago 

Matthew Di Carlo Albert Shanker 
Institute 

Sarah Lubienski  Indiana University  
 

 Larisa Warhol  
 University of Connecticut 

Sherman Dorn Arizona State 
University 

William J. Mathis University of 
Colorado, Boulder 

John Weathers University of  
Colorado, Colorado Springs 

Michael J. Dumas University of 
California, Berkeley 

Michele S. Moses University of 
Colorado, Boulder 

Kevin Welner University of  
Colorado, Boulder 

Kathy Escamilla  University of 
Colorado, Boulder 

Julianne Moss  Deakin  
University, Australia  

Terrence G. Wiley  Center  
 for Applied Linguistics 

Melissa Lynn Freeman Adams 
State College 

Sharon Nichols  University of Texas, 
San Antonio  

John Willinsky   
 Stanford University  

Rachael Gabriel 
University of Connecticut 

Eric Parsons University of  
Missouri-Columbia 

Jennifer R. Wolgemuth University of 
South Florida 

Amy Garrett Dikkers University 
of North Carolina, Wilmington 

Amanda U. Potterton 
University of Kentucky 

Kyo Yamashiro Claremont Graduate 

University 



Education Policy Analysis Archives  Vol. 26 No. 29      SPECIAL ISSUE 38 

 

archivos analíticos de políticas educativas 
consejo editorial 

Editor Consultor: Gustavo E. Fischman (Arizona State University) 
Editores Asociados: Armando Alcántara Santuario (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), Jason Beech 

(Universidad de San Andrés), Ezequiel Gomez Caride (Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina), Antonio Luzon 
(Universidad de Granada), Angelica Buendia (Metropolitan Autonomous University), José Luis Ramírez 

(Universidad de Sonora) 
 

Claudio Almonacid 
Universidad Metropolitana de 
Ciencias de la Educación, Chile 

Inés Dussel, DIE-CINVESTAV, 
México 
 

Miriam Rodríguez Vargas 
Universidad Autónoma de 
Tamaulipas, México 

Miguel Ángel Arias Ortega 
Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad 
de México 

Juan Carlos González Faraco 
Universidad de Huelva, España 

José Gregorio Rodríguez 
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 
Colombia 

Xavier Besalú Costa  
Universitat de Girona, España 

María Clemente Linuesa 
Universidad de Salamanca, España 

Mario Rueda Beltrán Instituto de 
Investigaciones sobre la 
Universidad y la Educación, 
UNAM, México 

Xavier Bonal Sarro Universidad 
Autónoma de Barcelona, España   
 

Jaume Martínez Bonafé 
 Universitat de València, España 

José Luis San Fabián Maroto  
Universidad de Oviedo,  
España 
 

Antonio Bolívar Boitia Universidad 
de Granada, España 

Alejandro Márquez Jiménez 
Instituto de Investigaciones sobre 
la Universidad y la Educación, 
UNAM, México 

Jurjo Torres Santomé, 
Universidad de la Coruña, España 

José Joaquín Brunner Universidad 
Diego Portales, Chile  

María Guadalupe Olivier Tellez, 
Universidad Pedagógica Nacional, 
México 

Yengny Marisol Silva Laya 
Universidad Iberoamericana, 
México 

Damián Canales Sánchez Instituto 
Nacional para la Evaluación de la 
Educación, México  
 

Miguel Pereyra Universidad de 
Granada, España 

Ernesto Treviño Ronzón 
Universidad Veracruzana, México 

Gabriela de la Cruz Flores 
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de 
México 

Mónica Pini Universidad Nacional 
de San Martín, Argentina 

Ernesto Treviño Villarreal 
Universidad Diego Portales 
Santiago, Chile 

Marco Antonio Delgado Fuentes 
Universidad Iberoamericana, México 

Omar Orlando Pulido Chaves 
Instituto para la Investigación 
Educativa y el Desarrollo 
Pedagógico (IDEP) 

Antoni Verger Planells 
Universidad Autónoma de 
Barcelona, España 

 Paula Razquin Universidad de 
San Andrés, Argentina 

 

 

 

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The Intersections of Selves and Policies  39 

 

arquivos analíticos de políticas educativas 
conselho editorial 

Editor Consultor:  Gustavo E. Fischman (Arizona State University) 
Editoras Associadas: Kaizo Iwakami Beltrao, (Brazilian School of Public and Private Management - EBAPE/FGV, 

Brazil), Geovana Mendonça Lunardi Mendes (Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina), Gilberto José Miranda, 
(Universidade Federal de Uberlândia, Brazil), Marcia Pletsch, Sandra Regina Sales (Universidade Federal Rural do 

Rio de Janeiro) 
 

Almerindo Afonso 

Universidade do Minho  

Portugal 

 

Alexandre Fernandez Vaz  

Universidade Federal de Santa 

Catarina, Brasil 

José Augusto Pacheco 

Universidade do Minho, Portugal 

Rosanna Maria Barros Sá  

Universidade do Algarve 

Portugal 

 

Regina Célia Linhares Hostins 

Universidade do Vale do Itajaí, 

 Brasil 

Jane Paiva 

Universidade do Estado do Rio de 

Janeiro, Brasil 

Maria Helena Bonilla  

Universidade Federal da Bahia  

Brasil 

 

Alfredo Macedo Gomes  

Universidade Federal de Pernambuco 

Brasil 

Paulo Alberto Santos Vieira  

Universidade do Estado de Mato 

Grosso, Brasil 

Rosa Maria Bueno Fischer  

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande 

do Sul, Brasil 

 

Jefferson Mainardes  

Universidade Estadual de Ponta 

Grossa, Brasil 

Fabiany de Cássia Tavares Silva 

Universidade Federal do Mato 

Grosso do Sul, Brasil 

Alice Casimiro Lopes  

Universidade do Estado do Rio de 

Janeiro, Brasil 

Jader Janer Moreira Lopes  

Universidade Federal Fluminense e 

Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, 

Brasil 

António Teodoro  

Universidade Lusófona 

Portugal 

Suzana Feldens Schwertner 

Centro Universitário Univates  

Brasil 

 

 Debora Nunes 

 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande 

do Norte, Brasil 

Lílian do Valle 

Universidade do Estado do Rio de 

Janeiro, Brasil 

Flávia Miller Naethe Motta 

Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de 

Janeiro, Brasil 

 

Alda Junqueira Marin 

 Pontifícia Universidade Católica de 

São Paulo, Brasil 

Alfredo Veiga-Neto 

 Universidade Federal do Rio Grande 

do Sul, Brasil 

 Dalila Andrade Oliveira 

Universidade Federal de Minas 

Gerais, Brasil