Teaching through Discomfort: Critical Reflections on Co-Teaching Pre-Service Teachers

Abstract

How might we navigate through tension and resistance as pre-service teachers in our classroom praxis and methods? In this paper, we will describe our experiences co-teaching a group of almost one hundred pre-service teachers as two PhD students in education at a mid-sized university in New Brunswick, Canada. The Bachelor of Education (BEd) course we co-taught together was designed to challenge pre-service teachers to engage critically in dialogue with each other across a wide-range of educational policies, social issues, histories, philosophies, and anti-oppressive approaches to teaching. While the course is not advertised as critical studies, many of the conversations and topics are organized around various critical theories and methods. Over the semester, as course content was brought into conversation with provincial politics, we encountered a multitude of tensions, opportunities, and resistance as co-instructors that we navigated by engaging with many different teaching methods and practices: some of these methods were successful and others were not. In this paper, we want to engage with some of the dominant tensions and themes that we encountered. We will also discuss how these challenges influenced our teaching methods and praxis, and the adjustments we made in response. Ultimately, we propose that co-teaching ended up being our most useful strategy in navigating through the discomfort and tension that can sometimes exist in large undergraduate lecture halls.