Dilemmas from the School: Systems, Power, and the Ethical Life of the Teacher

EDU T238 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

You have found your footing in the classroom. You know how you stand, how you move, how you sound. Now the harder question: what is the system you are standing in, and what are you going to do about it? This course asks teacher candidates to turn their attention outward to the institutions, structures, and power dynamics that shape what teaching is and what it can be. Through philosophical anchor texts, case studies, role analysis, and dilemmatic protocols, students develop the diagnostic tools to read a system clearly: its routines, its silences, its pressure points, and its possibilities. The goal is not critique for its own sake, but something more demanding: principled resistance, strategic positioning, and the cultivation of an ethical life inside systems that are genuinely hard to navigate for students and teachers alike. The cases in the spring do not shy away from difficulty: grief, family conflict, race, power, and the traumatic realities of schools are all part of the work. Students leave not with easy answers but with sharper questions, stronger frameworks, and a clearer sense of what it means to fight for students from the inside