The Dreamwork of Transformation in Teacher Education

ENGAGES THE LIMITS of the stories we tell ourselves in teacher education through the idea/image/metaphor/vantage of dreams and dreaming.Ever since the publication of Freud's (1900) Interpretation of Dreams, the status of dreams and dreaming has persisted in inquiry as a means to resist-through practices of analysis, interpretation, and social critique-our most taken for granted understandings of ourselves and others.Freud (1914Freud ( /2001) ) argued that dreams act as "the guardian of sleep" (p.38), allowing us to become conversant with parts of ourselves that are difficult to know or accept.Pinar's (2004) reference to the contemporary landscape of educational reform as "the nightmare that is the present" inaugurates his book, What is Curriculum Theory?(p. 5).Ta-Nehisi Coates' (2015) elaboration of "The Dream," in Between the World and Me, identifies national mythologies of race as structuring the persistence of white supremacy.Following in this tradition of scholarship on dreams, the writers in this special issue demonstrate that dreamwork-as understood through psychoanalysis, social theory, and curriculum studies-complicates the subjective and social dimensions of teacher education, expanding the sphere of teaching and our sense of the teacher as subject.In this issue, we ask: What can we make of the various versions of dreaming if we use them to think anew about our work in the spaces of teacher education?A linear theory of learning predominates the structures and features of most teacher education programs.The focus typically resides in the terrain of explicit pedagogical exchange: unit and lesson plans about mandated curricular topics, ways of engaging students' interest in order to maximize academic achievement, cultural relevance of classroom spaces, teaching for social justice, and so on.Within the framework of linearity, teacher educators risk operating within a narrowed sense of the teacher-subject they are teaching, and at the same time, the students risk a narrowed sense of the teacher they are working to become.T

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