Positioned in a university with religious and cultural roots in an Anabaptist tradition, the education department program acknowledges and confronts the changing and complex nature of schooling and schools. Aware that education has promise to build democracy and increase societal equity, we also recognize that systematic tendencies often allow schools to perpetuate unjust racial and class divisions, as well as other inequities. In our work with candidates and in our collaborative scholarship, we seek to address the tensions embedded in teaching and learning with an ethos of care, a commitment to justice, and a critical and sustaining hope. These commitments are anchored in religious and moral values embraced by Anabaptists for nearly 500 years and informed by educational theorists and theories including, but not limited to, John Dewey, Lev Vygotsky, Paulo Freire, Nel Noddings, Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and Jerome Bruner. As we prepare teachers for a changing world, a world that is increasingly technological, multicultural, postmodern, and secular, we do so by incorporating the distinctive themes of Anabaptist faith into the ethos and pedagogy of education (Roth, 2011). We also work with a keen awareness that “teachers who re-imagine teaching as a set of critical practices disrupt the normative patterns of society and open up spaces for new voices to be heard” (Leland & Harste, 2000, p. 6).
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