The Personal Is Pedagogical: A Critical Teacher Educator’s Self-Reflexive Dialogue on Adultism

Abstract

Adultism, or the belief that youth are inferior to adults, remains an understudied topic. In the field of teacher education, a field that can benefit from such exploration, this is especially true. Considering its limited research scope, particularly at the personal level, it is worth examining how a teacher educator becomes critically aware of adultism. This six-month autoethnographic study does just that. By collecting data from artifacts, auto-interviews, and systematic self-observation, this study seeks to answer the following question: How am I developing a critical consciousness about adultism as a teacher educator? My findings reveal that there are enabling factors, which I refer to as the three E’s–education, epiphanies, and experiences–that allow this process to occur. Concomitantly, there are constraining factors, or three C’s–constructs, contexts, and curricula–that challenge this process. To illustrate how I am becoming critically aware of adultism, I composed a self-reflexive dialogue. The purpose of my study is twofold. First, it serves as a model for teacher educators’ (un)learning processes. Second, it informs critical teacher education on how to prepare anti-adultist PK-12 teachers.