Liberating from literalness : making space for meaningful forms of abstraction

There is a need for some alternative approaches to the way that undergraduate teacher education programs have traditionally been delivered. Our warrant for this assertion is derived, in the first instance, from the work of Aronowitz and Giroux who have argued that there are many different signs of a crisis of cognition within all levels of education. Twenty years later the conditions that they described seem even more entrenched. This paper argues for a fresh inquiry into the deeper logics of learning and teaching, by drawing primarily on the work of James, Dewey, Kierkegaard, Britzman and Mackay. There is also a brief inclusion of anecdotes from some initial applications of these theories into our own practice.