Doctoral Candidate Brochure: Meghan A. Brindley

Doctoral Dissertation Defense
of
Meghan A. Brindley

For the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
Cultural Foundations

Post-Critical Approaches to Not-Yet Teachers in the Social Foundations of Education Classroom

June 3, 2025
11:00 A.M.
Microsoft Teams

Post-Critical Approaches to Not-Yet Teachers in the Social Foundations of Education Classroom

The purpose of this Dissertation is to think philosophically through my own experiences as a teacher in the undergraduate Social/Cultural Foundations classrooms, teaching preservice teachers. As a teacher who has been traditionally trained, but not always traditional in practice, I wanted to find a way to address the overwhelming amount of educational critique that was drawing my students away from engagement with the materials in the Social Foundations of Education course I teach. The exploration of the history of the Foundations and encounters with post-critical philosophers of education has deeply impacted my own teaching and thinking about how we approach not-yet teachers, who are often teacher education students “visiting” Foundations classrooms. I engage with the voices of philosophies of education and the post-critical approach to education to find a way to talk about my own teaching to frame the experiences of my own not-yet teachers in my Foundations’ classroom. Among the post-critical concepts explored are: grown-up-ness, interruption, profanation, space and time in the classroom, study, reclaiming and rediscovery, and my conceptualization of “not-yet teachers.”