Student teachers and critical approaches to education: re-imagining the 'other' through a re-imagining of the learning environment

This paper reports on a teacher education initiative that seeks a more effective approach to a commonly used treatment of education foundations, particularly the sociology and philosophy of education. The initiative takes as its starting points a critique of education foundation practices in at least two universities and the standpoint that the main rationale for including education foundations is to (morally) influence learning outcomes in schools. The ‘vehicle’ or ‘mechanism’ for this re-conceptualisation is a developing theory of the Learning Environment, used by the author and others, which takes the Learning Environment to be not simply the location of learning but the total conditions that enable and constrain learning.