As the work of teacher education becomes increasingly focused on the challenges of helping mostly white, monolingual, middle-class prospective teachers become compassionate, successful teachers of racially, culturally, linguistically, economically, and academically diverse students, some teacher educators struggle to find compassion for the prospective teachers they teach. Motivated by this concern and drawing on feminist and Buddhist theories, Hilary Conklin argues that many teacher educators would benefit from a renewed consideration of modeling the pedagogy they hope prospective teachers will employ. In this article, she analyzes and brings together the work on critical, justice-oriented approaches to teacher education, relationships in teaching, modeling as pedagogy, and the Buddhist notion of compassion to articulate a pedagogy of modeling in critical, justice-oriented teacher education. Conklin proposes that such a pedagogy has the potential to move us closer to transformative teacher education.

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Hilary Gehlbach Conklin is an assistant professor of social studies education at the College of Education at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on the pathways into middle school social studies teaching, teacher learning, and the pedagogy of teacher education. Her work has appeared in journals, including Journal of Teacher Education and Theory and Research in Social Education, and she has coauthored chapters in Studying Teacher Education: The Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education (2005) and the Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Issues in Changing Contexts (3rd ed., 2008).