Conundrums of our own making: critical pedagogy and trainee further education teachers

This article examines the experiences and understandings of a group of fulltime further education (FE) trainee teachers in a university in the English Midlands. The article places the research within its socio-economic and discursive context as well as drawing out parallels with earlier work on FE trainee teachers. The main thrust of the article is concerned with constructions of critical pedagogy and learning and examines the relation of trainees to such constructions. It compares a model of critical practice with trainee teachers' accounts of their practice. It concludes by arguing that it is not enough to hold to an ethic of care or even a concern to engage students, and that there is a wider politics inscribed within pedagogic practice. A critical pedagogy would seek to question the wider social structure that generates systematic inequality.