This is the introduction to the special issue on advancing equity and democracy in teacher education.

This conceptual article argues that the term equity is often undertheorized in teacher education, and then elaborates on the distinction between thin equity and strong equity, which has potential to reposition teacher education as part of a broader effort to challenge the systems and structures that reproduce inequity.

Teacher education programs can serve as an important lever for strengthening our democratic values and institutions if they can free themselves from the accountability and accreditation technocracy. Using recent empirical research on declining support for democratic values and on teachers’ civic engagement, this essay suggests that teacher education must move from reactive technocratic concerns for accountability and standardization to proactive commitments to foundational principles of democracy, equality, and multiple perspectives.

In this article, we reflect upon our work as community and university educators and partners. We argue that the only way to realize the democratic possibilities of public education is to commit to a community-engaged approach to teacher preparation, one that seeks to radically disrupt teacher education as we know it.

We build on participatory and critical understandings of democracy to analyze a two-and-a-half-year collaborative redesign of our teacher education program. Our analysis contributes to a theory and practice of democratic teacher education that is grounded in the everydayness of programs and has the interpretive power to understand and help transform the obstacles, structures, and relationships that hinder justice-oriented, reflexive, deliberative, participatory, educative democratic practice in teacher education.

This conceptual article argues that special education teacher preparation should be examined for structural ableism and the ways that teacher preparation programs perpetuate oppressive educational conditions and negative or ableist perceptions of disability. Democratic teacher education is proposed as a remedy.

This paper reports on how candidates applying for an Australian equity-oriented initial teacher education (ITE) program describe their backgrounds and beliefs. Drawing on Villegas’s (2007) explanations of beliefs as precursors to social justice dispositions, we examine the candidates’ statements as starting points in designing a program that prepares democratic teachers.

This paper provides a framework for connecting the demands of abolition with the field of teacher education. Drawing from our own work as organizers and educators, we offer lessons for teacher education programs and teacher educators to grow abolition within the field.

Using critical race theory (CRT) and critical studies of whiteness, we theoretically explore a new “constitution” for the state of education, specifically teacher education, in today’s climate to posit whether democratic education can truly exist in the midst of systemic racism. We consider examples from within both teacher education and U.S. society writ large, then offer recommendations to create a more racially just teacher education.

In this study, we investigate how and what teacher education programs can learn from and support teaching practices in prison settings and pre-K–12 contexts.