The Politics of Survival in Foundations of Education: Borderlands, Frames, and Strategies

In this article, the authors consider the ways that faculty in the Foundations strategize the placement of Foundations in teacher education in a politics of survival. Drawing on archival and interview data, the authors discuss the strategies invoked as boundary-work. They then situate boundary-work within the broader interpretive lens of cognitive framing. The authors then consider how the very language that faculty members use reveals the cognitive frames that simultaneously inform and shape their strategies. In this way, faculty members strategically invoke and are influenced by larger contemporary discourses. Current strategies, we argue, will tend to reinscribe the existing neoliberal order or substantially dilute the Foundations. The authors call for a new sense of boundary-work by going back to the future and invoking Foundations of disciplines against a current trend of generalism.