This phenomenological study explores the lived experiences of four teacher candidates in relation to their understandings of teacher authority and citizenship. The medium through which these understandings take life is the participants’ individual ideologies. These individual ideologies are studied by looking between the lines of the participants’ lived experiences. The research is based in the idea that students learn about citizenship in schools not only through the formal curriculum but also through the implicit curriculum of how authority is enacted between teachers and students. The participants were all social studies teacher candidates. The research begins with lived experiences from the participants’ lives as students in K-12 schooling. These experiences revealed an expected script of the role of authority in the pedagogical relationship of teachers and students. These scripts were contradicted in the participants’ experiences, allowing for new desires in regards to enacting authority as teachers. Then the participants desires in regards to citizenship education are explored through experiences of troubled belonging that reveal what the participants hoped to foster in their students. Lived experiences from the final two year of their teacher education program, show how the participants desires were often frustrated by the ways in which dominant Ideologies are taken up in the structure of schools, particularly in regards to meritocracy, bureaucratic authority and race.
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