Nations throughout the world have increasingly looked at teacher education policy as a vehicle for reform of both the educational system and the society at large, and teacher quality is often positively associated with the quality of the overall educational system. Although such reforms often target pre-service teacher education, little is known about the teacher educators who play a central role in such reforms. While some studies have examined teachers as policy actors, little work has been done in the area of teacher educators as policy actors who interpret and implement education policy. This study fills that void by exploring the interaction between teacher educators' beliefs and values and a federal education policy in Mexico. One example of an attempt to engage in social reform by targeting teacher education is Mexico's General Law on the Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2003), a measure aimed at improving educational opportunities for Mexico's diverse indigenous population, who suffer high poverty, low literacy, and limited educational opportunity. The law gives Mexico's indigenous students the right to a teacher who both writes and speaks the language of their community. It also requires Mexico's teacher education institutions to establish programs in Intercultural, Bilingual Education (IBE) and to include indigenous culture and languages in the curriculum. This study uses Spillane's (2006) cognitive sense-making framework to investigate how teacher educators in two southern Mexican states with large indigenous populations make sense of the reform. Employing a mixed-methods approach, I examined teacher educator attitudes and beliefs as both a catalyst for and an impediment to indigenous educational reform. I further considered whether or not such attitudes and beliefs are affected by the institutional and geographic contexts of the teacher educators and I looked at how the personal backgrounds of the teacher educators affected their beliefs and attitudes. I also analyzed the sources of policy information they found most useful in keeping current on recent educational policy. The study has broad implications for the fields of education, political science, and international development.
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