This article examines the role modes of participation play in pre-service teachers' learning - what it means to teach and to learn, and what it means to be a teacher and a student. In particular, it examines how a teacher educator's taking up some social positions and refusing to take up others serves to cultivate active engagement and inquiry about teaching, learning, and schooling among the pre-service teachers by providing them with opportunities to reinterpret the figured world of school.