Teacher knowledge, the sources of that knowledge, and the day-to-day use of that knowledge have become focal points of contemporary research on teacher education. As this body of research has found, a teacher's knowledge base and her subsequent practice is a composite of her beliefs and identities (Britzman, 2003), experiences (Lortie, 1975), knowledge of content (Wineburg & Wilson, 2001), knowledge of pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986b), and interpretation of education course work field experiences (Adler, 2008; Borko & Mayfield, 1995), all of which depicts the complexity of teaching. In this qualitative analysis, the authors explore how purposefully challenging the official curriculum and its dominant, hegemonic ideologies and worldviews provides preservice social studies teachers with vital opportunities to confront and challenge K-12 schooling practices that create inequities. They argue that teachers' deviation from the traditional canon is not simply an act of intellectual defiance but rather an understanding of how "to think critically about and challenge the universality of that knowledge" (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009, p. 635). The knowledge pre-service teachers use to mediate and transform the curriculum ought to be examined as an "interpretation of their experiences [as] embedded in social and cultural contexts" (Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005, p. 86). In sum, what teachers know, how they know what they know, and how they use what they know to engage in the critical teaching of the curriculum is essential in adding to our understanding of how to construct a more social justice and critical pedagogy oriented teacher education program. The purpose of this article is to investigate how pre-service social studies teachers come to understand their disciplines as a way to challenge the power structures and institutional practice which inhibit the realization of democratic ideals. Certainly, this investigation may be an endeavor within any discipline taught in schools; however, the authors specifically contextualize this research within the field of social studies education. In this article, they first situate the research within existing literature, then they establish their conceptual framework using the notion of intellectual biography, and then move on to explore how this framework can be used to better understand how pre-service social studies teachers understand and use their disciplinary knowledge to challenge the traditional curriculum.