Abstract
This study explores faculty perspectives of social justice in teacher education within one New York institution with a social justice focus. Grounded in the institution’s self-study process for accreditation, the researchers were a part of a team that collected data from structured interviews, including a card sort, of 42 full time teacher educators across 16 programs in the institution. Informed by sociocultural theories (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1991), a content analysis revealed the language selected by faculty as well as their meaning-making process and describes how individuals contextualized those meanings. Findings demonstrated a range of meanings and lack of a shared understanding about social justice. Even where apparent consensus existed around particular terminology, the content analysis revealed that individual meanings were deeply contextualized within disciplines and, thereby, were quite distinct. We raise questions regarding how to use dialogue as a meaning making process, the possibilities for a range of meanings, and the significance of contextualizing social justice. The study suggests that significant tensions remain but that “being in tension” is a critical position and potentially informative to faculty who might consider using a framework that invites more diverse perspective rather than embrace a unitary meaning of the term.
Highlights
Social justice in teaching has been a persistent force in the development of teacher education
We addressed two research questions: 1) What are the perspectives on social justice among teacher educators in one institution? 2) Given a set of attributes for a social justice stance culled from the literature to consider, what do faculty believe are important attributes for teachers who have such a stance? Data collection and analysis strategies considered the reflexivity between individual perspectives and the collective viewpoint implied by publicly naming a social justice stance in order to identify trends that clarify the diversity of perspectives within this faculty
Where apparent consensus existed around particular terminology, there was a range of meanings asserted by individuals who spoke about social justice within various contexts
Summary
Social justice in teaching has been a persistent force in the development of teacher education. The social reconstructionist tradition in education during the 1920s and 1930s framed schools as sites to redress social injustices (Zeichner, 1993). Even within the social reconstructionist movement, there were tensions and debates regarding the role of schools and the positions of teacher educators (Zeichner, 1993). Social justice may translate into multicultural education courses or placement of teacher candidates in racially and socioeconomically diverse educational settings (Ritchie, An, Cone, & Bullock, 2013). These different institutional structures, do not address questions regarding faculty members' conceptualizations of what social justice is.
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