Equity and social justice in teaching and teacher education

Abstract

This essay presents a review on the theme of equity and social justice in teaching and teacher education based on articles published in TATE since its inception. It is a part of an initiative started by the current editors of TATE to “encourage us all to look backward to deepen our understandings of how earlier research has shaped our current research and the ways we can see the reverberations across the temporal span” (Clandinin & Hamilton, 2011, P. 2).The selected articles (1) represent the work of researchers from several countries and different backgrounds across the years; (2) reflect the range of “differences” that constitute the “minorities, margins and misfits” in the educational “mainstream”(Currie, 2006); and (3) extend the inquiry beyond the extant work along some dimension, and grapple with the complexity of issues related to in/equity and social justice. The main themes that the authors have focused on include: understanding the nature and significance of educational inequities and the systemic practices and individual beliefs that, historically and currently, sustain these within and across different contexts. Their overarching concern is with preparing teachers and creating contexts to effect real change towards attaining a vision of a more just education and society.