Seeking social justice: a teacher education faculty's self-study

Abstract

Committed in a general way to the idea of teaching and teacher education for social justice, the nine co-authors of this paper embarked upon a multi-year collaborative research and professional development project that came to be known as ‘Seeking Social Justice’. The project was designed to allow group members (all faculty in the same department) to examine their own understandings of social justice issues as part of the process of helping their students do the same as well as to encourage students to work for social change and effectively meet the needs of the increasingly diverse K-12 school population. In this article the authors discuss the framework for the project and the first two years of collaborative work. They suggest that their work together provides a ‘proof of possibility’ for faculty groups attempting to emphasize or infuse social justice into pre-service teacher education despite profound differences in politics, disciplines and perspectives. They argue that part of what made this possible was a commitment to extended and repeated conversations that evolved over time into a culture of careful listening. This led to deeper and richer understandings of participants' own biases as well as understandings of where colleagues were coming from on particular issues. The article suggests that it was these deeper understandings, and not consensus, that allowed the group to take action—designing and implementing new administrative policies and practices, establishing social justice as the centrepiece of the curriculum, and beginning to look critically and publicly at their own pedagogy as teacher educators.