Teachers as Activists: Teacher Development and Alternate Sites of Learning

Abstract

Recently, hundreds of teachers, parents, students, and community activists, most of them members of the Organization for Justice in Teaching (OJT) gathered in front of the urban school district headquarters in Los Angeles, California. These educational activists were responding to a set of educational priorities proposed by the California State Department of Education, Governor Gray Davis, Superintendent Roy Romer, and the local school board. These priorities collectively mandate the yearly standardized testing of students, scripted reading programs, and student retention, along with other education reforms that remain in contention today. Among the hundreds of activists were five alumni from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Teacher Education Program (TEP), the group of activists this study focuses upon “whose advocacy of social justice . . . illuminate[s] their pedagogical practices’’ (McLaren & Baltodano, 2000, p. 57). Becoming transformative educators and working for social justice are central tenets of the UCLA TEP. The program’s recruitment document declares that one of TEP’s goals is to “prepare teachers to have the commitment, capacity, and resilience to promote social justice, caring and instructional equity in low-income, urban schools’’ (UCLA Graduate School of Education, 2000). Cochran-Smith (1997) asserts that teachers who work for social justice also work for the transformation of society’s “fundamental inequities.’’We maintain that many social justice educators are, in fact, teacher activists in political and social movements working to bring about changes in educational policies that they perceive to be unjust. UCLA TEP began with a set of nonnegotiable principles. Among these ideals is an explicit reference to the embodiment of a social justice agenda, defined as follows: