Justice-oriented Teacher Education Research Articles

Exploring the Goals of Social Justice Teaching Through the Eyes of Early Career Science Teachers

ABSTRACT Social justice-oriented teacher education programs infuse critical pedagogies in their coursework to build teachers’ capacity to design and enact teaching that seeks to disrupt systemic oppression and injustice. Graduates of these programs often seek teaching positions in schools that serve working class communities of color with the goal of working alongside students, families, and the community to act as agents of change. Yet, we know that teacher turnover remains high in these schools, especially for early career teachers (i.e. 1–5 years teaching experience). Understanding the needs and challenges that teachers face in their first few years of teaching can help teacher education programs design intentional support systems to ameliorate the lack of support early career teachers experience and issues with teacher turnover. In this paper, we share excerpts from interviews conducted with 20 early career science teachers that shared the social justice strategies, lessons, and pedagogies they used in their classroom. Our findings identified a multitude of teaching practices that depict teachers’ everyday pursuit of social justice in their science classrooms, namely how teachers reflected on their positionality, built restorative relationships with students, developed students’ critical dispositions, built positive science identities, increased student access to science, and incorporated students’ knowledge, experiences, and histories, some of which also presented some challenges for them. We describe these practices and associated challenges with implications for how teacher education can support early career teachers and their alumni in their continued development as social justice educators.

When Shutting the Door Won’t Do: Teaching With the Specter of Community Backlash and the Implications for Teacher Education

Recently, numerous news stories have detailed the ways teachers across the country have been disciplined for addressing issues of oppression and justice in their schools. This paper engages poststructural discourse analysis to consider data from a year-long study of recent graduates of a justice-oriented teacher education program during their first year teaching, examining the ways that stories of community backlash functioned to discipline early career teachers to behave in particular ways. I theorize that these stories serve to discourage teachers from pursuing justice-oriented work in the classroom and that such discourses must be addressed in teacher education programs to prepare preservice teachers for the political realities of entering classrooms in the United States in the current cultural moment.

Unmasking queer bodies to humanize teacher education: A diffractive collaborative autohistoria-teoria

Recent scholarship in social justice-oriented teacher education emphasizes the importance of critical reflection for preservice teachers and teacher educators. However, more research is needed to document how teacher educators carry out this complex work from various perspectives. Therefore, we queer teacher educators explored selves in this study. We employed a diffractive collaborative autohistoria-teoria to unmask our identities and humanity. Specifically, we drew on queer, new materialist, and humanizing approaches to think with us. We have experienced joy and identity development and offer a queer way of designing and researching in teaching and teacher education.

Creating the space of possibility: The dynamics of multiculturalism, neoliberalism, and nationalism in South Korean prospective teachers learning to teach for social justice

This study explores prospective teachers’ experiences of learning to teach social justice with a focus on tensions and dilemmas encountered in the practice of transformative curriculum planning. Findings come from a qualitative case of one social justice-oriented teacher education program in South Korea. Drawing on concepts from transformative learning theory and a theory of hybridity, this study reveals that expansion of neoliberalism interwoven with resilient (ethnic) nationalism can lead prospective teachers to dilemmas in the practice of transformative curriculum planning. However, the space of dilemmas can be transformed into a space of possibility by thoroughly examining and creatively responding to recognized constraints.

Integrating Feminist Theory, Pedagogy, and Praxis into Teacher Education

This article discusses suggestions for integrating feminist epistemology, theory, pedagogy, and praxis even more intentionally into existing U.S. teacher education curricula. The premise is that in light of recent 21st century women’s empowerment movements, such ideas should be examined and integrated fully in justice-oriented teacher education programs. Supporting them with a review of the relevant literature, the author offers additions to existing frames within teacher education in U.S. programs. The author suggests emphasis on establishing authentic teacher voice through intentional pedagogy that incorporates feminism, through establishment of community, and through praxis and reflection. With these aspects firmly established in teacher education as essential to justice-oriented teacher education, the author advocates for counter-hegemonic conversations and storylines that encourage feminist voice and feminist praxis in teacher education.

Exploring student teachers’ ‘stuck moments’: affect[ing] the theory-practice gap in social justice teacher education

ABSTRACT This article attends to student teachers’ ‘stuck moments,’ or emotional moments of crisis, in a social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJTE). It seeks to problematise the familiar tendency of viewing student teachers’ stuck moments as symptomatic of the theory-practice gap. By troubling both the representational logic that undergirds the theory-practice gap and its reductionist explanations of stuckness, this work conceptualises stuck moments as a fluid, moving assemblage of bodies and discursive, affective, and material forces. Informed by posthumanist theories of affect and a post-qualitative methodology, this article posits that the pressure on student teachers to achieve teaching mastery, and participants’ desire to make a discernible impact on their students, partially constitute the stuck moment assemblage. These elements illuminate the infiltration of learning discourses in stuckness. I argue that learning discourses, with their neoliberal focus on mastery, control, and measurable outcomes, collide with the uncertainty and tenuousness of social justice work. This research suggests that stuck moments have the potential to both expose and oppose the conflicting discourses, affective attachments, and intensities that student teachers encounter as they navigate their SJTE program.

The preparation of novice teacher educators for critical, justice-oriented teacher education: A longitudinal exploration of formal study in the pedagogy of teacher education

ABSTRACT There continues to be limited focus on the preparation of teacher educators, particularly for teacher education aimed at challenging educational inequities. This case study explores the impact of a curricular approach to preparing novice teacher educators in the pedagogy of teacher education. Drawing on surveys, interviews, documents, and observations of practice, the study traces what novice teacher educators learned 5 years after enrolment in a doctoral course, and how this learning shaped their teacher education practice over time. The analysis illuminates conceptual and practical tools as well as unanticipated learning that were salient for novice teacher educators’ learning and practice.

Access, Dissent, Ethics, and Politics: Pre-service Teachers Negotiating Conceptions of the Work of Teaching Science for Equity

This study examines the development of secondary preservice science teachers’ (PSTs’) sociopolitical understandings in the context of a yearlong, masters-level, justice-oriented teacher education program. It articulates a theoretical perspective regarding teachers’ conceptions of the work-of-teaching in terms of pedagogical and disciplinary commitments. These conceptions are ideological links between classroom practices and teachers’ understanding of the sociopolitical context of their work. Teachers’ conceptions include how they view their and their students’ agency to gain access to enabling structures or dissent against oppressive structures that contribute to inequity in science education. The embedded case study design with 10 PSTs draws on various data sources from three time periods, and several types of experiences, in the teacher education program. A focus on four cases illustrates how PSTs rearticulated ideological committments in ways that have direct implications for the development of their practice and also connections to the content areas they teach. One case reinforces that teachers may begin to reject deficit views and embrace their agency by learning about the ways in which racism structures society. Another case shows how PSTs’ political clarity may be pushed in the direction of understanding multiple forms of oppression as structural. Together, the four cases illuminate an ideological component to content area teaching, or content area considerations in teachers’ ideological committments. Science teachers may develop sophisticated views of their work by analyzing their disciplines and curriculum as structures that are subject to the same critiques levied against other social structures. While PSTs did not feel that justice-centered pedagogies were within their full reach at the end of the program, they moved from aiming to demonstrate to students the utility, value, and importance of content areas toward exploring the relevance of the content areas with students.

Affective (An)Archive as Method

The purpose of this article is to explore affective (an)archives in educational research. Unlike archives, which act more like a repository, the (an)archive is a technique for research-creation; it is a process-making engine that triggers new, creative events. The affective (an)archives studied in this paper encompass the affective intensities that arise for teacher-activists participating in public political activism, as well as the affects that animate the moments of emotional crisis (or “stuck moments”) of student teachers in a social justice-oriented teacher education program. We ruminate on the possibilities, intensities, conversations, and materialities that our (an)archives might open. Specifically, we wonder what new events can these (an)archives feed-forward and what pedagogical and emotional thresholds might the traces from our (an)archives do for both our own studies and the field of educational research.

Clouded Views and Silver Linings: Learning to Teach Literacy in Cooperating Teachers’ Classrooms

ABSTRACTThis paper explores Megan’s – a preservice teacher’s – learning around teaching literacy while enrolled in a social justice-oriented teacher education program and student teaching in poverty-impacted schools. Megan had fewer opportunities to teach literacy in university-promoted ways when student teaching with an attentive cooperating teacher (CT) she revered than when apprenticing with a negligent CT she did not respect. However, Megan’s personal opinions about her CTs influenced her reflections, as she reported predominantly positive learnings from her placement with her adored CT and predominantly negative learnings from her placement with her disdained CT. Implications for teacher educator mediation are addressed.

Moving beyond Asset-, Equity-, and Justice-Oriented Teacher Education

Moving beyond Asset-, Equity-, and Justice-Oriented Teacher Education

"I Guess I Just Realized How Tired I Had Become": In Defense of Insurgent Pedagogy

This manuscript details how four self-described justice-oriented teachers, teaching social studies in urban schools maintained, defended, and expanded their teaching in unsupported environments. All four teachers are veteran educators who teach intentionally chose their school sites deliberately and can all be labeled activist educators, though one uncomfortably. Taken from a larger 5 year study, this article seeks to describe the actions taken by four teachers during the first two years of the study who teach in similar socio-economic, geographic and school spaces and who all attended the same justice oriented teacher education program. These four teachers prove that it is possible to teach for social justice in unsupportive schools but also indicate that are costs. These costs raise serious questions about the sustainability of their efforts over time.

The potential of modelling culturally responsive teaching: pre-service teachers’ learning experiences

ABSTRACTThis qualitative case study examined two pre-service teachers’ learning experiences in relation to encountering modelling culturally responsive teaching (CRT) in a multicultural education course. Using Constant Comparison Approach, the researchers searched for evidence of observing aspects of modelling in the course, and described the pre-service teachers’ learning experiences that occurred in relation to this observation, as well as the possible transformation they went through. The study revealed that the critical, justice-oriented teacher education course that implemented modelling CRT activities and behavior seemed to help pre-service teachers to transform and extend their conceptual knowledge of CRT, critically reflect and reconstruct prior knowledge, and connect these experiences to future teaching practice. Based on the data, a framework for modelling CRT in teacher education is delineated. Implications for teacher education are addressed.

Evolving through tensions: preservice teachers’ conceptions of social justice teaching

ABSTRACT This study utilized cultural historical activity theory to explore the evolution of nine preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) conceptions of social justice teaching while enrolled in a social justice-oriented teacher education program. From three interviews conducted over one year, findings show that tensions PSTs encountered while student teaching in high-poverty schools predominantly shaped their thinking. PSTs’ conceptions of social justice teaching evolved to include navigating inequitable systems, loving students critically, and viewing social justice teaching as uniquely personal. Implications include the importance of teacher educators leveraging inevitable student-teaching tensions as learning opportunities to further PSTs’ commitment to social justice teaching.

It’s Heart Work: Critical Case Studies, Critical Professional Development, and Fostering Hope Among Social Justice–Oriented Teacher Educators

As social justice–oriented teachers and teacher educators, it can seem as if we are fighting a losing battle against neoliberal education policies designed to disrupt and dismantle our field. In this article we draw upon traditions of critical race theory, counterstorying, and critical hope to examine the complex realities of contemporary teacher education and envision an alternate reality in which our profession develops and thrives. To do so, we first present a series of autoethnographic critical case studies that highlight dilemmas of practice. We then invite readers to examine each case through multiple lenses, as they grapple with the complexities of a visionary path forward. In so doing, we offer tools for critical professional development that articulate, deconstruct, and reimagine social justice–oriented teacher education and activism in this changing landscape. We close with recommendations to increase our collective capacity as social justice teacher educators, placing a central emphasis on the need for community, critical professional development, and hope.

Changing the Place of Teacher Education: Feminism, Fear, and Pedagogical Paradoxes

In this article, Stephanie Jones and Hilary E. Hughes suggest that particular discursive lessons are readily available in justice-oriented teacher education which might influence a pedagogy that crowds out responsiveness, the experience of the student, and the role of gender and feminism in teacher education. They contend that changing the place of teacher education to include unpredictable community settings requires pedagogical responses that defy predictable storylines and ready-made discursive lessons common in teacher education. The lessons learned contribute to justice-oriented teacher education and an emerging trend for including community-based experiences in teacher education, and highlight the importance of feminist storylines for the incommensurability of misogyny and racism for teacher education.

Practices of Compassionate, Critical, Justice-Oriented Teacher Education

In this cross-institutional, qualitative case study, two teacher educators in urban teacher education programs identify and analyze the components of our teacher education practice in relation to a vision of compassionate, critical, justice-oriented teacher education. Using Grossman et al.’s concepts of preparation for professional practice as an analytic tool, we illuminate some of our teacher education practices that (a) facilitated the development of relationships and community within our classes, (b) honored preservice teachers’ lived experiences and existing attitudes, (c) introduced preservice teachers to multiple perspectives of viewing the world, and (d) provided a vision of equitable, intellectually challenging teaching and learning. Drawing on our data, we offer a pedagogical framework that identifies key features of compassionate, critical, justice-oriented teacher education to inform research and practice. We highlight the contributions of this framework for justice-oriented teacher education and the inherent complexity of attempts to parse such fundamentally messy relational practice.

(Re)Constructing Cultural Conceptions and Practices in Art Education: An Action Research Study

Abstract It is heavily argued that art educators should consider the various ways racism, classism, and heterosexism work to shape consciousness and produce identity, as these constructions shape what content is privileged in the art classroom. This examination of power and privilege is what critical multicultural art education calls for. Unfortunately, K-12 art teachers continue to struggle to enact critical multicultural art education curriculum. This paper seeks to identify what personal pedagogical changes I can make to help pre-service and practicing art teachers transfer concepts and practices derived from social justiceoriented teacher education into their art classrooms. I assert that art teachers, practicing and prospective, must first establish positionality and recognize the implications of their position in order to facilitate equitable educational experiences for all their students.

We make the road by walking together: New teachers and the collaborative and context-specific appropriation of shared social justice-oriented practices and concepts

This study examined the work of a collaborative group of six new United States-based social studies teachers from the same social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJOTEP). Shared practices and concepts introduced previously in the SJOTEP were developed and appropriated to their classrooms and schools in consideration of the local context, through the collaborative problem-solving process of the group. It is argued that SJOTEPs and TEPs committed to issues of diversity, democracy, inclusion, and/or equity should be collaboration-based, teach a coherent and consistent social justice-focused curriculum, and provide post-graduation collaborative support and research it.

Teaching Bodies in Place

Background/Context This piece draws on literature in justice-oriented teacher education, feminist pedagogy, and postmodern notions of bodies and place to make sense of data generated from a three-year study of an undergraduate teacher education course. A feminist lens was used to engage a body- and place-focused pedagogy that aimed to engage students in recognizing themselves as full-bodied and cultured beings who can work to better understand and expand their perceptions of themselves and others in place. Purpose The authors argue that postmodern theories of bodies and place can provide complex insights for both theorizing and practicing teacher education. Readers have the opportunity to experience alternative community-based teacher education practice through a graphic presentation and consider both the theoretical and practice implications in the broader field of education. Research Design This three-year study is an arts-based qualitative inquiry into the experiences of a course where feminist and postmodern notions of bodies and place informed the pedagogical decision-making of their professor (Stephanie Jones). Data were generated across three years and those focused specifically on or around the community bus ride were used to ask questions about how bodies and places interact with one another to produce sense-making about people, places, and the purposes of education. As part of the inquiry, Stephanie produced visual images in comics-form presenting pedagogical interactions and experiences that illuminated theoretical insights and then engaged Jim in conversations and sketch-sharing about theory and practice related to the data and how it was experienced in real-time by Stephanie. After numerous conversations looking over each panel and analytical discussions about bodies, place, and pedagogies as they were produced on the page and multiple revisions of both images and print text, Stephanie and Jim settled on the graphic production published here as both a representation of the research and a provocation for reimagining teacher education practice and scholarship. Conclusions The study is an example of how pedagogies informed by theoretical understandings of bodies and place can produce practices that help teacher education students recognize their bodies as central sites for critical change inside and outside institutions. Tending to, documenting, and discussing their bodily-ways-of-being in different places and how bodies/places produce perceptions of others were powerful practices that helped students think deeply about power and their roles as future teachers.