Social Justice In Teacher Education Research Articles

The Social Justice Core Practices of Philadelphia Educators: A Modified Delphi Study

To live justice-oriented commitments in teaching practice, approaches spanning Social Justice Teacher Education, the Core Practice Movement, and Context-specific Teacher Preparation might dovetail by identifying “social justice core practices” (SJCPs) novices learn to enact. At the intersection of the situated and critical perspectives underlying these three approaches, this study investigates the SJCPs of Philadelphia educators and how they characterize their contextuality. A modified Delphi study drawing on the expertise of 27 local social justice educators revealed group consensus on 13 SJCPs. Further qualitative analysis surfaced four patterns related to contextuality: SJCPs as responses to macrosociopolitical inequities, manifesting critical praxis; the role of school, district, and professional constraints; the need to situate and adapt SJCPs for the subject area and grade level; and the inseparability of identity and positionality from enactment. From this site-specific approach positioning local educators as experts, implications for teacher education’s role in shaping a more justice-oriented profession are discussed.

Teachers at the speed of light: alternative pathways into teaching and implications for social justice

ABSTRACT What happens when Initial Teacher Education shifts focus from preparing teachers as change agents to focusing on fast-tracking candidates into the profession? In this paper, we focus on the implications of the accelerated push in teacher education for key social justice and transformative aims of preparing critically reflective, culturally responsive teachers. We tease out what these emerging priorities mean for work of capacity-building for equity, diversity and social justice in teaching and teacher education. We unpack how alternative teacher education programmes that prioritise “employment” present both caveats and opportunities in this regard. We conclude by suggesting ways to harness existing challenges in the service of closer alliances between teacher educators, school staff, members of communities and the education departments for preparing a teaching workforce capable of responding to the needs of their students.

Initial Teacher Education for Social Justice in South Africa: A Higher Education Policy Perspective

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa envisions a socially just society where all citizens enjoy fundamental human rights. Education is regarded as significant in realizing social justice (SJ). Hence, South African education policy is underpinned by the conviction that teachers are drivers of societal change and instrumental in creating a socially just society. It is therefore expected that initial teacher education (ITE) programs to train prospective teachers will be infused with knowledge, competencies, values and attitudes to develop the dispositions that would facilitate social justice in a democratic and open South African society. In this desk-top study, we investigate the attributes and competencies promoted and advanced through the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications Policy (MRTEQ) (2015) concerning the training of prospective South African teachers for the realization of social justice. We gathered our data through a literature review and a policy analysis, and we drew from critical social theory (CST), which argues for social transformation, human emancipation, and capacitation to make sense of our findings. We found that the MRTEQ (2015) promotes and advances knowledge, contextual awareness, and critical pedagogy as significant attributes and competencies for realizing social justice through education and, more specifically, ITE. The implication is that all initial teacher programmes must be designed to equip prospective teachers with these attributes to contribute to realizing social justice and transforming society. Against this backdrop, specific recommendations are made to develop these attributes in prospective teachers.

A justice oriented examination of teacher education through the lens of deans’ innovations and leadership in schools of education

ABSTRACT Social-justice teacher education literature is widespread, but research highlighting the perspectives and insights from those who lead is far less common. This interview-based case-study of 20 deans from the Schools of Education across the United States addresses this gap and explores insights that pertain to the leadership and implementation of teacher education programs that advance social justice and teacher agency. Using conceptualisations of thin and strong equity, we identify, explain, and discuss three themes which emerged from the data. The first involves addressing barriers and access issues for prospective teacher candidates. The second includes programmatic actions taken by deans in attempts to further social justice goals and the third highlights an understanding that social justice work inevitably includes working to change systems and structures at the societal scale. We explore the extent to which these patterns reflect strong equity and provide ideas for deepening this work through the development and reframing of teacher agency.

“Just attaching a face”: Engaging local refugee communities in preservice teacher education focused on students with immigrant/refugee backgrounds

AbstractThis arts‐practice research study explores what happens when preservice high school teachers (aka teacher‐learners) and local refugee communities engage in the co‐creation of art together via an arts‐and community‐based project. Grounded in social justice teacher education, the researchers conducted a 2‐week workshop in which participants included preservice high school teachers and local Yazidi community members who explored art in a museum together, spent time getting to know each other and their backgrounds, and re‐created some of their stories in the form of dance. Findings reveal a variety of ways in which the workshops helped teacher‐learners develop interculturality, increase understanding of migration, become more caring educators, and make personal connections that allowed them to disrupt stereotypes. In addition, the study includes the voices of Yazidi community members and what they want teachers to know about working with refugee children.

Cornell Notes from Underground: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and AVID for Higher Education

Context: This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AVID acculturates teacher educators and teacher preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines his double identity as an AVID for Higher Education (AHE) trainee, simultaneously alienated as a social justice educator but complicit in co-constructing AVID’s target white neoliberal identity. Purpose: This article aims to encourage resistant risk-taking among critically leaning educators who may find themselves either avoiding white neoliberal educational reform activities taking place in their programs or complying with them against their better judgment. By co-conspiring to carry out critical interventions during white neoliberal reform activities, or by conducting critical “underground” research as this article exemplifies, white neoliberal educational reform may be decentered and more space opened for anti-oppressive pedagogies in teacher education. Research Design: This study combines autobiographical and arts-informed methods from narrative inquiry to examine the double identity that emerged for the author during AHE training. Beginning with critical Cornell notes taken and kept “underground” during training, the author turns to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella Notes From Underground as a guide to analysis, showing that critical resistance to the culture of positivism white neoliberalism promotes is both long-standing and not won by working alone. Recommendations: The article recommends that, in the struggle to center racial and social justice in teacher education, critical educators should co-conspire and actively seek out white neoliberal reform activities, prepared to intervene with knowledge not only from critical theories but from the histories of race that drive the discourses reform organizations use to acculturate teacher educators to their ideological networks.

Are We Preparing Teachers to Fight Labor Oppression?: A Critical Community Autoethnography Interrogating Social Justice Teacher Education

ABSTRACT Teachers in public schools regularly face labor oppression. Despite this reality, in research and practice, “social justice teacher preparation” has largely neglected the topic of labor struggle. We offer this community auto-ethnography as a collective reflection on how we came to our own understandings around these issues and what we learned from supporting students’ development around these topics as we co-taught a Foundations pre-service teacher preparation course. We unpack the experiences that shaped our individual relationships to issues of social justice and labor that were prioritized in the class with implications for expanding the purview of social justice teacher preparation.

Envisioning Pre-service English teacher education in Colombia as political action

This reflective article explores the need to revise the education of pre-service English teachers to place critical and political dimensions as central components in the education of future teachers. The author presents a brief critical overview of some key historical events in Colombia that have taken place mainly during the last sixty years. Two national educational proposals that aim to promote peaceful human relations and knowledge of the country’s historically violent past (Cátedra para la Paz and Estándares de Competencias Ciudadanas) are also described. Two complementary approaches to English teacher education are discussed as possible alternatives to enacting teacher education from a political and critical stance (Teacher Education for Social Justice and Critical Teacher Education). Finally, three trends in English teaching and research in Colombia are described as a way to illustrate some of the ways in which different scholars have enacted English teaching as part of a political and critical endeavor. The author concludes that in order to contribute to a more just, equitable, and peaceful country, pre-service English teacher programs must prepare prospective teachers committed to a process of social, cultural, and political transformation of the local realities of Colombia.

The role of growth mindset in shaping teachers' intercultural competencies: A study among Finnish teachers

AbstractCultural heterogenisation of classrooms and existing achievement gaps have led to an acknowledgement of the need to develop teachers' intercultural competencies. A growth mindset (a belief that intelligence, personality and other such qualities can be cultivated) predicts positive intergroup attitudes and reduces stereotyping, but has not been researched as an aspect of teachers' intercultural competence. This study analyses the role of growth mindset in shaping three aspects relevant to teachers' intercultural competencies: process versus trait orientation to students, diversity beliefs and orientation to social justice and equity. Fifteen Finnish comprehensive schoolteachers were interviewed. Significant differences were found between teachers with fixed and growth mindsets. Teachers with a growth mindset were more likely to hold polyculturalist beliefs about the interconnectedness and changeability of cultures, and to recognise and combat issues of social injustice and inequity. Teachers with a fixed mindset made trait‐focused interpretations of their students and did not easily recognise problems of social justice in school or in society. These results encourage us to suggest that a growth mindset is a construct with a lot of potential to introduce novel approaches to multi/intercultural and social justice teacher education, but more research is needed. The implications of the findings for teacher education and further research are discussed.

Transforming World Language Teaching and Teacher Education for Equity and Justice: Pushing Boundaries in US Contexts ed. by Beth Wassell and Cassandra Glynn

Reviewed by: Transforming World Language Teaching and Teacher Education for Equity and Justice: Pushing Boundaries in US Contexts ed. by Beth Wassell and Cassandra Glynn Diana Ruggiero Wassell, Beth, and Cassandra Glynn, editors. Transforming World Language Teaching and Teacher Education for Equity and Justice: Pushing Boundaries in US Contexts. Multilingual Matters, 2022. Pp. 202. ISBN 978-1-78892-650-8. In Transforming World Language Teaching and Teacher Education, editors Beth Wassell and Cassandra Glynn alongside contributing authors to this edited volume illuminate the ways in which educators are working toward greater social equity and justice in the world language classroom. In the process, they also critically reflect on how the structural and institutional dynamics of the field as well as their own respective backgrounds are complicit in upholding and perpetuating systemic injustice and inequity in world language education. Consciously drawing on a diverse range of perspectives from scholars on the margins of the field, many of them first-time authors, the chapters provide a snapshot of world language education in a state of transformation as scholars rethink the assumptions that inform how educators think about and approach world language teaching today. Introspective, critical, and bold in its honest assessment of and efforts to reform world language education, this book and its conclusions are both timely and relevant for a field in need of such critical reassessment and transformation. The volume consists of ten chapters, including an introduction, and is divided into two main sections. The introduction provides the premise for and approach to the book as well as a brief synopsis of the book’s contents relative to the major arguments. The remainder of the chapters are divided into two equal parts, the first part addressing systemic challenges to equity and social justice in world language programs as well as responses to them by educators, presenting theoretical frameworks and curricular models based on authors experiences and [End Page 164] research along the way. The second part similarly addresses more directly ways in which world language educators on the margins of world language education are addressing curricular reform. For instance, Dorie Conlon Perugini and Manuela Wagner present a model for integrating and foregrounding intercultural citizenship in world language education as a way of moving beyond a focus on vocabulary and grammar and engaging issues of social justice in the classroom. Similarly, Mary Curan and Joan Clifford in their respective chapters discuss the significance of community engagement in redressing issues of social justice in world education; Curran through a presentation of her pre-service Urban Social Justice Teacher Education Program at Rutgers University, and Clifford through the presentation of a curricular model that blends community-based language learning and global health to likewise enact greater equity and social justice in the world language curriculum. Though there are many books and edited volumes now calling for change and transformation in world language education, this book is unique in its call for and focus on critical self-reflection. Indeed, as a framing device for the book’s contents and approach, Wassell and Glynn use the tropes of “calling out” and “calling in.” By “calling out,” they mean looking at how educators themselves may be complicit in the process of maintaining and perpetuating systemic racism and social inequities in the classroom. This could include biases and unquestioned standards and norms in teaching world languages stemming from one’s own privilege (stemming from gender, race, ethnicity, etc.). By “calling in” they mean similarly reflecting on the ways in which the field itself is likewise complicit in perpetuating systemic racism, social inequity, and injustice. This includes an assessment of the field as a whole as well as the curriculum, standards, and approaches at the local, state, and national levels of world language teaching. While this level of critical self-reflection is not new in the field, Wassell and Glynn remind us that a positive first step in redressing these problems begins with recognizing that there is indeed a problem and that we, as educators trained within a field founded and situated within a specific historical context worth examining for its shortcomings, have much to rethink in order to and as we move forward. While the book presents...

An Evolving Disabled Professor Training Highly Qualified Teachers Committed to Disability Rights and Social Justice

<p style="text-align:justify">I use the disability studies framework and autoethnography method in this qualitative research to examine my lived experiences in education and their impact on the disability community. The qualitative research method focuses on obtaining data through open-ended and conversational communication. This method is about what people think and why they think so. Disability Studies is an interdisciplinary body of intellectual work that positions disability positively and complexly, interrogating rhetoric that disability is a deficit that experts should remedy. Autoethnography is a research method and methodology which uses the researcher’s personal experience as data to describe, analyze and understand cultural experience. I focus on my disability community membership, professional development, and ways I integrate social justice in teacher education to correct education systems into ones that value disabled people. Using the self-study technique, I review my education journey and identities and how they have shaped me into a teacher educator who believes education leverages us to question happenings and provide solutions. I, therefore, reflect on the entwinement of my scholarship and community outreach and how they are geared towards creating and advancing a local and global pluralistic society that values disabled people. My values of collaboration, innovation, integrity, excellence, access, diversity, equity, equality, and inclusion are best practices that dismantle educational barriers and empower educators and disabled people. </p>

Incorporating Social Justice Education into Teacher Education: A Book Review of Communicating Social Justice in Teacher Education: Insights from a Critical Classroom Ethnography

Aubrey Huber's book is of great value to aspiring and current educators alike, providing a comprehensive analysis of how qualitative critical classroom ethnography can be applied to support social justice in the field of education. Through this text, readers will gain an understanding of the unique opportunity that classroom ethnography provides in terms of utilizing it as an actionable mechanism to respond to social injustices while balancing intertwined multiple perspectives. Teacher educators who use this text will obtain a deeper appreciation for the instrumental role qualitative research such as classroom ethnography plays in improving and reforming education. All in all, Huber’s text is an apt resource for anyone looking to integrate a critical lens and create meaningful social change in teacher education.

A qualitative metasynthesis of teacher educator self-studies on social justice: Articulating a social justice pedagogy

Teacher preparation programs are vital to facilitating the development of teacher candidates who have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that align with a social justice approach to teaching. However, enacting teacher preparation for social justice will necessitate teacher educators with sophisticated expertise. To gain insight into this enactment, we engaged in a qualitative metasynthesis of teacher educator self-studies about teacher preparation for social justice. Teacher educator self-studies serve as a context for teacher educators to study and problematize their practice while also contributing to the larger teacher education literature base. The qualitative metasynthesis examined 65 teacher educator self-studies from 1992 to 2021 across journal articles, books, and conference proceedings. The analysis and synthesis of the teacher educator self-studies resulted in naming three components necessary for facilitating teacher candidate social justice learning within the context of teacher preparation: 1) Centralizing the Lens of Identity, 2) Classroom Environment Conducive to Social Justice Learning, and 3) Pedagogical Practices to Promote Critical Consciousness and Praxis. Within each of these components are high-leverage practices and routines of practice that can be utilized to enact that component. Taken together, the findings result in a framework for a pedagogy of teacher education for social justice rather than focusing solely on what teacher candidates need to know and be able to do. The findings have implications for teacher educator professional learning, program design, and future approaches to research.

Teacher Education Reimagined: A Letter to Teacher Educators on Preparing Teachers to Educate Refugee Students

Turkey is currently home to the world's largest refugee population, with more than 3.7 million Syrians and around 322,000 refugees and asylum-seekers of other nationalities under international protection. Situated in a theory of teacher education for social justice, the current study aims to illustrate the lessons and insights that teacher educators, who are critically engaged in preparing teachers to teach immigrant and refugee students, offer in reimagining preservice teacher education to prepare prospective teachers to teach all students, including refugee children. The study employed phenomenological research to investigate the perspectives and the lived experiences of 18 teacher educators who were purposefully selected through criterion, maximum variation, and snowball sampling strategies. The data were collected through semi-structured in-depth interviews with the participants. The findings revealed three key issues for a socially just teacher education system: “who should teach: teacher educator identities”, “teacher education curriculum and pedagogy”, and “contexts, structures, and collaborators in teacher education”. As a letter to educational stakeholders in general and to teacher educators specifically, the present study issues a call to action to revisit our roles and rethink the education of massive numbers of refugee students in Turkey and around the globe to advocate for and enact social justice in and through teacher education

Social justice teacher education and culturally democratic Pedagogy: el camino se hace caminando

As a commentary text to Antonia Darder’s “Reflections on Cultural Democracy and Schooling”, this text is a reflection on how the author, as a teacher educator working in language teacher education, has been influenced by Darder’s thinking, namely on her work on bicultural education and on culturally democratic pedagogy. It seeks to evidence how Portuguese (im)migrant students and students from ethnolinguistic minorities are perceived as subaltern students in Portuguese public schools and the role (language) teacher preparation plays in counteracting power imbalances and transforming pedagogy for these students. Some examples from student teacher narratives are presented, to illustrate how social justice teacher education is developed in the author’s practice, in order to decolonize a neoliberal hegemonic perspective in pedagogy and in teacher education in Portuguese schools.

Moving toward a Comprehensive Program of Critical Social Justice Teacher Education: A QuantCrit Analysis of Preservice Teachers’ Perceptions of Social Justice Education

This study utilizes a QuantCrit framework to accomplish three goals: (1) describe a curricular and pedagogical redesign of teacher education courses grounded in social justice teaching (SJT), (2) discuss a Critical Social Justice Teaching instrument we used to measure attitudes and behaviors of preservice teachers (PSTs) as a result of these changes, and (3) present a quasi-experimental analysis to show changes in PSTs’ CSJ dispositions following engagement in our redesigned coursework and teaching efforts. Significant changes in PSTs’ CSJs’ dispositions were observed after completion of a single redesigned course and increased minimally after completing additional courses. However, changes were related to PSTs’ identity characteristics including race, gender, and religious practice.

Editorial: Social justice in teacher education: Equity, diversity, inclusion

Editorial: Social justice in teacher education: Equity, diversity, inclusion

Book Review: McNaught & Gravett, Eds., Embedding Social Justice in Teacher Education and Development in South Africa

Book Review: McNaught & Gravett, Eds., Embedding Social Justice in Teacher Education and Development in South Africa

Feeling Black: A Conversation About Justice Imperatives in Education, Disability, and Health

The purpose of this paper is to engage the reader in a conversation about justice imperatives in education, disability, and health. As counternarrative to structured majoritarian scholarship and positioned in the expressed intent of the National Academy of Kinesiology’s 90th annual meeting theme of Kinesiology’s Social Justice Imperative, we express feelings about the urgency for social justice in teacher education. To start, we operationally define social justice as advocacy, agency, and action. Next, we recommend the application of critical theoretical frameworks in conceptualizing and conducting research involving historically marginalized and minoritized populations (e.g., African American students). This conversation is theoretically grounded in intersectionality to offer a nuanced understanding of social constructions, such as ethnicity (e.g., African American) and race (e.g., Black), gender, culture, disability, and sociometric positioning regarding justice imperatives in education, disability, and health.

Working in Solidarity: An Intersectional Self-Study Methodology as a Means to Inform Social Justice Teacher Education

ABSTRACT In this article, we critically analyze our experiences in preparing pre-service teachers (PSTs) to teach for social justice. We utilized an intersectional lens to identify and validate our different positionalities and pedagogies. It is this interplay of validating our differences and commonalities that enabled us to form a sense of solidarity in our efforts to nurture our students’ critical consciousness. Through our collective engagement with intersectionality and self-study methodology, we co-constructed a common ground of what social justice teaching meant to us and how we navigated the highly personal, messy, and often contradictory experiences of engaging in this work with students. From this process, we uncovered three themes from our self-study: 1) curriculum is a living entity; 2) teaching is personal and vulnerable, and 3) co-teaching and collaboration invigorates us to keep practicing our social justice orientation.