Examining How Microaggressions in Marginalized Student Populations Can Inform Sociospatial Justice Teaching Dispositions

• In Event: Literacy in the 21st Century: Reenvisioning Teaching and Research

Abstract

Objectives
How do pre-service English teachers come to understand their role as agents for social justice as part of their teaching dispositions through geo-histories, or through the history of a particular geography that is derivative of former inhabitants? Based on prior work by this investigator (Author 3, 2007, 2010) this study extends the newfangled theory on social justice in English teacher education and moves the work of the CEE Commission for Social Justice into practice in order to explore the possibilities of cultivating social justice as a center/conceptual framework of inchoate pre-service English teachers’ dispositions.

Overview
There is a lack of research on how pre-service English teachers understand, embody and practice social justice in their classrooms (Author 3, 2008), yet there is growing momentum in education about spatializing social justice toward an evolving spatial consciousness that Soja (2010) notes is a “spatial praxis” (p.169). Turning research toward methods for how to cultivate social justice dispositions in pre-service teacher education programs by paying particular attention to the geo-historically situated microaggressions (Sue, 2010) experienced by traditionally underserved students, can pivot the pedagogical approaches that instantiate shifting social paradigms. “Fourthspace”* (Author, forthcoming), a socially produced vertical space that is enacted or triggered by the experience in the classroom setting that rises above a whole society in which a deficient educational system and corporatized politics renders teachers devoid of agency, helps explore how to develop social justice dispositions and as pre-service teachers embody this method, it can be spatialized into practice, and has great possibility for shifting evolving geo-histories.
Scholarly or scientific significance
Carroll’s (2011) work on teacher dispositions, coupled with the CEE Commission for Social Justice’s (2009) definition for social justice, and Sue’s (2010) work on microaggressions were applied to how pre-service teachers understood social justice, what it could look like in their classroom practice, and how it could be spatialized into various places and contexts. This critical qualitative research study, based on purposeful sampling and case-studies were analyzed in order to develop a larger understanding of the matrix of social justice and injustices that impact a teacher’s disposition about teaching for social justice. Data included examining and unpacking how social justice and diversity issues have impacted and continue to impact their lives through prompts, participating in weekly activities related to an issue of social justice/injustice, researching an area of social injustice related to schools, and keeping a social justice log.

Findings/Issues/Discussion/Session Structure
Initial findings reveal that when patterned absences in school policy remain unnamed and unchallenged and neglect full inclusivity for all students, it enables microaggressions to occur as an integral and normalized part of the hidden agenda that supports and sustains ableist, sexist, transphobist, genderist, heterosexist, and even ‘religist’ beliefs. Participants will be invited to partake in a new likert scale survey that was developed for how pre-service English teachers come to understand their dispositions related to social justice and will be asked about how they connect social justice to literacy education courses through geo-histories of place.

Author

• SJ Miller, University of Missouri - Kansas City