English Is “Not Just About Teaching Semicolons and Steinbeck”: Instantiating Dispositions for Sociospatial Justice in Education

• In Event: Unmasking International Social Injustices in Education: Incursions, Interruptions, and Interventions

Abstract

Outcomes of this study provide methods for supporting preservice teachers for how to become spatially agentive by instantiating social justice capital throughout inservice teaching, and suggestions for performance-based assessments demonstrating dispositions for social justice.

A geo-history, or the history of a particular geography that is derivative of former inhabitants, impacts all of the stakeholders in educational spaces through embodiment of policy, teaching, curriculum and/or learning and behavior. While some spatiality and hybridity studies have focused on how literacy practices position student identities, and others on larger schooling systems as spaces where bodies are contested sites for competing hidden ideologies, this research introduces how geospatial theory can be applied to social justice research and pedagogy. It draws from current theorists who have observed a “spatial turn” suggesting that geographies inform critical consciousness about how to read the world whereby social, historical, and spatial perspectives are neither hierarchical nor essentialized. This suggests that histories have spatial dimensions normalized with inequities hidden in bodies, which are contested sites that experience social injustice temporally. Spatializing social justice throughout literacy work presents possibilities for praxis and agentiveness as examples for how to rupture oppressive narratives in schools.

Part of an ongoing four-year longitudinal, qualitative, practitioner action research study reflecting how preservice English students shifted and performed embodiments of social justice dispositions as they moved into their secondary teaching careers, this research is grounded in Moll et al.’s (1992) findings, whereby funds of knowledge have historical and spatial dimensions that change based on reconceptions of past practices. As teachers build on students’ funds of social justice knowledge, or the already available embodied, moral, cultural, and socially-conscious understandings of how ideologies perpetuate oppression among various subjectivities, they become agentive disseminators of socially just literacy practices.

Using purposeful sampling, I employed informed consent, member checks, and researcher reflexivity, created data collection boundaries, discussed reciprocity, crystallized data using multiple methods, and prolonged the longitudinally.

Participants kept a social justice log throughout their coursework, answered two writing prompts per semester, interviewed twice and completed an exit Likert Scale. Drawing on the continuum of social justice awareness and its sub-domains, data was initially sensitized and placed across critical reflection, acceptance, respect, affirmation, solidarity and critique, and critical imaginings for the classroom, and as they further operationalized into the sub-domains. This was purposeful to determine shifts, challenges, and agreements for the codes.

Findings reveal how classroom activities mediated identities through geo-histories. Participants were “spatially agentive” as they deconstructed place, ideologies, and beliefs, and through assignments, recast how a geo-history can disrupt current practices that reproduce multiple injustices across urban, rural, and, suburban contexts. Participants recognized that by applying recasting to praxis, they shift social justice work into “spatial praxis” across contexts, and by learning about and teaching emerging geo-histories, the classroom becomes a space for restorative/transformative justice.

The National Council Teachers of English drew from this research to inform the recently vetted Standard 6 on social justice and it will continue to inform how to generate performance-based assessments for assessing the Standard

Author

• SJ Miller, University of Colorado - Boulder