Core Practices and the Work of Learning to Teach for Social Justice

• In Event: Redesigning Teacher Education as a Practice-Based Venture: Lessons and Challenges

Abstract

Many teacher education programs across the country have been engaged in the long, steady work of preparing teachers to teach for justice. These efforts are borne from various commitments including commitments that aim to prepare teachers who will 1) include multicultural content, 2) attend to the diversity of the children in their classrooms, 3) work to close the achievement gap, 4) work to change the institutional inequity within the educational system that continues to disadvantage students of color, low-income students, and English language learners and so forth. To do this work teacher education programs have typically adopted the strategy of adding on multicultural education courses to the curriculum and placing candidates for student teaching in diverse, high needs schools.

Within multicultural education courses, for the most part, these efforts have focused on supporting candidates to develop attitudes and dispositions toward justice and equity, and have less often supported candidates to develop specific practices for supporting equity and/or intervening in inequity in the contexts of their classrooms, schools, and communities. This is not to say that many teacher educators across the country are not engaged in supporting teachers to develop such practices, but rather that as a field we haven't conceptualized the work of social justice as a practice. As a result, it is difficult, if not impossible, for those of us in the field of teacher education to aggregate knowledge about such practices and to learn collectively about how best to support teacher candidates.

In this talk, the presenters propose a framework for preparing teachers about justice and equity that connects social justice work in teacher education with the increasing focus on organizing teacher education around core practices. This framework draws on current work occurring mostly in the content methods areas of mathematics, science, and language arts to identify a set of core practice for teaching about justice and equity. A major contribution of such a framework is that it provides a common language for orienting the work of preparing teachers with social justice practices. In addition to presenting the framework, the presenters will provide specific examples of how teacher educators have redesigned the work of learning to teach for justice around practice.

Authors

• Morva McDonald, University of Washington

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Washington - Seattle