Justice, Practice, and Teacher Education: Conceptualizing the Relationship Between Core Practices, Social Justice, and Pedagogies of Teacher Education

• In Event: 75.039 - Social Foundations for Teaching Practice

Abstract

Purpose
As practice-based approaches to teacher education have gained popularity (Zeichner, 2012), conceptual and pedagogical tools for designing and implementing practice-based work have arisen across the field. Some of these tools, such as core practices (Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009) and instructional activities (Lampert & Graziani, 2009), have gained field-level traction, finding footholds at institutions across the country. To date, most of the work on practice-based teacher education, core practices, and instructional activities has been spearheaded by teacher education scholars in the content areas and implemented primarily in methods courses. Because of its methods-orientation, scholarship on core practices has yet to speak directly to teacher educators in the foundations whose work is organized not around a content area, but instead around purposes of education, such as the promotion of social justice. While many teacher educators focused on social justice issues have found ways to tie their work to the practice of teaching (Authors, 2013), as a field we have been slow conceptualize the work of teaching for social justice as a practice or as a set of practices. Lacking this conceptual understanding, we have been slow to design practice-based approaches to preparing novices (Authors, 2012).

Theoretical Framework and Mode of Inquiry
This paper is a conceptual piece that draws primarily on three theoretical constructs: (1) conceptions of practice (Bordieu, 1977; Lampert, 2010; Grossman, 2011), (2) conceptions of justice (Young, 1990) and (3) conceptions of the relationship between practice and teacher education pedagogy (McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013). Using these conceptual tools, the author proposes a framework for conceptualizing the relationship between core practices, teaching for social justice, and pedagogies of teacher education. This framework draws on current work occurring in the content methods areas of mathematics (Kazemi, Lampert & Franke, 2009), science (Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten & Stroupe, 2012), and language arts (Grossman, 2013) and applies it to the work of teaching for social justice.

Scholarly Significance
The development of a framework for understanding the relationship between core practices, teaching for social justice, and pedagogies of teacher education is significant to the field in three ways. First, a more robust relationship between core practice scholarship and scholarship in the foundations might help counter criticisms that core practices are just another technocratic approach to teacher preparation. Second, by offering a conceptualization of the relationship between social justice and teaching practice, it offers teacher educators in the foundations a way into developing practice-based approaches to preparing novices lending legitimacy to foundations work in teacher education at a moment when the relevancy of foundations work is being questioned (Authors, 2013). Third, the framework can provide a common language for orienting the work of preparing teachers to engage in the practice of teaching for social justice thereby promoting continued collaboration in the field around issues of justice and practice.

Author

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Washington - Seattle