Just Community principles and peace education in the Colombian post conflict: Could Kohlberg’s radical claims be useful to Colombia’s educational initiative for peace and reconciliation?

• In Event: Some Engage, Others Don't: New Directions on the Development of Teachers' Professional Ethos

Abstract

Introduction
Creating schools that embody fairness in their institutions and processes ensures developing students with social-moral and civic competencies. Such schools deepen teachers’ commitments to social justice as they expand their responsibilities. Our research shows teachers’ work environment plays a mediating role between a school reform intervention and school climate, which in turn, relates to students’ prosocial and academic attitudes. Second, we developed and are validating a multicultural competence instrument that assesses how well teachers distribute learning opportunities to actively engage all students.

Theoretical Framework
School reform efforts can effectively foster development and future citizenship capabilities by engaging teachers with issues of social justice; however, they often fail when they don’t build teacher autonomy and responsibility (Brown, Corrigan, & Higgins-D’Alessandro, 2012). We expand on these models by examining the role of the teachers’ work environment and developing their multicultural classroom competencies as means to highlight fairness issues implicit in school and classroom processes. We suggest that as a result of developing skills in classroom pedagogical fairness teachers will foster students’ social justice motivations. Necessarily, school-wide interventions for social justice are put on more solid ground when the fairness of teachers’ work environment is considered.
Method
Research Design
Using a sample of 400 teachers from 4 elementary, 4 middle, and 4 high schools, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses created a work environment measure from items of teacher-administrator relationships. SEM of relationships among a school reform intervention, teachers’ work environment, school climate, and student outcomes were tested. Second, we developed an observational measure of classroom multicultural competencies that operationalizes learning opportunity gaps due to racial, ethnic, and sex characteristics of students. Weighted counts of student behaviors in response to 11 types of teacher requests (from raising hand to contributing new ideas) for 25% of students from represented race/ethnicity gender intersection groups (African-American girls, African-American boys, etc) are used. The validation sample is drawn from a national dataset of classroom video recordings.

Results
The school reform intervention study demonstrated that teachers’ work environment is a separable construct from school culture and mediates the intervention-school climate relationship, impacting student prosocial and academic self-reported behaviors and attitudes. Pilot results from the second study demonstrated observers can reliably code behavioral indicators of the distribution of classroom learning opportunities. Reports of inter-rater and test-retest reliability, construct, convergent and divergent validity with the CLASS instrument, and predictive validity with a measure of teacher competency and student standardized test scores and grades will be presented.

Conclusion
Each study demonstrates teachers’ awareness and skills related to school and classroom fairness can be measured. Based on sound measurement, interventions can employ these instruments to improve teachers’ abilities to assess the fairness of their work and classroom environments. Together these instruments show possibilities for creating conditions for teachers that deepen their social justice commitments and effectiveness.

Authors

• Ann Higgins-D'Alessandro

• John Anibal Gomez Varon, Fordham University