Are We "Promoting Social Justice"? Critically Examining One Teacher Education Program's Social Justice Assessment

• In Event: Social Justice Comes to Secondary English Teacher Preparation: Historicizing, Understanding, Implementing, and Assessing Standard VI

Abstract

Objectives
This paper, by a team of two teacher educators and four undergraduates, explores what happened when their English Education program created and implemented an assessment to measure students’ performance on the new National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) social justice standard. The team uses the lens of critical pedagogy to consider what it means to “promote social justice” within and beyond the context of the standard, whether our assessment can measure such promotion, and what our mixed methods data thus far suggests about whether and how social justice can be promoted by teacher preparation programs—our own and others.

Theoretical Framework
The teacher preparation program and assessments discussed in this paper were intended to be consistent with tenets of social justice (Wiedeman, 2002), particularly those Nieto (2000) names as essential moves for teacher preparation programs, such as creating a pervasive focus on social justice throughout the program and characterizing teachers and teaching as engaging in constant transformation. Because of NCTE’s new social justice-focused standard, English teacher preparation programs are, for the first time, being held accountable for candidates’ demonstrated understandings and enactments of social justice. This reality offers new opportunities for teacher educators to “walk the road” (Cochran-Smith, 2004) of social justice education and to engage in constant critique of the “power interests” (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2013, p. 90) in which we are involved.

Methods/Data Sources
Participants in our study were 56 undergraduate English Education majors at a large northeastern U.S. university: one cohort consisted of 30 seniors in a Fall 2014 seminar; another consisted of 26 juniors in a junior methods block course in Spring 2015.

Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected as part of this inquiry. We use as our primary data sources the quantitative data collected as part of our program’s 2015 national accreditation report and our analytic narrative of this data. These texts reflect our “official” perspective on whether and how the students in our sample met the NCTE social justice standard through a junior-year “Quad Text Set” project in an Adolescent Literature course and through a senior seminar “Communities Project.” Samples of de-identified student work that was submitted and assessed for these standards serve as secondary data. Of these texts, we asked what definition(s) of social justice were being privileged, whether anyone in the school ecology is being unintentionally marginalized in the process of promoting social justice, and whether it is possible to measure social justice promotion among teacher candidates.

Results/Significance
Our analysis raised many questions about what it means to “promote social justice” within and beyond teacher preparation programs: What counts and doesn’t count? What happens when various marginalized constituencies or perspectives on social justice conflict? How can we privilege the perspectives of those with the least power? This study fills a gap in the literature and history of social justice standards by using examples of student work to frame a theoretical and practical discussion of this new standard’s power and promise.

Authors

• Deborah A. Bieler, University of Delaware

• Ryan Faries, University of Delaware

• Jill Ewing Flynn, University of Delaware

• Stephanie Jennis, University of Delaware

• Sydney Palmer, University of Delaware

• Samantha Scarpone, University of Delaware