Partners in Action: Developing a Teacher Discourse Community to Read and Plan for Social Justice

• In Event: 16.062 - Poster Session 2
  In Poster Session: 16.062-2 - Division K Section 8 Poster Session 4

Abstract

In this paper, the author offers one avenue for discipline-specific, social justice-oriented professional development through a discourse community that values the voices of teachers and allows their full participation. The researcher examines data gathered from a qualitative study to illustrate how four secondary public school teachers participated in a university-sponsored teacher community centered on reading about and discussing topics related to social justice. The purpose is threefold: to illuminate how the participants conceptualized social justice; to analyze how they talked about topics such as racism, classism, sexual orientation, and gender; and to document how they planned to incorporate their reading experiences in classroom pedagogies with their own students.

Author

• Ashley Summer Boyd, Washington State University - Pullman