Justice, Practice, and the "Real World": Listening to Preservice Teachers Narrate Their Aims for Teaching

• In Event: Creative Visions of Anti-Oppressive Classroom Strategies

Abstract

Tensions between justice-focused and practice-focused approaches to teacher preparation can be seen in the ways in which the aims and frames of the work of teaching are understood by teacher educators, teacher education programs, researchers, and pre-service teachers themselves. Employing critical qualitative research methods as a teacher educator practitioner, this paper proposal explores the question: what is the relationship between how pre-service teachers conceptualize their teaching practice, and their beliefs and understandings about justice and equity? One key inductive finding that emerged was the range of ways pre-service teachers described the aims of their teaching practice in relation to the “real world," as either preparing students for it, or preparing them to critique and transform it.

Author

• Andrew J. Schiera, University of Pennsylvania