Beyond Imagination: Integrating Practice in Justice-Oriented Social Foundations

• In Event: Exploring Pedagogical Possibilities at the Intersections of Justice and Practice-Based Teacher Education

Abstract

Objectives
Despite being nearly a decade into the “practice turn” of teacher education (Zeichner, 2012), few studies have examined the intersection of Practice-based Teacher Education (PBTE) with social justice teacher education (SJTE) generally, and justice-oriented foundations specifically (Kavanagh & Danielson, 2019). The author’s last five years of teaching foundations has involved exploration and iteration to integrate practice and justice (Author, 2017). This practitioner inquiry investigates: Has/how attending to practice manifested in the pedagogies of a justice-oriented foundations instructor? Does/how does attention to practice relate to developing the orientations of social justice educators?

Theoretical Framework
Opportunities for convergence exist between the sociocultural theories underlying PBTE and critical theories underneath SJTE. A social justice educator’s practice includes PBTE’s sociocultural definition of practice (Grossman et al., 2009) infused with, and enveloped within, critical praxis (Freire, 2011). PBTE’s pedagogies of enactment, reflecting how sociocultural learning theories explain novice learning (Grossman et al., 2009; Lave & Wenger, 1991), are not mutually exclusive from problem-posing, dialogic co-investigation, and critical self-reflection (Freire, 2011; Gorski & Dalton, 2020). These theoretical perspectives’ intersections suggest how learning opportunities can be both justice-oriented and practice-based.

Modes of Inquiry, Methods, and Data Sources
This practitioner inquiry study (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999) uses critical qualitative methods (Ravitch & Carl, 2016) to compare the teacher educator’s practice from 2015 to 2020, reflecting the author’s current arc integrating practice-based approaches and justice-oriented foundations. Data sources include lesson plans, assignment descriptions, and other course artifacts reflecting the tasks and activities designed to develop novice social justice educators. Data analysis included open coding, surfacing patterns in these tasks related to practice, followed by deductive coding, making visible pedagogies of practice and orientations of justice (Grossman et al., 2009; Kavanagh, Conrad & Dagogo-Jack, 2020; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Analytic memos examined researcher positionality, considered validity threats, and explored emerging themes.

Results
First, while developing professional identity spanned iterations of the course, a shift emerged from asking novices to reflecting on self or imagining practice to examining situations of practice and making decisions. Second, while both sessions provided opportunities for co-investigation, the recent session did so with more grounded examples related to teaching practice, including videos of practice, curricular materials, and case studies (Ball & Forzani, 2009), creating a shared instructional context for processing justice in relation to practice (Kavanagh, Conrad, & Dagogo-Jack, 2020). Third, these shifts were seen most clearly in two fundamental orientations of social justice educators (Villegas & Lucas, 2002), taking an asset-based approach and seeing teachers as change agents, and less so with developing sociopolitical consciousness.

Significance
This study suggests possibilities for practice-based approaches to inform justice-oriented foundations, addressing common SJTE critiques of PBTE (e.g., Philip et al., 2019) and inviting further research and practice into blends of PBTE and SJTE approaches (Freire, 2011; Kavanagh, Conrad, & Dagogo-Jack, 2020). Additionally, these intersections surface tensions for further exploration, including how to overlap attention to justice and practice (Kavanagh & Danielson, 2019), how to sequence these experiences, and how to differentiate for novices’ range of identities, knowledges, and experiences in relation to justice and practice.

Author

• Andrew J. Schiera, University of Pennsylvania