Reconciling a False Dichotomy: Seeing Practice-Based Teacher Education in Harmony With Social Justice Teacher Education

• In Event: Tensions and Opportunities in Integrating Practice-Based Teacher Education and Socially Just Teacher Education

Abstract

I wouldn’t be a teacher if I didn’t think that it had a tangible way of moving us towards a more just, more equitable world. But it’s a little bit tougher in practice when you’re still gaining experience. (Schiera, (2020, p. 1).

A prominent debate persisting in the literature pertains to the relationship between practice-based teacher education (PBTE) and social-justice teacher education (SJTE). Many teacher educators have a goal of supporting preservice teachers (PSTs) to enact instructional practices that are both high-leverage and equitable. However, as teacher educators adopt practice-based approaches, some have questioned the compatibility between PBTE and SJTE. Some scholars believe PBTE and SJTE are inherently dichotomous (Philip et al., 2018), while others assert teacher preparation needs, and can have, both (Calabrese Barton, 2020; Schiera, 2020; Shah, 2021). In this paper, I argue that by seeing PBTE through an equity and justice lens, in which PSTs engage in equitable practices as learned through pedagogies of enactment (Grossman et al., 2009), we can increase the competency of PSTs to improve learning outcomes and schooling experiences for students of marginalized backgrounds.

Traditional teacher preparation has been criticized for teaching PSTs too much about theory without engaging in enough practice. One goal of PBTE is to bridge this gap between theory and practice (Ball & Forzani, 2009). However, the field has not settled on a shared definition of PBTE. Forzani (2014) tracks the differing definitions of PBTE over time, calling it an “amorphous term,” and still today the term lacks clarity. Some scholars put PBTE under a reductive lens, calling it prescriptive and decontextualized, and thus counter to equity and justice initiatives (Philip et al., 2018), while others do not. Calabrese Barton and colleagues (2020) observed teachers implementing justice-oriented pedagogy and identified their shared practices, naming them justice-oriented high-leverage practices. Similarly, TeachingWorks (2021) offers 19 high-leverage practices and describes how each advances justice. In the absence of practice-based approaches, researchers have found PSTs struggle to enact justice-oriented pedagogy (Kavanagh & Danielson, 2019; Schiera, 2020).

I propose a focus on equity-situated practice-based teacher education (E-PBTE). I suggest this for the following reasons: to address calls from scholars that PBTE be more explicit about equity, to recognize that PBTE can and has been used in justice-oriented ways, and to ultimately reconcile this false dichotomy between PBTE and SJTE. An E-PBTE model (Figure 1) illustrates the following: core practices selected from high-leverage practices, made learnable through pedagogies of enactment and increased field experiences with mediated fieldwork, as situated in an equity/justice lens (Table 1).

I argue that PBTE and SJTE can be most productive together versus as stand-alone initiatives. In music, harmony occurs when multiple notes come together simultaneously to produce a sound more beautiful than the sound of its stand-alone notes. To put PBTE and SJTE in harmony means to coalesce them in such a way that produces outcomes more powerful than could be produced independent of one another.

Author

• Kristin Doherty, Michigan State University