The Pathways and Practices of Transformative and Justice-Oriented Teachers (Poster 4)

• In Event: Justice-Centered Pedagogy: Context-Specific Adjustments and Cross-Cutting Constants

Abstract

Objectives
There are 300 bills, 28 laws, and 4000 books banned in 17 states aimed at limiting students' exposure to socially just teaching. Nevertheless, we need justice-oriented teachers to provide transformative learning experiences. The objectives of this study are to learn how teachers develop a justice-oriented approach to teaching and understand what justice-oriented teaching can look like. This study focuses on the pathways of 10 justice-oriented educators and the various instructional approaches they take.
Theoretical Frameworks
Transformative instruction requires teachers to develop an equity orientation towards students and their community. Transformative teachers reflect ‘critically on their own experiences, ideas, beliefs and values’ so that they might transform their students’ learning (Rahmawati & Taylor, 2015, p. 32). Freire (1996) describes critical consciousness as learning how to take action against forces of inequality. The teachers in our study have learned to see and disrupt inequities in their teaching practice and curriculum. Mason (2011) highlights the value of teachers having an “inner witness” or a refined sensitivity to classroom situations and a rich collection of responses on which to draw. The inner witness highlights information and interactions according to the perspective the teacher has developed. In our work, we emphasize the importance of developing an inner witness that is equity oriented and supports transformative teaching (Patterson et al., 2020).
Methods and Data analysis
To understand the pathways and practices of justice-oriented teachers, we collected data via surveys and follow-up interviews. First, we took a purposive approach and asked 50 critical teacher educators to distribute our survey to teachers they identified as critical and justice-oriented. Ten teachers completed the survey and a subset of teachers were interviewed. See Table 1 for demographic information of participants. We used NVivo to code our survey and interview data. We coded inductively. We then deductively coded the data using thematic codes developed from theory and frameworks on socially just teaching.
Results
Mentorship was important for our teachers' development as justice-oriented educators. Mentors for our teachers included teacher colleagues, teacher educators, principals, teacher communities, and more. Mentors supported teachers in developing an inner witness through 1) reading critical texts, modeling transformative teaching approaches, and provoking reflection through conversation. Our teachers described pivotal learning experiences in their careers that shaped them as justice-oriented educators, including such as conversations with other educators (e.g. other teachers in their district) and classroom experiences. Lastly, we asked our teachers about the foundational principles in their classroom and how they enact them. Some themes of these principles included “empowering students” and centering student voice and identity. Our teachers also gave examples of putting these principles into practice. These practices include having diverse curriculum and texts, using student-centered teaching practices, and building relationships with students and families. These data represent a subset of our findings.
Significance
From our findings, we provide teacher educators with a blueprint that can develop teachers' critical consciousness and orient themselves towards justice. This adds to the literature focusing on the development of criticality and justice orientations for broader teacher learning.

Authors

• Alexis Patterson Williams, University of California - Davis

• Téa Skye Pusey, University of California - Davis