Examining Preservice Teachers' Complex, Everyday Negotiations of the "What, Why, and How"

• In Event: Educating While Racially Marginalized: The Teaching Profession as a Site for Care and Activism

Abstract

Objectives
This study aims to analyze how pre-service teachers of color navigate the What, Why, and How of their social justice teaching practices. Despite good intentions, namely the desire to provide critical content for students (What) that is grounded in a focus on social justice (Why), the teachers would design and create everyday experiences (How) for students that are not too different from the social ills they sought to eliminate. Findings reveal the personal and professional tensions between the social justice commitments and pedagogical rationales, and the schooling constraints pre-service teachers of color encounter in their work.

Theoretical Framework
Despite their political commitments (Why), if social justice teaching is framed as content (What) instead of a process (How), teachers are less likely to attend to student thinking and experiences (Spitzman & Balconi, 2019). Thus, framing is the theoretical anchor for the process by which the What and the Why obscures the How. Leveraging Omi & Winant’s (2014) racial formation with the notion of educators in a double bind between their personal and professional commitments (Achinstein & Ogawa, 2012), this paper attunes to the minute-to-minute classroom interactions to examine racial formation in the processes of both becoming and teaching in spaces of pedagogical complexity.

Methods & Data
Data include 3 co-planning-observation-debrief lesson cycles between a pre-service teacher and their cooperating teacher, coupled with 3-4 interviews with each pre-service teacher throughout the 2022-2023 academic year. These instructional case study (Stake, 1995) lesson cycles were coded for “educative [co]mentoring practices” (Stanulis et al., 2019; Wexler, 2019). Using methods of critical discourse analysis, the lesson cycles and interviews were coded for instances of ideological convergences and expansions and their alignments and misalignments across the corpus of data (Fairclough, 2003; Philip et al., 2018).

Findings
Findings reveal how a focus on critical content (What) and an understanding of the role of social justice (Why) often obscured a teacher’s attention to the details of classroom practice, student dialogue, and the design of the learning environment (How). Two patterns emerged across both pre-service teachers. First, they sought to create learning environments to address anti-Blackness at the societal and structural level. Second, they sought to create learning environments to foster increased study agency. Yet, despite these goals and support from their cooperating teachers, both pre-service teachers often engage in surveillance of students and presenting remedial learning tasks. This was true of all their students, but particularly true of the Black boys in their classrooms.

Scholarly Significance
By foregrounding the complexity of teaching, these findings offer insights about what gets illuminated and obscured as teachers construct, contest, and transform truths through the intricacies of their everyday work. Through these findings, I propose alternative political and pedagogical approaches outside of the contemporary binaries that dominate public discourse of socially just and unjust. Specifically, how to better support teachers to recognize the contradictions in their practice, and what needs to happen for them to consider what their classrooms could look like to disrupt unjust power structures and foster alternative educational opportunities.

Author

• Andy Castro, University of California - Berkeley