Fostering Social Justice and Critical Reflection With Practitioner Inquiry

• In Event: “They’re Telling Us Not To”: Teaching for Racial Justice During Times of Censorship and Bans

Abstract

We are a team of five teacher educators who teach and research collaboratively. In this presentation we explain how we employ practitioner inquiry to enact social justice as an ongoing project of critical reflection and reciprocal care, what we call justice-centered reflective practice. Our approach is premised on foundational principles that guide our teaching practice and are mediated by joy, imagination, vulnerability, and uncertainty. An ongoing and imperfect praxis always undergoing revision and re-creation, justice-centered reflective practice is:
1. Purposeful and systematic, drawing on a methodology that is aligned with a radical politics of liberation (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Esposito & Evans-Winters, 2021) .
2. Iterative and cyclical, generating learning that reaches beyond dominant paradigms and facilitating shared ownership of learning environments (Kaba, 2021).
3. Critically reflective, offering counterhegemonic frameworks to challenge oppressive norms and examine their own and others’ positionality, as well as the positionality of their schools (Crenshaw, 2017; Love, 2019; Swalwell & Spikes, 2021).
4. Agentive, positioning teachers as change makers within and outside of schools, encouraging them to approach pedagogy as a political act that fosters collective agency (Freire, 1970).
5. Done in community, decentering the capitalistic notion of teacher-as-rugged-individual while prioritizing collectivity, cooperation, and the sacrifice of privilege as key means of disrupting power asymmetries (Giroux, 1992; hooks, 1994; Muhammad, 2020).
6. Loving and hopeful, placing radical care - “care with,” not “care for” - at the center of pedagogy and constructing teachers as visionaries who believe in their capacity to make change at multiple levels ( Kaba, 2021; McAdam et al., 1996; Watson-Vandiver & Wiggan, 2021).

Our teacher education program is rooted in collaborative partnerships between our university and 20 independent school partner sites that host our novice teachers for a two-year teaching placement. Though all our partner schools have evolved to become more inclusive, they are still highly privileged spaces where characteristics of white supremacy culture (Okun, n.d.) influence everyday interactions within the school community.

Collaboration is central to our program’s structure, with critical reflective practice and dialogue between students, faculty, and school partners integrated into all we do. Every student in our program completes a year-long practitioner inquiry project that positions them - and all of us - to embody a deeply personal and political learner-stance toward their practice within this culture of community collaboration. This stance includes cultural humility toward our own biases and sources of privilege and a willingness to learn continually from the experiences of others, along with a continual understanding that the personal journey of learning to teach as a “process of becoming” (Britzman, 2003) requires vulnerability and uncertainty.
As a research methodology and pedagogy, practitioner inquiry allows us to support novice teachers engage in justice-centered reflective practice in their own classrooms as they grapple with questions of power, agency, and positionality in relation to their students, colleagues, schools, and profession. Practitioner inquiry enables us to model a defined concept of justice and support novice teachers to orient themselves toward teaching in ways that prioritize criticality and humanization.

Authors

• Sonia M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania

• Vinay Mallikaarjun, University of Pennsylvania

• Jessica Whitelaw, University of Pennsylvania

• Charlotte E Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania

• Frances OC Rust, University of Pennsylvania