Co-Constructing Supports for Justice-Oriented Early Career Teachers

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 1:45 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Navigating Tension and Transformation: Preparing Teachers for Justice in a Divided World

Abstract

This study examines how novice teachers committed to justice-oriented pedagogy conceptualize barriers to their commitments in order to co-construct needed supports. Drawing on critical-constructivist grounded theory, data provides insight into the specific barriers teachers described across a year-long professional learning community and the ways that those barriers did and did not impede their efforts. Barriers include reckoning with miseducation, emotions of fear, anxiety, and being overwhelmed, isolation, and systemic as well as internal conflicts. Teachers’ barriers provide insight into the specific supports novice teachers acknowledge as fortifying their commitments to justice. As such, this project offers perspectives regarding novice teachers’ barriers and how they might be understood in a context of developing sustainable coalitions of activism in schools.

Authors

• Katie Harlan Eller, Marist University

• Kathleen Van Cauwenberge, Marist College

• Amanda Williamson, Marist College