Surmounting Barriers to Social Justice in U.S. Education Through Critical Multicultural, Counterracist, "Dialogical Interconnecting Strategies"

• In Event: Roundtable Session 42
  In Roundtable Session: Freire's Thought, Social Justice, and Dialogical Strategies

Abstract

In the last thirty years, gross disparities in wealth and income, and access to educational opportunity, have been growing exponentially. In the context of the AERA conference theme, this paper offers support in the form of critical pedagogical theorizing and concrete “interconnecting dialogical strategies” to teacher educators and others committed to preparing pre-service educators as agents of educational and social equity. Within a critical pedagogical framework, the author analyzes the results of research data produced by white, middle class, pre-service educators during their field experience in ethnically diverse schools. Results suggest this study has been effective in helping pre-service educators, who have lived segregated lives, re-shape their taken-for-granted stereotypes, problematize how hegemony supports educational inequities, and develop counter-hegemonic pedagogies.

Author

• Virginia M. Lea, University of Wisconsin - Stout