TY - JOUR
T1 - The Social Justice Teaching Collaborative
T2 - A Collective Turn Towards Critical Teacher Education
AU - Aronson, Brittany
AU - Banda, Racheal
AU - Johnson, Ashley
AU - Kelly, Molly
AU - Radina, Raquel
AU - Reyes, Ganiva
AU - Sander, Scott
AU - Wronowski, Meredith
N1 - Funding Information:
In 2000, Sonia Nieto argued that in order to put equity at the center of teacher education, schools and universities must ?radically transform their policies and practices if they are to become places where teachers and prospective teachers learn to become effective with students of all backgrounds in U 堀布堀 schools ? ?p 堀 ? ? ? ?ince then ? other critical scholars have argued the need for social justice to be a focus in teacher education (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009; Zeichner, 2009). Despite these calls to action, there are still few teacher preparation programs centering social justice across coursework (Liu & Ball, 2019), and even fewer programs that require courses in race and ethnicity (Cook, 2015), gender and sexuality (Gorski et al., 2013), or disability studies (Annamma, 2015). In general, race, ethnicity, and whiteness continue to be undertheorized in teacher education (Harris et al., 2019). These gaps in social justice teacher education (SJTE) are problematic given the ?demographic divide 开 between a predominately white ? heterosexual 唀 female ? monolingual ? able-bodied teaching force who are charged with teaching an increasingly diverse student population (Enterline et al., 2008). Early career and pre-service teachers (PSTs) also report that they are underprepared to have conversations about race in their classrooms; only 31% of 386 surveyed teachers reported their teacher education programs prepared them for this type of social justice work (Milner, 2017). In agreement with these scholars, we argue that social justice is a crucial part of effective teaching and should be the core of teacher education. In this piece we examine what it looks like when we, interdisciplinary faculty, collaborate to center social justice across multiple required courses in a teacher education program, located at a mid-sized predominantly white institution (PWI) in the Midwest. We also discuss how critical theories in education can be used to construct transformative curricula and pedagogy for PSTs. Representing Teacher Education, Educational Leadership, and Educational Psychology, we came together to form the Social Justice Teaching Collaborative (SJTC) within our college. In response to the tradition of minimal cross-departmental communication about curriculum and pedagogy at our institution, we formed this collective to un-silo our individual efforts in centering social justice in our courses required for PSTs. The formation of this group is a manifestation of our commitment to prepare culturally proficient and justice-oriented teachers. With the support of the College of Education, Health and Society, we worked on an interdisciplinary teaching grant which encouraged collaboration across departments. Our unique collaboration consisted of faculty from across departments with differences in power dynamics. At our initial inception, we were all either pre-tenured or contingent faculty (i.e. in a clinical role or a visiting assistant professor which is not a permanent position and holds heavier teaching loads). This meant that the charge to lead change within our college was initiated all by junior faculty in precarious roles. The position we held was actually pointed out to us by some of our senior colleagues who noted that doing social justice work is sometimes viewed as ?risky 唃? especially for junior faculty 堀 However 唀 with the grant support from our college ? our Dean 嬁? and department chairs 嬀 support 唀 and the support we ipdreodveach other, we pushed forward to do this work despite some of the resistance we faced from some faculty.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, OpenED Network. All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/12/1
Y1 - 2020/12/1
N2 - In this article, we share the collaborative curricular work of an interdisciplinary Social Justice Teaching Collaborative (SJTC) from a PWI university. Members of the SJTC worked strategically to center social justice across required courses pre-service teachers are required to take: Introduction to Education, Sociocultural Studies in Education, and Inclusive Education. We share our conceptualization of social justice and guiding theoretical frameworks that have shaped our pedagogy and curriculum. These frameworks include democratic education, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, critical disability studies, and feminist and intersectionality theory. We then detail changes made across courses including examples of readings and assignments. Finally, we conclude by offering reflections, challenges, and lessons learned for collaborative work within teacher education and educational leadership.
AB - In this article, we share the collaborative curricular work of an interdisciplinary Social Justice Teaching Collaborative (SJTC) from a PWI university. Members of the SJTC worked strategically to center social justice across required courses pre-service teachers are required to take: Introduction to Education, Sociocultural Studies in Education, and Inclusive Education. We share our conceptualization of social justice and guiding theoretical frameworks that have shaped our pedagogy and curriculum. These frameworks include democratic education, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, critical disability studies, and feminist and intersectionality theory. We then detail changes made across courses including examples of readings and assignments. Finally, we conclude by offering reflections, challenges, and lessons learned for collaborative work within teacher education and educational leadership.
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U2 - 10.46303/jcsr.2020.8
DO - 10.46303/jcsr.2020.8
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85103837289
SN - 2690-2788
VL - 2
SP - 21
EP - 39
JO - Journal of Curriculum Studies Research
JF - Journal of Curriculum Studies Research
IS - 2
ER -
