Since its inception 30 years ago, Shulman’s Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) has fundamentally altered the landscape of teacher preparation. Despite its prominence in the field, the paradigm fails to delineate a space for the role of social justice in classroom practices and teacher preparation. Accordingly, we complicate the relationship between PCK and equitable teaching practices by forwarding Social Justice Pedagogical and Content Knowledge (SJPACK), a theoretical model segmented into three knowledge domains: Social Justice Knowledge, Social Justice Pedagogical Knowledge, and Social Justice Content Knowledge. Because all instructional maneuvers are politically charged and therefore never neutral, SJPACK advances Social Justice Knowledge as the foundational knowledge domain that permeates and shapes all PCK practices. Consequently, the framework posits that PCK can never be siloed from Social Justice Knowledge. Implications for SJPACK-oriented teacher preparation are discussed.
In this article, Jeanne Dyches investigates the ways in which inquiry models of instruction have failed to provide students with a space in which to grapple with discipline-specific histories and hegemonies. Accordingly, this study offers critical canon pedagogy (CCP) to help students problematize and disrupt the practices specific to a discipline. Drawing from critical curriculum theory and critical Whiteness studies, Dyches details the experiences of high school students who participated in a CCP unit that investigated the disciplinary practices that have marked the teaching of canonical British literature in secondary English classrooms. Dyches shows how the unit provided students with an opportunity to restory their entirely White curriculum and, in doing so, reconsider and resist the traditional narratives and voices of the canon, develop an increased sense of canonical critical consciousness, and demonstrate a sense of discipline-specific agentive identity.
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