Practicing Justice, Justifying Practice: Toward Critical Practice Teacher Education

Abstract

Arguments for social justice teacher education and arguments for practice-based teacher education are often seen as incongruous. Drawing on sociocultural theory and theories of justice, our study interrogates this underresearched assumption. We conducted video analyses of teacher education coursework and novice teachers’ K–6 classroom instruction, together with novices’ written reflections on videos. Data were collected during a university-based, accelerated teacher credentialing program. Analyses of videos of teacher education coursework revealed that while teacher educators frequently represented, decomposed, and approximated teaching practice, they rarely did so when discussing social justice issues. In a mirror-image finding, analyses of videos of (and reflections on) novices’ subsequent K–6 teaching revealed that novices rarely identified instructional decisions during which they attended to social justice issues.

Measuring Equity-Promoting Behaviors in Digital Teaching Simulations: A Topic Modeling Approach

“…One reason for this may be that changing behavior is a trailing indicator. This is consistent with studies that have found that changes in attitudes toward equity take time and repetition to be successfully incorporated into teachers' behavior (Aronson et al, 2020;Cochran-Smith et al, 2016;Kavanagh & Danielson, 2020). Changes in behaviors are also mediated by what educators see around them (Battey & Franke, 2015;Woodcock & Woolfson, 2019); participants who were still in the beginning stages of changing their practice may have found it difficult to do so in schools where equity approaches to teaching were not broadly adopted.…”

“…Teacher education, like many other fields, has long been criticized for examining equity issues at a surface level, if they are addressed at all (Aronson et al, 2020;Cochran-Smith, 1995) Moreover, even when equity is explicitly discussed in teacher education, it is often disconnected from practice (Sleeter, 2012). For example, Kavanagh & Danielson (2020) studied a teacher education program focused on preparing educators to teach in urban environments with a specific focus on equity and social justice. The researchers found that while the faculty in the program explicitly modeled instructional techniques and provided opportunities for student practice, they rarely did so for equity issues.…”

Ambitious Coaching Core Practices: Borrowing From Teacher Education to Inform Coach Development Pedagogy

“…Teacher educators have long struggled with how to create programming for teachers that bridges the gap between theory and practice and orients teacher education around the complexities and relational elements of teaching and learning to teach (Darling-Hammond, Hammerness, Grossman, Rust, & Shulman, 2005;Kavanagh & Danielson, 2020;Kazemi, Franke, & Lampert, 2009; McDonald, Kazemi, & Kavanagh, 2013;Zeichner, 2012).…”

Seeking Convergence and Surfacing Tensions Between Social Justice and Core Practices: Re-Presenting Teacher Education as a Community of Praxis

“…Conklin and Hughes’s (2016) coding of their “compassionate, critical, justice-oriented” methods and curriculum courses, for example, found that their pedagogy incorporated representations more than decompositions and approximations. In another study, Kavanagh and Danielson (2019) analyzed video from their multicultural literacy methods course, finding that they employed pedagogies of enactment when teaching instructional practices but not when discussing issues of justice. Video analysis of novices’ instruction paralleled this, as most reflected on their instructional decisions through a frame of practice without attending to justice.…”