Supporting Teacher Candidates as Social Justice Change-Makers

Abstract

Critical consciousness, teacher agency, intellectual freedom, and equity-informed practices are vital aspects of a collaboration between a faculty member and an educational librarian, whose shared goal is to support teacher candidates' capacity to use diverse children's literature to teach for social justice. In this chapter, teacher educator Homza and head librarian Fontno share ways to help teacher candidates use diverse children's literature to develop their own critical consciousness, explore issues of equity, and teach for social justice in their future classrooms. Grounding their work in conceptual frameworks, the authors discuss their positionalities, how the literature collection is built, and course activities that use diverse children's literature. Teacher candidates' reflections suggest that these efforts have an impact on their critical consciousness and capacity to engage in the challenging work of transformative pedagogy. The authors share implications for other teacher educators and librarians and questions to explore in future work.