Session Information
07 SES 04 A, Teachers' Professional Development Regarding Social Justice
Paper Session
Contribution
While looking back at our research on the development of teaching identity (Beijaard, Meijer and Verloop, 2004; Flores and Day, 2006) among pre-service and newly qualified teachers, we noticed that many of the case studies we have narrated involved an encounter with a student that we can call “diverse” student, for the sake of a better term. We believe that this is not a coincidence but “a detail” that the research group has been blind to in previous accounts of these micronarratives. In this presentation we reopen the stories of a graduate and three undergraduate students in education paying special attention to the particular aspects of these narratives that can be associated with the broad construct of social justice (Adams, Bell and Griffin, 2007).
The reason for this revision is that the academic stories are not fully completed or even ethically completed if we do not readdress the fact that the triggers of the stories we have narrated elsewhere can be considered transforming stories that challenge situations of injustice or oppression.
In this presentation we propose that the encounter of a beginner teacher with these school situations and the special children involved can become a turning point or a “learning moment” where the construct of social justice is considered for the first time. According to Adams, Bell and Griffin, “teaching for social justice is defined in part by the moral and ethical values to which it is attached and by its strong commitments to improving the life chances of all students, ensuring that all students have rich learning opportunities, and challenging aspects of the system that reinforce inequities” (p. 374). In the U.S. educational system, teaching for social justice usually means fighting against racism, homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism and, more recently, against Arabophobia. In our Spanish context, there is not a strong academic tradition on social justice (although see Jovés, Siqués and Esteban-Guitart, 2015), and the only course that addresses social justice in our curriculum of teacher education is the compulsory course Bases de la Escuela Inclusiva (Basis of an inclusive school), of 6 credits and 60 contact hours.
This gap in the education of new teachers becomes apparent when they are in the classroom during the practicum. There is no doubt that it is in the encounter with the other when teachers realize of their own teaching identity in general and their social justice teacher identity in particular. We agree with Farnsworth (2010) when she
proposes that "a social justice teacher identity is negotiated (Wenger,
1998) with respect to lived experiences and culturally-informed reflections on
those experiences (Connelly and Clandinin, 1990)" (p. 1482).
Thus, in this presentation we describe and analyze how student teachers cope with social justice issues during their practicum and what kind of strategies they develop to overcome the difficulties and barriers they encounter.
As has been mentioned many times, the school of education of today has to prepare future teachers for the unexpected challenges to come (Hargreaves 2003). In our teaching context, we are dealing with unprecedented growing numbers of immigrant children (Hierro, 2013), yielding to multilingual and multicultural classrooms. Immigration is frequently a source of the (Creese and Blackledge, 2010) students develop and that new teachers will have to interact with. Although the presence of Romany children in our classrooms is not new, our postmodern understanding of identity as complex, hybrid and contested (Block, 2007) has forced us to give to these encounters a more relevant space in teacher education. In addition, similar considerations pay a crucial role in teacher education regarding the blurring of the traditionally assigned gender roles (Butler, 2004), as our first case study illustrated.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Adams, M., Bell, L.A., & Griffin, P. (Eds.) (2007). Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice (Second Edition). New York: Routledge. Alsup, J. (2006). Teacher identity discourse: Negotiating personal and professional spaces. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Beijaard, D., Meijer, P. C., & Verloop, N. (2004). Reconsidering research on teachers’ professional identity. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(2), 107-128. Block, D. (2007). The rise of identity in SLA research, post Firth and Wagner (1997). The Modern Language Journal. 91 (s1), 863-876. Butler, J. (2004). Undoing gender. London: Routledge Clandinin, D. J., Huber, J. Huber, M., & Murphy, M. S. (2006). Composing diverse identities. Narrative inquiries into the interwoven lives of children and teachers. New York: Routledge. Cochran-Smith, M., Shakman, K., Jong, C., Terrell,D. G., Barnatt, J. and McQuillan, P. (2009). Good and just teaching: The Case for Social Justice in Teacher Education. American Journal of Education 115: 347-377. Cohen, J. L. (2010). Getting recognised: Teachers negotiating professional identities as learners through talk. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26, 473-481. Connelly, F. M., & Clandinin, D. J. (1988). Teachers as curriculum planers: Narratives of experience. New York: Teachers College Press. Creese, A., & Blackledge, A. (2010). Translanguaging in the Bilingual Classroom: A pedagogy for Learning and Teaching? The Modern Language Journal, 94: 103-115. Farnsworth, V. (2010). Conceptualizing identity, learning and social justice in community-based learning. Teaching and Teacher Education, 26: 1481-1489. Flores, M. A. & Day, C. (2006). Contexts which shape and reshape new teachers´ identities: a multi-perspective study. Teaching and Teacher Education, 22: 219-232. Hargreaves, A. (2003). Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity. New York: Teachers College Press. Hierro, M. (2013). Latin American Migration to Spain: Main reasons and future perspectives. International Migration. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/imig.12056 Jovés, P., Siqués, C., and Esteban-Guitart, M. (2015). The incorporation of funds of knowledge and funds of identity of students and their families into educational practice. A case study from Catalonia, Spain. Teaching and Teacher Education, 49: 68-77. MacLure, M. (1993). Arguing for yourself: identity as an organising principle in teachers’ jobs and lives. British Educational Research Journal, 19(4), 311-322. Polkinghorne, D. E. (2005). Language and Meaning: Data Collection in Qualitative Research. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 52(2): 137-145. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.52.2.137
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