Practicing Social Justice: Toward a Practice-Based Approach to Learning to Teach for Social Justice

Currently, teacher preparation that is primarily focused on social justice occurs through internal reflection: reflection on one’s own dispositions, identity, experiences, commitments, and beliefs. In this chapter, I propose a curricular and pedagogical framework for promoting reflection on issues of justice and equity that is practice based. Weaving together concepts from scholarship on multicultural education and scholarship on core practices of teaching, the framework offers curricular and pedagogical tools for teacher education that is anchored in practice and aimed at issues of identity, power, privilege, and equity. To date, the preparation of teachers for social justice work has primarily been understood as a process of dispositional change rather than a process of developing professional judgment and repertoires of practice. In this chapter, I argue for a shift toward the specification of justice-oriented teaching practices. Specifying practice allows teacher educators to engage preservice teachers in representations, decompositions, approximations, and reflections of and on episodes of teaching that intentionally bring social justice issues to the fore. When teacher educators can scaffold preservice teachers’ early attempts at social justice teaching by bounding and specifying teaching activities and social justice goals, they can create spaces of practice within which preservice teachers can reflect on how justice and equity play out in the fine-grained interactions that make up the work of teaching.