Narratives of Social Justice Teaching
sj Miller, Laura Bolf Beliveau, Peggy Rice and David Kirkland
This book documents how preservice and inservice English teachers negotiate the transfer of the social justice pedagogies they learn in university methods classes to their own work as beginning full-time teachers.
Based on a set of teacher narratives, this critical and evidence-based view of English teachers’ interpretations of, responses to, and embodiments of social justice explores the complex shifts and concessions that English teachers often make when transitioning between preservice and inservice spaces – shifts which cause teachers to embrace and negotiate a social justice agenda in their classrooms, or for some, to modify, or even abandon it altogether.
This work also offers a fresh perspective on the specific, context-dependent pathways and mechanisms through which English teachers enter school culture and respond to their own racial, sexual, and financial positions in relation to the gendered, raced, and classed positions of their schools, students, and classrooms. The book will be useful to social justice researchers, English teacher educators, inservice and preservice teachers, policymakers, cross-disciplinary teacher education fields, and interdisciplinary audiences, particularly in the fields of anthropology, sociology of education, philosophy, and cultural studies.
Winner, Richard A. Meade Award from NCTE, 2007
Table of Contents
Foreword: If We Could, Only, What?
Ruth Vinz
Introduction: Fourthspace – Revisiting Social Justice in Teacher Education
sj Miller
It’s in the Telling and the Sharing: Becoming Conscious of Social Justice through Communal Exploration
Laura Bolf Beliveau with Kristen Ogilvie Holzer and Stephanie Schmidt
Quiet Tensions in Meaning: A Conversation with a “Social Justice” Teacher
David Kirkland with Danielle Filipiak
Dream Big: The Power of Literature, Imagination, and the Arts
Peggy Rice with Alena Bogucki, Jamey Katen, and Emily Marie Keifer
Multicultural Spaces Meet Rural Places
sj Miller with Channell Wilson-Segura and Kristy Lorenzo
Lifting the Veil of Ignorance: Thoughts on the Future of Social Justice Teaching
Todd DeStigter
Review
- Don Zancanella, Professor of English Education, University of New Mexico