In Pursuit of Social Justice: Collaborative Research and Practice in Teacher Education

Abstract

Recent demographic trends in American education have reaffirmed the need to teach prospective teachers about social justice issues such as race, class, and disability. With this goal in mind, fourteen members of the Boston College of Teacher Education faculty and three administrators engaged in a year-long series of conversations over the meaning of social justice. The goal of these “social justice conversations” was to investigate individual understandings of the meaning of social justice and find the commonality necessary to “teach for social justice” A sub-group of faculty, including the authors, studied these conversations. The authors found that participants unanimously embraced the goal of teaching for social justice but that their definitions of social justice ranged along a “continuum of beliefs” They identify three categories of divergence around the meaning of social justice: Definitions of fairness and equity; institutional vs. individual understandings of injustice; and the responsibility of individuals to advocate for social justice. The authors conclude by discussing the implications of these discussions for the Teacher Education faculty and individual faculty members.