Teacher education for social justice across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts: An autobiographical narrative study.

Abstract

Teacher education for social justice aims to prepare teachers to work towards equity and justice in society and to transform the lives of their students. Conceptualizing teaching as a political and ethical endeavor, social justice teacher education must engage seriously with the local and lived experiences of both teacher educators and student-teachers. How then does teacher education for social justice move across communities and identities, and through cultural, social, geographic and temporal spaces? This study is an autobiographical narrative inquiry into social justice teacher education across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, across time, and within different educational communities. Bakhtin’s dialogic theory (1981) helps to trace the narrative threads wherein “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293). The study examines the author’s ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) around social justice teacher education in the context of a youth mentoring, service-learning course for undergraduate teacher-candidates. The analysis examines the complexities and tensions in exploring experiences and co-constructing understandings of oppression, privilege and social justice with her student-teachers on the youth mentoring course in dialogic struggles with her own experiences of justice and education in the USA and Hong Kong as an English-speaking Chinese-American. Providing an in-depth examination of convergence of identity, social relations, place and time in a teacher-educator’s knowledge formation, the study highlights the complexities of the notion of social justice suggests that social justice teacher education is multi-voiced and lived both locally and globally.