The Relationship between Social Justice Attitudes and Compassion in Preservice Teachers: A Critically Compassionate Intellectualism Framework

This dissertation aims to gain further knowledge about the implementation of the Critically Compassionate Intellectualism (CCI; Cammarota & Romero, 2003) framework in teacher education. This framework, originally developed to provide a better education for Latine students who were being silenced in their original schools, emphasizes authentic caring, critical pedagogy, and social justice content. CCI aims to provide students with an education that better equips them to be part of our democratic society and is supposed to lead to an increase in students’ critical consciousness through developing compassionate relationships and making content related to students’ experiences. Based on the success of the CCI framework in secondary education, Rector-Aranda (2017, 2019a) argued that the framework can also be applied to teacher education. However, there is a lack of research investigating the framework holistically which this dissertation aims to do. To gain the most knowledge about the CCI framework in teacher education, I analyzed the framework through three studies which are presented in this dissertation as three manuscripts. The first manuscript describes a mixed-method study where I analyzed students’ quantitative change from pre- to post-semester on their compassion, empathy, critical consciousness, and social justice beliefs. In addition to these quantitative outcomes, I collected post-semester qualitative data to investigate whether students’ responses could provide context for the quantitative findings. For the second manuscript, I analyzed how my students were responding to the social justice curriculum and how I, as the instructor of the CCI-based course, responded to resistant and non-resistant students. Together with my critical friends, we analyzed critical incidents to learn about students’ resistance and how I could frame my teaching in more critical compassion. The purpose of the final manuscript was to dive deeper into the perspectives of the students in the CCI-based course to better understand their experiences with CCI. The findings underscored the potential of the CCI framework in fostering social justice beliefs among preservice teachers and emphasized the importance of classroom culture and student-centered teaching approaches. Additionally, the self-study illuminated possibilities for enhancing the CCI framework through the integration of additional social justice-oriented pedagogies, such as the pedagogy of discomfort. Furthermore, students' perspectives indicated that classroom activities, materials, and the instructor’s philosophical stance facilitated the development of greater critical consciousness. In summary, the dissertation highlights the effectiveness of the CCI framework in teacher education, while also suggesting the value of implementing supportive changes to promote social justice teaching among preservice teachers.