Social Justice Teacher Education and the Case for Enacting High-Leverage Practices

Social justice teacher education programs aim to prepare teachers who are able to provide high-quality, equitable opportunities to learn to all students, who are able to advocate for the transformation of not only individual classrooms but whole schools and districts, and who are able to consider their work as being connected to broader social movements. To do so, programs must engage a range of approaches to preparation. In this article, the author focuses on a perennial problem in the preparation of teachers, a challenge most commonly thought of as falling under the jurisdiction of methods courses but one that she suggests is critical to the success of social justice teacher education. And this is the problem of enactment, which essentially identifies the gap between what teachers envision doing and are prepared to do and what they actually do in the context of practice in classrooms with children. Efforts to identify high-leverage social justice practices would significantly contribute to the field of teacher education as it works to clarify the meaning of social justice and how it takes shape in teacher education and teaching. (Contains 2 notes.)