The Changing Nature of Equity: Initial Teacher Education Programs And Transitioning New Understanding Of Social Justice

Author(s):

Jo Lampert(presenting / submitting)Bruce Burnett(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2015

Network:

WERA Focal Meeting

Format:

Paper

Session Information

WERA SES 03 C, Socio-Political Context and Education Internationally

Paper Session

Time:

2015-09-08

17:15-18:45

Room:

305. [Main]

Chair:

Lesley Wood

Contribution

Research Question & Theoretical Approach

This paper focuses on specific tensions in relation to social justice and teacher education, addressing the research question: How do teachers and principals at high poverty schools reconcile their beliefs about social justice in the light of recent pressures put upon them to produce test-based outcomes for their students?

Concerns about teacher education for high poverty schools overlap with a large 2014 European Commission Research Executive Agency (REA) - Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange project entitled ‘Overcoming Inequalities in Schools and Learning Communities: Innovative Education for a New Century’ of which both authors are a part. The paper, which problematizes social justice work in teacher education, is underpinned by socio-cultural understandings of educational disadvantage (Connell, 1994), complex grounded frameworks of quality teaching (Gore, Griffiths & Ladwig, 2004) and teacher education targeting poverty (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005). The theoretical positioning of the paper situates equity/social justice as mediated by a range of social, cultural and organizational contexts within high poverty schools.

There is international consensus that a critical component in improving educational outcomes for disadvantaged students is a commitment to social justice. For instance, Shim (2012) suggests that teachers often enter the profession with their own prejudices, which require critical unpacking. Most significantly, scholars are voicing increasing concern that current conceptions of teaching quality run the risk of teaching to the test or prescribed curriculum at the expense of what we know of social justice teaching. In other words, we have stopped asking questions such as “whose knowledge counts?” (Thomson, 2008). Despite such disheartening trends, teacher educators have continued to explore alternative pathways within traditional Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programs to address the shortage of well prepared teachers for high poverty schools with representative examples from the UK (Lupton, 2004), from the US (Villegas, 2007), and from Australia (Lampert and Burnett, 2014).

Teacher education programs for high poverty schools generally overlap in two areas. Firstly they generally address ‘diversity’ drawing on assorted configurations of culturally responsive pedagogies (Villegas, 2007) and secondly, they approach ‘equity’ or ‘social justice’ through various experiential or reflective journeys involving pre-service teachers “learning about others, learning about society, and learning about self” (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, in press). While Initial Teacher Education programs tackle the problem in different ways, there is nonetheless overlap in what Cochran-Smith and Villegas (in press) refer to as a common concern with preparing “a teaching force capable of producing equitable learning opportunities and outcomes for diverse students”. The topic of this paper focuses predominantly on how equity and social justice are defined by pre-service and early career teachers and principals of low socio-economic schools, and how their perceptions of equity are currently influenced by neoliberal discourses that increasingly measure equity in flawed data-rich comparative driven metrics. (Lingard, Sellar and Savage 2014).

This research is conducted as one strand of research within Australia’s established National Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools program (NETDS) in response to pre-service teachers, teachers and principals who expressed their desire to transition their beliefs to school contexts that are not always aligned to the social justice theory they had gained within the NETDS program.

Method

The study is designed to ascertain how early career teachers and principals in high poverty schools in Australia express their understandings of social justice and the extent to which particular interventions can impact on their understandings and practice in test-driven times. Participants in this research include pre-service and early career teachers (n=88) and principals (n=40) who have been involved in the National Exceptional Teachers for Disadvantaged Schools Program and who currently work in high poverty schools. The narratives we collected document the building of connections between the teachers’ practical experiences and the theories on disadvantage and social justice they were introduced to at university. The reflections provide voice/space for the contradictions, consolidations and new understandings that arise for these pre-service teachers as they teach children in range of high-poverty classroom and diverse settings. The opportunity to tell their stories provides a space in which the teachers can speak of their own competing ideas and submit them for scrutiny. Interviews from NETDS students, graduates and their employers are analyzed as a means of generating, disciplining, dismantling and potentially displaying tensions in teachers’ work. Their narratives trace the connections between the theories of disadvantage that are covered at university and the embodied practical experiences of teaching. Data sets included focus groups and interviews with NETDS cohort participants and partnering school principals/mentor teachers, as well as artefacts such as reflective journals. In particular, we asked questions about their original motivations to become teachers; their initial impressions of teaching in low SES schools; the ways they revised their expectations and re-imagined their work, and their knowledge of policy and how they practise teaching in light of the research about teaching for social justice they were introduced to in their Initial Teacher Education program during NETDS.

Expected Outcomes

Despite increasing pressures for student teachers and teacher educators as a result of high-stakes testing, teacher education and notions of social justice must now share a new discursive space. While NETDS began with the aim of exploring how mainstream ITE programs could enhance teaching quality within the context of high-poverty schools a dilemma exist for teacher educators who want to improve teaching quality, but wish to resist a troublesome neoliberal logic that simplistically links notions of quality teaching to high stakes tests or quick-fix ‘fast track’ models. There are clearly tensions that are yet to be resolved which in turn have implications for teacher education for high poverty schools. While it is critical that claims around teachers who ‘make a difference’ are evidence based, and to know how this comes about, it is equally important that we understand how neoliberal discourses obsessed with testing and measurement tell a limited story about equity and social justice within these challenging sites. While the NETDS program fortifies graduates with theory driven notions of equity/social justice this particular research on competing notions of social justice provides knowledge for the program to transition/resist new data-driven pressures to re-define equity from a “national and global reworking of education into a field of measurement and comparison” (Lingard, Sellar and Savage 2014, p. 711). For teachers to be agents of change they need ways, as one early career teacher told us “to hang on to what [they] believe even if pressured in other directions”. This research, which addresses multinational concerns, impacts on how Initial Teacher Education programs such as NETDS in Australia and similar programs in other nations prepare socially justice educators in these times.

References

Cochran-Smith, M., Zeichner, K. M., & American Educational Research Association. (2005). Studying Teacher Education: The Report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education. Washington D. C.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Cochran-Smith, M. & Villegas, A. M. (In Press). Research on Teacher Preparation: Charting the Landscape of a Sprawling Field. In Handbook of Research in Teaching, edited by D. Gitomer and C. Bell, Washington DC: AERA. Connell, R. W. (1994). Poverty and education. Harvard Educational Review, 64(2), 125-150. Gore, J., Griffiths, T. & Ladwig, J. (2004). Towards better teaching: Productive pedagogy as a framework for teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20(4), 375-387. Lampert, J. & Burnett, B. (2014). Teacher Education for High-Poverty Schools: Keeping the Bar High In Contemporary Issues of Equity in Education, edited by S. Gannon & W. Sawyer, 115-128. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Lingard, B., Sellar, S., & Savage, G. (2014). Re-articulating social justice as equity in schooling policy: the effects of testing and data infrastructures. British Journal of Sociology of Education. 35(5), 710-730. Lupton, R. (2004). Schools in Disadvantaged Areas: Recognising Context and Raising Quality. London: Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion. Shim, J. M. (2012). Pierre Bourdieu and intercultural education: it is not just about lack of knowledge about others. Intercultural Education 23(3): 209-220. Thomson, P. (2008). Lessons for Australia? Learning from England's curriculum 'black box'. English in Australia 43(3): 13 - 19. Villegas, A. M. (2007). Dispositions in teacher education: A look at social justice. Journal of Teacher Education, 58(5): 370-380.

Author Information

Jo Lampert (presenting / submitting)

Queensland University of Technology

Faculty of Education

Brisbane

Bruce Burnett (presenting)