Fitting in: Narratives Of Beginning Teachers On Education For Social Justice

Author(s):

Orna Schatz Oppenheimer(presenting / submitting)Nurit Dvir(presenting)

Conference:

ECER 2016

Network:

10. Teacher Education Research

Format:

Paper

Session Information

10 SES 02 D, On Being a Teacher

Paper Session

Time:

2016-08-23

15:15-16:45

Room:

NM-J112

Chair:

ML White

Contribution

Theoretical Framework

Migration is a significant part of the multicultural reality of our times, and an integral aspect of globalization (Noddings, 2010; Zembylas, 2010). It poses challenges to many school systems in coping with cases of injustice and unfairness toward individual students as well as excluded groups of students. It is therefore to be expected that educating for social justice would be a central topic both in school curricula (Banks, 1995) and teacher-training programs (Zeichner & Flessner, 2009).

The notion of educating for social justice is a direct outgrowth of the humanistic-liberal worldview that evolved in the second half of the twentieth century (Dover, 2013). Common to these concepts is the view that education for social justice is based on ideals of human dignity and equality, the goal being to afford every person a fair opportunity for a full and decent life. To achieve this, it is not enough to uphold the rights of individuals and to foster their autonomy; it is also essential to recognize their cultural rights. Education for social justice enables the individual to live a meaningful and dignified life, keeping the mechanisms of control and exclusion of the hegemonic culture and society in check, and maintaining the possibility of class mobility. At the same time, it lays the foundation for democratic culture and active, participatory citizenship, and counters ethnocentric perceptions and behavior (Tillery, Jourdan, & Deis, 2011).

The teaching of social justice in schools entails actions at both the individual and systemic levels (Whipp, 2013). At the individual level, it is reflected in the way the students are treated and in their academic, emotional, and social empowerment. Teachers require professional, academic, and practical training to maintain a warm, supportive atmosphere in the classroom, learn the personal background of the students and their communities. Likewise, education for social justice involves preventing stereotypical attitudes on the part of both teachers and students, helping to develop critical thinking, identifying incidents and situations in the classroom that involve injustice.

At the systemic level, teachers must go beyond the walls of the classroom, and strive to instill norms of social justice in the school and in the public space (i.e., broader social frameworks) and to view the student not only as an individual but as a person who belongs to, and represents, a group (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009; Picower, 2011). At both these levels, there is room for reflective thinking by teachers about the opinions, beliefs, and philosophy that drive their pedagogical choices, and making systemic/structural decisions related to policy and cooperation between various sources of assistance in the school and the community (Whipp, 2013).

The following difficulties have been encountered in trying to implement the concept of education for social justice:

1. It is hard to determine measurable standards to assess the quality of teachers' work in teaching social justice (Dover, 2013).

2. Educating for social justice is context-dependent (Mayo & Larke, 2011).

3. The lack of adequate training in this area makes it difficult for beginning teachers (Chubbuck, 2010).

4. New teachers find it particularly hard to handle issues related to the teaching of social justice at the systemic level, (Johnson, Oppenheim, & Suh, 2009).

The purpose of this presentation is to present six stories written by beginning teachers on the subject of social justice in the classroom and the public space. Through their stories, we will examine two principal questions: What process do beginning teachers undergo in coping with injustices committed against their students? And how do they handle cases of social injustice that arise in their work?

Method

Methods/methodology Narrative This qualitative research is based on narrative inquiry of six stories (out of hundreds submitted to a competition for beginning teachers). The stories were selected based on their literary quality (Riessman, 2008) and the prominence of this theme in the text (Miles & Huberman, 1994). To better understand the meaning of the social justice education in the stories, we made use of the hermeneutic interpretive approach (Josselson, 2006) and of thematic-holistic content analysis (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Lieblich et al., 1998). After selecting six of the stories, we analyzed them in five stages: 1. First reading by each researcher separately, and individual interpretation of each of the stories. 2. Joint second reading at which we looked for the similarities and differences between the stories. 3. Extraction of a similar theme in both stories: how the beginning teachers who wrote the stories coped with cases of social injustice and unfairness encountered in their work. 4. Analysis of the theme, yielding two categories shared by both stories: observation and action. 5. Breakdown and reconstruction of the stories, enabling us to study the differences between them in both categories as well as the meaning attributed by the interns to their overt actions in educating for social justice and their covert perceptions of their professional role.

Expected Outcomes

Expected outcomes/results Findings revealed two prominent themes: observation and action. Observation evokes identification with the hardships of the excluded pupils, and is reflected in the rich description of the immigrant-students, revealing their loneliness and social difficulties in the classroom. In all the cases, observation sets in motion reflective processes, brings the immigrant-students to the forefront, transforms them from "invisible" to "visible," and gives meaning to the professional role of beginning teachers in response to social wrongs (Green, 2013). The actions of the beginning teachers in pursuit of social justice are varied. In four stories, the intern makes use of coursework to create an atmosphere of respect for "the other" (Agarwall et al., 2010). Curriculum is an important tool for bringing out different or suppressed voices in the classroom (Banks, 1995). In three stories, mobilization of various parties at the school wide level is a form of struggle against injustice, and helps to integrate the students into the school (Picower, 2011). Their perception of their role can be seen as a reflection of the processes they undergo as new teachers. They see the "foreign" students as mirrors of themselves, and their sensitivity to them stems from their own personal-professional experiences in their first year of teaching. As beginning teachers, they face integration difficulties, alienation, and loneliness, and are at times excluded from the school culture and the teaching staff. ( Sabar Ben Yehoshua, 2004). But the status of beginning teachers as "foreigners" can also be interpreted a different way. It is precisely because they are "strangers" that they have heightened sensitivity, and consequently, greater ability to observe and identify injustices; thus they can "defamiliarize" situations that call for action to promote social justice. The advantage of foreignness and marginalization lies in their perspective, which is not bound by tradition and the norms of the school culture.

References

Agarwall, R., Epstein, S., Oppenheim, R., Oyler, C., & Sonu, D. (2010). From ideal to practice and back again: Beginning teachers teaching for social justice. Journal of Teacher Education, 61(3), 237–247. Banks, J. (1995). Multicultural education: Historical development, dimensions, and practice. In J. Banks & A. McGee-Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (pp. 3–24). New York: McMillan Publishers. Cochran-Smith, M., Shakman, K., Jong, C., Terrell, D., Barnatt, J., & McQuillan, P. (2009). Good and just teaching: The case for social justice in teacher education. American Journal of Education, 115(3), 347–377. Dover, A. G. (2013). Teaching for social justice: From conceptual frameworks to classroom practices, Multicultural Perspectives, 15(1), 3–11. Green, K. L. (2013). The way we hear ourselves is different from the way others hear us: Exploring the literate identities of a black radio youth collective. Equity & Excellence in Education, 46(3), 315–326. Johnson, E., Oppenheim, R., & Suh, Y. (2009). Would that be social justice? A conceptual constellation of social justice curriculum in action. The New Educator, 5, 293–310. Josselson, R. (2006). Narrative research and the challenge of accumulating knowledge, Narrative Inquiry, 16, (1), 3–10. Mayo, S., & Larke, P. J. (2011). Multicultural education transformation in higher education: Getting faculty to “buy in”. Journal of Case Studies in Education, 1 (Jan.), 1–9. Noddings, N. (2010). Moral education in the era of globalization. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 42(4), 390–396. Picower, B. (2011). Resisting compliance: Learning to teach for social justice in a neoliberal context. Teachers College Record, 113(5), 1105–1134. Sabar Ben-Yehoshua, N. (2004). From heaven to reality through crisis: Novice teachers as migrants. Teaching and Teacher Education, 20, 145–161. Tillery, K., Jourdan, L. F., & Deis, M. (2011). World mindedness, cosmopolitanism, and views of purchasing: Behavior in two cross-cultural student groups. Culture & Religion Review Journal, 3, 145–167. Whipp, J. L. (2013). Developing socially just teaching: The interaction of experiences before, during, and after teacher preparation in beginning urban teachers. Journal of Teacher Education, 64(5), 454–468. Zembylas, M. (2010). The ethics of care in globalized societies: Implications for citizenship education. Ethics and Education, 5(3), 233–245. Zeichner, K., & Flessner, K. (2009). Educating teachers for social justice. In K. Zeichner (Ed.), Teacher education and the struggle for social justice (pp. 24–43). New York: Routledge.

Author Information

Orna Schatz Oppenheimer (presenting / submitting)

Hebrew University , Jerusaelm

Nataf

Nurit Dvir (presenting)

The Mofet institute, The Kibbutzim college of Education, Tel-Aviv, Israel

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