Cultivating Social Justice Teachers

How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concepts

Paul C. Gorski, Nana Osei-Kofi, Jeff Sapp, Kristien Zenkov, Paul C. Gorski, Nana Osei-Kofi, Jeff Sapp, Kristien Zenkov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000979947
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment?Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about "diversity," "multiculturalism," or "social justice?"Recognizing these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the "bottlenecks" that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings. The authors initiate a conversation – one largely absent in the social justice education literature and the discourse – about the common content- and pedagogy-related challenges that social justice educators face in their work, particularly for those doing this work in relative or literal isolation, where collegial understanding cannot be found down the hall or around the corner. In doing so they hope not only to help individual teachers in their practice, but also strengthen social justice teacher education more systemically. Each contributor identifies a learning bottleneck related to one or two specific threshold concepts that they have struggled to help their students learn. Each chapter is a narrative about individual efforts toward sometimes profound pedagogical adjustment, about ambiguity and cognitive dissonance and resistance, about trial and error, and about how these educators found ways to facilitate foundational social justice learning among a diversity of education students. Although this is not intended to be a "how-to" manual, or to provide five easy steps to enable straight students to "get" heteronormativity, each chapter does describe practical strategies that teachers might adapt as part of their own practice.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The art of Teaching Intersectionality
• 3. Overcoming Nomos
• 4. Learning to Tell a Pedagogical Story About Heteronormativity
• 5. Overcoming Deficit Thinking Through Interpretive Discussion
• 6. Teaching Against Essentialism and the “Culture of Poverty”
• 7. Disrupting Denial and White Privilege in Teacher Education
• 8. Teaching About Christian Privilege in the Teacher Education Classroom
• 9. From Literacy to “Literacies”: Using Photography to Help Teachers See What Youth Can Do
• 10. Teaching and Learning About Immigration as a Humanitarian Issue: The Sociopolitical Context Bottleneck
• 11. “You’re Going to Hell!”: When Critical Multicultural Queer Affirmation Meets Christian Homophobia
• 12. Beyond Open-Mindedness: How “Overlaying” Can Help Foster Impactful Discussions of Meritocracy in Teacher Education Classrooms
• About the Contributors
• Index