Drawing on practitioner-research and case study methods, including interview protocols, this study aimed to explore the insights and experiences, as described by four teachers, of developing and teaching racial-justice curriculum for predominantly White 6th, 7th, and 8th graders in their course: Sparking Courageous Conversations: Discussing Race and Racism. This study was framed in critical literacy theories that are grounded in the work of Freire (2000) but draw on the work of contemporary critical scholars and practitioners with the knowledge that critical literacy pedagogy can provide a powerful means for interrogating how larger structures, texts, individuals, and groups are constructed. Data collection took place in four phases across three months. Primary data sources included analysis of: curriculum and emerging curricular artifacts, in-depth interviews, surveys, teacher journals, researcher journal, and memos. The findings of this study emerged from the curriculum development that occurred the summer prior to the 2017-2018 academic school year as well as the teaching that occurred that year. The reflections of each of the teachers about their development and teaching of the racial-justice curriculum demonstrated the breakthroughs and boundaries of teaching about race and racism with predominantly White middle-school students. Further, their reflections illustrated the ongoing, internal work required to facilitate conversations about race with students more effectively. Such work included monitoring for how race affected their lives as well as the lives of others, and how race as one of their identities affected the ways in which they developed and taught curriculum. Finally, the teachers discovered that facilitating courses on race required moving from a content-based approach to a consciousness-based approach where they each, alongside of their students, assumed a researching-the-world stance to learn about race and confront and challenge racism.

Set within a discursive field of humanist and neoliberal thought, this post-qualitative study attended to student teachers’ “stuck moments” in a university-based, social justice-oriented teacher education program (SJTE). It sought to problematize the familiar tendency of ascribing student teachers’ stuck moments as symptomatic of the theory-practice gap, an argument frequently lobbied by policy makers to dismantle university-based teacher education in favor of alternative (read: more lucrative) programs. Challenging the representational logic that undergirds prevailing conceptualizations of stuckness and the theory-practice gap obsession in teacher education, this study conceptualized stuck moments as a fluid, moving assemblage of bodies (human and nonhuman), and discursive, affective, and material forces. Informed by posthumanist theories of affect, this case study of six preservice teachers enrolled in an SJTE program used a rhizomatic mapping process that entailed assembling a series of wonder cabinets to map the discursive, affective, and material forces that shape student teachers’ stuck moment(s) and explore what these stuck moments do to student teachers. Data sources included field notes and jottings, individual and group conversations, and the creation of wonder cabinets of stuckness. The findings of this study suggest that the materiality of field placement sites (i.e., the physical and discursive), the pressure on student teachers to achieve teaching mastery, participants’ desire to have an impact on their students, and the challenges of enacting critical/justice practices, constitute the stuck moment assemblage. These constituting elements also illuminate the infiltration of learning discourses in student teachers’ stuckness. With their focus on mastery, normative teacher identity categories, measurable goals, and telos-driven progress narratives, learning discourses—while seductive for student teachers—collide with the tenuousness and uncertainty of social justice work. These discourses also generate and intensify the negative affects that animate student teachers’ stuck moments. These affects include, among others, worry, shame, and loneliness. This research foregrounds how stuckness holds the potential to simultaneously expose and oppose the conflicting discourses, affective attachments, and intensities, that student teachers encounter as they navigate through the various spaces of their SJTE program.

This qualitative case study examined the efforts of one elementary public school teacher to implement a social justice curriculum unit in her fourth grade social studies classroom. The study was guided by two research questions and one sub-question. With the first research question, I examined the role of the teacher in an elementary public school classroom implementing social justice. With the second research question, I explored the manner in which social justice education was implemented in the elementary social studies and incorporated into a standards-based public school classroom. This study also examined the barriers to implementation faced by the teacher in a public school setting. The data collection for this case study included daily observation notes over a sixweek period, multiple interviews with the teacher participant, and classroom and unit artifacts. Four themes emerged from the data analysis. The first three themes each addressed the first research question and examined the role of the teacher in a classroom implementing social justice education. These themes examined the role of the teacher in terms of establishing a socially-just climate, creating a child-centered curriculum that allowed for voice and choice, and recognizing that education is value-laden. The fourth theme addressed the second research question and sub-question and examined the implementation of the social justice curriculum unit in a fourth grade standards-based public school classroom. The findings of the study suggest that the teacher has a pivotal role in the implementation of social justice education, as the teacher both serves as a model for social justice and sets the context for social justice education to emerge in the classroom. The findings also suggest that the teacher may have to negotiate and/or circumvent standardized curricula to implement a social justice curriculum unit. The findings of this case study further suggest that the structure and substance of the social studies at the elementary public school level may not adequately support social justice education. Finally, although there are many conceptualizations of social justice education, the findings of this study suggest that the teacher’s own perception of social justice education impacts its implementation in the classroom. / text

This research seeks a clearer understanding of the field of social justice education in Canada. Informed by multicultural and antiracist pedagogy, I explore the theoretical underpinnings and practical realities of this work among 11 activist Alberta teachers and students. Collaborative interviews with these participants reveal portraits of current activism in voluntary coalitions in secondary schools. Through guided critical self-reflection, fellow activists and I examine forming and sustaining ongoing projects. I present guiding hypotheses and assumptions that steer this research, and a theoretical framework that accommodates complex intersections of "race," class, gender, sexual orientation, and other considerations of social justice pedagogy and activism. This research addresses omissions in the educational literature; one such gap is a lack of research attention to young people—particularly to their role as active participants in social justice movements. In addition, I address teachers' previously undervalued role as crucial participants in educational policy development, reform efforts, and research on social justice education. Attending to the relatively few accounts of school-based action projects, I describe the integrative STOP model of student and community activism. An overview of the unique Canadian and regional contexts and recent political developments around social justice issues, and a summary of relevant research and theory from British and American literature, suggest specific areas of contention, influence, and overlap of relevance to this study. I employ a qualitative research methodology using a specific collaborative approach, and include details of participant selection, data gathering and analysis, and ethical considerations. Two chapters develop my research results along the lines traced by my guiding hypotheses. A concluding chapter outlines the specific significance of this research, factors that promote coalition-building, and promising avenues for further scholarly study. A value of this investigation is the rich offerings from my participants, whose reflections on their work are solidly grounded in understandings of daily activism. Their contributions show the potential mutual benefits of respectful research collaborations that both reveal and share the wisdom of social justice practitioners as theorists.

This research seeks a clearer understanding of the field of social justice education in Canada. Informed by multicultural and antiracist pedagogy, I explore the theoretical underpinnings and practical realities of this work among 11 activist Alberta teachers and students. Collaborative interviews with these participants reveal portraits of current activism in voluntary coalitions in secondary schools. Through guided critical self-reflection, fellow activists and I examine forming and sustaining ongoing projects. I present guiding hypotheses and assumptions that steer this research, and a theoretical framework that accommodates complex intersections of "race," class, gender, sexual orientation, and other considerations of social justice pedagogy and activism. This research addresses omissions in the educational literature; one such gap is a lack of research attention to young people—particularly to their role as active participants in social justice movements. In addition, I address teachers' previously undervalued role as crucial participants in educational policy development, reform efforts, and research on social justice education. Attending to the relatively few accounts of school-based action projects, I describe the integrative STOP model of student and community activism. An overview of the unique Canadian and regional contexts and recent political developments around social justice issues, and a summary of relevant research and theory from British and American literature, suggest specific areas of contention, influence, and overlap of relevance to this study. I employ a qualitative research methodology using a specific collaborative approach, and include details of participant selection, data gathering and analysis, and ethical considerations. Two chapters develop my research results along the lines traced by my guiding hypotheses. A concluding chapter outlines the specific significance of this research, factors that promote coalition-building, and promising avenues for further scholarly study. A value of this investigation is the rich offerings from my participants, whose reflections on their work are solidly grounded in understandings of daily activism. Their contributions show the potential mutual benefits of respectful research collaborations that both reveal and share the wisdom of social justice practitioners as theorists. / Education, Faculty of / Curriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department of / Graduate

Looking through the philosophical lens of love, this study seeks a deeper understanding and appreciation of how postsecondary social justice educators use storytelling, in the context of critical peace education, to create social change. This research explores the guiding question of how storytelling is used to encourage social change and to inspire action toward the goal of greater social justice. The argument for the importance of this research is located within the crisis of neoliberalism, where the very tenets of democratic education are being challenged by an educational agenda that favors standards-based learning and employment training over the critical and analytical thinking skills required for democracy to flourish. The results of this study identify storytelling as a method of ideology critique, and locate it within a larger process of loving praxis. A theoretical model of loving praxis is offered to explain how postsecondary social justice educators engage story as an action that leads to the goal of social justice. The steps in the model describe how valuing the common good motivates social justice educators to take action through storytelling, toward the outcome of building transformation, voice, and agency within students as a means to build greater social justice. The sense of possibility that is cultivated in this process re-engages the cycle by validating the value of and hope for the common good.

Enactment of social justice education is an important step toward rectifying pervasive discrimination woven into public schools and other American institutions. A social justice educator must develop diverse cultural competencies and also recognize oneself as a racialized participant in a system of racial inequity. The demographics of an overwhelmingly White teaching force and increasingly diverse student body creates both need and opportunity to understand the development of White multicultural educators. This is a case study of two White, female, middle-class first-year urban teachers who had completed a social justice-oriented preparation program. Written reflections, interviews, and focus groups captured teachers’ perspectives on their first-year intercultural, urban teaching experiences. Findings illuminated experiences with cultural disequilibrium, culturally relevant teaching, critical consciousness, learning to teach, relationships, and navigating institutional knowledge. Teachers negotiated cultural disequilibrium by both seeking new cultural knowledge, and seeking or creating experiences more consistent with schooling they experienced as students. Culturally relevant teaching emerged through teachers’ critiques of academic policy and practices that disadvantaged their students, yet were coupled with constraints that inhibited cultural synchronization in classrooms. Student achievement was considered a primary responsibility, but teachers were frustrated by accountability to fill perceived large academic gaps. Teachers simultaneously participated in and critiqued the dominant structures, stereotypes, and narratives in place in their schools Teachers viewed themselves as life-long learners and valued foundational preservice experiences and school-based relationships to build knowledge of teaching. Teachers understood the value of relationships with families and students yet felt constrained in developing those relationships to enhance culturally relevant teaching practices. Teaching in a culture of high stakes accountability and monitoring stifled innovative teaching. Implications for teacher supports during induction include preparing teachers to enter the induction process with an experience bank and foundational critical consciousness from which they can build in new contexts, providing opportunities for teachers to build community- and school-based knowledge and relationships as early as possible, and providing supportive mentoring that guides teachers’ critical consciousness in their new school contexts.

Urban schools exist within everyday parlance as an ongoing quandary within American public schools. However, historical, social, cultural, and discursive meanings intersect and compose urban school contexts (re)producing what is known and understandable. Early–career teachers work within these intersections. How they work within and think about these intersections influence their teaching and classroom pedagogical practices. In other words, urban school discourses influence and impact curriculum, which is navigated and mediated by early–career teachers. Through Critical Race Theory and poststructural lenses, this research interrogates normative assumptions and interpretations undergirding these historical (re)productions which often constitute the families and students within these school communities. I conducted this study through individual interviews and a focus group session with six teachers who graduated from a graduate–level, university–based Urban Teacher Residency teacher preparation program and who have worked completed between three to six years as teachers in urban school settings. By focusing on the lived experiences of these early–career teachers, this study contributes to teacher education programs and to in–service induction teaching. These early–career teachers navigate district– and school–level discourses, both professionally in how they conduct their classrooms and personally in how they process their emotional lives. They continuously seek ways in which to maintain their vision for social justice and equity within urban school settings and to maintain an ethic of care for their students. Therefore, the analysis includes my reading and interpretation of teacher and student discourses within these conversations. Throughout these interpretations, I write through, integrate, and interrogate my own experiences and positionalities as an African–American woman, former student, and educator in urban school contexts. Finally, I construct a counter–story in which the teachers grapple with and support an ethic of care for their students. Counter–stories center the voices and experiences of teachers of color as they attend to systemic school inequalities. This research provides a platform for examining and revising the oft–repeated stories of urban schools so that they might become vehicles for transforming structural and cultural norms that have subordinated access and equity for all students, and especially in the context of urban schools, students of color.

In this study I am aiming to improve my practice as a Social Justice Educator of educator-students, basing my methodology primarily on Jean McNiff's (2002) approach to self-reflective action-research. The self-reflective action-research requirements mean that the study is necessarily an iterative process. I construct tools from within my praxis that has informed my work as a social justice educator. I apply these tools to the work of students (that has been informed by my praxis) to evaluate how well this same praxis lives up to its purpose. Through the same process I seek to improve the tools with which to better frame and name the praxis, for its improvement. From my own and collective writing, working, learning and reading experiences I have aimed to do this by constructing a Trajectory Model describing an understanding of social justice education to apply to the Self-Reflective Action-Research (SR-AR) Reports of our Advanced Certificate in Education (ACE) students. I use this process to draw conclusions about the Trajectory Model and indications of social justice educator practice. The Trajectory Model - containing the Critical Elements for indicating social justice education-praxis - is the model I construct for and in this research - for use in our ongoing developmental praxis as social justice educators. The Trajectory Model, for social justice education, is constructed - and hence understood through - a series of layered models of informing concepts and theories. The Trajectory Model is my attempt to describe the standing; yearning-imagining-dreaming; gazing; seeing; thinking-naming and framing; and doing subjective being for social justice - in a way that is communicable and usable to articulate indicators of what I - in this contextual space, time and community of practice - understand to be critical in being a social justice educator 1. The trajectory Model discussion focuses particularly on three Critical Elements: Position and Stance; Indigenous Knowledge Construction; and Agency and Praxis. They are to be 'read' as being embedded within 'imagination and yearning' for a socially just, non-oppressive society - and they all imply self-reflexivity as an integral aspect of their existence. Thus while there are six numbered elements or aspects in the Trajectory Model, it is the three 'intersecting circles' (of the model diagram) that I name to be the central or Critical Elements - the other three being contextualising or 'embedding' 'aspects' rather than 'elements'. Through this process I came to the following primary conclusions: The method of researching the reports was inadequate for the purpose of drawing any but the most tentative conclusions about growth of social justice practice from the work contained in the reports. However, they proved of some value in students' self-reflections on their own social justice praxis. Through the process of engagement and analysis, indications emerged that the constructed tools have value for the purpose of facilitating analysis and articulation of social justice educator praxis through the provision of a conceptual structure to name and frame the work. This has beneficial implications for social justice educator pedagogical development with regard to both praxis and research possibilities for our community of practice as social justice educators at UKZN in the future. The self-reflexivity and collective engagement of the research process in this study has helped to strengthen my practice as an educator of social justice educators, primarily through improving definition and mapping of critical elements in educating for social justice, as I understand it, in relation to current understandings and practiecs in the literature. 1. The discussion in the Introduction to this study, on the reason for using an alternative set of words to the "dreaming, seeing, being" terminology, pertains. / Thesis (M.Ed.) - University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2006.

This study detected and explored the existence of two proposed school cultures, the use of leader actions by principals, and the relationships between them, of a sample of 42 public schools in Southeast Florida. A quantitative non-experimental design was used, guided by eight research questions. One instrument, the BSJQ, was created for the purposes of detecting school normative cultures and another, the SLQ, was refined and used to detect principal leader actions. The existence of Business and Social Justice cultures was confirmed, and three latent cultures of Standards Performance, Democratic Community and Equity Curriculum were discovered. Of the schools participating, 74% had at least one of these cultures. The use of four leader actions was measured and statistically associated with different detected cultures. Managing/Transforming and Bridging actions were associated with all, Bonding was associated with all except the Equity Curriculum culture, and Bartering was associated only with the Business/Standards Performance culture. The schools' context had limited impact on the relationship between actions and culture. / Only higher student poverty increased the principal's use of Managing/Transforming actions in schools with a Democratic Community culture. Four principal demographics - years as principal, years at the school, undergraduate major, and level of graduate study - had a actions and school culture. The study reinforces Pisapia's (2009) theory of strategic leadership, develops new instrumentation to measure cultures associated with social justice and accountability, and provides guidance to principals and those who educate them on leader actions associated with desired school cultures. / by Daniel Reyes-Guerra. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.