Social Justice Language Teacher Education

Introduction

MARGARET R. HAWKINS

Why Social Justice Language Teacher Education?

There is currently an increase in focus, within the field of education worldwide, on globalization and particularly on its inherent movement of people across national and international borders. In response to this movement, educators are grappling with defining ‘best practices’ for teaching immigrant, migrant and refugee students. Simultaneously, many countries that are home to multiple indigenous language and cultural groups are attempting to broaden and unify the reach and scope of education, resulting in the provision of education in languages other than students’ home languages. With increased visibility of language issues come increasing regional and national interests in setting policies and in ensuring accountability in educational outcomes for students who do not speak the dominant language of the communities in which they live. Thus there is a demand for teachers to know how to adequately support students to learn the language of instruction in schools, although there is little agreement in the educational literature on how best to do so. What is clear, however, is that virtually all teachers, regardless of geographic location or area of expertise, must be prepared to teach students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds, whereas historically language teacher education was considered the domain of those preparing to be ‘language’ teachers.

The language teacher education literature primarily falls into two distinct categories: (1) scholars and educators who focus on issues of language, including grammar, function, structure and usage; and (2) those who focus on linguistically and culturally responsive pedagogies. This stems, in part, from the trajectory of the ways in which language learning and teaching has been approached historically, moving from a view of language as a set of words and structures governed by particular principles and stored in the mind (a psycholinguistic approach) through a view of language as a tool for meaning-making (a communicative approach) to a view of meaning-making as situated in specific social encounters that take place in specific places at specific times between specific people (a sociocultural approach), and ultimately to a view of situated language usage that is shaped through pervasive social, cultural and political ideologies and forces that serve to empower some people while marginalizing others (a critical approach). While language teacher preparation often takes into account competencies from the first category identified above – ensuring that teachers know something about grammar, structure and function – issues that align with sociocultural perspectives fall within the second category and are embodied in culturally and linguistically responsive pedagogy. Rarely are teachers of students who are not being schooled in their home language, through preservice or in-service preparation or professional development, provided the opportunity to explore the impact of sociocultural issues on the language, literacy and academic learning of their students. And almost never are critical issues and approaches part of language teacher education practices (although see Hawkins & Norton, 2009, for several examples of exceptions).

In this volume, we call for a turn to social justice language teacher education. While ‘critical’ language teacher education puts the focus squarely on societal inequities often based on differences vis-à-vis race, class, gender, language, dis/ability and ethnicity and calls for educators (and indeed everybody) to understand how positioning within those categories leads to inequitable distribution of goods and resources, including education, a social justice turn highlights teachers’ responsibility to serve as agents of social change. This aligns with current literature in mainstream teacher education, where scholars advocate for social justice teacher education (e.g. Cochran-Smith, 2004; McDonald, 2005; McDonald & Zeichner, 2009; Zeichner, 2009). A social justice approach not only shifts understandings of language learning, teaching and usage, acknowledges inequities in educational landscapes and envisions more just social futures, but redefines the roles of teachers in effecting change.

As noted above, there is much educational rhetoric, in policy and scholarship, about ‘best practices’ for serving English learners. As may be clear, the conceptual frames we utilize to understand what language teaching, learning and use is and entails shape our program designs, curricula and practices. Those of us who adopt a sociocultural, critical and/or social justice approach (they are not the same, but they are not mutually exclusive) are not apt to buy into the notion of ‘best practices’ at all. We believe that learning and teaching (including but not limited to language learning and teaching) occur in specific situated contexts and are contingent on the time, place and participants in specific interactions that constitute the learning events, all of which is, in part, shaped by larger societal and institutional discourses. Thus curriculum and pedagogy must be responsive to local contexts and contingencies. However, if we are not advocating for a stable, fixed set of programs and practices, what do we advocate for? How can educators know how to approach the design and implementation of education for English learners?

The Book

Authors in this book explore just those questions. What is social justice language teacher education, and what might it look like? In the opening chapter, Zeichner articulates a view of a social justice approach to teacher education. In subsequent chapters, authors from diverse geographic locales offer theorized accounts of their social justice language teacher education practices, aligning with aspects of Zeichner's vision. These accounts are not meant to be prescriptive but to demonstrate how social justice language teacher education has been taken up across the globe to respond to local contexts and circumstances. Chapters address language teacher preparation at all levels – preservice, in-service and professional development; formal and informal; graduate, undergraduate and nonmatriculated – and represent university-based programs and classes as well as non-university-based educational configurations and modes. Chapters also define ‘language teacher ’ in various ways: as grade-level or subject-area teachers in places where the language that is the medium of instruction is not the language of the community and students’ homes; as grade-level or subject-area teachers whose students include both native speakers and nonnative speakers of the language of instruction; as teachers being prepared to teach the dominant language of the community as a subject area to nonnative speakers; and as those being prepared to teach a language as a foreign language in communities where it is not the dominant language.

While cross-cutting themes, issues and challenges are evident, there is no panacea offered. In fact, while many of the authors point to what they consider to be powerful components of practice, such as collaboration, dialogue, reflection and working to empower/legitimize teachers, they point equally to the challenge and tensions of doing this work within the context of societal and institutional power structures. There are no easy solutions to preparing teachers to provide equitable educations to students who are not aligned with dominant language and literacy practices in schools and communities. Each author offers a look at their programs and practices as they are informed by their beliefs, discussing their efforts and attendant challenges.

The book begins, in Chapter 1, with an articulation by Ken Zeichner of key elements of, and challenges in, social justice teacher education. In ‘Teacher Education for Social Justice’, Zeichner explicates the need for such an approach and situates it within the current professional teacher education literature. He describes programs designed to align with a social justice approach and discusses pitfalls and tensions.

In ‘Multimodality, Social Justice and Becoming a Really South African Democracy: Case Studies from Language Classrooms’ (Chapter 2), Denise Newfield examines social justice in education in postapartheid South Africa. She portrays the current educational landscape and policies and discusses how she and her colleagues, through a shared vision, are attempting to transform teacher education in her university. She calls for a multimodal approach to social justice language teacher education to ‘form the foundation of a semiotics that is strongly grounded in the social’ (p. 25) and to articulate with South African ways of knowing and communicating. She then describes three projects from South African classrooms that utilize a multimodal approach in the service of social justice language (and language teacher) education.

Mahia Maurial and Moisés Suxo, in Chapter 3, ‘Does Intercultural Bilingual Education Open Spaces for Inclusion at Higher Education?’ provide a history of Intercultural Bilingual Education as socioculturally situated in South America and compare and contrast it to social justice teacher education. They then describe the Peruvian university program in which they work, analyzing systemically, programmatically, socially and practically how it does and does not align with the indigenous ways of knowing, learning and relating that its indigenous students bring to the program. They discuss the role of research and suggest recommendations for future directions.

In Chapter 4, ‘Education and Social Justice in Neoliberal Times: Historical and Pedagogical Perspectives from Two Postcolonial Contexts’, Matthew Clarke and Brian Morgan explicate how neoliberal concerns with effectiveness and accountability encourage narrow understandings of education and teaching and lead to reform agendas that do not promote social justice. They provide examples from their respective contexts in Australia and Canada, situating them historically, and illustrate how they each, in their own contexts, provide their students with linguistic tools to analyze and challenge contemporary neoliberal discourses.

Chapter 5 turns the social justice lens on language teacher education in Uganda. In ‘Enfranchising the Teacher of English through Action Research: Perspectives on English Language Teacher Education in Uganda’, Robinah Kyeyune situates readers in the local language and English-medium educational environments in Uganda. She discusses current policies and programs for schools and current practices in language teacher preparation. Through an analysis of teacher training programs, she points to inequities in the teaching of English and in the teaching of teachers, locating these primarily in hierarchical relations of power within institutions. She calls for critical inquiry from teacher trainers, and for action research to be implemented as part of the teacher preparation program in order to empower teachers to see themselves as agents for change and to ultimately change the educational landscape.

In Chapter 6, ‘Dialogic Determination: Constructing a Social Justice Discourse in Language Teacher Education’, Margaret R. Hawkins offers a rationale for social justice language teacher education, grounding her discussion in current educational discourses around teaching English learners in the United States. She describes a language teacher education program built on principles of social justice and conducts an empirical analysis of the effectiveness of an English as a second language methods course for K–12 teachers designed to fully integrate a social justice perspective. The analysis portrays some of the tensions and struggles in implementing social justice language teacher education and points to critical issues for exploration.

Chapter 7 presents a contextualized e-mail exchange between a school vice principal and a university faculty member in Hong Kong. In ‘Creating a School Program to Cater for Learner Diversity: A Dialogue between a School Administrator and an Academic’, Franky Poon and Angel Lin explore the complicated issues around providing instruction, including a remedial English resource class, for special education students in Franky's school, in an effort to provide them a socially just and equitable education. The dialogue functions to provide scaffolding for Franky's explorations and efforts but also is educational for Angel; they call for professional development to intersect academic and practitioner spaces.

The final chapter (Chapter 8), ‘Working for Social Justice in a Collaborative Action Research Group’, by Kelleen Toohey and Bonnie Waterstone, portrays the power of collaborative inquiry groups as a form of professional development. After introducing the reader to the histories, goals, composition and activities of the TARG (Teacher Action Research Group) group in which the authors participated, they provide a rationale for action research in the service of social justice work. Then, through detailed description and analysis of the activities and interactions of the group, they portray the tensions and challenges of collaborative inquiry when participants have differing goals and interests shaped by their differing positions across different institutional domains and discourses. They problematize ‘communities who work for social change’ while portraying how such ‘educative spaces’ hold promise for social justice transformation in education.

Authors hope that readers find the chapters informative and that our work may, perhaps, through illuminating what a social justice lens has to offer to language teacher education, be generative of ideas that may be taken up and applied, in locally responsive ways, in readers’ own contexts.

References

Cochran-Smith, M. (2004) Walking the Road: Race, Diversity and Social Justice in Teacher Education. New York: Teachers College Press.

Hawkins, M. and Norton, B. (2009) Critical language teacher education. In J. Richards. and A. Burns (eds) The Cambridge Guide To Second Language Teacher Education. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

McDonald, M. and Zeichner, K. (2009) Social justice teacher education. In W. Ayers, T. Quinn and D. Stovall (eds) Handbook of Social Justice in Education. New York: Routledge.

McDonald, M.A. (2005) The integration of social justice in teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education 56 (5), 418–435.

Zeichner, K. (2009) Teacher Education and the Struggle for Social Justice. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 1

Teacher Education for Social Justice

¹

KEN ZEICHNER

The focus of this chapter is on an approach to teacher education that has come to be known as teacher education for social justice. Although various labels have been attached to this approach over the years, such as social reconstructionist teacher education, antiracist teacher education, critical teacher education and social reconstructionist multicultural teacher education, social justice teacher education (SJTE) seems to have become the label of choice among college and university teacher educators in recent years (e.g. Cochran-Smith, 1999; McDonald & Zeichner, 2009; Michelli & Keiser, 2005; Solomon et al., 2007; Zeichner, 2009).

SJTE aims to respond to preparing teachers to teach in ways that contribute to a lessening of the inequalities that exist in school systems throughout the world between children of the poor and children of the middle and wealthy classes, and the injustices that exist in societies beyond systems of schooling – in access to shelter, food, healthcare, transportation, access to meaningful work that pays a living wage, and so on. The uncertainty that characterizes the current context is related to the uncertain future this planet faces if these injustices persist. We continue today to see widening gaps in education and income between the haves and have-nots in every society.

In current times, SJTE also aims to prepare teachers to teach in societies where increasingly narrow and punitive forms of accountability have been thrust upon schools and teacher education institutions that are often inconsistent with educators’ own views about what they are trying to accomplish (Hamel & Merz, 2005; Johnson et al., 2005; Sirotnik, 2001). Teachers and others who work in schools do not object to being held accountable for their work, but to the narrow forms of accountability that they are required to meet (Ingersoll, 2003). The ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB) Act in the United States, for example, which has required high stakes testing during many years of schooling, has captured a large share of the insufficient resources that have been given to public education after the military and the corporations have taken their shares. Public education systems throughout the world are underfunded and teachers are underpaid everywhere (UNESCO, 1998). Current accountability mandates often adopt a punitive stance toward schools and blame teachers and school administrators for the problems of the society (Dahlstrom, 2006; Reimers, 1994).

In some cases, such as in large urban school districts in the United States and in many classrooms throughout the developing world, the press for high stakes testing has been combined with efforts to minimize opportunities for teachers to exercise their judgment in their classrooms as curriculum is scripted and prescribed (Robertson, 2008; Samoff, 1999; Sleeter, 2008; Tatto, 2006; Torres, 2000).

In the United States, for example, a high government official in the federal education department spoke in a meeting of teacher educators and foundation staff about the need to prepare ‘good enough teachers’, just good enough to follow a scripted curriculum and be trained in prescribed teaching practices that are allegedly based on research. He and others in the Bush administration claimed that tightly monitoring teachers’ actions, scripting the curriculum and intensifying standardized testing with serious consequences for schools and teachers related to examination results will lead to rising levels of educational quality and a narrowing of the achievement gaps between different groups.²

The argument has been made that many children in US public schools, particularly poor children and children of color, have less access to fully qualified teachers who have completed a teacher education program and that these ‘good enough teachers’ who are trained to follow directions but not to think and exercise their judgment are better than teachers who are just pulled in off the street with no preparation at all.

This same argument has been made in many developing countries that also struggle to give all students access to teachers who have completed a teacher education program at the postsecondary level. With increased access to basic education and in some countries to secondary education, and with the implementation of neoliberal economic policies that have resulted in drastic reductions in public expenditures in many countries (e.g. Carnoy, 1995; Klees, 2002), it has become increasingly difficult to provide qualified teachers for every child (Villegas Reimers & Reimers, 1996). Some say that providing a fully qualified teacher to all learners around the world is an unrealistic goal unless we move to a more cost-effective training of teacher technicians. Consequently, many nations have moved toward establishing ‘fast track’ programs that get people into the classroom as quickly as possible, oftentimes with little prior preparation (e.g. Baines, 2006; Hinchey & Cadiero-Kaplan, 2005).

I find it interesting that many of these government officials who advocate ‘good enough teachers’ apparently do not find these teachers good enough for their own children whom they often send to private schools. There is a clear gap in many countries between children who have access to fully qualified teachers and those who do not, which is connected to social class and immigrant status (e.g. Peske & Haycock, 2006). Dewey (1929) asserted that ‘what the best and wisest parent wants for his own child that must the community want for all of its children’. Whatever one thinks about the role of teachers and schooling, one should be willing to subject one's own children and grandchildren to what one advocates for other people's children. If this one principle were followed by policymakers around the world, we would probably find a lot smaller gaps in the quality of education experienced by different children.

Despite all of the forces that are seeking to maintain unjust and unequal societies and educational systems, dedicated and talented teachers, administrators and others continue to work against the grain in progressive ways that contribute to greater social justice through public education. One goal of SJTE has been to make this kind of teaching possible for more students.

Teacher Education Reform Agendas

Over the years, I have had a particular interest in trying to make sense of the different purposes and practices associated with calls for reform in teacher education and particularly with what has come to be called SJTE. From the very beginning of my career in education, I saw my efforts as a teacher connected to efforts to bring about greater equity in schooling and society, providing individuals like me who attended a large urban public school system with the same high quality of education that is routinely available to others who come from more economically advantaged backgrounds. I chose to enter teaching in the first place as an alternative to fighting in what many of us thought was an unjust war in Vietnam and all of my public school teaching was done in schools in predominately low-income African American communities (Zeichner, 1995). Much of my research over the years has focused on