Reconstructive education and the road to social justice: the case of post-colonial teacher education in Namibia

1999 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 149-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Dahlstrom ◽  
Patti Swarts ◽  
Kenneth Zeichner
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 368-384
Author(s):  
Lucinda Grace Heimer

Race is a marker hiding more complex narratives. Children identify the social cues that continue to segregate based on race, yet too often teachers fail to provide support for making sense of these worlds. Current critical scholarship highlights the importance of addressing issues of race, culture, and social justice with future teachers. The timing of this work is urgent as health, social and civil unrest due to systemic racism in the U.S. raise critiques and also open possibilities to reimagine early childhood education. Classroom teachers feel pressure to standardize pedagogy and outcomes yet meet myriad student needs and talents in complex settings. This study builds on the current literature as it uses one case study to explore institutional messages and student perceptions in a future teacher education program that centers race, culture, identity, and social justice. Teaching as a caring profession is explored to illuminate the impact authentic, aesthetic, and rhetorical care may have in classrooms. Using key tenets of Critical Race Theory as an analytical tool enhanced the case study process by focusing the inquiry on identity within a racist society. Four themes are highlighted related to institutional values, rigorous coursework, white privilege, and connecting individual racial and cultural understanding with classroom practice. With consideration of ethical relationality, teacher education programs begin to address the impact of racist histories. This work calls for individualized critical inquiry regarding future teacher understanding of “self” in new contexts as well as an investigation of how teacher education programs fit into larger institutional philosophies.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Baburhan Uzum ◽  
Bedrettin Yazan ◽  
Netta Avineri ◽  
Sedat Akayoglu

The study reports on a telecollaboration exchange between two teacher education classes in the United States and Turkey. In synchronous and asynchronous conversations, preservice teachers (PTs) engaged in social justice issues and made discourse choices that captured culture(s) and communities as diverse or essentialized. These choices were affected by PTs’ positionings and impacted how PTs connected to individuals only and/or to broader society.  PTs asked questions that created space for critical discussions and facilitated awareness of diversity, yet sometimes led to overgeneralizations. The study has implications for designing telecollaborations that promote language and practices to unpack the issues of social justice.


Urban Studies ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1257-1278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Bunnell ◽  
S. Nagarajan ◽  
Andrew Willford

This paper traces senses of injustice among Indian Malaysians which found expression in the ‘illegal’ Hindraf rally in Kuala Lumpur in 2007. While underlying ethnic and racial differentiation has been rendered through law in the post-colonial nation-state, the focus here is on a specific locality: resettlement flats for Indians displaced for the construction of Malaysia’s federal government administrative centre, Putrajaya. Ex-plantation workers are shown to be symbolically peripheral (to the spectacular ‘national landscape’ of Putrajaya) and to have experienced everyday forms of ethnicised marginalisation. The rally in the commercial heart of Kuala Lumpur—involving tens of thousands of Indian Malaysians from across peninsular Malaysia—mobilised what were previously largely localised grievances such as those associated with the Putrajaya estate evictions. It is shown how this ethnic transgression not only contests the ‘second-class’ position of Indians in Malaysia, but may also contribute to a redrawing of the ethnic contours of Malaysia’s legal and political landscape. More broadly, the Hindraf events also serve as a reminder that rights and social justice claims expressed in key urban centres continue to have important national-scale dimensions, even in an ostensibly neo-liberalised global economy.


2020 ◽  
pp. 002248712092962
Author(s):  
Marleen C. Pugach ◽  
Ananya M. Matewos ◽  
Joyce Gomez-Najarro

Although disability is assumed to be part of the teacher education social justice landscape, its position in the context of social justice is contested and has not been informed by an analysis of the empirical record. To address this gap, we examined 25 years of research on social justice in teacher education, focusing on how disability is presented in relationship to other social markers of identity. Disability is only modestly visible within this literature; when included, it is typically treated as an isolated marker of identity, absent considerations of intersectionality. Overcoming this marginalization of disability requires new, robust cross-faculty alliances in conceptualizing research on social justice in teacher education; adopting discursive practices that complicate disability in terms of its intersectional, reciprocal relationship with the full range of social markers of identity; and intersectionality-driven instruction connecting multiple identities and the multiple instructional strategies required to transform teacher education for social justice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann-Albrecht Meylahn

It has been argued that most countries that had been exposed to European colonialism have inherited a Western Christianity thanks to the mission societies from Europe and North America. In such colonial and post-colonial (countries where the political administration is no longer in European hands, but the effects of colonialism are still in place) contexts, together with Western contexts facing the ever-growing impact of migrants coming from the previous colonies, there is a need to reflect on the possibility of what a non-colonial liturgy, rather than a decolonial or postcolonial liturgy, would look like. For many, postcolonial or decolonial liturgies are those that specifically create spaces for the voice of a particular identified other. The other is identified and categorised as a particular voice from the margins, or a specific voice from the borders, or the voices of particular identified previously silenced voices from, for example, the indigenous backyards. A question that this context raises is as follows: Is consciously creating such social justice spaces – that is determined spaces by identifying particular voices that someone or a specific group decides to need to be heard and even making these particular voiceless (previously voiceless) voices central to any worship experience – really that different to the colonial liturgies of the past? To give voice to another voice, is maybe only a change of voice, which certainly has tremendous historical value, but is it truly a transformation? Such a determined ethical space is certainly a step towards greater multiculturalism and can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of greater diversity and inclusivity in the dominant ontology. Yet, this ontology remains policed, either by the state-maintaining police or by the moral (social justice) police.Contribution: In this article, a non-colonial liturgy will be sought that goes beyond the binary of the dominant voice and the voice of the other, as the voice of the other too often becomes the voice of a particular identified and thus determined victim – in other words, beyond the binary of master and slave, perpetrator and victim, good and evil, and justice and injustice, as these binaries hardly ever bring about transformation, but only a change in the face of master and the face of the slave, yet remaining in the same policed ontology.


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