Exploring the Experiences of Social Justice-Oriented Teachers in South Korea: A Comparative Analysis of Elementary and Secondary Teachers

Justice, equity, and diversity are more critical than ever in the global agenda in education. In the context of South Korea, this study aims to understand teachers’ practice of teaching for social justice, with a focus on how they respond to tensions and dilemmas encountered in different contexts of student development, student demographics, and school types. The process of data collection and analysis was guided by a narrative inquiry. Findings of this study demonstrate contextual constraints that the teachers face in their day-to-day practice of social justice teaching and instructional strategies that they crafted to deal with context-specific tensions and dilemmas. The discussion highlights politics of negotiation that has emerged from the teachers’ experiences of creating tactics for implementing social justice education in the given context.

Preparing Students For 21st Century Practice: Enhancing Social Justice Teaching In Clinical Legal Education

Social justice has always played an important role in clinical legal education (CLE). Clinicians are aware that students need to acquire the necessary legal skills and strategies related to client-centred lawyering, process choice and procedural justice. This paper shows that increasingly, despite clinicians’ recognition of the value of teaching social justice in CLE, those who promote it face various challenges in instilling in students the notion that social justice is important. This paper discusses some of these challenges, including, that as experiential education expands, students are being offered clinical placements in the private sector where clients do not face the barriers in accessing justice similar to those in community settings. It therefore becomes imperative to encourage students to retain the notion that social justice is an important value. This paper makes suggestions for how these challenges can be overcome to enhance students’ awareness of the importance of social justice and ensure that it remains a value they retain as 21st century practitioners.

Social Justice Experiential Education in Rural Fiji

This chapter examines how an experiential education (EE) program in rural Fiji provided rich experiences for social justice teaching and learning in the context of a teacher preparation program. This chapter discusses the instructor's lived experiences, positionality, and commitment to social justice work that propel a desire to create classrooms that are sites of transformation. The primary aspects of social justice teaching and learning discussed include the creation of spaces for critical consciousness to emerge and an embracement of pedagogies of love in the context of the EE program. This chapter concludes with the instructor's continued commitment embodying a social justice agenda in classroom spaces and beyond through a lifetime commitment to this work through hopeful, patiently impatient praxis.

From A to Zinn

Scholars have presented a number of challenges to elementary pre-service teachers gaining content mastery specifically in social studies methods courses. One of those challenges relates to the selection of what social studies content should be mastered by pre-service teachers. Scholars encouraged elementary social studies teacher educators to engage their students in new, challenging, critical, and complex topics, rather than redundant, simple, and general content the students already agree with. In response, this endeavor presents an instructional framework rooted in social justice teaching designed to inspire elementary pre-service teachers with the necessity of teaching social studies for social justice and the content knowledge and skills to do so. The chapter author shares how she supported students in conducting macro-to-micro content analyses of critical and challenging sociological issues of race, economic status, and gender in the development of the United States while sharing the methods for teaching elementary social studies that represented diverse ideas and perspectives.

Effectively Managing Bias in Teacher Preparation

This is the call for teacher preparation programs to actively incorporate an emphasis on social justice education and the development of teachers committed to creating equitable schools. Education in today's multicultural, pluralistic society must be actively concentrated on and successful at creating more just and unbiased schools for underserved students. Similar to Ladson-Billings' argument for a redefining of ‘good teaching,' there must be a redefinition of that which constitutes social justice teaching. It is the role of today's teacher preparation programs to equip teachers with the essential skills necessary to develop students, manage bias, and create a culture of equity for all. Particularly as it relates to the education, understanding, cultivation, and development of all students in the K-12 school system, a required component of every teacher preparation program must be an increased focus on teaching that is comprehensive, socially just, and impartial.

Social Justice Teaching Practices: A Case Study of a Latinx Pre-service Teacher in Urban Schools

Teacher education programs (TEPs) prepare educators to provide an environment conducive for student learning regardless of race, class, ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic status. Drawing from a larger study, this single-unit case study examines the experience of a Latinx pre-service teacher instructor at an urban school. Specifically, we highlight her perceptions as compared to the experiences of her White female counterparts in urban schools. The findings suggest that she appeared to utilize social justice supportive pedagogy to position her interactions with and for students. The implications and recommendations are provided to strengthen the use of social justice approaches in clinical and field experiences.

The Social Justice Teaching Collaborative: A Collective Turn Towards Critical Teacher Education

In this article, we share the collaborative curricular work of an interdisciplinary Social Justice Teaching Collaborative (SJTC) from a PWI university. Members of the SJTC worked strategically to center social justice across required courses pre-service teachers are required to take: Introduction to Education, Sociocultural Studies in Education, and Inclusive Education. We share our conceptualization of social justice and guiding theoretical frameworks that have shaped our pedagogy and curriculum. These frameworks include democratic education, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, critical disability studies, and feminist and intersectionality theory. We then detail changes made across courses including examples of readings and assignments. Finally, we conclude by offering reflections, challenges, and lessons learned for collaborative work within teacher education and educational leadership.