Stop, Collaborate and Listen: Co-designing Social Justice Teacher Education Programs With Preservice Teachers

摘要

This three-article dissertation includes a book proposal and two articles. First, in the book proposal I tell the story of collaboratively designing and teaching a practice-based teacher education course called "Studio" with secondary English and History teacher candidates. This book provides examples of curriculum and clear and accessible approaches to the development of social justice teacher dispositions and practice. In the second article, I draw on research on anti-oppressive practice and theoretical work on the dialogical self. I follow one candidate through the yearlong process of co-designing and participating in Studio. Specifically, I analyze how video recordings of Studio class activities, candidate audio journals, and video recordings of Studio co-design meetings offered a complex mix of discursive opportunities that allowed one candidate to create and improvise as they co-negotiated and narrated their own development as a social justice educator. Finally, in the third article I highlight one Studio engagement (audio journals) as a reflective practice within social justice teacher education as a way for candidates to question their assumptions around oppressive structures within and outside of schools. In examining how another candidate spoke about her experiences in her practicum site, I analyze how ideas around race, ethnicity, gender, and ability were negotiated and explored. Throughout this dissertation, across all three articles, I argue that in order to move candidates from passive observers to critical agents who dissect how power indexes and is indexed through learning, it is important for candidates to have a flexible and co-constructed way to reflect on who they are as social justice teachers and who they want to become.