 | Cultivating Social Justice Teachers : How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concepts Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment?Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about "diversity," "multiculturalism," or "social justice?"Recognizing these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the "bottlenecks" that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings. The authors initiate a conversation - one largely absent in the social justice education literature and the discourse - about the common content- and pedagogy-related challenges that social justice educators face in their work, particularly for those doing this work in relative or literal isolation, where collegial understanding cannot be found down the hall or around the corner. In doing so they hope not only to help individual teachers in their practice, but also strengthen social justice teacher education more systemically. Each contributor identifies a learning bottleneck related to one or two specific threshold concepts that they have struggled to help their students learn. Each chapter is a narrative about individual efforts toward sometimes profound pedagogical adjustment, about ambiguity and cognitive dissonance and resistance, about trial and error, and about how these educators found ways to facilitate foundational social justice learning among a diversity of education students. Although this is not intended to be a "how-to" manual, or to provide five easy steps to enable straight students to "get" heteronormativity, each chapter does describe practical strategies that teachers might adapt as part of their own practice. Paul C. Gorski is Associate Professor of Integrative Studies in New Century College at George Mason University. He is the founder of EdChange and the Multicultural Pavilion, a Web site that has won more than a dozen awards internationally for its contribution to multicultural education scholarship and practice. Nana Osei-Kofi is Associate Professor of Social Justice Studies in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Iowa State University, where she is the Director of the Social Justice Certificate Program. Jeff Sapp is a Professor of Education at California State University Dominguez Hills in Carson, California. He has been a frequent contributor to Teaching Tolerance Magazine and is an Associate Editor for Multicultural Perspectives, the official journal of The National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME). Kristien Zenkov is Associate Professor of Literacy Education at George Mason University. He is the co-director of "Through Students' Eyes," an international photo elicitation project which asks youth to document with photographs and writing what they believe are the purposes of school. David O. Stovall is Assistant Professor of Policy Studies in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. |
