Social justice language education (SJLE) explores the ways in which language classrooms can be transformed to disrupt the existing oppressive policies and practices in schools and the society at large (Ortaçtepe Hart & Martel, 2020; Ortaçtepe Hart, 2023; Ortega, 2021). As an approach within SJLE, dramatizing children's literature can raise the…

Race, poverty, and gender interplay with school discipline, to make schools ancillary to the juvenile justice system (Morris and Perry 2017). Exclusionary discipline contributes to the school-to-prison nexus, a metaphor that illuminates the complex, interconnected relationship between schools and prisons (Okilwa, Khalifa, and Briscoe 2017).…

This article reports a service learning experience carried out by volunteer university student teachers of English during 2017-2018 in a non-governmental organisation in Argentina. In collaboration with their university teachers, they taught workshops using intercultural literature in English for underserved children aged 8-12. Drawing on…

To allow prospective teachers to see mathematics as a useful tool to make sense of the world we redesigned a university mathematics content course for prospective elementary school teachers in the context of exploring income distribution in the United States. This allowed the prospective teachers to learn mathematics in a meaningful context and…

All too often pre-service teachers are not well prepared to discuss issues of racism, oppression and bias with their future students. Teacher educators can prepare their students for this work by developing projects that focus on addressing equity and racial justice. This article describes one such project in which a group of twenty early…

This article describes design-based research undertaken by two teacher educators to support elementary preservice teachers (PSTs) in integrating culturally responsive teaching practices with reading methods. The study described was motivated by calls for teacher preparation programs to be more intentional about supporting PSTs in synthesizing…

This study explored how preservice teachers engaged in collaborative inquiry with elementary students to facilitate social justice and equity in science education. By inviting elementary students as key stakeholders into collaborative inquiry, we examined how preservice teachers uncovered critical problems of science education in underserved…

School counselors play a vital role in promoting students' development in academic, career, and social/emotional domains. Professional organizations and educational partners have advocated for equitable access to school counselors and school counseling services by all students from pre-K through 12th grade. However, recent controversies have…

As two White, privileged educators and researchers, we have questioned, challenged, and examined how to best operate in diverse classrooms, keeping in mind our joint goals of advancing socially just teaching agendas alongside our desire not to "whitesplain" issues centering on race to students of color. Through narrative case…

Purpose: To explore a teacher educator professional learning opportunity within the context of a taught unit of work at a government primary school in Canberra, Australia's national capital. The unit of work focus was a traditional Australian Aboriginal game taught using a Game Sense Approach to deliver a socially just version of quality physical…

This article details the development of design principles to support teachers in planning for a Community-Based Mathematical Modeling task with a focus on social justice in the elementary grades. By reflecting on the dilemmas we encountered in the design and enactment of the tasks, we developed five design principles that allowed us to address…

The U.S. K-12 public education system is fundamentally unequal. What efforts can facilitate students to become deeply immersed in the realities of the system and to embody the need for social change? This article investigates scaffolded, semester-long writing assignments to demonstrate patterns in the three tenets of critical community-engaged…

Purpose: Public schools are spaces where capital-T transformation in teachers is needed (Guillory, 2012). To shift schools to places where all communities are valued, teacher education programs must create spaces where shifts in beliefs and practice can occur. This study aims to describe how the use of a social justice curriculum framework…

Research literature suggests students need to engage in "actual" civic experiences; however, in most cases, teachers feel unwilling or unable to facilitate experiences beyond the formal classroom setting. In this project, we sought to understand the relationship between social studies teachers' civic ideology, pedagogical approaches, and…

This paper explores Megan's -- a preservice teacher's -- learning around teaching literacy while enrolled in a social justice-oriented teacher education program and student teaching in poverty-impacted schools. Megan had fewer opportunities to teach literacy in university-promoted ways when student teaching with an attentive cooperating teacher…