In the wake of grim events such as Russian invasion on Ukraine, Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the death of George Floyd in America and mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, all occurring amid the pandemic of COVID-19, it became increasingly more important to recognise literacy work that promotes a critically informed and just society.…

A growing body of scholarship in teacher education details methods for supporting inservice and preservice teachers in developing critical consciousness, particularly White preservice teachers. Less examined is critical consciousness development for Black preservice teachers. This study employs case study methods to examine beliefs and practices…

Creating transformative experiences for teacher candidates around issues of critical social justice literacy requires that teacher educators anticipate and prepare for obstacles to learning that arise when knowledge residing in students' bodies is challenged by course content. Scholars have argued that the imprint of students' emotions,…

Injustices are woven into the fabric of the U.S. education system. Teacher education programs (TEPs) need to prepare teachers to identify inequities and dismantle them. In other words, TEPs need to prepare teachers to engage in critical reflection and teach their subject matter for social justice. Here, I explore what preservice teachers' (PSTs)…

This qualitative case study examined exit-credential papers from a teacher preparation program to explore how pre-service teachers discussed racial positionality in relation to teaching for social justice. Framed by a Critical Whiteness perspective, the pre-service teachers' papers revealed that out of the cohort of twenty-four, only seven White…

This qualitative instrumental case study examines the practices, curriculum, and experiences of teacher educators and White preservice teachers at one credential program in NorCal through the frameworks of White Racial Identity Development and Critical Pedagogy. This study examined five teaching constructs: policy, pedagogy, curriculum, discourse,…

This community-based action research (CBAR) project acknowledges and disrupts existing systemic barriers to bring teacher candidates and grassroots youth organizers together through dialogue and reflection for transformative action. The practice of community-based pedagogy is described and utilized to demonstrate how critical understandings of…

This study utilizes a QuantCrit framework to accomplish three goals: (1) describe a curricular and pedagogical redesign of teacher education courses grounded in social justice teaching (SJT), (2) discuss a Critical Social Justice Teaching instrument we used to measure attitudes and behaviors of preservice teachers (PSTs) as a result of these…

Background: In the wake of COVID-19 and protests against racial violence, scholars of education, alongside educational organizations, called for innovative responses to address racial injustice, but one solution was consistently mentioned across educational spaces: the need for educators to reimagine education in a postpandemic/endemic world. And…

A hyper-standardized and alarmist educational climate in the U.S. propagates deficit discourses about students and creates a roadblock for teachers seeking to center their students' lives through critical and multicultural pedagogies. Scholars have called for attention to mapping as a pedagogical tool to unearth and push back against sociospatial…

Science content, teaching, and teacher preparation are all political acts. However, accepting the political nature of science as well as that of science teaching has proven to be a hard shift for many in the science community. In this paper, we suggest a shift away from an apolitical teaching of science toward a system of practices that transforms…

This qualitative case-study looks at how one preservice teacher uses multimodal counter-storytelling to push back on dominant historical narratives in social studies teaching. It examines how the teacher conceptualizes the use of critical arts and humanities as pedagogical tools to represent historically marginalized voices and disrupt dominant…

As the COVID-19 pandemic invaded our lives in March of 2020, schools were forced to close their doors and urgently transition to remote learning. This action research study is about pre-service elementary teachers (PSTs) in a social justice-focused social studies methods course who used this unprecedented time as valid curricular material. While…

The increase in online education programs, accompanied by the current COVID-10 pandemic, has led universities to reconsider alternative ways to prepare teachers for social justice. One under-researched area in this conversation is the need for teacher candidates to examine their racialized expectations that often negate students of color in TK-12…

This research implements and evaluates the effectiveness of three scaffolds: critical theories in classes, critical friends groups to discuss white identity, dominant ideologies, anti-racist practices and diverse field based experiences. These scaffolds provided white pre-service teachers the opportunity to reconcile how their identities influence…