Abstract:
Even as teacher education programs raise issues of social justice with pre-service
teachers, the opportunities for them to practice their skills happen within the existing
school structure— a structure that resists change. Many cooperating teachers who mentor
pre-service teachers during their internship hold common-sense and taken-for-granted
assumptions about what it means to be a “good” teacher that can interfere with the
practice of critical social justice pedagogy.
This narrative inquiry begins with an autobiographical exploration of my origins
as a social justice educator and then examines the relationship between me, a cooperating
teacher, and an intern as I strive to provide her with purposeful support, using social
justice as a touchstone by which to consistently reflect. Throughout our semester
together, we each maintained journals, communicated electronically, and met regularly
for focused conversations reflecting on our experiences and research that could inform
our practice. Using these field texts, I was able to capture, narratively, our experience as
well as the relational nature of critical social justice work.
While the intention of this work is not to be prescriptive or to provide answers to
other educators, it does demonstrate that critical social justice education is not a static
destination at which I will arrive once I am sufficiently knowledgeable, but rather a
continual process in which I will always be engaged.
Description:
A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Education in Curriculum & Instruction, University of Regina. v, 149 p.