“Always in the process of Becoming”: Inquiring Narratively Into Providing Purposeful Support Towards Critical Social Justice Education

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.