Teacher Education for Social Justice Across Sociocultural and Sociopolitical Contexts: An Autobiographical Narrative Study

Abstract

Teacher education for social justice aims to enable teachers to work toward equity and justice in society and humanizing the educational experience of their students. Conceptualizing teaching as a political and ethical endeavor, social justice teacher education must engage seriously with the local and lived experiences of both teacher educators and student teachers. How then does teacher education for social justice move across communities and identities, and through cultural, social, geographic and temporal spaces? This chapter presents an autobiographical narrative inquiry into social justice teacher education across sociocultural and sociopolitical contexts, across time, and within different educational communities. Bakhtin's dialogic theory (1981) helps to trace the narrative threads wherein “each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (p. 293). The study examines my ideological becoming (Bakhtin, 1981) as a critical teacher educator in the context of a youth mentoring service-learning course for undergraduate teacher candidates. I examine the complexities and tensions in exploring experiences and co-constructing understandings of oppression, privilege and social justice with my student teachers on the youth mentoring course in dialogic struggles with my experiences of justice and education in the USA and Hong Kong as an English-speaking Chinese American. Providing an in-depth examination of the convergence of identity, social relations, place, and time in my knowledge formation, I critically reflect upon the notion of social justice to suggest that social justice teacher education is multi-voiced and lived both locally and globally.

Citation

Lo, M.M. (2023), "Teacher Education for Social Justice Across Sociocultural and Sociopolitical Contexts: An Autobiographical Narrative Study", Chan, E. and Ross, V. (Ed.) Smudging Composition Lines of Identity and Teacher Knowledge (Advances in Research on Teaching, Vol. 46), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 75-95. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-368720230000046005