Transforming Teacher Education for Social Justice offers teacher educators a new way to think about the development of culturally responsive educators. The authors identify the core components needed to restructure and reorient programs of teacher education to adequately prepare new teachers for the racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse communities they will serve upon graduation. They propose a new model of teacher preparation that capitalizes on the strengths of programs evidencing important outcomes. Chapters address the notion of situated learning embedded in communities; the need for extensive clinical experience in authentic teaching situations; strategies for interweaving theory, content, pedagogy, and classroom practice; the importance of student engagement and motivation; and the implementation of critical service learning. Key policy implications of this model are also discussed within the current landscape of teacher education reform. Book Features: A specific approach for realizing the promise of culturally responsive teaching. A flexible model for a community-engaged teacher preparation. Compelling data on student learning outcomes based on university/school/community collaboration as evidence of eliminating the achievement gap. “The most striking piece of this book is the descriptions and stories of how the community serves as mentors to the university faculty and students. The authors take readers with them through the many authentic activities led by the community mentors. We are left both with the desire to spend time with these remarkable community members ourselves and the desire to develop similar community-based programs.” —Jana Noel, California State University, Sacramento “Mandatory reading for teacher educators who are serious about preparing teachers for diverse schools and communities.” —Tyrone Howard, UCLA

Transforming Teacher Education through Service-Learning provides a fresh look at educational reform through the lens of teacher preparation. It poses the question “Why service-learning now?” as it discusses the meaningful ways service-learning pedagogy can transform the approaches used to prepare teachers to educate tomorrow’s children. The pedagogy of service-learning has significant implications for teacher education. Its transformative aspects have far reaching potential to address teacher candidate dispositions and provide deeper understanding of diversity. Knowledge of the pedagogy and how to implement it in candidates’ future classrooms could alter education to a more powerful experience of democracy in action and enhance the civic mission of schools. The current and ongoing research found within this volume is meant to continue support of the notion of educational reform. Because the vision we hold becomes the reality we experience, it is imperative to consider the question—Why service-learning now?—as we adjust teacher preparation programs to promote engaging opportunities for today’s youth.

Preparing and Sustaining Social Justice Educators spotlights the challenging and necessary work of fostering social justice in schools. Integral to this work are the teachers and school leaders who enact the principles of social justice—racial equity, cultural inclusivity, and identity acceptance—daily in their classrooms. This volume makes the case that high-quality public education relies on the recruitment, professional development, and retention of educators ready to navigate complex systemic and structural inequities to best serve vulnerable student populations. Annamarie Francois and Karen Hunter Quartz, along with contributing scholars and practitioners, present an intersectional approach to educational justice. The approach is grounded in research about deeper learning, community development, and school reform. Throughout the book, the contributors detail professional activities proven to sustain social justice educators. They show, for example, how effective teacher coaching encourages educators to confront their explicit and implicit biases, to engage in critical conversations and self-reflection, and to assess teacher performance through a social justice lens. The book illustrates how professional learning collaborations promote diverse, antiracist, and socially responsible learning communities. Case studies at three university-partnered K–12 schools in Los Angeles demonstrate the benefits of these professional alliances and practices. Francois and Quartz acknowledge the difficulty of the social justice educator’s task, a challenge heightened by a K–12 teacher shortage, an undersupplied teacher pipeline, and school closures. Yet they keep their sights set on a just and equitable future, and in this work, they give educators the tools to build such a future.

In this selection of his work from 1991-2008, Zeichner examines the relationships between various aspects of teacher education, teacher development, and their contributions to the achievement of greater justice in schooling and in the broader society.

This edited book expands the current scholarship on teaching world languages for social justice and equity in K-12 and postsecondary contexts in the US. Over the past decade, demand has been growing for a more critical approach to teaching languages and cultures: in response, this volume brings together a group of scholars whose work bridges the fields of world language education and critical approaches to education. Within the current US context, the chapters address the following key questions: (1) How are pre-service or in-service world language teachers/professors embedding issues, understandings, or content related to social justice, human rights, access, critical pedagogy and equity into their teaching and curriculum? (2) How are teacher educators preparing language teachers to teach for social justice, human rights, access and equity?

In recent years there have been strong movements of reforms in teacher education. The most common are intended to adjust teacher preparation to the standardization demands of NCLB, Race to the Top, and CAEP to make teacher education more accountable. These reforms—carried out in the name of excellence, accountability, diversity, and inclusion—constitute subliminal efforts to appropriate the possibilities for real transformation in teacher education. However, in spite of the pervasive rhetoric to identify diversity and social justice with the accountability and standardization movement, there are endeavors to create transformations in teacher preparation that are authentic. These deliberate changes seek to counteract the neoliberal vision of school reform and strive to reclaim the original goals of public education represented in a vision of rigorous content knowledge, democratic schooling, and social justice. Appropriating the Discourse of Social Justice in Teacher Education is a testimony to that kind of authentic reform. It documents the transformational efforts of a teacher education program that infused the preparation of its teachers with a vision of education as a public good. This book validates the claim that the process of reproduction of social inequalities in teacher education is not a perfect, static process, but on the contrary, the real “seeds of transformation” within teacher education departments are abundant.

In this book, a group of student teachers share their candid questions, concerns, dilemmas, and lessons learned about how to teach for social justice and social change. This text provides powerful examples of how they integrated diversity within a teacher education program--an excellent model for educators who are seeking ways to transform their teacher education programs to better prepare teachers to work effectively in multicultural classrooms.