Naming our priorities: Centering justice and anti-racism in teacher education curriculum

Is naming social justice as a commitment enough to transform a teacher education (TE) program? Elementary teacher educators at a large midwestern university leaned into this question as we sought to center social justice and anti-racism in our program’s curriculum. Our faculty decided that we would seek, not just a general curricular pursuit of social justice, but rather the naming of a specific set of trenchant racial injustices in PK-12 education. We drew from educational scholarship to articulate a set of “TE Justice Priorities,” that instructors would address across the program from distinct and complementary disciplinary and conceptual lenses. We engage in a notion of specificity by conducting an analysis of learning opportunities and artifacts in two courses where teacher candidates focused on three Justice Priorities. We elaborate a case study of one white teacher candidate, Lauren, by examining her learning artifacts across the two courses to provide a snapshot of the kind of growth we observe when we commit to a teacher education curriculum that coheres around specific racial justice priorities. Our case study reveals the potential for beginning teacher candidates to develop deepening understandings of racial injustice that transfer to their practice-based knowledge for teaching.