Mediating Equity and Justice Across Learning Spaces in Teacher Education

We draw on collaborative self-study methodology to examine how we leverage our role as university supervisors to enhance cohesion between teacher candidates’ experiences in their coursework and the roles they take on at their field placements in connection with our program’s Equity and Justice Teaching Framework. Through investigating our roles as doctoral student university supervisors, we understand how teacher educators can serve to mediate learning across spaces through inviting mentor teachers in and navigating tensions. Our findings serve as an entry point for other teacher educators striving to build programmatic cohesion between university coursework and students’ field placement experiences with attention paid to equity and justice. In the findings and discussion, we turn toward issues of accountability by recognizing how our coaching is embedded in contexts, in the navigation of expectations that we hold for ourselves as well as teacher candidates and mentor teachers, and ultimately, in understanding how these expectations originate from a value-determined stance. We suggest that collective reflective practices among university supervisors within teacher education programs can serve to strengthen the ability to mediate tensions when teaching for equity and justice between the many spaces supervisors inhabit.