Practicing Justice, Justifying Practice: Toward Critical Practice Teacher Education

Arguments for social justice teacher education and arguments for practice-based teacher education are often seen as incongruous. Drawing on sociocultural theory and theories of justice, our study interrogates this underresearched assumption. We conducted video analyses of teacher education coursework and novice teachers’ K–6 classroom instruction, together with novices’ written reflections on videos. Data were collected during a university-based, accelerated teacher credentialing program. Analyses of videos of teacher education coursework revealed that while teacher educators frequently represented, decomposed, and approximated teaching practice, they rarely did so when discussing social justice issues. In a mirror-image finding, analyses of videos of (and reflections on) novices’ subsequent K–6 teaching revealed that novices rarely identified instructional decisions during which they attended to social justice issues.