Reflect and Inject: Using Portraiture to Enact and Analyze Context-Focused Partnerships to Improve Teachers' Social Justice Practice

Abstract

Teaching that supports ideas of social justice is often difficult to enact, particularly for teachers who may have few models for the process of developing such instruction. In this dissertation, I address the development and analysis of three semester-long partnerships between myself and three high school teachers interested in improving their social justice practice. The design of these partnerships, and of the work teachers and I did within them, was highly collaborative and drew primarily on teachers’ ideas and understandings rather than privileging my own. Teachers were asked to conceptualize and define social justice with respect to their own classroom context, to consider ways in which they might respond through their practice to the issues they identified, and to design and implement changes that addressed these issues. My own role was that of a dynamic resource, available to support teachers and to discuss, observe, comment, assess, and challenge as per their preferences. My use of the methodology of portraiture enabled me to tell the story of our work together in order to demonstrate the process through which these teachers worked to improve their social justice practice. Further, by drawing on interviews with a principal and district leader in addition to teacher data, I was able to contextualize teachers’ work within the functioning of the school and district in which they operate, with a focus on all participants’ understandings of work being done at their own and other levels, the context of their school and district and its impact on teachers’ work, and the relationship between teachers’ classroom practice and the policies that support or constrain it. My analysis demonstrates that these teachers have substantial knowledge of their students and classroom context that supported our work together, and teachers themselves suggested both that they found our partnerships to be impactful and that they had a desire for further feedback and discussion around their practice. I found that teachers had different ways of linking issues of social justice to their work, sometimes addressing connections between these issues and the curriculum, sometimes incorporating social justice ideas into their relationships with students, and sometimes focusing on these issues through the ways in which they supported students in interacting with one another. Further, teachers identified discussion in our work together as far more helpful for improving their practice than the simple provision of external resources and expressed a desire for further constructive conversation about their practice. My interviews with teachers and administrators suggested that future opportunities for learning might be complicated by disconnects both among teachers and between teachers and the administration in ways in which concepts like social justice, equity, equality, and fairness, as well as classroom issues like gender and politics, were taken up. I conclude with recommendations for researchers, school and district leaders, and other educational stakeholders around improving dialogue and focusing on what is good in others’ practice in order to better support social justice work in education.