Constructions and Enactments of Justice in Secondary English Methods and Student Teaching Spaces

Abstract

Secondary English Language Arts classrooms are spaces where teachers can pursue justice through curricular, pedagogical, assessment, and discretionary decisions they make, using popular asset (i.e., cultural modeling, culturally responsive pedagogy) and justice pedagogies (i.e., critical literacies, culturally sustaining pedagogy, restorative English education) as guides, learning about them in their secondary English methods university coursework. Despite the work of teacher educators, the number of pedagogies, and research on their use in the classroom, many secondary English Language Arts classrooms continue to be spaces that reify injustice. This dissertation project thus explored how justice was constructed and enacted in a secondary English methods course at a midsize public university, how preservice teachers in that methods course took up those ideas, and how the ideas moved from methods into their student teaching.

In order to investigate this problem, I conducted a two-semester ethnographic-inspired study, observing a 14-week methods course and following five preservice teachers from that course into their student teaching classrooms. Data for the project include lesson plans, course texts, classroom observations, field notes, class materials, audio recorded and transcribed class sessions, preservice teacher portfolio materials, and interviews and their transcripts. I examined this data through the lens of existing justice pedagogies and how they constructed justice, devising an original framework that thematizes the approaches and classroom practices of justice into three categories: distributive, relational, and consequential justice.

I found that participants did not share common definitions or enactments of justice. Although guidelines exist for how to construct justice in secondary English Language Arts classrooms, they do not in and of themselves offer principles for how enacting those guidelines with particular students enacts what kinds of justice for whom. Without fully understanding what it means to construct justice, teachers can potentially foil those constructions.

I also found that teachers in the study enacted justice unevenly. They most often engaged in relational justice, building relationships with learners, recognizing that learners’ perspectives on the world were shaped by their unique experiences, and building learners’ knowledge of the world, themselves, and each other. The next most common enactment was distributive justice, where teachers taught leaners disciplinary knowledge and taught for their academic success. The least-often construction of justice was consequential justice, which promotes social transformation and questions structural inequities. Even these enactments of justice, however, occurred on a spectrum where the potentiality for justice existed although might not have been fully enacted. By better understanding the many definitions, constructions, and enactments of justice, teacher educators and researchers have more ways to examine how secondary English Language Arts teachers can be taught to teach in ways that move intentionally and meaningfully towards the kinds of justice they think they are enacting.

Finally, I found that the identities, backgrounds, and positionalities of the participants shaped their notions of English class and what occurred there and how they considered justice, both of which affected the kinds of justice they enacted in their teaching. Continued study of the relationship between preservice teacher identities, constructions of justice, and purposes of English class has the potential to build the field’s continued understanding of constructions and enactments of justice and how they are developed in preservice teachers.