Exploring the Goals of Social Justice Teaching Through the Eyes of Early Career Science Teachers

ABSTRACT

Social justice-oriented teacher education programs infuse critical pedagogies in their coursework to build teachers’ capacity to design and enact teaching that seeks to disrupt systemic oppression and injustice. Graduates of these programs often seek teaching positions in schools that serve working class communities of color with the goal of working alongside students, families, and the community to act as agents of change. Yet, we know that teacher turnover remains high in these schools, especially for early career teachers (i.e. 1–5 years teaching experience). Understanding the needs and challenges that teachers face in their first few years of teaching can help teacher education programs design intentional support systems to ameliorate the lack of support early career teachers experience and issues with teacher turnover. In this paper, we share excerpts from interviews conducted with 20 early career science teachers that shared the social justice strategies, lessons, and pedagogies they used in their classroom. Our findings identified a multitude of teaching practices that depict teachers’ everyday pursuit of social justice in their science classrooms, namely how teachers reflected on their positionality, built restorative relationships with students, developed students’ critical dispositions, built positive science identities, increased student access to science, and incorporated students’ knowledge, experiences, and histories, some of which also presented some challenges for them. We describe these practices and associated challenges with implications for how teacher education can support early career teachers and their alumni in their continued development as social justice educators.

KEYWORDS:

• Early career teachers
• science education
• social justice education
• teacher education

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the 20 science teachers for sharing their teaching practice with us for this study and for their commitment and resilience to work in schools serving families from working class communities of color.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a grant from the University of California Office of the President, California Teachers Education Research and Improvement Network grant program. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors only and do not represent the official views and opinions of the sponsors.