“Pretty Much Fear!!” Rationalizing Teacher (Dis)Engagement in Social Justice Education

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes how teachers in U.S. classrooms navigate, dialogue, debate, and absorb the ideas of privilege, power, and the presence of various forms of injustices. Through their understanding of these topics, we explore how K-12 teachers engage, disengage, and rationalize issues of social justice in education, society, and their own classrooms. This article utilizes teachers' dialogue through one curricular design used by a group of teacher educators to ensure safety, dialogue, and reflection. Using a grounded theory approach, we find that teachers lie on a continuum somewhere between shirking or embracing their role and responsibilities towards social justice. By highlighting K-12 teachers' understandings and positionalities regarding social justice, this study helps teacher educators charged with preparing teachers to better recognize the challenges we face in bringing social justice curricula to teacher education programs.

Notes on contributors

Supriya Baily is an associate professor in the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. Her research interests include gender and power relations, social justice issues in international education, and teacher agency and leadership.

Maria Katradis is a PhD candidate in education at George Mason University. Her dissertation research is focused on teachers', students', and parents' beliefs about language learning in Modern Greek language programs at the elementary school level in the United States.

Notes

1. Substantial signifying postings that furthered the discussion of the selected topic, and moved beyond “I agree” or supportive statements.

2. To protect the teachers participating in the study, both the discussion group they belonged to, the reading they were discussing, and their names have been changed based on a formula that prevents linking the two together. The coding on the quotes used in this article reflect the group and reading numbers and reflect different participants within the groups, unless otherwise noted.

3. ESL refers to English as a Second Language.

4. SpEd refers to Special Education.