Editorial: social justice and language teacher education from Latin America

ABSTRACT

In this special issue, we seek to problematise how teacher education can be approached from a social justice perspective by showcasing research and practice from Latin America. It is undeniable that this region of the world and the educational research and practices carried out in it are not usually featured in English-medium international journals. The reasons for this lack of visibility exceed the scope of this editorial, but they are usually connected to hegemonic, Anglo-centric ideologies, epistemic perspectives, and discourses entrenched in the ecology of research and dissemination, together with inequity regarding discursive affordances, working conditions and access to (im)material resources.

KEYWORDS:

• Social justice
• language teacher education
• inclusion
• agency

Why is this issue special?

Social justice could be broadly understood as a philosophy that seeks to bring about social change through civic engagement across settings. A cursory view of the literature (e.g. Bramley & Morrison, 2022; Vincent, 2020) confirms that social justice continues to develop as a framework which can help educational systems and communities become inclusive and equitable. In times when inalienable human rights remain under threat, it is of paramount importance to examine how educational systems around the world address social imperatives through teacher preparation.

In this special issue, we seek to problematise how teacher education can be approached from a social justice perspective by showcasing research and practice from Latin America. It is undeniable that this region of the world and the educational research and practices carried out in it are not usually featured in English-medium international journals. The reasons for this lack of visibility exceed the scope of this editorial, but they are usually connected to hegemonic, Anglo-centric ideologies, epistemic perspectives, and discourses entrenched in the ecology of research and dissemination (Corcoran, 2019), together with inequity regarding working conditions and access to (im)material resources (Janssen & Ruecker, 2022).

In our problematisation of social justice in teacher education, we concentrate on English education given our own professional trajectories. Nevertheless, this is not just a matter of convenience. In the global landscape, Hall et al. (2016) underlines that learning English as an additional language is no longer a luxury; it is a right through which users of English can access a wider range of intercultural practices. Yet, we must acknowledge that the teaching of English as an additional language may be understood as another representation of imperialism, the perpetuation of systems of inequity and racism, and a powerful tool to maintain and spread a neoliberal agenda for hegemonic powers to continue the subjugation of others (Flores, 2020; Phillipson, 2009). Despite this reservation, English is the language usually chosen by governments to include in the primary and secondary curriculum given its international status as a lingua franca for communication. In Latin America, even governments with a critical agenda and social justice perspective support English language teaching, together with other languages, because they recognise its instrumental value in the global landscape (Khami-Stein et al., 2017).

Given the concomitant expansion of English as a lingua franca and as a medium of instruction around the world, countries are under pressure to offer English language teacher education (ELTE) programmes which support pre-service and in-service teachers of English in developing context-sensitive pedagogies and a critical understanding of education that challenges hegemonic paradigms. The aim of this special issue is to bring together empirical studies which explore, through different research approaches and methods, how social justice is embedded and enacted in pre-service and in-service ELTE in Latin America. In so doing, we seek to increase the visibility of teacher education in this region, often underrepresented in high-impact journals.

Social justice and education

Education provides a powerful platform for generating and sustaining social transformation. It has the potential to ‘dismantle[e] the power relations, social hierarchies and cultural hegemonies that currently underpin the canons, the assumed norms and values of inherited curricula and [set] up processes to reimagine more inclusive ways of participating in curriculum and pedagogic practices’ (Luckett & Shay, 2020, p. 52). Teachers, as key stakeholders in education with direct socio-political impact in educational institutions and classrooms, are in a privileged position to engage in socially just practices which promote and facilitate equal participation in the co-creation of knowledge and experience. It seems essential, therefore, that educational systems operate under a social justice framework so that quality education reaches everyone, particularly those who are subjugated by discourses and practices which perpetuate inequity. Against this backdrop, it is crucial that teachers’ formal and non-formal education be informed by a social justice perspective.

Contemporary notions of social justice emphasise the need to dismantle inequality and injustice in all aspects of social life. Fraser (2012) endorses this need, claiming that ‘justice is the first virtue’ and that ‘it is only by overcoming institutionalised injustice that we can create the ground on which other virtues, both societal and individual, can flourish’ (Fraser, 2012, p. 42). At the heart of social justice, she argues, are three overarching dimensions—redistribution, recognition, and participation (Fraser, 2012). These highlight the importance of equal access to adequate infrastructure and resources, acknowledgement of the claims made by minoritised and marginalised groups, and participatory parity in social justice debates and decision-making. A just social system should promote equality, equity, diversity and inclusion and thus guarantee individuals’ right to participate effectively in all areas of human experience (Lamb et al., 2019; Okan & Papa, 2019).

In line with Fraser’s (2008) dimensions, Tikly and Barrett (2011), in their theoretical approach for understanding education quality, propose three interrelated principles of social justice in education: (1) inclusion (redistribution, access to quality education), (2) relevance (recognition, meaningful learning outcomes for all learners), and (3) democracy (participation in curriculum development). Such principles, we believe, could become imbricated in educational discoursal practices if teacher education assumes a social justice perspective. The present special issue employs Tikly and Barrett’s (2011) social justice principles as a conceptual framework given the prominence these place to context, dialogue, and debate at local and global levels, and to stakeholder engagement and community voice. In addition, these principles serve as a working platform to align this special issue with the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals for 2030, particularly with Goal 4, which refers to quality education for all. Thus, our point of departure is the UN global agenda, but we populate it with local, culturally responsive teacher education initiatives.

On the articles included in this special issue

Embedded in the special issue itself are the principles of inclusion, relevance, and democracy. We address each below through three provocations aimed at extending the conversation and generating frames of action anchored in an epistemologies of the South stance (De Souza Santos, 2011) which seeks to fracture Eurocentric/hegemonic discourses.

Provocation 1: attention to learning about inclusion and social justice is not enough

This first provocation turns attention to the role of inclusion in teacher education. Two articles included in this special issue can serve as exemplars. In his contribution, Diaz Maggioli examined student teachers’ views of seminars on social justice topics (e.g. human rights, sexual education). The author noted that the intended curriculum failed to promote a conscientisation of distributive issues beyond a superficial understanding. Moreover, the participating pre-service teachers claimed to experience deficits in their access to classroom strategies beyond awareness raising. The seminars supported participants in learning about social justice but not in learning how to teach for social justice. In this regard, the issue was the incorporation of social justice as discrete, pedagogically detached items instead of adopting it as a conceptual lens informing teacher education practices. In Romero’s article, attention is given to access to quality English language instruction (e.g. contact hours, teachers’ qualifications and L2 proficiency level, (im)material resources, study abroad opportunities). The study shows that such access is ruled by student teachers’ socioeconomic background, which reveals that equity needs to be prioritised over equality in inclusive teacher education.

These two articles exhibit that practice and research efforts need to be oriented towards the design and enactment of teacher education curricula which are deeply rooted in the analysis of contextual circumstances as well as student teachers’ situated trajectories, needs, lacks, and wants. Social justice needs to be taken and experienced for what it is, a philosophy that seeks to fight for intra- and inter- equitable (re)distribution and inclusion. By intra-, we refer to teacher education programmes themselves; whereas inter- entails the wider communities (e.g. schools). Thus, future teachers have the right (and perhaps obligation) to be cognisant of the systemic inequities pervading their own histories and those of their peers, educators, and wider community, and employ that knowledge to create socially just learning events that allow students to engage in civic activism through languages.

Provocation 2: focusing on reconceptualising meaningful educational experiences

Social justice is associated with creating learning experiences which are relevant to marginalised groups. This provocation highlights that meaningful educational experiences need to be reconceptualised as equity-oriented events which are built on the acknowledgement of claims made by and on behalf of those who are erased from or misrepresented in dominant discourses. It also underscores the transversality of social justice issues and the interconnectedness of social justice dimensions since a meaningful learning experience may be the outcome of merging relevant, participatory, and inclusive pedagogical decisions.

In the article by Heras et al., special attention is given to recognising and incorporating the claims made by indigenous communities in Ecuador in relation to equity in receiving quality teacher preparation. The authors describe the views of a group of indigenous students who envisage English language teaching as an opportunity for professional growth and intercultural communication provided it is situated in their cosmos of beliefs and practices. A focus on indigenous communities and low socio-economic status groups is also at the heart of Lopez Gopar et al.’s article. Their study shows that socioeconomic struggles acted as barriers in student teachers’ English language education, which provides evidence of the transversality of social justice issues and of how some social injustices are less visible than others. The authors expose their own need as teacher educators to be empathetic to the socially marginalised condition of their pre-service teachers. Recent studies within and beyond the field of education have theorised empathy as an antecedent of social justice attitudes (e.g. Cartabuke et al., 2019) as well as a pedagogical framework to incorporate social justice in education (e.g. Segal & Wagaman, 2017).

In Barahona and Ibaceta’s study, a group of pre-service teachers problematised professional pedagogical responsibility (PPR) by exercising their agency during their practicum experience. By reorienting their attention to their learners’ needs, the participants started to construct a professional identity as agents of change. The students’ disposition to see themselves as agents of change is connected to having participated in culturally sensitive and socially relevant language education practices that care for their learners even if that means deviating from teaching the language. The articles by Rodrigues and Duboc and by Romero illustrate the need to design and enact teacher education programmes which consider the needs of vulnerable students, their families, and the reality of marginalised schools.

Socially just teacher education programmes wishing to embrace relevance as an epistemic compass must consider the complex and sometimes unsettling conditions in which teaching and learning occur. Failing to do this may result in preparing future teachers for unrealistic pedagogical practices where subject-specific knowledge is detached from the contexts in which it is created, mobilised, challenged, and reconstructed. Even worse, failing to imbue relevance may lead to the preparation for a context which simply does not exist.

Provocation 3: mobilising teacher agency as an inherent element of social justice teacher education

The special issue adopts an ecological view of social justice teacher education as it shows that what teacher educators and future teachers can do shapes and is shaped by the environment. This position aligns with the ecological conceptualisation of agency by Priestly et al. (2015): ‘an emergent phenomenon – as something that is achieved by individuals through the interplay of personal capacities and the resources, affordances and constraints of the environment by means of which individuals act’ (p. 19). Agency is therefore conceptualised as ‘something that people do or achieve’ and constitutes ‘a “quality” of the engagement of actors with temporal-relational contexts-for-action, not a quality of the actors themselves’ (p. 22). Teacher agency as well as student agency are a core actualisation of democracy as a necessary pillar to guarantee participatory parity in social justice debates and participation in curriculum development.

Teacher agency cuts across the articles included in this special issue. The authors coincide in linking this potent construct to both teacher educators as well as pre-service and in-service teachers. Barahona and Ibaceta’s investigation demonstrates how teacher agency can move from deflecting PPR to others, such as mentors and the syllabus (as resistance to status quo), through an emerging sense of PPR and limited sense of social responsibility and social justice (evident in motives for and beliefs about teaching) to a high degree of PPR and a developing sense of social justice. Such a sense needs to be accompanied by shifts in practised identities.

Diaz Maggioli’s contribution remarks that redistribution does not guarantee access to quality and equitable education. Traditionally marginalised groups should be able to negotiate what educational opportunities are worth pursuing. From this stance, vulnerable groups should not be seen as the recipients of transformative education; they need to be part of all the stages of curriculum change. As Lopez Gopar et al. argue, they must find and create ‘ways to participate and be recognised as competent people by seek[ing] their own empowerment’ (this issue, p. xx). In supporting pre-service teachers, teacher educators need to emerge as critical, politically invested agents of change, as illustrated in Lopez Gopar et al.’s and Romero’s articles. From this professional identity that comes to contest hegemonic ideologies, Rodrigues and Duboc suggest that teacher educators and future teachers can actively participate in the delineation of curricula that consider the larger community and the entrenched contradictory relations between local, regional, and global interpretations and responses to what it means to promote quality teacher education committed to social justice in contemporary societies.

This third provocation calls for practice-based studies that showcase and promote teacher education experiences which move from recognising professional unpreparedness to tackle social justice to the emergence of student teachers’ critical positioning that rises out of ‘actual participation in school contexts, community life, and collaborative work’ (Rodrigues & Duboc, this issue, p. xx). This politically-oriented and agentive participation allows the construction of diverse and intricately threaded fabrics of knowledge and experience.

The three provocations bring together and help to operationalise Tikly and Barrett’s (2011) dimensions of quality education, which we have repurposed towards social justice in English language teacher education in Latin America. They exhibit that promoting social justice seems to involve problematising discourse and praxis at multiple levels of context. The articles in this special issue suggest that (1) social injustices must be addressed in local terms, (2) analysing local injustices may help increase our understanding of global injustices (e.g. unequal access to quality education, a global concern included in UN’s SDG 4, may be manifested in different ways depending on local particularities), and (3) developing a social justice mindset requires engagement with concrete, practical dilemmas which become ‘the object of reflection, problematisation and action’ or the ‘social arenas for debate’ (Rodrigues & Duboc, this issue, p. xx).

The way forward

This special issue may act as a springboard to advance the conversation in relation to social justice in (language) teacher education at epistemological, methodological, and political levels.

As noted earlier in this editorial, the special issue includes a large variety of research designs (collaborative and analytical autoethnography, narrative inquiry, single and multiple case study, qualitative sequential design), data collection methods (policy and document analysis, discursive analysis, individual and focus group interviews, retrospective interviews,, surveys, autoethnographic vignettes, analysis of students’ coursework), and multimodal data sets (aural and text) gathered from a diversity of contexts (state and private sector, primary and secondary schools, higher education, and urban and rural institutions). This rich methodological landscape can be taken as an invitation to engage in studies which recognise the multidimensional and multifactorial nature of socially just teacher education. The combination of instruments, participants, trajectories, and underpinning constructs coming from different fields has the potency of providing robust accounts that depart from the norm, the expected, the hegemonically sanctioned as research proper. Needless to say, this necessitates professionals with forward-thinking mindsets who are ready to engage in mature and diverse conversations outside their comfort zone. Echoing Gutiérrez’s (2009), it is time for educational researchers and teacher educators to move from ‘learning to play the game’ to ‘learning to change the game’ to make research and teacher education equitable.

While each of the articles is specifically anchored in ELTE in Latin America, implications for research and pedagogy resonate with the broader field of teacher education. In this regard, each article moves from a situated account to wider engagement with the local communities in which teacher education programmes are immersed. To a certain extent, the deeply entrenched issues and social inequities portrayed in this special issue do not make a distinction between English, science, or history. What is more, the frames of action and voices contained in the articles can be adapted by teacher educators across programmes. Hence, social justice in teacher education regardless of disciplines has the valency of turning teacher education institutions into powerhouses that defy dominant ideologies by examining and acting upon real-life injustices and dilemmas. There is no apolitical education. As we develop more social awareness, remaining neutral only favours the oppressor.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the journal editors and reviewers for their support, guidance, and ability to conceive teacher education from more subversive, non-hegemonic ways of doing and communicating research.

Disclosure statement

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