Social Justice Language Teacher Education

by Margaret R. Hawkins

Social justice language teacher education is a response to the acknowledgement that there are social/societal inequities that shape access to learning and educational achievement. In social justice language teacher education, social justice is the driving force and primary organizational device for the teacher education agenda. What does “social justice” mean in diverse global locations? What role does English play in promoting or denying equity? How can teachers come to see themselves as advocates for equal educational access and opportunity? This volume begins by articulating a view of social justice teacher education, followed by language teacher educators from 7 countries offering theorized accounts of their situated practices. Authors discuss powerful components of practice, and the challenges and tensions of doing this work within situated societal and institutional power structures.

189 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 1, 2011

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book gives the idea that nobody really knows what social justice teacher education looks like, and the people who might know something won't tell us for fear of "imposing" their own ideas on us. The book does not give any clear examples of what one might do beyond one "Issues Analysis Project" in Chapter 4 and then a discussion in Chapter 6 about a couple of assignments in an ESL and Bilingual Education teacher preparation program that did not succeed in getting teachers to develop lessons that focused on social justice, but only increased their vocabulary to talk about social justice. That would have been valuable had it gone on to say how those lessons would have fulfilled the social justice focus, but it didn't. This might be valuable for a researcher who would like to build off these insights, but for a published book about SJTE, I would expect more guidance and a few suggestions as to what would have improved these lessons and a clear direction for developing my own, or adapting course book lessons to extend into the social justice arena.