Stylus Publishing (VA) Cultivating Social Justice Teachers: How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concepts

Review Cultivating Social Justice Teachers emphasizes the profound connection between how we, as teachers, see ourselves and how we see our students, and recognizes that educators are de facto agents of Social Justice, positioned to either perpetuate or interrupt systems of oppression. This book points out how collaboration, connection, and communication are fundamental tools and practices in the work of preparing teachers to be Social Justice educators, planting seeds that, hopefully, will translate into the reflective practices that bridge our knowing of systemic oppression to guiding our own students in recognizing the social structures they have inherited. Most importantly, this book inspires hope that beyond acknowledging the roots of our current reality, teachers and students can change the course of injustice.--Jennifer Chavez-Miller, Middle School Teacher and Curriculum Coordinator (1/1/2012 12:00:00 AM)"Packed with honest stories that document the missteps, mistakes, and rethinking of courses that focus on issues of social justice, Cultivating Social Justice Teachers offers all of us - professors, teachers, researchers, and students - strategies for teaching and learning how to face the inevitable bumps and obstacles that get in the way of full inclusion and understanding of multiple perspectives. Engaging in brave and frank discussions, the editors and authors of this text are a model of what is needed if we are to change how teachers are prepared to teach in our diverse classrooms."--Sonia Nieto, Professor Emerita, School of Education (1/1/2012 12:00:00 AM)"Few challenges in teacher preparation are as salient as teaching the central, troubling concepts of social justice that many profoundly resist learning. With theoretical nuance, pedagogical savvy, and highly relate-able examples and self-reflections, Cultivating Social Justice Teachers shows the possibilities for doing what often seems impossible. This book is one that no teacher educator--or any educator--can or should do without."--Kevin Kumashiro, author of Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture Product Description Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment? Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “social justice?”<br><br>Recognising these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the “bottlenecks” that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings. <br><br>The authors initiate a conversation – one largely absent in the social justice education literature and the discourse – about the common content- and pedagogy-related challenges that social justice educators face in their work, particularly for those doing this work in relative or literal isolation, where collegial understanding cannot be found down the hall or around the corner. In doing so they hope not only to help individual teachers in their practice, but also strengthen social justice teacher education more systemically. <br><br>Each contributor identifies a learning bottleneck related to one or two specific threshold concepts that they have struggled to help their students learn. Each chapter is a narrative about individual efforts toward sometimes profound pedagogical adjustment, about ambiguity and cognitive dissonance and resistance, about trial and error, and about how these educators found ways to facilitate foundational social justice l