On responsibility: Teachers' conceptions of promoting social justice

Although a popular subject in philosophical literature, responsibility has been an underdeveloped construct in the fields of education and psychology. This study examined ways teachers understand and enact a sense of personal responsibility for the promotion of social justice in their classrooms as a specific form of responsibility-taking. Social justice provided an ideal case study because it is not a part of the fabric of education and its promotion is not mandated by policy or milieu in most public schools. As a result, teachers must take it upon themselves to engage in justice-seeking pedagogy and must also define for themselves what such teaching looks like in their own classrooms.The study employed a three-tiered data collection approach in which self-report surveys, cognitive appraisal interviews using the surveys, and classroom interviews and observations were used to examine pre-service and practicing teachers' beliefs and practices as a large group and as individual cases. Findings suggest participants across tiers subscribed one of six orientations towards toward teaching multicultural content using relevant pedagogy, as indicated by survey analyses. Cognitive appraisal interviews using the survey also suggest teachers apply several modes of reasoning even when they arrive at the same choices on the survey instrument. This suggests participants lack a common language or manner of thinking about multicultural education or responsibility. Finally, interview and observation participants who considered themselves multicultural educators, or teachers for social justice, discussed their beliefs and practices in a variety of ways. In all cases, this kind of teaching was synonymous with multicultural pedagogy through a representation or interpersonal interaction paradigm.Participating pre-service and practicing teachers also discussed their sense of teachers' professional identities through specific items on the survey, directed CAI questions, and interview questions in classrooms. Interestingly, some teachers believed teaching is not a profession while others believed it is fundamentally a profession. Nonetheless, none of the participants easily differentiated between personal and professional identities, and often spoke about the two as necessarily synonymous.Finally, participants addressed the role of policy in education and their beliefs about its ability to impede or enhance teaching through each tier of the study. Teachers again spoke about policy in diverging ways. Whereas some participants felt policy protected them, others felt it caused them to abdicate personal responsibility, and still others felt ambivalent towards policy. Not surprisingly, these beliefs were largely based upon the kind of policy participants imagined (e.g., state versus federal policy) and upon its effects in their teaching experience. This suggests teachers' interactions with policy and its influence are formative and further that their belief in its ability especially to enhance learning requires an experience in which they have witnessed desirable outcomes.