| This study highlights a dimension of social justice teaching that experience tells us is very important but that is understudied: how people act on their values in complex institutions like schools through strategic actions. Using interpretive and portraiture methods to carry out a case study of three teachers in underserved public schools in California, this work focuses squarely on (a) achieving a better understanding of what effective social justice educators do day by day in their institutional lives to forward educational justice goals and (b) developing a conceptual framework that will help us better prepare such teachers for their institutional roles as brokers of racial and economic justice. Through a critical micro sociological lens the dissertation develops a framework for the way people work powerfully in schools that is shaped by the concept of navigating actions that are generally structured in the following ways: tensions, goals, contexts, topics, general strategies, actions, and resolution. The navigating action grammar can be a powerful compass to orient teachers in ways to connect the myriad of theories about justice in education (social justice education, critical pedagogy, popular and libratory education theories, etc.) to daily concrete actions in schools. |
