| Social justice education which embraces critical, queer, and feminist pedagogies and promotes democracy, equity, and inclusion is often absent in the education of future teachers. The extent to which social justice issues are part of the curricula of many teacher preparation programs functions simply to fulfill minimal diversity/multicultural requirements mandated by the state or institution in which they operate. I argue that in-depth social justice education--one which explores the intersectionality of identity, power, privilege, and oppression--is vital for all pre-service teachers, regardless of what and where they intend to teach. Through use of qualitative critical, queer, and feminist methodology, this study explored the experiences of twelve pre-service teachers enrolled in Practicum (pseudonym), a dual-major special education and elementary education teacher preparation program at Southwestern State University (pseudonym), who became members of a social justice learning community. Over the six weeks that the learning community convened, the members participated in a variety of discussions and activities designed to build awareness about issues of social justice in schools and society in order to foster their creation of anti-oppressive pedagogies and practices. To lay the foundation for social justice education, the participants investigated the intersectionality of their own and others' identities as well as how hegemony operates to privilege some and oppress others on both the microscopic and macroscopic levels. It was found that the members of the learning community experienced the social justice curricula through the lenses of binarism, individualism, and proceduralism, which posed barriers to their creation of anti-oppressive pedagogies and practices. Binarism limited the participants' creation of their teacher identities by offering them constricted views of what they as teachers and women could and should be. It also caused them to view their students in the dichotomous roles of male and female, effectively limiting their accepted gender role expressions. Individualism led to the participants' othering those whom are members of groups they themselves were not a part, namely oppressed groups, their supervisors, and their students. This ultimately led to a failure on the participants' part to identify with people who are different from them and build relationships across boundaries, something teachers must be adept at in order to meet the needs of their students and the communities in which they work. Finally, proceduralism was found in the participants' predilection for concrete methods--the how--of implementing social justice education rather than the building of pedagogies predicated on theories of oppression, power, and privilege--the why. This effectively separated theory and practice, which need to be melded in order to truly embrace anti-oppressive education. |
