Becoming Justice-Oriented Teachers: A Collective Learning Experience for and with First-Year Teachers

Tetu, Elizabeth A.

Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

Becoming Justice-Oriented Teachers: A Collective Learning Experience for and with First-Year Teachers Public Deposited

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Citeable URL: https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/n583xw717

Abstract

Although scholarship has shown that new teachers struggle to make the transition to in- service teaching and enact the progressive practices that they learned during pre-service preparation, little research has explored how first-year teachers develop a justice-oriented practice during this transition. This project centers on a critical learning community convened and facilitated by the author for graduates of a justice-oriented elementary education program throughout their first year of teaching. Applying a framework of Critical Pedagogy (Freire, 2000, 2005, 2013) and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (Engeström, 1991, 2001, 2015), the qualitative case study examines the dilemmas of practice that first-year justice-oriented teachers (FYJOTs) encounter as they seek to enact their values in practice, the role of their contexts in constraining or supporting their pursuit of justice-oriented teaching, and the ways in which the learning community was generative for FYJOT learning. Findings reveal that FYJOTs encountered a range of dilemmas in which their values were challenged, either because multiple values seemed to be in conflict or because they perceived constraints originating in their contexts of practice, and participants experimented with both values- driven instructional strategies and principled advocacy efforts to address these dilemmas. The learning community appeared to mediate the learning process through relational practices that bolstered FYJOTs’ ideological clarity (Bartolomé, 1994) and facilitated collective pedagogical reasoning (Loughran, 2019). In addition, enacting culture circles pedagogy (Freire, 2000, 2013) helped participants analyze the causes and consequences of the dilemmas they encountered in relation to justice. This study offers implications for teacher educators, policymakers, and researchers in their efforts to support first-year teachers to remain in the profession and committed to their values as they continue to learn to enact justice-oriented teaching practices.

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