Publication Date

2022

Document Type

Dissertation/Thesis

First Advisor

Elish-Piper, Laurie

Second Advisor

Blake, Sally

Degree Name

Ed.D. (Doctor of Education)

Legacy Department

Department of Curriculum and Instruction (CI)

Abstract

This multicase study examined the socialization experiences of four preservice high school English teachers from four different Midwestern teacher education programs to understand how their acculturative and professional socialization experiences influenced their social justice beliefs. This study also examined how participants’ most salient social justice beliefs took shape within their social justice stances, mission-oriented approaches to enact social justice pedagogies like culturally responsive teaching, antiracist pedagogy, and culturally sustaining pedagogy within their classrooms. This study was framed by occupational socialization theory and critical race theory. Data were collected from the Learning to Teach for Social Justice Belief Scale, interviews, and artifact stimulated recalls composed of lesson plans, assignments, student work, and supplemental texts. Quantitative data were analyzed via descriptive statistics for survey response questions. Qualitative data were analyzed through open and axial coding to produce themes. Cross-case analysis findings revealed that participants’ meaningful experiences with diverse communities, races, ethnicities, and activism played significant roles in shaping the social justice stances they developed within their teacher education programs. Participants who experienced the most comprehensive social justice- oriented curricula were best equipped to support racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse students. Participants displayed low self-efficacy for identifying their positionality as White allies and discussing racism with their BIPOC students. Analysis resulted in the construction of the Social Justice Stance Teacher Typology Framework, a tool composed of eight archetypal social justice stances underscoring specific beliefs, pedagogies, and actions to support racial, cultural, and linguistic student diversity. Participants’ stances included curriculum reformer, historian, counselor, caregiver, philosopher, activist, community organizer, and team builder. Implications for preservice teacher programs are to coordinate meaningful experiences with diversity and activism with their curriculum, to explicitly teach students how to differentiate a variety of social justice pedagogies throughout scope and sequence of programmatic curriculum, and to explicitly model and provide resources to improve preservice teachers’ ability to discuss racism and their positionalities as allies in classrooms.

Extent

333 pages

Language

eng

Publisher

Northern Illinois University

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Rights Statement 2

NIU theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from Huskie Commons for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without the written permission of the authors.

Media Type

Text

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