| Teacher education programs increasingly aim to integrate social justice across their curriculum, pedagogy, and structures as a primary strategy for preparing teachers to work with students from diverse racial, ethnic, language, and class backgrounds. This dissertation examines the efforts of two such teacher education programs by addressing the questions: How is social justice integrated across teacher education? What are the policies and structures that enable or constrain integration? How do prospective teachers' opportunities to learn about social justice impact their developing conceptions of social justice, diverse students, and their role as teachers? I answer these questions through a qualitative, comparative case study of the Teachers for Tomorrow's Schools program at Mills College and the Teacher Education Intern Program at San Jose State University. I use sociocultural theory and a theory of justice as the conceptual framework. This study draws on data collected from August 2001 to June 2002 and includes multiple interviews with faculty and prospective teachers, observations of university courses and teachers' clinical placements, an extensive review of program documents, and a survey of teachers' developing conceptions. Findings include a framework that elaborates the key dimensions of prospective teachers' opportunities to learn about social justice that include conceptual and practical tools with an emphasis on the following: individual students and their learning needs; students identified by their educational needs; students identified by their status in an oppressed group; and institutional arrangements. I found teachers' opportunities to learn about social justice varied within and across these dimensions. In addition, this study found that an array of policies and structures such as course sequence, clinical placement coordination, and faculty selection informed the implementation of social justice. This dissertation makes several contributions to research, theory, and practice. Briefly, it specifies aspects of the integration of social justice and the dimensions of prospective teachers' opportunities to learn as well as policies and structures that shape that process. Teacher educators committed to social justice can use the framework of teachers' opportunities to learn and lessons regarding policies and structures to inform their own efforts to integrate social justice across program curriculum, pedagogy, and structures. |
