Justice-Centered Reflective Practice in Teacher Education: Pedagogy as a Process of Imaginative and Hopeful Invention

Abstract

This paper introduces justice-centered reflective practice, an approach that emerged out of our practitioner research in the Independent School Teaching Residency program. This ongoing and imperfect praxis is simultaneously a stance, a lens, a pedagogy, an orientation, and a way of understanding and mobilizing our individual and collective identities as teacher educators. Mediated by joy, imagination, vulnerability, and uncertainty, six foundational principles guide our work: justice-centered reflective practice is (1) purposeful and systematic, (2) iterative and cyclical, (3), critically reflective, (4) agentive, (5) done in community, and (6) loving and hopeful. Here we detail these principles and illustrate how they manifest in our work as teacher educators in how we structure the program and enact our pedagogy. We seek to continue a scholarly conversation among critical teacher educators about how we enact liberatory values and aspirations in the context of institutions and policy environments that often constrain our collective work.

Keywords

• critical teacher education
• social justice
• practitioner research
• critical pedagogy
• teacher agency