Seeking Convergence and Surfacing Tensions Between Social Justice and Core Practices: Re-Presenting Teacher Education as a Community of Praxis

Abstract

The Core Practices Movement (CPM) and Social Justice Teacher Education (SJTE) represent two communities of practice within which novices develop as professional educators. However, there is little dialogue about how they might collaborate to develop novice social justice educators, and the critiques and recommendations that do cross movements originate from divergent theoretical starting points. Possibilities for convergence within the learning theories that underpin CPM and SJTE are explored, examining how social learning theories might be infused with, and enveloped within, critical learning theories. This article thus re-presents teacher education as a “community of praxis.” Within each of its three hybrid dimensions—a shared repertoire of practice/praxis, mutual engagement of vertical and horizontal expertise, and joint enterprise of professional and political aims—possibilities for developing novice social justice educators are described, and tensions at the intersection of justice and practice in teacher education are explored.

Keywords

practice-based teacher education equity social justice teacher education preparation critical theory/critical pedagogy

My desire to be a teacher is rooted in these visions. I wouldn’t be a teacher if I didn’t think that it had a tangible way of moving us towards a more just, more equitable world. But it’s a little bit tougher in practice when you’re still gaining experience. In terms of the theoretical underpinning, that’s there all the time. I try to be very conscientious when you’re in the moment and trying to be a teacher-person. Just, in your position, at the front of the class, doing your day-to-day things, there needs to be a level of comfort before you’re conscie—I don’t want to say before you’re conscientiously doing things, but, when you’re more comfortable, it’s easier to be more mindful. (Sherwood, Interview, 2/18/2016)

Sherwood,¹ a novice teacher “still gaining experience,” shared this challenge 5 months into his year-long student teaching placement. He struggles to proficiently enact practices “at the front of the class” and develop his identity as a “teacher-person,” two intertwined aspects of entering a community of practice (P. Grossman, Compton, et al., 2009; Wenger, 1998). Becoming a practitioner is infused with, and enveloped within, Sherwood’s aim to become a social justice educator. His emerging identity is “rooted in these visions”; his nascent practice is mindful of the “theoretical underpinning” connecting schools and society; his work is oriented toward “a more just, more equitable world.” His epigraph thus also evokes critical praxis, “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1970/2011, p. 51). Sherwood’s teacher education program represents a community of practice in which he will become a social justice educator, supporting him to iterate his vision and develop a beginning repertoire (Feiman-Nemser, 2012). In an education context permeated by narrow neoliberal reforms, and a world where systemic oppression and white supremacy remain pervasive, preparing justice-oriented educators like Sherwood is urgent work (Souto-Manning, 2019). This conceptual piece explores the dimensions of teacher education as a community of practice that support the development of novice social justice educators.

Two movements are best positioned to respond to Sherwood’s challenge. First is the Core Practice Movement (CPM),² one iteration of the “practice turn” in teacher education (Hauser & Kavanagh, 2019). CPM emerged in response to a belief that university-based teacher education overemphasized teacher knowledge and ignored learning practice in the context of practice (D. L. Ball & Cohen, 1999; P. Grossman, 2018). It therefore organizes teacher learning around foundational practices which novices learn to enact (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). P. Grossman, Compton, and others’ (2009) study of professional learning, which provides the theoretical underpinning of CPM, locates the movement in relation to sociocultural theories generally and the communities of practice framework specifically. CPM’s approaches would help novices like Sherwood become “more comfortable” developing teaching practice, which would make it “easier to be more mindful” about how his practice achieves his justice-oriented vision.

Second is Social Justice Teacher Education (SJTE). Teacher education for justice and equity has existed for decades and has dovetailed with and iterated alongside multicultural teacher education, culturally responsive pedagogy, and antiracist and anti-oppressive education (Cochran-Smith, 2020; Zeichner, 2011). SJTE includes, but goes beyond, teaching novices culturally responsive practices by “explicitly attend[ing] to societal structures that perpetuate injustice,” thereby “prepar[ing] teachers to take both individual and collective action to mitigate oppression” (McDonald & Zeichner, 2008, p. 597). Some SJTE scholarship connects specifically to the notion of a community of practice, often to explain how preservice and early career teachers navigate conflicting university and school-based communities of practice (Flores, 2007; Y. A. Lee et al., 2017; McDonald, 2007; Philpott & Dagenais, 2011; Skerrett & Williamson, 2015). SJTE helps novices like Sherwood learn the “theoretical underpinning” that explains how schools reproduce societal inequities and find “tangible ways” to interrupt those inequities.

In designing a teacher education community of practice that prepares novice social justice educators, CPM and SJTE might easily complement each other. However, there are few studies at their intersection and the critiques and recommendations that span these movements emerge from opposite poles. CPM critiques SJTE for its lack of situatedness in practice (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). SJTE critiques CPM for reproducing social structures that perpetuate inequities (Philip et al., 2019). Such divergent starting points make it difficult to find common ground from which CPM and SJTE begin to collaborate. This leaves novices like Sherwood alone to figure out how to become “comfortable” with practice while being “mindful” of justice amid the complicated process of learning to teach (Schiera, 2019a). These challenges often lead novices to moderate their visions or leave teaching altogether (Agarwal et al., 2010; Hammerness, 2001; Philpott & Dagenais, 2011). Their students are also directly impacted—especially Black and Brown students, students experiencing poverty, immigrant and emergent bilingual students, LGBTQ+ students, and other students systematically marginalized by schools and society. They wait as novices learn to enact rigorous, responsive instruction, and are the most likely to be left to the rote practices and unexamined biases of Sherwood’s replacement (e.g., Gorski, 2018).

This article’s objective is to conceptualize teacher education as a “community of praxis,” which enables CPM and SJTE to collaborate in developing novice social justice educators. To begin, Wenger’s (1998) three dimensions of a community of practice—shared repertoire, mutual engagement, and joint enterprise—are used to organize CPM and SJTE, individually, as communities of practice. Critiques and recommendations across movements are reviewed, revealing the situated-versus-structural gap inhibiting collaboration across movements. Next, learning theories underneath CPM and SJTE are explored as a possible starting point for convergence, examining how social learning theories might be infused with, and enveloped within, critical learning theories. This approach invites re-presenting teacher education as a “community of praxis” to develop novice social justice educators. Across three hybrid dimensions—a shared repertoire of practice/praxis, mutual engagement of vertical and horizontal expertise, and joint enterprise of professional and political aims—possibilities and tensions for teacher education are described and investigated. Across this piece, a tone balancing wonder and work, imagination and urgency, aims to produce one conversation-starting sketch of how teacher education can support novices like Sherwood to develop the identities and practice/praxis of social justice educators.

Organizing CPM and SJTE as Communities of Practice

Figure 1 provides a conceptual framework for organizing teacher education as a community of practice/praxis, mirroring the unfolding of this article’s argument. Elements in black depict the “intellectual traditions” that shape a community of practice in Wenger’s (1998) conceptualization (p. 12). The x-axis is the level of (social) learning via a community of practice, entailing practice and identity—the elements of Sherwood’s challenge, extended here as critical praxis and social justice educator identity. Teacher education operates at this level because it entails social learning (to teach) in particular social groups (teachers), wherein individuals (novices) learn particular social practices and grow their practitioner identities. Wenger later articulates three dimensions of a community of practice: shared repertoire, mutual engagement, and joint enterprise (pp. 72–73). These dimensions, identified in the darker shaded box in the bottom right corner of Figure 1, represent useful analytic categories to compare how CPM and SJTE organize teacher education as a community of practice to support novice educators’ development.

Figure 1.

Intellectual traditions underpinning a community of practice/praxis.

First, a shared repertoire includes “routines, words, tools, ways of doing things, stories, gestures, symbols, genres, actions, or concepts” in professional practice (Wenger, 1998, p. 83). In CPM, novices learn a shared repertoire of core practices.³ These practices are said to be “core” because they are central to the work of teaching, foundational for building more complex practices with experience, and impact student achievement (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). Examples include “leading a group discussion”; “explaining and modeling content, practices, and strategies”; and “implementing norms and routines” (TeachingWorks, 2018). CPM advocates stress that core practices are both conceptual and practical in nature (P. Grossman, 2018). Drawing on P. Grossman, Compton, and others’ (2009) cross-professional case study, professionals learn this shared repertoire by viewing representations of practice, decomposing them into their constituent parts, and approximating them in less-complex settings. CPM calls these approaches “pedagogies of enactment,” compared with teacher education pedagogies that tend to involve investigation or reflection (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009; McDonald et al., 2013).

Although there is range and variation across SJTE programs, the shared repertoire of social justice educators tends to include sociopolitical consciousness plus culturally responsive practices (McDonald & Zeichner, 2008; Zeichner, 2011). Villegas and Lucas (2002) articulate three “fundamental orientations” in this repertoire—understanding diversity in an asset-based way, cultivating sociopolitical consciousness, and conceptualizing teachers as change agents—plus three elements of culturally responsive teaching practice. More recently, Cochran-Smith et al.’s (2016) conceptualization of initial teacher education for equity includes instructionally focused facets such as lesson alignment and scaffolding; culturally responsive facets such as honoring diversity in the learning environment and connecting to students’ experiences; and justice-oriented facets such as interrupting inequitable school and societal practices. In SJTE, varied pedagogical strategies are used to teach this repertoire, including critical self-reflection, cultural exchange, simulations, considering teaching cases, and teacher educator modeling of culturally responsive teaching (Sleeter, 2008; Villegas and Lucas, 2002; Zeichner, 2009, 2011). Specific techniques of critical pedagogy are also often employed (e.g., Beltramo et al., 2020; Chávez-Reyes, 2012).

The second dimension, mutual engagement, describes the relationships and interactions among those in a community of practice, including how newcomers learn from oldtimers to become full members (Lave, 1991). Because CPM locates university-based teacher education in practice, it positions teacher educators as more-knowing others mutually engaged with novice teachers. CPM does not claim these are the only relationships in teacher education, but they are the ones it leverages to help novices learn a shared repertoire of core practices. SJTE is also organized around the mutual engagement of teacher educators and novices interacting to develop culturally responsive and justice-oriented practices (McDonald & Zeichner, 2008). However, some SJTE programs often expand the range of actors to include inservice teachers, parents, and community members engaging with novices (Noel, 2013; Zeichner, 2011). Wenger (1998) would describe these additional stakeholders as at the periphery of a community of practice: They are not becoming teachers themselves, but their mutual engagement brings new perspectives and knowledge to novices’ development (pp. 117–118).

Third, joint enterprise relates to the common purpose members of a community of practice work toward through their practice (Wenger, 1998). For instance, CPM imagines novices learning to enact ambitious instructional practice toward a goal of impacting student learning (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). In addition, this facilitates novices more easily entering and remaining within the teaching profession. CPM also aims to bolster teaching as a profession by articulating its technical vocabulary while preserving the complexity of practice, similar to other professions (McDonald et al., 2013). Last, CPM advocates connote an equity-related purpose, believing that reliably preparing high-quality teachers increases access of all students to rigorous instruction (D. L. Ball & Forzani, 2009). Similarly, the joint enterprise of SJTE also facilitates student learning and advances equity (Sleeter, 2008). Cochran-Smith et al. (2016) describe these “twin goals” as developing the “knowledge, skill, and dispositions to enhance the learning of students historically not well served by the system” while also being able to “recognize and challenge the intersecting systems of inequality in schools and society that reproduce inequity” (p. 70). However, in contrast to CPM, SJTE explicitly locates these aims in relationship to students’ identities and cultures and the socio-historic forces which systematically underserve students from nondominant groups. By preparing asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented practitioners, teacher education itself works toward an enterprise of societal transformation (Cochran-Smith, 2020; Souto-Manning, 2019).

Table 1 summarizes how CPM and SJTE, individually, reflect these dimensions of a community of practice, providing an initial glance as to how these movements might “fill the gaps inherent in each” (Richmond et al., 2017, p. 433). To achieve student learning and larger, equity aims, Sherwood might learn a repertoire of culturally responsive practices and core practices, via pedagogies of enactment and investigation, while mutually engaged with teacher educators, parents, students, and community stakeholders. However, imagining collaboration between CPM and SJTE by this simple addition falls short when reviewing the commentaries, conceptual pieces, and empirical studies that cross movements.

Table 1.

Organizing CPM and SJTE by the Three Dimensions of a Community of Practice.

Dimension	CPM	SJTE
Shared repertoire	• Core practices or high-leverage practices • Learned through a pedagogy of enactment (e.g., representation, decomposition, approximation)	• Critically conscious foundational orientations about school and society, plus culturally responsive practices • Learned through teaching approaches of reflection and investigation, often rooted in critical pedagogy
Mutual engagement	• Teacher educators and novice teachers	• Teacher educators and novice teachers • Additional school and community stakeholders (students, parents, cooperating teachers/ inservice teachers, administrators, community members, etc.)
Joint enterprise	• Develop proficient novice teachers who can impact student learning • Professionalize teaching • Achieve equity by increasing access to quality teachers and ambitious teaching	• Develop culturally responsive teachers who can impact student learning • Develop teacher-activists within and beyond the classroom • Re-form schools and universities to transform, rather than reproduce, societal inequities

Note. CPM = Core Practices Movement; SJTE = Social Justice Teacher Education.

Surfacing Divergence: CPM’s Situated Critiques and SJTE’s Structural Critiques

Returning to Figure 1, Wenger’s (1998) original diagram of intellectual traditions includes a y-axis describing how theories of social structure (at the top) and situated experience (at the bottom) shape social learning in a community of practice. These poles mirror the divergent starting points of texts that speak across CPM and SJTE. CPM’s critiques of and recommendations for SJTE tend to emerge from situated theories, and SJTE’s critiques and recommendations for CPM derive from structural theories. These pieces must be fully engaged, and their critiques considered, if CPM and SJTE are to collaborate.

Theories of situated experience give “primacy to the dynamics of everyday existence, improvisation, coordination, and interactional choreography” (Wenger, 1998, p. 13). The extracted/situated critique is the central theme in CPM’s critiques, highlighting how university-based teacher education generally (and SJTE, by application) overemphasizes knowledge removed from situations of practice. While teachers need wide-ranging knowledge (of content, children, culture, learning, etc.), CPM argues that knowledge separated from complex situations of classroom practice is unusable (D. L. Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 12). Indeed, recent literature reviews of SJTE manifest this critique, in that emergent themes focus primarily on understandings, beliefs, and personal and contextual knowledge (Goodwin & Darity, 2019; Mills & Ballantyne, 2016). CPM scholars also argue that program structures which separate foundations and methods classes, and coursework from clinical experience, exacerbate the extraction of teacher learning from practice (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009).

Two critiques follow from this first one. One is what Kennedy (1999) calls the problem of enactment. Even if novices adopt university-emphasized, justice-oriented knowledge and beliefs, the problem of enactment manifests when novices, in a classroom moment, cannot recognize what response is needed or cannot enact the imagined response. Kavanagh (2017) connects this to SJTE specifically by observing that it focuses more on “traits of a social justice educator” than “what social justice educators do” (Kavanagh, 2017, p. 163). In addition, even if particular practices are named, teacher education must facilitate novices learning them. This professional/pedagogical critique originates from P. Grossman’s (2005) exhaustive literature review of teacher education pedagogies, concluding the field needs “better theory” to explain the relation between “pedagogies of professional education and features of professional practice” (p. 450). Applying both of these critiques to SJTE, McDonald (2010) observes that teacher education “has yet to identify specific practices” that novices “could observe, rehearse, enact, and replay in the context of learning to teach from a social justice perspective” (pp. 453–454).

In response to these critiques, P. Grossman, Hammerness, and McDonald (2009) recommend that justice-oriented programs “will need to decide what core practices will best leverage that broader purpose,” rethinking the role foundations courses play in the development of practice (p. 286). More specifically, some CPM scholars identify specific social justice core practices, drawn from literature on multicultural education and culturally responsive teaching, which can be taught via a pedagogy of enactment (Kavanagh, 2017; McDonald, 2010). Conklin and Hughes’s (2016) coding of their “compassionate, critical, justice-oriented” methods and curriculum courses, for example, found that their pedagogy incorporated representations more than decompositions and approximations. In another study, Kavanagh and Danielson (2019) analyzed video from their multicultural literacy methods course, finding that they employed pedagogies of enactment when teaching instructional practices but not when discussing issues of justice. Video analysis of novices’ instruction paralleled this, as most reflected on their instructional decisions through a frame of practice without attending to justice. These two empirical studies illustrate a rigorous attempt to apply CPM’s situated curriculum of core practices and pedagogy of enactment to SJTE’s aims, examining the tensions that emerge.

At the opposite pole, SJTE’s critiques of CPM come from theories of social structure, which “seek underlying explanatory structures that account for social patterns” by focusing on “institutions, norms and rules” to “cultural systems, discourses, and history” (Wenger, 1998, p. 12). For example, the macrosociopolitical/equity critique suggests CPM ignores how intersecting systemic oppressions have shaped inequities over time. While CPM’s “equity-as-equality” aim seeks increase access to high-quality teachers, it leaves invisible the socio-historic structures by which these opportunity gaps have accumulated over time, thereby reproducing them (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016). The absence of a macrosociopolitical view enables CPM to also be critiqued as similar to, a product of, in cahoots with, or unwittingly subsumed by neoliberal educational reform structures which claim to address education inequities in the present but exacerbate stratification over time (Philip et al., 2019; Souto-Manning, 2019).

Applying structural lenses to CPM’s approaches, the complexity/deskilling critique suggests that core practices represent “overly simplistic notions of teaching practice” (Souto-Manning, 2019), tending toward a technical conceptualization of teaching (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016; Zeichner, 2012). Such approaches dovetail with narrow, accountability-focused reforms which deskill and deprofessionalize teachers (Horn & Kane, 2019; Zeichner, 2011), undermining democratic public schooling (Philip et al., 2019). The responsiveness/whiteness critique suggests that core practices reflect a universalization of practice, being articulated, taught, and enacted without reference to the racial, cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity of students (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016; Zeichner, 2012). Some CPM scholars may state that novices must “situate and adapt their work to specific pupils and contexts” (D. L. Ball & Forzani, 2009, p. 507), but CPM’s approaches leave this to novices themselves. Decontextualizing and generalizing practice also normalizes the practices of White teachers, marginalizing aspiring teachers of color by negating their identities and reinscribing whiteness in what counts as good teaching (Daniels & Varghese, 2019). Teacher education thus perpetuates systemic racism and White supremacy because it “covertly and overtly (over) values the knowledge, values, practices, and legacies of dominant groups” (Philip et al., 2019, pp. 259–260).

As recommendations, SJTE scholars name principles and commitments CPM must adopt to avoid reproducing structural inequities. Philip et al. (2019) and Souto-Manning (2019) call on CPM to clearly oppose market-based, neoliberal reforms which undermine democratic public education; acknowledge education’s contextual, cultural, and political dimensions; and steadfastly “name, problematize, and interrupt overt and covert systems of oppression” in teacher education (Souto-Manning, 2019, p. 16). Empirical studies can apply theories of social structure to interrogate CPM approaches, as when Dutro and Cartun (2016) examined an elementary writing methods course in relation to larger discourses that perpetuate oppression. In analyzing one novice facilitating small group discussion, they observed his struggle to avoid succumbing to racialized discourses of control, concluding that justice-oriented, structural lenses on practice “must be seen as the core” (p. 127, emphasis original). Broadly stated, structural theories provide frameworks for evaluating “if, how, and when core practices might mis/align with this commitment to justice” (Philip et al., 2019, p. 260).

Sherwood’s learning is caught between these structural and situated poles. He insists his “theoretical underpinning” is always with him, averring he “wouldn’t be a teacher” if it did not contribute toward societal transformation. However, as a novice, he struggles with the “in the moment” work of teaching, “at the front of the class, doing [his] day-to-day things.” Some other starting point for collaboration between CPM and SJTE, which attends to the insights illuminated by these critiques, is needed.

Seeking Convergence Between Social and Critical Learning Theories

Like Sherwood, Wenger (1998) describes learning as “caught in the middle” between structural and situated theories: it occurs “in actions and interactions [embedded] in culture and history,” but through those interactions, “learning reproduces and transforms the social structure in which it takes place” (p. 13). While Wenger is specifically describing social learning theories, his words also allude to critical praxis: action and reflection toward societal transformation (Freire, 1970/2011). This invites consideration of how social learning theories and critical learning theories might dovetail with each other (Esmonde & Booker, 2017). This section posits that convergence between CPM and SJTE might be found by imagining how social learning theories can be infused with, and enveloped within, critical learning theories, as depicted in the center of Figure 1.

CPM explicitly draws on social theories of learning,⁴ positioning newcomers (novice teachers) learning from oldtimers (teacher educators) through legitimate peripheral participation, authentic activities with reduced complexity to facilitate novice learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991). A pedagogy of enactment incorporating representation, decomposition, and approximation exemplifies legitimate peripheral participation. These social learning theories explain how CPM’s recommendations improve SJTE, addressing the professional/pedagogical critique. Some claim CPM’s approach simplifies practice and is “extracted from [these] rich scholarly traditions” (Philip et al., 2019, p. 256). An alternate explanation is that CPM facilitates novice learning by choosing to foreground “the actual contexts of teachers’ ongoing work,” like designing units or organizing classroom space (D. L. Ball & Cohen, 1999, p. 20), and reducing complexity by being “less concerned with where teachers’ training takes place,” like the social contexts of particular schools or communities (Forzani, 2014, p. 2).

The development of critical praxis is explained by critical learning theories, including critical pedagogy.⁵ Critical pedagogues develop critical consciousness by drawing from generative themes, reflecting students’ own lived experiences, using problem-posing methods to introduce questions about power and oppression. Their facilitation of co-investigation through dialogic inquiry positions all as co-knowers and co-learners, rather than the teacher as the all-knowing transmitters of official knowledge (Freire, 1998; Shor, 1992). These iterative and cyclical processes connect critically conscious reflection and justice-oriented action as critical praxis (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). However, some may claim that these pedagogies are primarily composed of reflection and investigation, rather than enactment (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). Being oriented toward transformation, critical learning theories position pedagogy as inherently political, never technical or neutral (Giroux, 1988). In a way, they represent the missing link between SJTE’s critiques of and recommendations for CPM, as they describe how one becomes critically conscious to see how teacher education reproduces structural inequities.

These depictions of social and critical learning theories are not intended to capture the intricacies of and variations within these rich theoretical traditions. However, they provide enough conceptual grist to imagine how they might converge. Both social and critical learning theories speak to “activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally structured world” (Lave, 1991, p. 67, emphasis original), and how individuals within those worlds can act toward its transformation (Freire, 1970/2011).

First, critical learning theories, which develop critical praxis, can be infused within social learning theories, which develop social practice. Partly, this involves learning to see from a critical frame, which Kincheloe (2004) defines as the “ability to view everyday teaching practice from a variety of contextual vantage points—including social justice and power” (p. 13). If social practice includes both conceptual and practical tools (P. L. Grossman et al., 1999), a critical frame applied to situations of social practice might be a “critical conceptual tool” (Schiera, 2019a). For example, the core practice “eliciting and interpreting student responses” (TeachingWorks, 2018) requires conceptual tools associated with constructivist learning (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009). Because eliciting student ideas is always cultural and political, critical conceptual tools that enable them to see students from an asset- rather than deficit-based perspectives must be infused within this practice (Villegas & Lucas, 2002).

To its most granular extent, a critical frame makes visible how every “discretionary space” in teaching is infused with “teachers’ experiences in a society filled with racism and oppression” and “normalized practices in schools that institutionalize dominant values and habits” (D. L. Ball, 2018). This mirrors Wenger’s (1998) observation that practice is inseparable from one’s “position within a broader system” and “the pervasive influence of the institution that employs them” (p. 79). Attending to every discretionary space reveals the extraordinarily high degree of complexity of teaching; some CPM advocates argue that even attending to the context of students, schools, and communities, in addition to the context of teaching practices, introduces too much complexity for novices as they are learning to teach. At the same time, the existence of subject-specific core practices in CPM (P. Grossman, 2018) suggests that attending to both the contexts of teaching practice and academic disciplines is not too much complexity for novices. Whatever choices define the right degree of complexity in legitimate peripheral participation, as long as social learning of practice is infused with critical frames, novices will learn to attend to structural forces within the situated experience of practice/praxis.

Second, critical learning theories can envelop social learning theories, as novices position learning professional practice/praxis within a larger project of educational and societal transformation (Souto-Manning, 2019). Wenger (1998) stresses that “communities of practice are not self-contained entities” (p. 79) and may be both “the locus of resistance to oppression” or “the reproduction of its conditions” (p. 85). Developing critical praxis makes visible how being a social justice educator is conterminous with being a change agent in classrooms, schools, and society (Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Thus, the social practices of social justice educators—and novices’ learning of these practices—extends beyond the classroom walls to include interrupting inequities at the school level and participating in networks and coalitions at the societal level (Gorski, 2018; Picower, 2013).

Furthermore, social learning theories may assist critical learning theories in developing the critical praxis of novices. First, social learning theories are bounded by the conceptualization of a particular community of practice, clarifying what reflection and action for transformation look like for the teaching profession specifically. Second, they specifically attend to novices’ stage of development, inviting consideration of what activism they may be immediately ready for and how it might grow across their professional trajectory. Finally, whereas problem-posing pedagogies explain how one becomes critically conscious, social learning theories can help explain how one learns to take action toward societal transformation, providing a solution to the obstacles early career social justice educators face (Flores, 2007; Philpott & Dagenais, 2011).

Sherwood’s epigraph implies both social and critical learning theories, and also includes a telling pause. He wonders if “there needs to be a level of comfort before you’re conscie—,” suggesting developing proficiency in practice undergirds the ability to attend to justice. Others might suggest the reverse that mindfulness (critical consciousness) must be developed first to inform practice (e.g., Gay, 2010). This opens a conversation on whether and how justice and practice/praxis can be learned in tandem.

Imagining Teacher Education as a Community of Praxis

Wenger’s original diagram can now be iterated in Figure 1: practice includes critical praxis; identity references social justice practitioner identity; social learning is infused with, and enveloped within, critical learning; and, to this article’s focusing question, teacher education can be seen as a community of praxis.⁶ Here, I imagine the three dimensions of a sociocultural community of practice blended with understandings from critical praxis: a shared repertoire of practice/praxis, mutual engagement of vertical and horizontal expertise, and a joint enterprise of professional and political aims. Within each dimension, possible implications for teacher education are described, and potential tensions explored. These features of teacher education as a community of praxis are summarized in Table 2, revealing the richness of what is possible at the intersection of CPM and SJTE when compared with Table 1.

Table 2.

Re-Presenting Teacher Education as a Community of Praxis: Possibilities and Tensions.

Dimension	Possible implications for teacher education	Tensions surfaced for teacher education
Shared repertoire of practice/praxis	• Social justice core practices, culturally responsive and contextually relevant practices, and activism/advocacy practices • Critical conceptual tools (including professional vision) • Taught via pedagogies of co-investigation and enactment in tandem	• Encountering biases and inequities in interactions, practices, and policies in the school context • Enacting practices without a critical frame, thereby appropriating the surface features of social justice practice/praxis
Mutual engagement of vertical and horizontal expertise	• Vertical expertise of more-knowing others’ practice/praxis • Novices’ horizontal expertise related to teaching practice, social justice, and identity/lived experience • Horizontal expertise of school and community stakeholders about teaching, schools, and society	• Teacher educators balancing vertical and horizontal expertise • Interrupting power hierarchies in traditionally vertical relationships (e.g., professor/student, universities/schools)
Joint enterprise of professional and political aims	• Justice-oriented professional visions (novices and teacher educators) • Mutual negotiation of a program’s joint enterprise • Stance of inquiry/inquiry stance to reflect on practice in relation to vision/joint enterprise	• Differing conceptualizations of equity and justice that require mutual negotiation • Mutual accountability when joint enterprise is not both professional and political, or reproduces inequities in society

Shared Repertoire of Practice/Praxis

The dimension imagines a shared repertoire blending CPM’s “broad, expanded definition of practice characteristic of sociocultural definitions” (P. Grossman, Compton, et al., 2009), with the “expanded and transformative view of practice” inherent in critical praxis (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 132). Previously identified social justice core practices provide a starting point for this repertoire (Kavanagh, 2017; McDonald, 2010):

developing cultural knowledge of students (which TeachingWorks includes in its list of 18 high-leverage practices);

building caring relationships;

integrating content that represents traditionally marginalized groups;

posing alternatives to marginalizing narratives;

leveraging empowering cultural patterns of participation;

interrupting marginalizing patterns; and

interrupting prejudice in the classroom.

More social justice core practices might be identified from existing literature on multicultural education, culturally responsive teaching, social justice education, and antiracist and anti-oppressive teaching. For example, Dyches and Boyd (2017) conceptualize social justice pedagogical knowledge as including culturally accessing pedagogies, critical pedagogies, and agency inciting pedagogies; these might suggest core practices such as identifying generative themes from students’ lived experiences, facilitating dialogic discussion and co-investigation, and scaffolding student participation in public discourse.

In addition to adding these social justice core practices, for critical praxis to truly infuse the shared repertoire, existing core practices must be re-articulated and taught in ways that explicitly attend to culture, context, and justice (Calabrese Barton et al., 2020). As one CPM teacher educator averred, “none of these core practices occur in isolation” because “the cultural and lived experiences of the individual students and the school and classroom community are always necessary to consider and negotiate” (P. Grossman, 2018, p. 111). Of the 17 remaining high-leverage practices TeachingWorks (2018) identifies, just one, “communicating with parents,” is articulated in this fashion. The description states that “productive meetings . . . are attentive to considerations of language and culture” and imagines that multicultural education courses invite diverse caregivers to share their experiences with school–family communication (a pedagogy of investigation) before practicing varying forms of engagement (a pedagogy of enactment). A shared repertoire of practice/praxis would articulate all other practices—including eliciting and interpreting student responses, discussed previously—in ways that attend to culture, context, and justice. This is necessary to address to the responsiveness/whiteness critique.

Novices can learn this emerging repertoire through a pedagogy of enactment. Kavanagh (2017) describes teaching novices to enact an interactive read-aloud which introduced a counternarrative to heteronormative family structures. She modeled the read-aloud (a representation of practice), demonstrating how to activate children’s schema about families to surface assumptions and decompose responses, including addressing possible moments of student prejudice. Novices then approximated the read-aloud as a fishbowl: inside, one novice enacted the read-aloud, while others played students; outside, novices observed and created a public record for debriefing. Through this process, novices learned to enact social justice core practices integrating content, posing alternatives, and interrupting prejudice. Other hybrid pedagogies of enactment might iterate approaches which develop responsiveness to student ideas to attend to identity, culture, and lived experience (Kavanagh et al., 2019), or to situate rehearsals, as approximations of practice, within critical pedagogical approaches like Freirean culture circles (Beltramo et al., 2020).

The social justice core practices and culturally responsive core practices, above, illustrate two ways critical praxis can infuse social justice educators’ shared repertoire. As noted earlier, critical theories also envelop social theories by expanding the notion of social justice teaching practice beyond the classroom. Whipp’s (2013) analysis observed that some, but not all, social justice-oriented teacher candidates were “engaged in activism (consciousness-raising and advocacy) within and outside of their classroom” (p. 459). Picower (2013) similarly observes how some early career social justice educators get “stuck at the classroom door” (p. 71). Because practice/praxis is oriented toward the transformation of schools and society, advocacy/activism core practices are a third part of the shared repertoire. Kavanagh (2017) identifies a general one, “empowering students and addressing inequities through advocacy.” Others, again, might be conceptualized from existing literature. For example, Gorski’s (2018) equity literacy abilities might become practices of addressing bias in curricular materials, interrupting inequitable school polices, and discussing systemic oppression with colleagues. Without advocacy/activism practices in their repertoire, social justice educators might “raise awareness about the symptoms of injustice, but never impact the roots, creating an endless cycle” (Picower, 2013, p. 71).

The necessity of advocacy/activism practices highlights one key tension in imagining this shared repertoire. Despite efforts to cultivate justice-minded school placements and cooperating teachers (Sleeter, 2008), school-based communities of practice may be at odds with a social justice-oriented teacher education community of praxis (Flores, 2007). This includes the pervasive “teacher talk” novices encounter which reproduce deficit orientations of students of color (Pollack, 2012), as well as school practices and policies which reproduce socioeconomic stratification and systemic racism (D. L. Ball, 2018). Advocacy/activism practices can help novices learn to respond to these moments, obviating the problem of enactment. They can also be taught with a pedagogy of enactment, for instance, by rehearsals (an approximation) to help novice social justice educators move beyond “sticking points” in the field (Lillge & Knowles, 2020), addressing the professional/pedagogical critique.

A second tension emerges if novices learn the “actions” in this repertoire without the critical frame necessary to underpin it. This would lead to them only appropriate the labels or surface features of social justice practice/praxis (P. L. Grossman et al., 1999). Consider Kavanagh’s (2017) example of the social justice core practice “Integrating Content”: “Noticing that none of your students are reading books with Asian American characters and choosing a read aloud book whose main characters are Asian American” (p. 168). Enacting the practice (choosing the text) requires noticing students’ pattern in reading choices, which requires knowing how representation in literature manifests larger power structures. Those “critical conceptual tools” must be in the novice’s shared repertoire of practice/praxis (Schiera, 2019a) to apply knowledge from a critical frame to a particular situation in practice.

Justice-oriented foundations and multicultural education courses can aid novices learning about critical conceptual tools and applying them to classroom situations via pedagogies of co-investigation (Schiera, 2019a). For example, critical conceptual tools that surface domains of power (Collins, 2009) can be applied to case studies within and beyond the classroom, prompting novices to develop possible responses to the dilemmas that arise (Kavanagh et al., 2020). Critical conceptual tools derived from critical race theory make possible the “racial noticing” that enables novices to attend to, interpret, and then respond to racial phenomena in classroom situations (Shah & Coles, 2020), as well as the larger socio-historic forces that shape the places of practice (Bowman & Gottesman, 2017). Principles of equity literacy (Gorski, 2018) can be applied to individual reflections on personal identity, cross-cultural interactions, and justice-oriented actions (Gorski & Dalton, 2020). Critical conceptual tools can also be incorporated into a pedagogy of enactment in methods courses, used during the decomposition of practices to make discretionary spaces visible, and allowing novices to approximate responses in these decision-making moments to interrupt inequities. In these ways, pedagogies of co-investigation and enactment can be employed in tandem, blurring boundaries between foundations and methods courses (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009) to support novice social justice educators’ development of a shared repertoire of practice/praxis.

Mutual Engagement of Vertical and Horizontal Expertise

Mutual engagement of “newcomers” and “oldtimers” (Lave, 1991) is usually organized around the latter’s vertical expertise in practice (Zeichner & Payne, 2013). University-based teacher education is often organized similarly, whether in “traditional” courses where professors transmit knowledge or practice-based courses where teacher educators-as-experts facilitate novices learning practice. In contrast, critical learning theories require a “horizontal relationship” of mutual trust (Freire, 1970/2011, p. 91), which democratizes knowledge (Zeichner & Payne, 2013). Novices bring three forms of knowledge to the teacher education classroom. First, they enter with some knowledge of teaching practice, whether from their own prior teaching or mentoring experiences, current field placements, or their experiences as K–12 students. Second, novices enter with a range of understandings and experiences with justice in society, given prior coursework, their own self-directed learning, or socialization in activist families or organizations (Schiera, 2019a). Third, novices bring knowledge from their own identities and life experiences (Freire, 1998, p. 62), which are inseparable from the identities and practices they are developing as teachers. Given the pervasive whiteness of the field, failing to attend to this reproduces normative whiteness in how teacher education conceptualizes teachers and teaching (Daniels & Varghese, 2019).

Mutual engagement in a community of praxis requires blending vertical and horizontal expertise and attending to novices’ horizontal expertise implies pedagogical, relational, and epistemological work for teacher educators (Souto-Manning & Martell, 2019). Pedagogically, teacher educators must differentiate instruction, meeting novices where they are and leveraging prior knowledge for learning. Relationally, teacher education must be responsive to novices’ identities, cultures, and experiences—both to model inclusive classroom communities and to position diversity as an asset in learning to teach in a multicultural society. Epistemologically, teacher educators must reposition novices as co-knowers about teaching, and thus as experts in their own learning, interrupting power hierarchies by identity and positionality. This is especially imperative for supporting aspiring teachers of color. While they are still learning practice from the vertical expertise of (often White) teacher educators, only they understand what this means when it intersects with their identity and positionality as teachers in schools and society (Pham, 2018; Zeichner, 2011).

Blending vertical and horizontal expertise reveals multiple potential tensions. First, the teacher educator and novice teacher are in similar, but not identical, professional communities. Although teacher educators have vertical expertise about teaching practice, many are not currently practicing K–12 teachers. Acknowledging this can actually democratize engagement by positioning novices as more-knowing others of the particular school and community contexts in which they are teaching. Second, teacher educators will have to make choices on how to integrate horizontal expertise, in developing student-centered, constructivist courses or facilitating critical co-investigation, and when novices need to learn from their vertical expertise of practice (Graziano, 2008). Withholding vertical expertise from novice teachers can mean withholding rigorous, responsive learning experiences from students. Third, the horizontal expertise novices bring may often conflict with the university’s approaches to teaching practice and social justice (Kennedy, 1999). In contrast to the university’s student-centered, culturally responsive vision for teaching, novices may enter envisioning themselves being master storyteller lecturers and assigning rigorous exams, reflecting instructional strategies they learned from observing their own teachers (Lortie, 1975). Similarly, novices’ unexamined privilege, biases, and beliefs can contradict how critical frames reveal how racism, classism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and ableism are systematically reproduced through teachers in schools. Accepting horizontal expertise invites novices to bring these prior understandings in for co-investigation; if uninvited, and they remain dormant, novices only adopting labels or surface features of social justice practice/praxis (P. L. Grossman et al., 1999), harming the students they teach. Again, this learning will look different for each novice, given their particular overlapping identities and positionalities.

Following SJTE’s inclusion of stakeholders beyond the university, mutual engagement in a community of praxis is enveloped by the horizontal expertise of students, parents, teachers, administrators, district officials, and community members. Such an approach centers community knowledge in asset-based ways, positioning these stakeholders as co-knowers about what good teaching means for their students (Noel, 2013). School approaches to developing literacy, inservice teachers’ wisdom about facilitating discussion, and parents’ priorities about communication (shown earlier) should inform what novices teachers learn (Zeichner, 2011), with the most overlooked experts quite possibly being students themselves (Morrell & Collatos, 2002). Again, while these stakeholders are not aspiring to become teachers themselves, mutual engagement across these peripheries (Wenger, 1998) can enable differently positioned stakeholders’ goals to be pursued in tandem, for example, by preparing a pipeline of community teachers that stay beyond their apprenticeship (R. E. Lee, 2018).

Moving learning experiences to school and community sites can facilitate this learning (Noel, 2013). For example, Souto-Manning and Martell (2019), as university-based professor and inservice teacher, respectively, co-taught novice teachers and K–12 students in a local public school. While this addressed the geographic spacialization of teacher education, they also faced a second, epistemological tension: that university–school relationships are typically vertically constructed, positioning the former as sites of knowledge and the latter as sites of application. To “re-mediate” these power hierarchies, they critically read and discussed texts on teaching and teacher preparation; collaboratively explored identities and experiences to develop a truly horizontal relationship; mapped power hierarchies in their different professional contexts; mutually negotiated learning goals that disrupted Eurocentric curricula; co-taught lessons to K–12 students and novice teachers; and positioned K–12 students and novice teachers to be learners from each other, facilitating the learning of all in the process. This is the work required to attend to power hierarchies to ensure school and community stakeholders’ horizontal expertise shapes how novices become social justice educators (Zeichner, 2011).

Joint Enterprise of Professional and Political Aims

While CPM and SJTE both individually aim to impact learning and equity, a community of praxis sees these twin goals as integrated. The joint enterprise of the profession is infused with and enveloped within critical frames and political aims.

One starting point lies in how individuals’ teaching visions (Hammerness, 2001) manifest a justice-oriented, antiracist, anti-oppressive joint enterprise of the profession. Kavanagh (2017) states that teacher education must support novices in developing “a vision of high-quality teaching” that includes “content rich, rigorous, and meaningful to students” (professional aims) and “interrupting inequitable disparities between social groups” (political aims) (p. 166). In foundations and multicultural education courses, novices can craft their visions and investigate them in reference to both situated practice and structural forces. Methods instructors can orient learning to enact particular practices in relation to vision (Schiera, 2019b), considering equity goals alongside instructional goals (P. Grossman, 2018, p. 124). These examples illustrate how vision is also a conceptual tool in one’s repertoire, representing a broad framework for guiding planning, motivating growth, and organizing reflection (Hammerness, 2001). As co-participants in the community of praxis, teacher educators must name and live their justice-oriented visions, too. Their vision also guides their practice; it provides a model to novices of how vision guides practice; and it positions teacher educators as learns from novices’ horizontal expertise when reflecting on practice in relation to vision.

As Wenger (1998) writes, “the enterprise is joint not in that everybody believes the same thing or agrees with everything, but in that it is communally negotiated” (p. 78). CPM advocates stressed that program participants must “negotiate a specific vision for teaching and learning” and “how they will engage that vision pedagogically and programmatically” (P. Grossman, Hammerness, & McDonald, 2009, p. 286). In a community of praxis, mutual negotiation of joint enterprise must specifically insist that critical frames and political aims permeate the teaching vision and its pedagogical and programmatic implications (McDonald, 2007). This is essential because individual teacher educators will be responsible for incorporating the joint enterprise into their individual courses, as when one teacher educator explained how she employed practiced-based methods to advance the program’s “decolonizing framework . . . that aims to complexify our definition of high-quality teaching” and “equip novice teachers . . . to disrupt the status quo” (P. Grossman, 2018, p. 125). Participants in this mutual negotiation include teacher educators and program leaders, and also extend outward to include novices and school and community partners.

The possibility—even likelihood—of disagreement amid mutual negotiation represents one obvious tension in joint enterprise. While the absence of consensus on what social justice is represents a challenge (Zeichner, 2011), North’s (2008) mapping of three “spheres” can provide language for negotiation of the joint enterprise: between redistribution of access and resources, and recognition of marginalized identities, cultures, and groups; between micro- and macro-level processes of transformation; and between emphasis on knowledge or action in that transformation. Dialogue, from a critical perspective, across instructors and administrators in a program (McDonald, 2007) and across teacher educators and novices in course spaces can provide opportunities for individual reflection and collective deliberation on a socially just vision for teaching and teacher education.

Within joint enterprise, individual vision and mutual negotiation go hand-in-hand with individual and collective inquiry. Indeed, teaching vision functions as a measuring-stick for reflection on practice (Hammerness, 2001), and this process of inquiry happens both individually and within professional communities (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). From CPM scholarship, a “stance of inquiry” (D. L. Ball & Cohen, 1999) that emphasizes continuous reflection on practice toward improvement is a core practice for novices (TeachingWorks, 2018), part of the pedagogy of enactment (McDonald et al., 2013), and critical for teacher educators, too (P. Grossman, 2018). This “single-loop learning” (Argyris, 1991) reveals ways to improve practice to achieve the joint enterprise. CPM’s recommendations might be understood as providing a mechanism to better achieve SJTE’s aims. A stance of inquiry must be infused with, and enveloped within, an “inquiry stance,” which is “not simply instrumental in . . . figuring out how to get things done,” but also is “political in the sense of deliberating about what to get done, why to get it done, who decides, and whose interests are served” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 121). This represents “double-loop learning” (Argyris, 1991), reconsidering underlying assumptions—including revisiting and re-negotiating joint enterprise—to change beliefs and actions. Here, SJTE’s critiques of CPM come from an inquiry stance, stepping back to examine how any “uptake of the ‘practical’ alone . . . tends toward the preservation of the status quo” (Philip et al., 2019, p. 259). As mutual accountability is one additional feature of joint enterprise (Wenger, 1998), SJTE’s insistence that teacher education is inherently political represents an effort toward mutual accountability for the CPM and the entire field of teacher education.

What might a community of praxis mean for Sherwood? As a novice, learning to teach will always be a “little bit tougher in practice when you’re still gaining experience,” but Sherwood would develop a shared repertoire in which his “theoretical underpinning” was applied “in-the-moment” as critical conceptual tools, and he enact “tangible” “day-to-day” practices that manifest culturally responsive, justice-oriented praxis. He would grow via mutual engagement which honored his horizontal expertise—after all, he was a high school activist, studied critical theories in college, and mentored students in his city afterward—while learning from the expertise of a range of university, school, and community stakeholders. His “vision” of a “more equitable world” is shared, supported, and pushed by a community with a similar joint enterprise, involving negotiation, inquiry, and accountability along the way. A community of praxis might just support novices like Sherwood becoming “comfortable” in practice/praxis, infused with and enveloped within a “mindful[ness]” of justice.

Conclusion: On Paradigms and Unfinishedness

This article presents one conversation-starting sketch, beginning with how CPM and SJTE individually develop practice and identity, attending to their situated and structural critiques of each other, conceptualizing novice learning at the intersection of social and critical learning theories, and imagining teacher education as a community of praxis that supports the development of novice social justice educators. Given the absence of a “conceptual mechanism through which to aggregate knowledge” at the intersection of justice and practice (Kavanagh, 2017, p. 174), a community of praxis re-presents a familiar-yet-new way of conceptualizing teacher education research and practice. It provides one possible outline for prioritizing “the assets of communities of color, foster equity in and through education, and promote the preparation and development of justice-oriented teachers” (Souto-Manning, 2019, p. 4), transforming teacher education, and thus, society.

As a sketch and staring point, iterations must emerge, contractions explored, flaws identified, and alternatives proposed. However, some may believe that CPM and SJTE are inherently irreconcilable. They may fear that well-intentioned, equity-oriented approaches will reduce teaching to the technical, negating its professional and political dimensions (Giroux, 1988). Consider one contemporary teacher coaching organization, which aims to train “a great teacher in every classroom” especially for “our most vulnerable kids” by developing teachers to “execut[e] correctly every time, with very little thought or effort” (Jounce Partners, n.d.). Core practices, even justice-oriented ones, may not seem so different when they are “broken down into their many parts,” “taught and rehearsed separately,” and then “brought back together in the act of teaching” (Cochran-Smith et al., 2016, p. 72). Both may assume neutrality, perpetuating normative whiteness (Daniels & Varghese, 2019), and observability, measuring novices’ performance on these (and only these) practices. The resulting “terrors of performativity” might produce novices who maximize performance at the expense of their own “irrelevant” principles (S. J. Ball, 2003, p. 223), like justice.

These fears operate at the level of paradigm (Carr & Kemmis, 1986; Guba, 1990): they imagine ontological and epistemological beliefs about teaching irreconcilable with justice. Specifically, they reflect concerns of a natural scientific/positivist paradigm that views teaching as solely technical (Carr & Kemmis, 1986), which would deskill teachers, reproduce whiteness, and perpetuate inequities, as in SJTE’s structural critiques, and deprofessionalize teaching by extracting practice from complex situations, as in CPM’s situated critiques. Because paradigms function as a “basic set of beliefs” (Guba, 1990, p. 17), one either believes that core practices manifest (or may devolve into) a technical view of teaching, or they do not. The mutual negotiation and mutual accountability within a joint enterprise of professional and political aims must resist “reduc[ing] teaching practice to an atomized collection of discrete and unconnected tiny acts” (D. L. Ball & Forzani, 2009, p. 507). Research might re-search how to resist the pull to the technical, as in recent studies employing practice-based methods to develop novices’ responsiveness to students’ ideas and pedagogical reasoning in their choices (Kavanagh et al., 2019, 2020).

Mutual negotiation and accountability, in service of supporting justice-oriented novices developing practice/praxis that is complex, contextual, and political, requires continuous work. Social learning is a “process of becoming” (Lave & Wenger, 1991, p. 29). CPM advocates see teacher preparation as “works in progress” that are “never finished or ‘right’” and always responsive to “what it means to teach for a more just society” (P. Grossman, 2018, p. 153). Freire (1998) also uses “unfinishedness” to refer to the “permanent process of search” of critical praxis toward societal transformation (p. 56). SJTE advocates acknowledge that “communities of teacher educators” must “critically analyze and renew their teacher education programs on an ongoing basis” (Zeichner, 2009, p. 43). Becoming, works in progress, unfinishedness, renewal; individually, and in communities: preparing novice social justice educators like Sherwood is inextricably linked with the project of being and becoming justice-oriented teacher educators and programs, ourselves.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This paper would not be possible without Abby Reisman’s year-after-year support ranging from specific feedback on drafts to broad-strokes guidance across the process; Chenelle Boatswain, Nicole Mittenfelner Carl, Karen Clark, Rowan Machalow, Adam Santos, and Jada Warfield-Henry for detailed and extensive feedback; members of RAC and Summer RAC for their insight and advice at critical junctures; and Ed Brockenbrough, Janine Remillard, Sharon Ravitch, Cleveland Hayes, Kate Kinney, Melissa Donner, Shubha Sarode, and Taryn Ortlip for their continuous guidance and support.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Andrew J. Schiera

Notes

Author Biography

Andrew J. Schiera, EdD, is a senior instructional coach for social studies at the Urban Teaching Apprenticeship Program at the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, he co-instructs a social justice-oriented foundations course, as well as teaching curriculum, instruction, assessment course and a methods course. Prior to this role, he was a social studies teacher in Philadelphia public schools and continues to blur boundaries by co-teaching one course at a local high school and locating university coursework in public schools, positioning teachers and students as co-teachers and co-learners.

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