Elsevier

Teaching and Teacher Education

Volume 85, October 2019, Pages 58-68
Teaching and Teacher Education

Social justice beliefs and curricular freedom: Factors supporting critical composition pedagogy in a U.S. middle school

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.06.004Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Critical composition pedagogy (CCP) can be enacted in middle school settings.

  • Major supports for CCP include teacher belief/knowledge; curricular freedom; professional development; and years teaching.

  • Curricular freedom is produced by curricular resources, trust of teachers, and minimal focus on raising test scores.

  • Additional CCP supports are teacher biography/identity; teacher activism; and a progressive school culture.

Abstract

In this case study, we explore one social justice-oriented middle school teacher's instruction and the factors that influence her way of teaching. Findings indicate that this teacher's instructional practices represent all tenets of critical composition pedagogy (CCP) and that teacher belief and knowledge in social justice/critical pedagogy; curricular freedom; professional development; years of experience teaching; teacher biography/identity; teacher activism outside of school; and a progressive school culture are supports for CCP. However, curricular freedom is produced by many contextual factors, including available curricular/pedagogical resources, trust between teachers and administration, and the absence of pressure to increase test scores.

Section snippets

Defining urban

Although important for all, critical pedagogy is particularly important for youth in socially stratified countries, such as the United States. Across the United States, high concentrations of people of color live in poverty and the majority of economically disadvantaged students of color and students whose first language is not English attend U.S. urban schools (Milner & Lomotey, 2014). We employ Milner’s (2012) distinctions between urban intensive, urban emergent, and urban characteristic. The

Methods

Although our guiding questions, enumerated in the introduction, start with “what,” we sought to understand how Greta teaches and why she teaches the way she does. We employed a single-case study design (Yin, 2014) that was well-suited for analyzing the inherently complex process of teaching (Cochran-Smith, 2003). Yin (2014) presents a two-fold definition of case study as: 1) an empirical, in-depth inquiry into a complex, social phenomenon within a real-world context where “boundaries between

Findings

In our findings, we first describe Greta's instruction to examine to what extent her practices align with CCP tenets and illustrate what CCP looks like in a middle school. Second, we explore factors that may have enabled or impeded Greta in implementing CCP.

Discussion

Overall, Greta's instructional practices represent all five CCP tenets and demonstrate how CCP can be enacted in a middle school setting. Greta promoted problem-posing by choosing topics focused on social issues with imbalanced power relations, and supported dialogism by inviting students to explore diverse perspectives on various issues, discuss topics with one another in small groups, and engage in whole class discussions. One element we did not frequently observe was extended dialogue among

Implications for teacher education

Teacher educators, classroom teachers, and instructional coaches can contribute to increasing access to critical pedagogy through working with districts and schools to ensure that pacing guides, textbooks, and lesson plans are flexible and support rather than impede CCP. Two resources for developing criticality are Muhammad’s (2018) equity-based standards for literacy learning that integrate skills, knowledge, identity and criticality, and the CCP analytic tool offered in this study (Table 1).

Noble work

Returning to Greta's words, she claims, “Our work as educators could be noble in these present times,” specifying that this work requires re-education in our “thinking about race, class & access.” We believe that Greta is doing this noble work, in large part due to her own knowledge and beliefs about critical education. Yet City Charter has many affordances for CCP that may not be present at other urban, public schools, especially schools serving mostly Black and Brown students who have

Funding

This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation [201700071].

Acknowledgements

We want to express our sincere gratitude to our participants for allowing us access to their classrooms and their willingness to give the gifts of their time and thinking to this project.

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