Shira Eve Epstein

From Ideal to Practice and Back Again: Beginning Teachers Teaching for Social Justice:

The five authors of this article designed a multicase study to follow recent graduates of an elementary preservice teacher education program into their beginning teaching placements and explore the ways in which they enacted social justice curricula. The authors highlight the stories of three beginning teachers, honoring the plurality of their conceptions of social justice teaching and the resiliency they exhibited in translating social justice ideals into viable pedagogy. They also discuss the struggles the teachers faced when enacting social justice curricula and the tenuous connection they perceived between their conceptions and their practices. The authors emphasize that such struggles are inevitable and end the article with recommendations for ways in which teacher educators can prepare beginning teachers for the uncertain journey of teaching for social justice.

An Inescapable Network of Mutuality: Building Relationships of Solidarity in a First Grade Classroom.

This case study of a first grade teacher enacting a social action curriculum is based on the understanding that schools can be sites where even young children can work toward the common good. This paper examines the way a first grade teacher (Paula Rogovin) and her students built solidarity with a community member and in turn adopted a new social concern as their own. We identify, detail, and analyze the building of ties of solidarity as a practice enacted within a social action curriculum.

Getting personal? Student talk about racism

This research explores student responses to Beyond Today, an after school program that brings youth together from diverse urban neighborhoods to form a multiracial community. Through the enacted curriculum, Beyond Today facilitators scaffold opportunities for students to study race and racial discrimination in historical and contemporary contexts. In this article, we examine how the students personally related to examples of racism and inequity. Our work is based on the premise that if individuals are to develop the impetus to be change makers in society, they should build personal connections to past and present day examples of injustice. During the year of this research, some lessons provided a context for students to describe personal connections to socio-historical trends of racism, while the observation of other lessons helped us investigate the educational practices that may dampen such participation. We explore three lessons that portray students’ comparative responses. We conclude with recommendations for educators who wish to promote students’ stories about inequity in their own teaching contexts and craft visions of how to facilitate conversations with youth about racism.

Taking responsibility: The multiple and shifting positions of social justice educators

In this article, we present a qualitative multi-case study of three beginning elementary teachers working in New York City and describe the distinct ways in which each articulates her responsibility to teach a social justice-oriented education. We employ positioning theory to examine how teachers narrate their relationship to the concept of social justice and how this relates to the ways in which they identify themselves and others as capable and qualified to engage in such work. We find that responsibility to teach for social justice is often delegated based on a perception of experiences with injustice and wonder how this rigid outlook can be made more malleable and inclusive. We draw from the work of Sharon Todd to imagine how individuals, situated within unique and divergent circumstances, can all be framed as integral members in the making of a more just world. This article ends with suggestions for how teachers and teacher educators can infuse such theories into reflective, autoethnographic practices.

Supporting Global Awareness: A Proposal for Youth Civic Engagement

While students’ civic efforts are often focused on local social problems, this article highlights various ways a locally oriented civic project can be “stretched” to build students’ global awareness. I present a series of recommendations for educators on how to foster the global civic mindedness of youth. Furthermore, I illustrate the application of these recommendations through a discussion of a school-based civic engagement project focused on a school’s inadequate sex education curriculum. I offer this example to inspire teacher thinking about the enactment of global civic projects.