More Than Formalized Structures: Toward Shared Understanding and a Comprehensive Mission of Promoting Social Justice in Professional Development Schools

Critiques of traditional teacher preparation structures often problematize the “theory-practice” gap, the perceived—and often real—disconnect between university-based courses (and the professors who teach these) and the clinical realities preservice teachers encounter during their preparation (and the experiences of their school-based mentors). Literacy and teacher education scholars and practitioners have long attempted to bridge this divide by crafting boundary-spanning, cross-institutional roles and activities. Additional, perhaps more intentional efforts have occurred via professional development school structures and more recently through “practice-based” approaches, “pedagogies of enactment,” and “critical, project-based” clinical experiences. These efforts rely on the concept of third space activity, and all of these models suggest that such hybrid capacities must be further developed if they are to become sustainable teacher education structures. The concept of third space suggests that human beings appeal to multiple, sometimes conflicting discourses to make sense of phenomena. This chapter reports on a national study of literacy teacher educators functioning in these border-crossing roles, revealing the nature of their activities and documenting the supports and constraints they encounter in these positions. Such examinations are needed to determine how university-based literacy and teacher educators might best bridge literacy and English education courses and clinical teacher preparation placements, engage in meaningful scholarship that serves all teacher education constituents, prepare teacher candidates to serve increasingly diverse students in a changing educational landscape, and address the “existential crisis” of the teacher education profession.

Professional development school (PDS) partnerships have a legacy of viewing education as a moral endeavor that ensures all learners have equitable access to knowledge; sustain democracy; work toward addressing injustices by eliminating class and social barriers; and support simultaneous renewal and parity of all partners (Goodlad, 1994; Holmes Group, 1990; National Network for Educational Renewal [NNER], 1990). There is a need to more thoroughly understand the types of learning and possibilities that occur in large complex systems like PDSs, which are dialectically influencing and influenced by social, historical, political, and cultural practices and PDS partnerships. Thus, this chapter empirically and systematically studies a transformation within a PDS partnership to center social justice. Informed by Sociocultural Theory and Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) (Vygotsky, 1978, 1986; Leont’ev, 1978, 1981; Engeström, 2015), this study examines the ways in which the PDS activity system mediates teacher candidates’ development of socially just teaching. The findings revealed constraints on the teacher candidates’ development as socially just teachers: A lack of shared understanding of social justice and the separation of social justice from other learning goals. Implications speak to the powerful role that practitioner inquiry can have when coupled with social justice, and the fruitfulness of CHAT as both a research methodology and a theoretical and analytical framework to theorize the structures and complex webs of interaction in PDS partnerships.