Chapter 8: Promoting Sustainable Development in Study Abroad Programs: Focus on Social Justice in Honduras and Tanzania

Study abroad programs have the potential to provide preservice teachers with multicultural experiences and opportunities to develop the competencies and dispositions necessary to support the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, including empathy, global understanding, a critical perspective, and a social justice mindset. However, researchers have found that such learning and development are not inevitable. This study utilized a social justice framework with three dimensions—redistribution, recognition, and representation―to explore study abroad participants’ conceptualizations of social justice. The data were collected from 2, short-term, study abroad programs with distinctive instructors, curricula, activities, and geographic contexts; however, a collective rather than comparative case study approach was utilized. Findings indicated that the social justice framework provided a useful tool for analysis as participants were able to describe situations related to social justice as redistribution, but found articulating examples of issues related to power structures—social justice as recognition and representation—more challenging. Further investigation of the framework’s explicit and expanded use for both research and practice are discussed.