Chapter 3: Welcoming What we Cannot Imagine: Sensory Curriculum in Teacher Education

In this chapter, I discuss some pedagogical implications for teacher education stemming from my recent dissertation (Airton, 2014) on social justice teacher education or SJTE. I define the work of SJTE as preparing teachers to welcome and foster social difference, but it is more commonly defined as preparing teachers to practice in a way that narrows demographic divides in education, including that between privileged students on the one hand and historically underserved students on the other (see Airton, 2014). The academic field of SJTE is largely American despite having considerable influence in Canada and around the world. It is a deeply historical and venerable field, with a recognizable pantheon (e.g., James Banks, Geneva Gay, Carl Grant, Sonia Nieto, Christine Sleeter, Anna-Maria Villegas) and canon (e.g., Grant & Secada’s 1990 foundational literature review on preparing teachers for diversity, or Villegas and Lucas’ 2002 book on preparing culturally relevant teachers). Crucially, SJTE is beset by perpetual anxiety about its difference from other approaches to teacher education. In other words, if teacher educators who prepare future teachers for “social justice practice” have been successful—if we have produced “social justice teachers”—how do we know? How will the outcome of this work differ from the outcome of teacher education approaches that do not do the things prioritized in the SJTE literature?