CHAPTER 13: Using Art and Community Investigation to Motivate Preservice Teachers’ Learning and Teaching of Social and Economic/Financial Justice Issues

Preparing preservice teachers (PSTs) who appreciate their roles as agents for social justice, in general, and economic/financial justice, in particular, represents a moral challenge. In an education climate that emphasizes mathematics and literacy, additional instructional strategies are needed to stimulate PST’s deeper awareness and reconciliation of social justice’s abstract and concrete elements.

In abstract, social justice represents a procedural conception that concerns the governance of personal interactions. There is a vision or ideal that largely eludes PSTs. While they grasp the theoretical conceptions argued in their preparation settings, such as Freire’s Critical Pedagogy, their daily commonsense experiences provide a background of disinformation that requires modification to challenge the generally accepted traditional “grammar” of schooling (Tyack & Tobin, 1994). This education structure employs hierarchical decision-making processes and perpetuates classist social patterns. Educators tend to shape student learning within this framework, rather than guiding student thinking that encourages social change. Teacher preparation programs motivate students by priming their interest in social change, but may limit these efforts to teaching of conceptions but not their applications.