Cultivating Social Justice Teachers ─ How Teacher Educators Have Helped Students Overcome Cognitive Bottlenecks and Learn Critical Social Justice Concepts

Frustrated by the challenge of opening teacher education students to a genuine understanding of the social justice concepts vital for creating an equitable learning environment?

Do your students ever resist accepting that lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or queer people experience bias or oppression, or that their experiences even belong in a conversation about “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” or “social justice?”

“Few challenges in teacher preparation are as salient as teaching the central, troubling concepts of social justice that many profoundly resist learning. With theoretical nuance, pedagogical savvy, and highly relate-able examples and self-reflections, Cultivating Social Justice Teachers shows the possibilities for doing what often seems impossible. This book is one that no teacher educator—or any educator—can or should do without.”?Kevin Kumashiro, author of Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture

Recognizing these are common experiences for teacher educators, the contributors to this book present their struggles and achievements in developing approaches that have successfully guided students to complex understandings of such threshold concepts as White privilege, homophobia, and heteronormativity, overcoming the “bottlenecks” that impede progress toward bigger learning goals and understandings.