“People Need to Speak Up”: Preservice Secondary Science Teachers’ Movement Toward a Justice-Centered Science Education

Abstract

ABSTRACT Teacher education programs must prepare their preservice science teachers to center social justice and to meet the academic needs of culturally, racially, and linguistically diverse students, as justice-centered discourses are traditionally absent from science classrooms yet integral to the teaching and learning of rich and relevant phenomena. In this study, we investigated a cohort of preservice secondary science teachers enrolled in a yearlong, post-baccalaureate teacher education program that attended to social justice. We conducted four interviews with each participant across their program and qualitatively analyzed their discussions of social justice ideas and teaching practices using three tenets of a justice-centered science pedagogy framework: enacting an antiracist and equitable science education, grounding instruction in social and environmental justice phenomena, and framing students as transformative intellectuals. We found preservice teacher participants discussed enacting antiracist and equitable science teaching by using a critical lens to identify inequities in classrooms and schools, and by attending to high academic expectations. Preservice teachers described focusing on socioscientific phenomena and local contexts as starting points for teaching about social justice science issues. Participants also shared their work toward framing students as transformative intellectuals by developing teacher-student relationships, building from students’ ideas, and discussing emerging ideas and efforts for student advocacy. Findings from this study underscore the need for more focused work on ways to prioritize the justice component of social justice science issues and the student advocacy component of students as transformative intellectuals so as to prepare preservice teachers to fully enact a socially just science education.