Making Justice Fundamental: Teacher Educators’ Journey to Reimagine Accountability

ABSTRACT This article describes the journey of two teacher educators to reconstruct our knowledge about grading and shift justice from ornamental to fundamental in our teacher preparation methods courses. This work attempts to answer the call from scholars, who have been advocating for educators to be more prepared to meet the needs of a diverse student population. Despite these long-standing calls from scholars, teacher education programs, including the use of traditional grading methods, continue to uphold whiteness. We utilize a self-study methodology to document how we reimagined our grading practices in teacher preparation methods courses from perpetuating whiteness to centering justice. Drawing on principles of liberatory education, we designed a new accountability measure to invoke action and hold pre-service teachers accountable for growth toward anti-oppressive dispositions by taking ownership of their learning through the documentation of their learning and self-assessment of their continued progress. We discuss shifts in our own pedagogy, practices, and beliefs as a result. We also analyze the tensions of engaging in our efforts to adopt an alternative, justice-oriented grading method as white teacher educators and in teacher preparation classrooms that are predominately white, middle-class female pre-service teachers.