The place for social justice imperatives in pre-service teacher education

Abstract

This paper presents a narrative account of the difficulties of incorporating the practices of social justice and critical perspectives into a pre-service teacher education programme. Drawing on Van Maanen’s (1988) ethnographic reportage, we offer several “tales” to represent our decade-long involvement in UNESCO’s Associated Schools Project. Van Maanen’s (1988) “tales” are forms of cultural representation, derived from concerns about the inadequacy of some forms of writing to express social meanings. Van Maanen (1988) suggests that confessional, realist, impressionist, or critical tales more adequately represent social reality expressed through a researcher’s perspective. Using data from our diary entries, this paper weaves together the various tales of our participation as we conclude how the notion of social action is applied in our teaching.