Dare Not to Compare

This chapter urges educators to think differently about identifying and serving young children in gifted education services. Embedded in the chapter are principles for creating equitable services for young children which include focusing on and respecting the strengths and talents that all young children bring to their early learning environments. Creating thinking environments maximizes opportunities to promote and strengthen intellectual engagement as well as social and emotional development. Described through the metaphor of a jazz musician, the author emphasizes the important roles that teachers play in implementing culturally responsive pedagogies that embrace teaching for social justice. The author concludes with a scenario that illustrates the principles for creating equitable services for all young students and reiterates the need to change conceptions of early childhood gifted education from comparative practices to strengths-based and appropriately challenging instruction for all.

Exploring the Experiences of Social Justice-Oriented Teachers in South Korea: A Comparative Analysis of Elementary and Secondary Teachers

Justice, equity, and diversity are more critical than ever in the global agenda in education. In the context of South Korea, this study aims to understand teachers’ practice of teaching for social justice, with a focus on how they respond to tensions and dilemmas encountered in different contexts of student development, student demographics, and school types. The process of data collection and analysis was guided by a narrative inquiry. Findings of this study demonstrate contextual constraints that the teachers face in their day-to-day practice of social justice teaching and instructional strategies that they crafted to deal with context-specific tensions and dilemmas. The discussion highlights politics of negotiation that has emerged from the teachers’ experiences of creating tactics for implementing social justice education in the given context.

Building community using experiential education with elementary preservice teachers in a social studies methodology course

There is urgency for teacher educators to instruct preservice teachers in the tenants of social justice education. This urgency is based upon the American demographic landscape and the responsibility of educators to teach for social justice. Preservice teachers report feeling inadequately prepared to educate for social justice when entering the classroom setting (citations from below). Feelings of incompetence in social justice teaching expressed among preservice teachers coupled with minimal examination in the literature of the effects of teacher education practices that aid in the readiness to teach for social justice provided the foundation for this study. This study examined experiential methodologies that can prepare preservice teachers to teach for social justice, particularly within a social studies context. The study focused on two research questions: (a) How do preservice elementary teachers in a social studies methods course conceptualize teaching for social justice within an experiential framework? (b) In what ways did preservice teachers operationalize teaching for social justice in the practicum classroom? Also examined was how the development of community in a social studies methodology course fostered the understanding of teaching for social justice. The findings highlight how preservice teachers were able to conceptualize building communities with experiential methods to teach for social justice and how doing so created an effective learning community. Although the preservice teachers valued the implementation of experiential methods to foster the teaching of social justice, difficulties were expressed in their incorporation of experiential methods in the practicum environment due to a lack of confidence, teaching competence, or collegial support.