Appropriating the Discourse of Social Justice in Teacher Education [Hardcover]

Marta Baltodanos book, Appropriating the Discourse of Social Justice in Teacher Education, is a brave and provocative expos? and cautionary tale for teacher education programs that seek to embody the principles of critical pedagogy as a path to social justice. Baltodano traces the arc of a program as it moved from a superficial embrace of diversity to a much more profound integration of critical pedagogy, and finally to the dismantling of the programs transformational orientation, when college administrators repackaged the program according to principles of neoliberalism with a focus on accountability (standardized testing), using the phrase social justice as a marketing tool. While the moral of this story can be read as disempowering and depressing for those committed to changing the conservative nature of teacher education in the US, Baltodano nonetheless delivers a message of hope through her analysis of what went wrong and how the program could have prevailed as a long-term model of transformational teacher education. Her recommendations speak clearly to all teacher educators and program administrators.In this outstanding ethnographic study, Marta Baltodano exposes the political brigandism and educational outlawry of the political right in their deceptive hijacking of the discourse of social justice. But Baltodano does much more than this. With singular verve and lucid analysis, she offers teachers and administrators both a bold critique of how education reproduces the inequalities of the larger social order and a tactical strategy for fundamental educational transformation. Her critique is tightly argued, convincing, and gripping. And her vision brims with hope and possibility. I highly recommend this book.This book validates the claim that the process of reproduction of social inequalities in teacher education is not a perfect, static process, but on the contrary, the real seeds of transformation within teacher education departments are abundanl³x