Learning Communities in Practice

"Chapter 3

Pre-Service Teachers and Sixth Graders Explore Social Justice as a Community of Inquiry (p. 31-32)

Monica Taylor and Gennifer Otinsky

Description of Our Learning Community

We are educators working in two different learning contexts: a university and middle school. Our chapter describes how we worked together to bring those two learning communities together. We share our efforts in developing a community of inquiry which explored issues of social justice. Monica is a teacher educator at a large public university in New Jersey. Gennifer is a sixth grade language arts/social studies teacher at a suburban middle school. Through our work in schools we have observed that, like many pre-service teachers across the country, our pre-service teachers have little first-hand knowledge and experience with issues of social justice and social justice teaching. Similarly, we have observed that middle schoolers do not view the world through a critical lens. In this chapter, we discuss the ways in which we developed a community of inquiry made up of pre-service teachers and sixth graders. Our goal for the community of inquiry was to provide a scaffolded social justice exploration for our students. This chapter explains the background and structure of our community of inquiry. Additionally we share the insights of our pre-service teachers from learning alongside middle schoolers, as well as our own reflections about establishing a community of inquiry.

Over the last six years, we have grown to know one another while our schools have established a professional development school (PDS) partnership. During the summer of our first year as a PDS, we participated in a two week Summer Leadership Associates program sponsored by the university’s agenda for Education in a Democracy, where we grappled with issues of democracy together. Engaging in difficult discussions around issues of social justice was scary, challenging, and at times gut-wrenching, and often having one another to talk to and reflect with made all of the difference. We realized how powerful our own small community of inquiry of two was and we wondered how we could replicate this type of experience for our students.

Building upon the tenets that have developed organically through the PDS partnership (NCATE, 2001) for the past six years, we have offered a series of pre-service teaching courses on-site at the middle school. The community built in these courses exemplifies three traits of a ""community of practice"" (Wenger, 1998, p. 73): ""1) mutual engagement, 2) a joint enterprise, and 3) a shared repertoire."" The courses are designed to provide pre-service teachers the opportunity to learn from and alongside middle schoolers.

Since our pre-service teachers, as well as sixth graders, are primarily white and from suburban communities, they have little to no experience with people who are different from them and take their positions of privilege for granted. They are unaccustomed to examining their world critically and view racism as isolated incidents rather than institutionalized or societal norms. We feel it is important that they develop a ""social justice lens"" because they have had mixed experiences with social justice and constructivist teaching in school, and view these paradigms as a significant leap of faith."