ABSTRACT
Scholars note that teacher preparation is a critical part of addressing equity and justice in K-12 school settings (Goodwin & Darity, 2019;Kretchmar & Zeichner, 2016;Zeichner et al., 2016). However, despite efforts to make teacher education programs more equitable and diverse, many continue to underprepare preservice teachers to center social justice and meet the academic needs of culturally and racially diverse students (Mensah, 2021) and inequity and racism persist in teacher education (Kohli, 2022). Therefore, it remains crucial to investigate how preservice teachers in teacher education programs can gain experience in learning how to enact teaching that decenters whiteness, fosters criticality, fosters rigorous scientific learning, provides a context which values the epistemologies of diverse cultures, and supports students in working to change social inequities (Ladson-Billings, 2000;Trigos-Carrillo & Rogers, 2017).The need for social justice teacher education is perhaps even more critical for preservice teachers of STEM subjects, as justice-centered discourses are often absent from science and mathematics classrooms and teacher education contexts (Rodriguez, 2015). Science preservice teachers who make socially just science instruction the foundation of their classrooms adopt curriculum that is academically rigorous and relevant to students (Ladson-Billings, 2020), teach students about the historically racist and inequitable aspects of science practices and products (Morales-Doyle, 2017), and also teach that science is a critical tool in alleviating equity and social justice issues. In this study, I utilized a multiple case study design to examine a science teacher educator and a cohort of preservice secondary science teachers' understandings and enactments of justice-centered science pedagogy (Morales-Doyle, 2017). Justice-centered science pedagogy engages students in academically rigorous learning based on social and environmental justice issues. The three domains of this framework are antiracist and equitable science education, social justice science issues, and youth as transformative intellectuals. Using semi-structured interviews, observations, and content analysis of their course website, data were gathered over the course of the yearlong program to understand the teacher educator and preservice teachers' opportunities to learn about justice-centered science pedagogy, as well as the ways that they were actually taking this work up. Results from this study demonstrate that the pandemic created limitations to the enactment of justice-centered science pedagogy, and that while preservice teachers reported focusing on academics, eliciting student ideas, framing students as producers of knowledge and culture, and prioritized building positive relationships with students, few reported utilizing social justice science issues in their science lessons. Implications from this study offer that explicit instruction and professional learning communities in both reform-based and justice-centered science practices can prepare preservice teachers to more fully enact justice-centered science teaching. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)