“Different Spots in Their Learning Journey”: Striving to Develop Equity-Oriented Teacher Education Pedagogy

We are three teacher educators who position our pedagogy as inclusive, relational, contextual, and community-based. As a team, we engaged in a critical case study seeking to understand if and how we made space for social justice in our teaching. We looked across interview data from the 2021–22 academic year to examine how nine teacher candidates (TCs) experienced our efforts to respond to and address issues related to equity and diversity within our courses. In this chapter, we address the research question: Across our courses, how did our pedagogical approaches help or hinder our efforts to address equity, diversity, and inclusion? Our analysis identified several pedagogy-related themes. We found that our pedagogical efforts supported TCs by validating their ways of being and doing and connecting theory and practice. However, the impetus for this chapter came from a recognition that TCs often did not recognize attention to equity across coursework and felt ill-equipped to engage in equity-related classroom discussions. Additionally, TCs identified issues related to power, privilege, and voice in experiences with our instructional team. These more critical aspects from our findings point to three implications for teacher education.