Teacher Education with an Attitude: Preparing Teachers to Educate Working-Class Students in Their Collective Self-Interest

Using a social justice approach to teacher education, the contributing teacher educators address the need to prepare teachers to understand the way social class, race, and culture impact their efforts to educate working-class students. By helping prepare teachers to strengthen democracy through education, the contributors offer ways to help them develop “critical consciousness”—the will to address society’s injustices and inequities. Teachers who collaborate actively with their students, their families, and others, such as community and labor organizers, to challenge the economic and educational policies that keep the hierarchical structure in place, develop their own educational and political power alongside their students. These educators see schools as sites of struggle for democracy, and their students learn to direct their attitude toward outcomes that are in their collective self-interest.