Two Sides of the Same Coin: Preservice Teachers’ Dispositions Towards Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice Concerns in Rural and Urban Teacher Education Contexts

Abstract

This paper describes preservice teachers’ (PTs) dispositions toward diversity, social justice education, and critical pedagogy (CP). PTs were enrolled in elementary Literacy Methods courses in two geographic locations, one rural and the other urban. We employed CP (Darder et al. in Critical pedagogy: an introduction. In: Darder A, Baltodano MP, Torres RD (eds) The critical pedagogy reader. Routledge, New York, NY, pp 1–20, 2009; Giroux in Theory and resistance in education: a pedagogy for the opposition. Bergin and Garvey, South Hadley, MA, 1983) and concepts such as technical and emancipatory knowledge (Habermas in Knowledge and human interests. Heinemann, London, 1972), field (setting, Bourdieu in The forms of capital. In: Richardson JG (ed) Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education. Greenwood, New York, NY, pp 241–258, 1986), and a field-related demographic and epistemological divide (Han in Challenges in implementing critical literacy practices in remote rural teacher education programs. In: Yoon B, Sharif R (eds) Critical literacy practice: applications of critical theory in diverse settings. Springer, New York, NY, 2015) to analyze the qualitative data from both contexts. Findings showed that rural and urban PTs displayed drastically different dispositions to CP and social justice curricula. This study contributes to the CP research and research on PTs’ dispositions in significant ways and implicates issues related to all (rural and urban) teacher educators and teacher education programs as they prepare our teachers, and therefore, our future.