Lessons from a professional learning community: Navigating tensions while moving between theory and practice in teaching chemistry for social justice

Abstract

Maintaining a commitment to social justice teaching can be especially challenging when navigating the bureaucratic systems and ever-spiraling responsibilities of the education system. To better understand how social-justice-oriented educators navigate these tensions, this paper uses qualitative methods to investigate the social justice problems of practice identified by five chemistry teachers in a year-long professional learning community. By analyzing the challenges described in their problem-posing segments, I identify seven major themes that represent key sources of tension and possibility as teachers move from theory to practice in teaching chemistry for social justice. These findings indicate that the practical considerations of day-to-day teaching practice create the most salient tensions when moving from theoretical ideas of social justice to a deeply integrated enactment of social justice teaching. Through a deeper analysis of two cases, I demonstrate the effects of discussing problems of practice with a group of teachers who had similar disciplinary backgrounds and ideological stances. These discussions shifted the tensions from potential barriers to areas of possibility in which they were able to enact new ideas within the confines of their context. Taken together, these findings indicate that developing social justice educators requires attention to navigating the practical details of teaching from a social justice lens.