Supporting Teachers’ Engagement in Pedagogies of Social Justice (STEPS): Collaborative project between five universities in Turkey and the USA

Sedat Akayoğlu akayoglu_s@ibu.edu.tr

Assoc. Prof. Dr., Bolu Abant İzzet Baysal University, Turquía

Babürhan Üzüm uzum@shsu.edu

Assoc. Prof. Dr., Sam Houston State University, Estados Unidos de América

Bedrettin Yazan bedrettin.yazan@utsa.edu

Assoc. Prof. Dr., The University of Texas at San Antonio, Estados Unidos de América

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivar 4.0 Internacional.

Our world changes every day linguistically, culturally, politically, and economically as a result of local events that may have global impacts. The demographic changes due to global movement of people inevitably affect how we educate students and prepare teachers for an ever- changing world. In recent years, we have witnessed the immigration of people with the hope of finding safer and better places to live, often escaping war-torn countries or looking for better economic opportunities. For example, at the time of writing this paper, many Ukrainian citizens were leaving their countries as a result of the Russian invasion in Ukraine that started in February 2022. Wars are not a problem of the past, and we will continue to live in a world in which people are forced to leave their homes. While there is surely room for improvement, the USA has traditionally been a country which receives immigrants and has plans and policies in place to address the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse populations. In comparison, Turkey has received exponentially more immigrants in the last decade compared to its history since its establishment. Therefore, the plans and policies to better serve diverse populations are still developing. According to the UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency) Global Report in 2019, Turkey hosted the highest number of refugees worldwide and the number of registered Syrian refugees in Turkey was over 3.6 million, only 1.7% of whom are living in temporary refugee camps. This means that 98.3% of the refugees are living in urban and rural areas of provinces all around the country. Among these people, 674,199 Syrian children were registered to receive education in public schools in the 2019-2020 academic year (MoNE, 2020), which has transformed the ethnolinguistic make-up of the children in schools. These are among the crucial factors that changed the dynamics of today’s classrooms: more access and need for technology in education and increased diversity of student populations across the world in general and Turkey in particular. Although there are many challenges that educators have encountered because of these changes, one of the most important ones can be named as promoting social justice in the classroom in order to better serve the linguistically and culturally diverse student populations. The uneven power relations minoritize and marginalize students based on their language, race, ethnicity, culture, and nation of origin. Therefore, teachers are expected to play a pivotal role in promoting more equitable education services and outcomes for all students with diverse backgrounds with such contextual parameters.

With globalization and recent waves of forced and voluntary migration throughout the world, classrooms are more diverse than ever before. Also, individuals, with access to required technologies, could communicate with the rest of the world regardless of their regions, and they could follow the recent news from anywhere they like. These changes brought some challenges into the classrooms, not only for teachers but also for students, administrators, and parents. One of the most crucial points in classrooms is about maintaining social justice among students. Therefore, attention to social justice issues has become an important component in the language classroom (Boylan, 2009; Carson, 2005; Cochran-Smith, 2009; Grant & Agosto, 2008; Kapustka et al., 2009; Mills, 2012; Mills & Ballantyne, 2010) and has received attention in virtual intercultural exchange projects (Akayoğlu et al., 2020; Üzüm et al., 2019, 2020, 2022; Yazan et al., 2021). However, social justice is not a new topic; it has always been an important issue in language classrooms (Lojacono, 2013).

Defining the concept of “social justice” is not an easy task (Cochran-Smith, 2009). Zajda et al. (2006) defined social justice as an “egalitarian society that is based on the principles of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognises the dignity of every human being” (p. 10). However, they also highlighted that this definition “may vary according to different definitions, perspectives, and social theories” (Zajda et al., 2006, p. 9). Nieto (2010) defined social justice as “a philosophy, an approach, and actions that embody treating all people with fairness, respect, dignity, and generosity” (p. 46). Despite the changing definitions, equality, liberty, and fraternity, agency for social change are expressed as common issues in social justice.

According to Nieto (2010), social justice is not just being kind and nice to others. She listed four components of social justice which she used as guidelines for language teachers who would like to create a learning environment to support agency for social justice. First of all, language teachers should examine their thoughts and attitudes towards those different from them. Then, they should encourage students to make comparisons between their own cultures and target cultures and question the ideas taken for granted. To achieve this, language teachers should challenge untruths and stereotypes because these lead to inequality and discrimination among people. Secondly, all students should be provided with the necessary resources. Language teachers should know the backgrounds, families, communities, and living conditions of their students and their abilities and provide authentic materials to develop them according to these. Thirdly, students’ talents and strengths should be used to enrich classrooms. Teachers should provide students with the understanding that cultural and social differences between individuals are a source of wealth and guide them on how to evaluate these differences. In this sense, language courses have the potential to provide vast and rich opportunities for teachers in terms of both subject and activity richness in gaining this understanding. Finally, a learning environment should be created to support critical thinking and agency for social change. Learners should be encouraged to take actions and be the voice of marginalized individuals. In teacher education, it could also be associated with some phrases like “teaching for diversity” (Boylan & Woolsey, 2015).

In the literature, the need for including social justice issues in teacher education has been widely discussed (Aronson et al., 2020; Cochran-Smith et al., 2009; Cochran-Smith & Fries, 2005; Milner, 2017; Pugach et al., 2019; Reyes et al., 2021; Zeichner, 2009). For example, Reyes et al. (2021) explained this need as “teacher educators work to prepare teachers for an array of contexts and demographic shifts” (p. 353). Moreover, teacher educators are often unaware of the contexts in which pre-service teachers will work. Milner (2017) also reported that early career and pre-service teachers felt unprepared for social justice work at schools. The importance of training pre-service teachers for their future teaching career is argued by Pugach et al. (2019, p. 206) as the world shifts towards “increasingly global societies facing persistent inequities”. It is quite obvious that there is an increasing need for integrating social justice issues in educational settings; however, it is not an effortless task for teachers. In previous studies, many researchers (Aronson et al., 2020; Ploof & Hochtritt, 2018; Pugach et al., 2019; Reyes et al., 2021) made suggestions on how to foster social justice for pre-service teachers and how to integrate these critical issues in teacher education curriculum. Aronson et al. (2020, p. 35) acknowledged that social justice should be “embedded across all courses within teacher preparation programs” rather than offering a single course aiming to foster social justice. During the implementation, they believed that teacher educators should be willing to reimagine the way they prepare pre-service teachers. Ploof and Hochtritt (2018) also highlighted the importance of introducing pre-service teachers to curriculum that fosters respect for human rights. Pugach et al. (2019) argued that the learning and growth process should start with understanding the identities of the students and suggested that teachers understand how they view and respond to their students regardless of their complexity. Last but not the least, Reyes et al. (2021) recommended co-teaching and collaboration, which they argued as one of the missing points in higher education. They stated that if we could build connections among the teacher educators, we could “better prepare to engage with our students in meaningful and transformative ways” (p. 363). This collective view of teaching and learning for teacher education was touched upon by Villegas and Lucas (2002). Aronson et al. (2020) worked on the curriculum in collaboration, and they stated that their study yielded positive results in terms of students’ social growth. These kinds of collaboration studies help teacher educators to critically examine the curriculum and revise it for diversity. In light of these studies, we also attempted to bring teachers and pre- service teachers from different contexts in an online platform and we expected the participants to critically examine their educational settings.

A small team of educators and writers working in Montgomery, Alabama, USA founded a group called Learning for Justice (https://www.learningforjustice.org) and are working with active teachers with “a deep belief that education is the best chance we have to build a better world, and a firm commitment to making sure that every student has the opportunity to learn and thrive.” They also worked on standards of social justice and proposed four pillars of social justice as identity, diversity, justice, and action. The first component, identity, is related to understanding one’s own identity. Individuals could develop positive identities, recognize traits of the dominant culture, their home culture, and other cultures, and understand how they negotiate their own identity in multiple spaces. First of all, individuals should have knowledge of identities. Second, diversity becomes an important concept. Individuals should be aware of the fact they are living in heterogeneous communities, and they should be aware of the similarities and differences among people, and as a result, they should be able to build empathy, respect, understanding, and connection with others. The third component, justice, is about being fair at the individual level, and individuals should be able to analyze the harmful impact of bias and injustice on the world, historically and today. The final component, action, emphasizes that individuals should take action in order to maintain social justice in all settings. They should be able to recognize their own responsibility to stand up to exclusion, prejudice, and injustice; they should be able to speak up with courage and respect when they or someone else has been hurt or wronged by bias. These are the four standards of social justice declared by this group of educators. In this study, the participants completed various tasks based on these components, and we attempted to determine whether our participants developed knowledge and skills on these standards at the end of the project. The tasks were designed to be parallel with these four components. The participants wrote about their own identities and their students’ identities at first. Then, we implemented another task in which they could notice the diversity in their classrooms; the participants were provided with some cases, and they were expected to empathize with a refugee student and, finally, they designed course materials and poster presentations as the culmination of the project, displaying the knowledge and skills they had developed throughout the collaboration.

While promoting social justice in classrooms, teachers have some concerns in addition to academic achievement, such as learning about other cultures, finding similarities and differences among different cultures, creating cultural awareness, and developing mutual understanding. These can only be achieved through communication. When it comes to communication, we could easily notice that most of the communication today is on Internet platforms and teachers are integrating information and communication tools (ICT) in their teaching contexts. The roles of students and teachers have changed dramatically from passive individuals to active agents in education. Teachers are expected to design and create materials using different Web 2.0 tools and learners have more chances to learn by doing and completing tasks. In other words, both teachers and learners are producers in this era. However, ICT integration is not limited to using technological tools to enrich classroom materials; these technologies are also used to facilitate communication and interaction between learners living in different regions of the world. As mentioned by Chun et al. (2016), “educators are increasingly under pressure to use technology to prepare students to live in a technologically interconnected, globalized world” (p. 65). With the increased interaction, teachers and learners can create digital spaces in which learners are able to interact and educate themselves. Unlike the past, it has become much easier and cheaper to gather people on Internet platforms and as such, one of the opportunities in today’s world is virtual exchange projects. These tools can be integrated for the purpose of promoting social justice for participants in international projects. As mentioned in the literature, “intercultural projects have the potential to enhance learners’ communication skills and to enrich their knowledge of another culture, as well as to provide a context for viewing one’s own culture from another group’s perspective” (Kern, 2006, p. 198). As educators, we could be involved in this kind of virtual exchange projects to focus on some critical issues, like social justice, from an intercultural perspective.

In the STEPS project, we designed and implemented a virtual intercultural exchange (a.k.a. telecollaboration) program for pre-service and in-service teachers to develop their intercultural communicative competence and prepare them to work with culturally and linguistically diverse student populations, especially from refugee backgrounds. Since this project was granted by the Regional English Language Office (RELO) of the US Embassy in Turkey, one of the goals was expected to foster Turkish and US ties and bring the individuals from both countries together in intercultural collaboration projects. Thus, this project involved teachers from Turkey and the USA and engaged them in collaborative intercultural learning through synchronous and asynchronous online participation to promote social justice. The project lasted for six weeks and was based on weekly tasks on the Edmodo platform, a learning management system (www.edmodo.com). While we were designing the project as a research team, we tried to focus on four pillars of social justice - identity, diversity, justice, and action- which were proposed by Learning for Justice group (https://www.learningforjustice.org). For example, in terms of identity, we asked participants to introduce themselves so that they could write and think about their own identities. Next, participants wrote posts about their students and the main goal was to create awareness about the diversity in the classroom. In another task, participants wrote a daily routine from the perspective of a refugee student and they discussed the injustices these students might encounter in their daily life. After the tasks were completed, they were shared with the RELO of the US Embassy. The RELO office also made some suggestions and recommendations and we finalized the tasks at least one month before the project implementation.

The purpose of this study is to identify whether/how a six-week intercultural collaboration project affected the pre-service and in-service teachers’ views of social justice. The data were collected in a project (STEPS Project) funded by the RELO of the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey. The implementation of the project and the weekly tasks are presented in Appendix A. In this study, a one group pre-test/post-test research design was used to evaluate the effectiveness of this project, and the following research question was posed: How does a six- week virtual exchange project influence in-service and pre-service teachers’ social justice orientation?

In this study, we explored whether the STEPS project had any statistically significant effect on the social justice perceptions of the participants, so a one group pre-test/post-test research design was adopted. For this purpose, the scores of the participants at the beginning of the study had to be compared to those obtained at the end of the project. When comparing the mean scores of pre-test and post-test surveys, the normality test was used to determine which statistical analysis needed to be conducted. At the end of the normality test, it was found that the significance level was 0.000, and this indicated that there was no normal distribution, as seen in Table 1.

Table 1
Test of normality

Since there was no normal distribution, the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test was used to determine whether the difference between the pre-test and post-test survey mean scores were statistically significant or not. A Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test revealed that the mean scores of the post-test survey were significantly higher after the implementation of the project (M=4.51, n=58) compared to before (M=4.31, n=58), z = -4.468, p= 0.000, with a large effect size, r= 0.59. More than 0.50 effect size is considered a large effect size (Cohen, 1988).

Table 2
Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Tests

According to the quantitative analysis, the project significantly influenced the perceptions of the participants on social justice in a positive manner. In other words, the project was found to be effective in the views of the participants in terms of social justice standards.

In order to better understand the analysis of the quantitative data, the reflection posts of the participants were analyzed as the qualitative data. As a result of the qualitative analysis, four themes emerged from the data: a) learning through sharing and working in collaboration, b) noticing common concerns with other educators, c) self-awareness and self-evaluation, and d) promise for taking action.

The first theme that emerged in the data was learning through sharing and working in collaboration. While designing the project, the activities were designed mostly based on sharing ideas, taking part in discussions, and producing materials in collaboration and individually. As a result, it is not surprising that almost all participants acknowledged that they learned through listening to other participants’ experiences, ideas, and suggestions. As a sample to this theme, one of the participants, who was an in-service teacher from the US, remarked:

Figure 1
An excerpt from the Edmodo post

In this quotation, the participant showed awareness of ongoing professional development, and she stated that she made use of the other participants’ responses to realize some of her biases and provide solutions to the problems she encountered in her classroom. This shows that in addition to pre-service teachers benefitting from the project, in-service teachers also learned from it.

The second theme was noticing common concerns with other educators. Before the project, some of the participants believed that they were the only ones who had difficulties in coping with the problems related to social justice in their classrooms. While sharing their experiences, ideas, and suggestions for the scenarios, they noticed that they were not alone, and these were common concerns of other educators in the project. They found some similarities in terms of social justice issues in their classrooms. For example, in-service teachers had some difficulties in using a common language with refugee students. The teachers did not know Arabic and the refugee students did not know Turkish or English, so they had some language difficulties during the communication. Another example was that the refugee students did not want to engage in the tasks in the classroom and teachers could not find a way to involve them in the activities. There were these kinds of problems for the in-service teachers in our study. They shared their experiences and recommendations with each other and noticed that this was not specific only for their classrooms. At the end of the project, one of the pre-service teachers wrote:

Figure 2
An excerpt from the Edmodo post

If educators do not share their experiences with their colleagues, they might encounter the same problems without knowing that they have the same concerns. In the project, they discussed the problems and social justice issues in their classrooms together and noticed that they were not alone.

The third theme was self-awareness and self-evaluation. This is one of the most important themes we found in this study. The pre-service and in-service teachers in the project found an opportunity to question their attitudes, biases, and opinions for the refugee students in their classrooms and refugees in the society. It was seen that the activities and weekly tasks created awareness for the participants, and they evaluated their perspectives with the help of other participants’ responses. One of the pre-service teachers acknowledged that:

Figure 3
An excerpt from the Edmodo post

This participant had a chance to rethink her behaviors, and in the end, she decided to change her perspectives towards injustice and discrimination in her future classroom and her daily life. We argue that these small steps might help reshape other people’s perspectives in the future.

As for the final theme, promise for taking action, it was found that the participants were determined to change their behaviors in the future. This was one of the main purposes of the project, which is to encourage teachers and future teachers to take action in their classrooms. Once again, most participants promised that they would take action for a better world. In the following quotations from two different participants in the project, we observe that the project had some meaningful impact on our participants’ perspectives of and engagement on social justice issues.

Figure 4
An excerpt from the Edmodo post

Figure 5
An excerpt from the Edmodo post

When compared with the social justice standards indicated by the Learning for Justice group, the qualitative analysis of the data showed that the participants in the project developed knowledge and skills in terms of identity, diversity, and action. They made self-evaluations and accomplished self-awareness. They found some similarities and differences among different individuals, and as the most important point, they decided to take action for maintaining social justice. As we can see in the quotations above, the participants completed the tasks, and gained an awareness that they could take action as teachers; they were the agents who could change the world.

This study was based on the reports of a project granted by the Regional English Language Office of the US Embassy in Turkey. The title of the project was Supporting Teachers’ Engagement in Pedagogies of Social Justice (STEPS). In this project, pre-service teachers from five different universities in Turkey and in-service teachers from Turkey and the US participated in activities on the Edmodo platform, which is a learning management system that allows participants to follow tasks asynchronously. The main objectives of the project were to increase intercultural, collaborative, professional learning activities between teachers from the USA and Turkey, to develop pre-service and in-service teachers’ intercultural communicative competence, to promote social justice informed pedagogies in K-12 schools through professional development and conversations between teachers from two countries, and to develop teachers as change agents and informed educators who attend to the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse students in their contexts. At the end of the study, we found that the project impacted the perspectives of the participants in a positive way. Furthermore, based on the qualitative analysis, four themes emerged from the data: a) learning through sharing and working in collaboration, b) noticing common concerns with other educators, c) self-awareness and self-evaluation, and d) promise for taking action.

Considering the roles of teachers in a globalized world, teachers are not only responsible for the academic achievement of their learners but also for preparing them as responsible individuals in society (Pantić & Florian, 2015). Therefore, social justice is among the issues that teachers should focus on, and teachers are the ones who could make a difference for their students.

In the literature, Nieto (2010) stated that teachers should examine their thoughts and attitudes towards others; and in this study, we found that the participants acknowledged that they evaluated themselves, and the project created an awareness for social justice issues. This issue is also related to the standards of the Learning for Justice research group. One of the social justice standards was identity, and we found the participants could find an opportunity to reflect on their attitudes and opinions on social justice. The most important component of the social justice standards and Nieto’s (2010) guidelines was taking action against discrimination, inequalities, prejudices, and stereotypes. Knowing the differences, being aware of the inequalities, and being kind to people are not enough for individuals (Nieto, 2010). Individuals are expected to take action for maintaining social justice. In this study, a theme related to this point emerged - promise for taking action. The participants stated that they would be more sensitive to social justice issues in their classrooms and future classrooms, which was the main goal of this project.

Considering the studies in the literature, it was clear that there is a need for critical pedagogy in teacher education and social justice is among the most important issues that should be touched upon in the curriculum. Milner (2017) reported that pre-service teachers were not prepared enough for social justice work. This was parallel with the pre-test results of the survey in this study. Before the implementation, the perceived social justice levels of pre-service teachers were lower than after the implementation. It was found that the weekly tasks used in this study contributed to the social justice perceptions of the pre-service teachers. Moreover, Pugach et al. (2019) mentioned that the inequities are increasing in this global world and one of the reasons for these inequalities is based on the wars that have resulted in increased immigration. In the context of our study, we noticed that pre-service teachers were aware of the fact that there were some students from other nations and this diversity made teaching more challenging and demanding. Aronson et al. (2020) highlighted the importance of a whole integration of this topic into the curriculum and they suggested reimagining the ways of preparing pre-service teachers. In our study, we integrated social justice related tasks as a project rather than using them as coursework for a single course. Teacher educators should understand that a single culture-related course might not be enough to promote social justice for pre-service teachers and that these issues need to be integrated into the whole teacher education curriculum. Additionally, Pugach et al. (2019) reported that pre-service teachers’ being aware of their own identities and teachers’ understanding of their students’ identities should be the starting point for learning and growth. In this study, we started the tasks with self- introductions of the participants. Then, we continued the tasks with a question “Who are your students?” which aimed at creating an awareness for the participants about their students and future students so that they could be prompted to look for the diversity in their classrooms. Finally, Lucas (2002) and Reyes et al. (2021) proposed co-teaching and collaboration to address the question: “How can we promote social justice?”. This was the main framework for our study. We, as the researchers, met from five different universities and designed a virtual exchange project and we invited participants from different regions of Turkey and the US. The participants worked in collaboration; they discussed critical topics; designed language teaching materials and shared their posters with other participants. As stated in the literature, these kinds of tasks are important and crucial for understanding each other.

In conclusion, we argue that the intercultural virtual exchange project had positively impacted the participants’ perceptions of and engagement on social justice issues in the classroom as evidenced in the statistically significant survey test results and participants’ self- reported/perceived growth throughout the project. In terms of implications, we argue that the number of virtual exchange projects can be increased so that teachers can find opportunities to meet their colleagues from any region of the world and find some similarities and differences between their contexts and the other teachers’ contexts. Teachers should also understand their potential to change the world. The stakeholders of teacher education, such as policy makers, teacher educators, in-service teachers and pre-service teachers should be involved in these projects in the future. We are aware that these critical issues in education can be negotiated through increased communication and the online platforms provide us many opportunities to meet and share our experiences, problems, and solutions to these problems. This kind of virtual intercultural collaborations will positively influence the pre-service and in-service teachers’ perspectives of social justice, who may otherwise not have the chance to meet like-minded colleagues across the world.