Learning to Teach for Social Justice

In this skillfully crafted and engaging book, a group of student teachers—led by Linda Darling-Hammond—share their candid questions, concerns, dilemmas, and lessons learned about how to teach for social justice and social change. This text provides powerful examples of how Darling-Hammond and her students thoughtfully integrated diversity within a teacher education program—an excellent model for educators who are seeking ways to transform their teacher education programs to better prepare teachers to work effectively in multicultural classrooms.

The honest reflections, case studies, lessons, and projects described offer valuable tools to help teachers:

• Engage in productive dialogues about both the inequities and the possibilities for social reconstruction within the communities where they will be teaching.
• Apply the concepts they are learning in a university classroom to teaching for social justice in their own classrooms.
• Find ways to use their insights about diversity to intervene on behalf of victimized and marginalized students.

Linda Darling-Hammond is Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education at Stanford University and faculty sponsor for the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP). Jennifer French teaches English and social studies at Tennyson High School in Hayward, California. Silvia Paloma Garcia-Lopez is a social studies teacher at Santa Clara High School in Santa Clara, California.

“This book is a singular contribution to the multicultural education literature because it is one of the first publications to describe the voices, perspectives, and experiences of students learning to become teachers in diverse classrooms.”
—From the Series Foreword by James A. Banks