Parallel Practices: Social Justice-Focused Teacher Education and the Elementary School Classroom

In Parallel Practices, a social justice-focused elementary teacher educator narrates her own experience with the rationale for selected lessons from critical literacy, equity-oriented multiculturalism, and pedagogical practice courses. She examines the «parallel practice» implications of her own curriculum with graduate students for the work her students will do with children. Regenspan situates her practices in a unique interpretation of John Dewey's thinking - one that suggests a standpoint for both her own curriculum-making and that of her students in opposition to the division of labor into thinking work and doing work. Using Dewey's later thinking, which calls for the integration of «mind-body in wholeness of operation, » Regenspan insists that the work of social justice-focused education is equally political and spiritual.