Educating teachers for social justice in intercultural context

Many scholars agree that teacher education is a key question to embody a social justice agenda, and in particular is crucial for preparing teachers working with diverse students. According to Gramsci, teachers should be viewed as transformative intellectuals, which means that an educator’s profile cannot be reduced to normative codes, defining it in purely instrumental or technical terms. Training teachers as public committed intellectuals involves not only knowledge, skills and competences, but most passion, engagement and ethical commitment. Teacher education for social justice is not about methods. Therefore, the more effective education strategies for educators are those aiming at reaching the deepest level of subjectivity and empowering practitioners with the purpose of co-constructing an ethos, not simply modifying external conditions or ‘depositing’ superficial information. The efficacy of intercultural teacher education program depends on the possibility of sharing a public ethos within a learning community. An ethos is an ethical competence which encompasses both knowledge and competence, it is rooted in inner worldviews and it rises from the innermost recesses of identity, always interrelated with experiences and ethical choices. An ethos makes sense of skills, competence, and knowledge required to work in low-income, multicultural disadvantaged areas and has an impact on deep domains of the personality of subjects in training. Some examples of teacher education according to this perspective will be given. In particular, since it is impossible to provide technical receipts, or pedagogical techniques for educating teacher as public intellectuals within a social justice paradigm, I will offer a couple of examples of it, taken from my research and practice on teacher education both in the US and in Italy. In particular I will refer to: 1. a critical ethnographic study on teacher education program in Southern California 2. a large teacher training program for teachers and principals in Trentino on intercultural education, based on the results of the previous research. The presentation fits the strand 7 in particular addressing the topic of equity within a democratic society and the role of (public) school in it and is aimed at academics, teacher educators as well as teachers.