Possibilities and Challenges of Practicing English Language Teacher Education for Social Justice in Turkey

Date

2022-06-01

Author

Tezgiden Cakcak, Sebahat Yasemin

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Despite ongoing actions of advocates of social justice in different walks of life, even the very acts of imagining and/or voicing a socially just world and of (teacher) education may sound utopian, naive and/or impossible to some especially in our current historical time in a country like Turkey hit by political and economic crisis, rising inflation and unemployment, and authoritarianism, implying the possible reason(s) behind the marginalization of critical teacher education practices and scholarship in the country. Even though critical (teacher) education is on the verge of becoming mainstream in the Western academia (Foley, Morris, Gounari & Agostine-Wilson, 2015, Hawkins, 2011, Zeichner, 2009), it is mostly marginalized in countries like Turkey with ongoing calls for embracing it (Abednia, 2012, Güven, 2008, Okçabol, 2012, Tezgiden-Cakcak, 2019). Invisibility of non-Western social justice teacher educators’ efforts and the absence of their voices both in national and global academia reproduces the marginalized status of such endeavors and educators culminating in beliefs as to the infeasibility of including social justice issues in our praxis. This self-study will hopefully contribute to this gap in critical teacher education scholarship by voicing the context-specific issues and challenges of English language teacher education for social justice in Turkey. In this paper, I question the possibility and scope of social justice teacher education in a context where teacher candidates are having a hard time seeing a future for themselves and where teacher educators operate under the restrictions of academic capitalism, decreased autonomy and the ongoing pressures to adopt a neutral stance. A grave sense of anxiety, desperation, hopelessness is spreading in the population, particularly among the young. Student-teachers pursuing undergraduate degrees in English language teacher education express reluctance to assuming teaching positions due to the low prestige, low salaries, and ever-increasing workload of both public and private school teachers in the country. They try to survive the financial, physical and emotional difficulties of student life. Given the frustration of both student teachers and teacher educators, it becomes even more important to raise critical consciousness about the reasons behind broader political, economic and social constraints threatening our well-being and to foreground our agentive potential to struggle against the unjust conditions. In this self-study, I share my own critical reflections and pedagogical actions as an English language teacher educator working at a public university in Turkey to showcase the possibility of opening counter-hegemonic spaces in English language teacher education for social justice. Based on my experiential knowledge, I also acknowledge the issues, challenges, and risks of the activity itself. This study on my own teacher education practices will hopefully help us teacher educators to think individually and collectively on enlarging the space for critical English language teacher education under difficult conditions.

Subject Keywords

English language teacher education for social justice, Critical teacher education, Transformative action

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/107680

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar