Considering Disability? A Review of Arts-Based Social Justice Pedagogies in Teacher Education

Abstract

As multiply marginalized students with disabilities spend more time in general education settings, it is increasingly vital that all new PreK- 12 teachers enter their classrooms prepared to teach all students in equitable, socially just ways. Because of its capacity to cultivate dispositions common to socially just educators, including critical thinking, creativity, empathy, and reflection, arts-based pedagogy has emerged as a promising approach for meaningfully addressing these issues in teacher education. To understand the impact of this approach as it is increasingly implemented, a systematic review of the literature yielded 16 studies, published between 2003 and 2019, focusing on arts-based social justice pedagogies in teacher education Studies identified similar positive outcomes for preservice teachers—critical reflection leading to personal transformation, feelings of self-efficacy and agency, authentic empathy practice and perspective-taking, and community building between participants—but varied widely in underlying conceptions of social justice, with none including a critical stance on disability in their definitions. Arts-based pedagogical approaches to teaching social justice are promising, but future work must begin from even stronger critical perspectives that engage directly with disability as a dimension of students’ intersectional identities, if we are to prepare preservice teachers to work towards social justice in their future classrooms.