Focus on ELT Journal

Special Issue, 4(1), 2022

ISSN: 2687-5381

🖂Corresponding Author: akayoglu_s@ibu.edu.tr

Supporting Teachers’ Engagement in Pedagogies of Social Justice (STEPS):

A Collaborative Project between Five Universities in Turkey and the USA

aSedat Akayoğlu bBabürhan Üzüm and cBedrettin Yazan

aAssoc. Prof. Dr., Bolu Abant İzzet Baysal University, Turkey, akayoglu_s@ibu.edu.tr
bAssoc. Prof. Dr., Sam Houston State University, USA, uzum@shsu.edu

cAssoc. Prof. Dr., The University of Texas at San Antonio, USA, bedrettin.yazan@utsa.edu

APA Citation: Akayoğlu, S., Üzüm, B., & Yazan, B. (2022). Supporting teachers’ engagement in pedagogies of

social justice (STEPS): A collaborative project between five universities in Turkey and the USA.

Focus on ELT Journal, 4(1), 7-27. https://doi.org/10.14744/felt.2022.4.1.2

ABSTRACT

This paper reports on the findings of a research project titled Supporting Teachers’

Engagement in Pedagogies of Social Justice (STEPS), in which pre-service and in-

service teachers from five universities in Turkey and the USA participated in a six-

week-long virtual exchange. The main objective of the study was to promote social

justice-informed pedagogies in K-12 schools through professional development and

intercultural discussions between pre-service and in-service teachers from two

countries. The study addressed the following research question: How does a six-

week virtual exchange project influence in-service and pre-service teachers’ social

justice orientation? For this purpose, we collected quantitative data through a

questionnaire based on social justice standards developed by a group of researchers

called “Learning for Justice”. Participants completed this questionnaire before and

after their participation in the project. Additionally, we asked the participants to

write a reflection post at the end of the project regarding its impact, and we treated

their posts as qualitative data. The findings indicated that the mean scores of the

post-test results were significantly higher than those of the pre-test results, which

indicated that participants’ engagement in the project changed their perspectives in

a positive way. Furthermore, analyzing the qualitative data, we found four recurring

themes: a) learning through sharing and working in collaboration, b) noticing

common concerns with other educators, c) self-awareness and self-evaluation, and

d) promise for taking action.

Keywords
teaching diverse learners of
English,

social justice pedagogy,

virtual intercultural
exchange,

teacher education.

Article History
Received : 15.02.2022

Revised : 19.03.2022
Accepted : 21.03.2022

Published : 04.04.2022

Type
Research Article

Introduction

Our world changes every day linguistically, culturally, politically, and economically as a result

of local events that may have global impacts. The demographic changes due to global

movement of people inevitably affect how we educate students and prepare teachers for an ever-

changing world. In recent years, we have witnessed the immigration of people with the hope of

finding safer and better places to live, often escaping war-torn countries or looking for better

economic opportunities. For example, at the time of writing this paper, many Ukrainian citizens

were leaving their countries as a result of the Russian invasion in Ukraine that started in

mailto:akayoglu_s@ibu.edu.tr
mailto:uzum@shsu.edu
mailto:bedrettin.yazan@utsa.edu
https://doi.org/10.14744/felt.2022.4.1.2
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9865-2546
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4511-7985
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1888-1120

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February 2022. Wars are not a problem of the past, and we will continue to live in a world in

which people are forced to leave their homes. While there is surely room for improvement, the

USA has traditionally been a country which receives immigrants and has plans and policies in

place to address the needs of linguistically and culturally diverse populations. In comparison,

Turkey has received exponentially more immigrants in the last decade compared to its history

since its establishment. Therefore, the plans and policies to better serve diverse populations are

still developing. According to the UNHCR (The UN Refugee Agency) Global Report in 2019,

Turkey hosted the highest number of refugees worldwide and the number of registered Syrian

refugees in Turkey was over 3.6 million, only 1.7% of whom are living in temporary refugee

camps. This means that 98.3% of the refugees are living in urban and rural areas of provinces

all around the country. Among these people, 674,199 Syrian children were registered to receive

education in public schools in the 2019-2020 academic year (MoNE, 2020), which has

transformed the ethnolinguistic make-up of the children in schools. These are among the crucial

factors that changed the dynamics of today’s classrooms: more access and need for technology

in education and increased diversity of student populations across the world in general and

Turkey in particular. Although there are many challenges that educators have encountered

because of these changes, one of the most important ones can be named as promoting social

justice in the classroom in order to better serve the linguistically and culturally diverse student

populations. The uneven power relations minoritize and marginalize students based on their

language, race, ethnicity, culture, and nation of origin. Therefore, teachers are expected to play

a pivotal role in promoting more equitable education services and outcomes for all students

with diverse backgrounds with such contextual parameters.

Social Justice in Language Classrooms

With globalization and recent waves of forced and voluntary migration throughout the world,

classrooms are more diverse than ever before. Also, individuals, with access to required

technologies, could communicate with the rest of the world regardless of their regions, and they

could follow the recent news from anywhere they like. These changes brought some challenges

into the classrooms, not only for teachers but also for students, administrators, and parents. One

of the most crucial points in classrooms is about maintaining social justice among students.

Therefore, attention to social justice issues has become an important component in the language

classroom (Boylan, 2009; Carson, 2005; Cochran-Smith, 2009; Grant & Agosto, 2008;

Kapustka et al., 2009; Mills, 2012; Mills & Ballantyne, 2010) and has received attention in

virtual intercultural exchange projects (Akayoğlu et al., 2020; Üzüm et al., 2019, 2020, 2022;

Yazan et al., 2021). However, social justice is not a new topic; it has always been an important

issue in language classrooms (Lojacono, 2013).

Defining the concept of “social justice” is not an easy task (Cochran-Smith, 2009).

Zajda et al. (2006) defined social justice as an “egalitarian society that is based on the principles

of equality and solidarity, that understands and values human rights, and that recognises the

dignity of every human being” (p. 10). However, they also highlighted that this definition “may

vary according to different definitions, perspectives, and social theories” (Zajda et al., 2006, p.

9). Nieto (2010) defined social justice as “a philosophy, an approach, and actions that embody

treating all people with fairness, respect, dignity, and generosity” (p. 46). Despite the changing

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definitions, equality, liberty, and fraternity, agency for social change are expressed as common

issues in social justice.

According to Nieto (2010), social justice is not just being kind and nice to others. She

listed four components of social justice which she used as guidelines for language teachers who

would like to create a learning environment to support agency for social justice. First of all,

language teachers should examine their thoughts and attitudes towards those different from

them. Then, they should encourage students to make comparisons between their own cultures

and target cultures and question the ideas taken for granted. To achieve this, language teachers

should challenge untruths and stereotypes because these lead to inequality and discrimination

among people. Secondly, all students should be provided with the necessary resources.

Language teachers should know the backgrounds, families, communities, and living conditions

of their students and their abilities and provide authentic materials to develop them according

to these. Thirdly, students’ talents and strengths should be used to enrich classrooms. Teachers

should provide students with the understanding that cultural and social differences between

individuals are a source of wealth and guide them on how to evaluate these differences. In this

sense, language courses have the potential to provide vast and rich opportunities for teachers in

terms of both subject and activity richness in gaining this understanding. Finally, a learning

environment should be created to support critical thinking and agency for social change.

Learners should be encouraged to take actions and be the voice of marginalized individuals. In

teacher education, it could also be associated with some phrases like “teaching for diversity”

(Boylan & Woolsey, 2015).

In the literature, the need for including social justice issues in teacher education has

been widely discussed (Aronson et al., 2020; Cochran-Smith et al., 2009; Cochran-Smith &

Fries, 2005; Milner, 2017; Pugach et al., 2019; Reyes et al., 2021; Zeichner, 2009). For

example, Reyes et al. (2021) explained this need as “teacher educators work to prepare teachers

for an array of contexts and demographic shifts” (p. 353). Moreover, teacher educators are often

unaware of the contexts in which pre-service teachers will work. Milner (2017) also reported

that early career and pre-service teachers felt unprepared for social justice work at schools. The

importance of training pre-service teachers for their future teaching career is argued by Pugach

et al. (2019, p. 206) as the world shifts towards “increasingly global societies facing persistent

inequities”. It is quite obvious that there is an increasing need for integrating social justice issues

in educational settings; however, it is not an effortless task for teachers. In previous studies,

many researchers (Aronson et al., 2020; Ploof & Hochtritt, 2018; Pugach et al., 2019; Reyes et

al., 2021) made suggestions on how to foster social justice for pre-service teachers and how to

integrate these critical issues in teacher education curriculum. Aronson et al. (2020, p. 35)

acknowledged that social justice should be “embedded across all courses within teacher

preparation programs” rather than offering a single course aiming to foster social justice. During

the implementation, they believed that teacher educators should be willing to reimagine the way

they prepare pre-service teachers. Ploof and Hochtritt (2018) also highlighted the importance

of introducing pre-service teachers to curriculum that fosters respect for human rights. Pugach

et al. (2019) argued that the learning and growth process should start with understanding the

identities of the students and suggested that teachers understand how they view and respond to

their students regardless of their complexity. Last but not the least, Reyes et al. (2021)

recommended co-teaching and collaboration, which they argued as one of the missing points in

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higher education. They stated that if we could build connections among the teacher educators,

we could “better prepare to engage with our students in meaningful and transformative ways”

(p. 363). This collective view of teaching and learning for teacher education was touched upon

by Villegas and Lucas (2002). Aronson et al. (2020) worked on the curriculum in collaboration,

and they stated that their study yielded positive results in terms of students’ social growth. These

kinds of collaboration studies help teacher educators to critically examine the curriculum and

revise it for diversity. In light of these studies, we also attempted to bring teachers and pre-

service teachers from different contexts in an online platform and we expected the participants

to critically examine their educational settings.

A small team of educators and writers working in Montgomery, Alabama, USA founded

a group called Learning for Justice (https://www.learningforjustice.org) and are working with

active teachers with “a deep belief that education is the best chance we have to build a better

world, and a firm commitment to making sure that every student has the opportunity to learn

and thrive.” They also worked on standards of social justice and proposed four pillars of social

justice as identity, diversity, justice, and action. The first component, identity, is related to

understanding one’s own identity. Individuals could develop positive identities, recognize traits

of the dominant culture, their home culture, and other cultures, and understand how they

negotiate their own identity in multiple spaces. First of all, individuals should have knowledge

of identities. Second, diversity becomes an important concept. Individuals should be aware of

the fact they are living in heterogeneous communities, and they should be aware of the

similarities and differences among people, and as a result, they should be able to build empathy,

respect, understanding, and connection with others. The third component, justice, is about being

fair at the individual level, and individuals should be able to analyze the harmful impact of bias

and injustice on the world, historically and today. The final component, action, emphasizes that

individuals should take action in order to maintain social justice in all settings. They should be

able to recognize their own responsibility to stand up to exclusion, prejudice, and injustice; they

should be able to speak up with courage and respect when they or someone else has been hurt

or wronged by bias. These are the four standards of social justice declared by this group of

educators. In this study, the participants completed various tasks based on these components,

and we attempted to determine whether our participants developed knowledge and skills on

these standards at the end of the project. The tasks were designed to be parallel with these four

components. The participants wrote about their own identities and their students’ identities at

first. Then, we implemented another task in which they could notice the diversity in their

classrooms; the participants were provided with some cases, and they were expected to

empathize with a refugee student and, finally, they designed course materials and poster

presentations as the culmination of the project, displaying the knowledge and skills they had

developed throughout the collaboration.

Using Technology to Connect People

While promoting social justice in classrooms, teachers have some concerns in addition to

academic achievement, such as learning about other cultures, finding similarities and

differences among different cultures, creating cultural awareness, and developing mutual

understanding. These can only be achieved through communication. When it comes to

communication, we could easily notice that most of the communication today is on Internet

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platforms and teachers are integrating information and communication tools (ICT) in their

teaching contexts. The roles of students and teachers have changed dramatically from passive

individuals to active agents in education. Teachers are expected to design and create materials

using different Web 2.0 tools and learners have more chances to learn by doing and completing

tasks. In other words, both teachers and learners are producers in this era. However, ICT

integration is not limited to using technological tools to enrich classroom materials; these

technologies are also used to facilitate communication and interaction between learners living

in different regions of the world. As mentioned by Chun et al. (2016), “educators are

increasingly under pressure to use technology to prepare students to live in a technologically

interconnected, globalized world” (p. 65). With the increased interaction, teachers and learners

can create digital spaces in which learners are able to interact and educate themselves. Unlike

the past, it has become much easier and cheaper to gather people on Internet platforms and as

such, one of the opportunities in today’s world is virtual exchange projects. These tools can be

integrated for the purpose of promoting social justice for participants in international projects.

As mentioned in the literature, “intercultural projects have the potential to enhance learners’

communication skills and to enrich their knowledge of another culture, as well as to provide a

context for viewing one’s own culture from another group’s perspective” (Kern, 2006, p. 198).

As educators, we could be involved in this kind of virtual exchange projects to focus on some

critical issues, like social justice, from an intercultural perspective.

The STEPS Project

In the STEPS project, we designed and implemented a virtual intercultural exchange (a.k.a.

telecollaboration) program for pre-service and in-service teachers to develop their intercultural

communicative competence and prepare them to work with culturally and linguistically diverse

student populations, especially from refugee backgrounds. Since this project was granted by

the Regional English Language Office (RELO) of the US Embassy in Turkey, one of the goals

was expected to foster Turkish and US ties and bring the individuals from both countries

together in intercultural collaboration projects. Thus, this project involved teachers from Turkey

and the USA and engaged them in collaborative intercultural learning through synchronous and

asynchronous online participation to promote social justice. The project lasted for six weeks

and was based on weekly tasks on the Edmodo platform, a learning management system

(www.edmodo.com). While we were designing the project as a research team, we tried to focus

on four pillars of social justice - identity, diversity, justice, and action- which were proposed by

Learning for Justice group (https://www.learningforjustice.org). For example, in terms of

identity, we asked participants to introduce themselves so that they could write and think about

their own identities. Next, participants wrote posts about their students and the main goal was

to create awareness about the diversity in the classroom. In another task, participants wrote a

daily routine from the perspective of a refugee student and they discussed the injustices these

students might encounter in their daily life. After the tasks were completed, they were shared

with the RELO of the US Embassy. The RELO office also made some suggestions and

recommendations and we finalized the tasks at least one month before the project

implementation.

http://www.edmodo.com/
https://www.learningforjustice.org/

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Participants

Throughout the study, 120 pre-service and in-service teachers participated in weekly activities.

There were 45 pre-service teachers from three different English Language Teaching

Departments in Turkey; 45 in-service teachers working in different regions of Turkey; and 30

undergraduate and Masters’ program students, some of which were working as teachers in the

US. The survey was administered on a voluntary basis, and although there were 120 participants

in the study, only 58 of them responded to the pre-test and post-test surveys. Of these 58

participants, 12 were pre-service teachers in the US, 29 were pre-service teachers in Turkey,

and 17 were in-service teachers in Turkey. The pre-service teachers in this study were all senior

students and were taking a “Teaching Practice” course. They were visiting state schools for

observation and practice teaching during the project, and they were planning to start their

teaching career the following year.

Weekly Tasks

Participants engaged in online discussion board conversations over six weeks. For the first

week, the goal was to introduce participants to the project by sharing its main goals, timeline,

tasks, and technological requirements/tools and to start a conversation on the relationship

between self and culture and reflect on the ways in which cultures concomitantly include and

exclude individuals through representation. Then, they were divided into 15 small groups and

asked to write a post replying to the following prompt:

Introduce yourself. Please introduce your daily routines (work, school), culture, and context?

How could you describe the majority cultures in your context, and do you feel that you belong

to those cultures? Discuss why or why not. How could you describe the experiences of people

in your context who are marginalized or minoritized in a community or broader society?

In the second week, the goal of the tasks was to reflect on the intricate relationship between

personal and professional identities, understand how their identities inform their teaching

practices and create awareness of their teaching contexts. They responded to the following

questions:

Who are your students? Do you have any background information about your students’

parents, culture? Do you think your values are similar to those of your students? Are all

students/parents equal in your context? Do you or your school administrator do something in

order to maintain equality among the students? Do minority students have access to resources

equitably? If not, what can you do as a teacher to achieve equitable outcomes for student

learning?

The third and fourth weeks included two scenarios from two different contexts, the US and

Turkey. The main objective of the tasks assigned to the participants in these two weeks was to

encourage empathy with the marginalized students. Therefore, the participants were asked to

write a daily routine from the perspectives of two immigrant students. Although the scenarios

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were fictitious, they were possible to witness in language classes. The scenarios were as

follows:

Scenario 1:

Abdulaziz is a Syrian student who immigrated to a small town in Turkey. He is accepted to a

state school, and he is the only Syrian student in his class. His native language is Arabic, and

he does not know Turkish or English. Neither his language teacher, Mustafa, nor his classmates

know Arabic, and there is no common language between them. Mustafa tried to communicate

with Abdulaziz several times, but the student was not willing to take part in classroom

activities. For example, whenever the teacher gives worksheets to the students, Abdulaziz

takes them and understands nothing. Since the teacher had other students, he could not focus

on only one student all the time. In time, the teacher gave up trying to communicate, and he

behaved as if he was not in the classroom.

Scenario 2:

Nancy is a 4th-grade teacher. Her student Eduardo is an EL from El Salvador. Eduardo has a

beginning English level proficiency but is a rising star in Math. Eduardo takes standardized

tests in English. Nancy wanted to give him Spanish versions, but her principal didn’t allow it.

When students were taking the test, Eduardo opened his dictionary and looked for a definition

for a word. Nancy saw this and told him dictionaries weren’t allowed and took the dictionary

away since they are not allowed during exams. What do you think about her actions? What

would you do if you were Eduardo’s teacher?

As for the fifth week, the participants were asked to work collaboratively in their small groups

(n=7-8) to design course material that could be used in their current or future classrooms. The

main objective of the material was to improve the language skills of their learners while creating

awareness about social justice. Finally, in the sixth week, they all designed posters individually,

answering the question: “Who am I as the teacher or future teacher of minorities?”; and wrote

reflection posts on what they learned at the end of the project.

Methodology

The purpose of this study is to identify whether/how a six-week intercultural collaboration

project affected the pre-service and in-service teachers’ views of social justice. The data were

collected in a project (STEPS Project) funded by the RELO of the US Embassy in Ankara,

Turkey. The implementation of the project and the weekly tasks are presented in Appendix A.

In this study, a one group pre-test/post-test research design was used to evaluate the

effectiveness of this project, and the following research question was posed: How does a six-

week virtual exchange project influence in-service and pre-service teachers’ social justice

orientation?

Data Collection and Analysis

Social justice standards, which were claimed to “provide a road map for anti-bias education at

every grade level” (https://www.learningforjustice.org/frameworks), composed of 20

statements. There were four factors in the survey: identity, diversity, justice, and action. First,

the founders of the “learning for justice” community were contacted and required permission

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was granted. Then, these statements were used as the survey items in a 5 Scale Likert Type

format and administered as the pre-test survey before the project and as the post-test survey

after the project (Appendix B). As mentioned before, 58 participants responded to both surveys

on a voluntary basis. As a result of the reliability analysis, the Cronbach’s Alpha was calculated

as 0.859 which means that the reliability of the survey was rated as excellent.

In addition to the quantitative data, we used participants’ responses to the reflection

questions at the end of the project: “What have you learned in this project?”. We used these

responses as qualitative data to complement the analysis of the quantitative survey data.

In order to find out the difference between the mean scores of pre-test and post-test

surveys, the normality of the difference test was administered. Since there was no normal

distribution between the difference of the two tests, the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used

to determine whether the difference was statistically significant or not. As for the qualitative

data, the reflection posts submitted by the participants were collected and analyzed through

content analysis (Schreier, 2012). After coding the qualitative data, the codes were organized

to create recurring themes. Representative excerpts from these recurring themes are presented

in the findings.

Findings

In this study, we explored whether the STEPS project had any statistically significant effect on

the social justice perceptions of the participants, so a one group pre-test/post-test research

design was adopted. For this purpose, the scores of the participants at the beginning of the study

had to be compared to those obtained at the end of the project. When comparing the mean scores

of pre-test and post-test surveys, the normality test was used to determine which statistical

analysis needed to be conducted. At the end of the normality test, it was found that the

significance level was 0.000, and this indicated that there was no normal distribution, as seen

in Table 1.

Table 1. Test of normality

Kolmogorov-Smirnova Shapiro-Wilk

Statistic df Sig. Statistic df Sig.

difference 0.227 58 0.000 0.644 58 0.000

Since there was no normal distribution, the Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test was used to determine

whether the difference between the pre-test and post-test survey mean scores were statistically

significant or not. A Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test revealed that the mean scores of the post-test

survey were significantly higher after the implementation of the project (M=4.51, n=58)

compared to before (M=4.31, n=58), z = -4.468, p= 0.000, with a large effect size, r= 0.59.

More than 0.50 effect size is considered a large effect size (Cohen, 1988).

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Table 2. Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Tests

Test Statisticsa

totalpost - totalpre

Z -4.468b

Asymp. Sig. (2-tailed) 0.000

According to the quantitative analysis, the project significantly influenced the perceptions of

the participants on social justice in a positive manner. In other words, the project was found to

be effective in the views of the participants in terms of social justice standards.

In order to better understand the analysis of the quantitative data, the reflection posts of

the participants were analyzed as the qualitative data. As a result of the qualitative analysis,

four themes emerged from the data: a) learning through sharing and working in collaboration,

b) noticing common concerns with other educators, c) self-awareness and self-evaluation, and

d) promise for taking action.

The first theme that emerged in the data was learning through sharing and working in

collaboration. While designing the project, the activities were designed mostly based on sharing

ideas, taking part in discussions, and producing materials in collaboration and individually. As

a result, it is not surprising that almost all participants acknowledged that they learned through

listening to other participants’ experiences, ideas, and suggestions. As a sample to this theme,

one of the participants, who was an in-service teacher from the US, remarked:

Figure 1. An excerpt from the Edmodo post

In this quotation, the participant showed awareness of ongoing professional development, and

she stated that she made use of the other participants’ responses to realize some of her biases

and provide solutions to the problems she encountered in her classroom. This shows that in

addition to pre-service teachers benefitting from the project, in-service teachers also learned

from it.

The second theme was noticing common concerns with other educators. Before the

project, some of the participants believed that they were the only ones who had difficulties in

coping with the problems related to social justice in their classrooms. While sharing their

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experiences, ideas, and suggestions for the scenarios, they noticed that they were not alone, and

these were common concerns of other educators in the project. They found some similarities in

terms of social justice issues in their classrooms. For example, in-service teachers had some

difficulties in using a common language with refugee students. The teachers did not know

Arabic and the refugee students did not know Turkish or English, so they had some language

difficulties during the communication. Another example was that the refugee students did not

want to engage in the tasks in the classroom and teachers could not find a way to involve them

in the activities. There were these kinds of problems for the in-service teachers in our study.

They shared their experiences and recommendations with each other and noticed that this was

not specific only for their classrooms. At the end of the project, one of the pre-service teachers

wrote:

Figure 2. An excerpt from the Edmodo post

If educators do not share their experiences with their colleagues, they might encounter the same

problems without knowing that they have the same concerns. In the project, they discussed the

problems and social justice issues in their classrooms together and noticed that they were not

alone.

The third theme was self-awareness and self-evaluation. This is one of the most

important themes we found in this study. The pre-service and in-service teachers in the project

found an opportunity to question their attitudes, biases, and opinions for the refugee students in

their classrooms and refugees in the society. It was seen that the activities and weekly tasks

created awareness for the participants, and they evaluated their perspectives with the help of

other participants’ responses. One of the pre-service teachers acknowledged that:

Figure 3. An excerpt from the Edmodo post

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This participant had a chance to rethink her behaviors, and in the end, she decided to change

her perspectives towards injustice and discrimination in her future classroom and her daily life.

We argue that these small steps might help reshape other people’s perspectives in the future.

As for the final theme, promise for taking action, it was found that the participants were

determined to change their behaviors in the future. This was one of the main purposes of the

project, which is to encourage teachers and future teachers to take action in their classrooms.

Once again, most participants promised that they would take action for a better world. In the

following quotations from two different participants in the project, we observe that the project

had some meaningful impact on our participants’ perspectives of and engagement on social

justice issues.

Figure 4. An excerpt from the Edmodo post

Figure 5. An excerpt from the Edmodo post

When compared with the social justice standards indicated by the Learning for Justice group,

the qualitative analysis of the data showed that the participants in the project developed

knowledge and skills in terms of identity, diversity, and action. They made self-evaluations and

accomplished self-awareness. They found some similarities and differences among different

individuals, and as the most important point, they decided to take action for maintaining social

justice. As we can see in the quotations above, the participants completed the tasks, and gained

an awareness that they could take action as teachers; they were the agents who could change

the world.

Discussion and Conclusion

This study was based on the reports of a project granted by the Regional English Language

Office of the US Embassy in Turkey. The title of the project was Supporting Teachers’

Engagement in Pedagogies of Social Justice (STEPS). In this project, pre-service teachers from

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five different universities in Turkey and in-service teachers from Turkey and the US

participated in activities on the Edmodo platform, which is a learning management system that

allows participants to follow tasks asynchronously. The main objectives of the project were to

increase intercultural, collaborative, professional learning activities between teachers from the

USA and Turkey, to develop pre-service and in-service teachers’ intercultural communicative

competence, to promote social justice informed pedagogies in K-12 schools through

professional development and conversations between teachers from two countries, and to

develop teachers as change agents and informed educators who attend to the needs of

linguistically and culturally diverse students in their contexts. At the end of the study, we found

that the project impacted the perspectives of the participants in a positive way. Furthermore,

based on the qualitative analysis, four themes emerged from the data: a) learning through

sharing and working in collaboration, b) noticing common concerns with other educators, c)

self-awareness and self-evaluation, and d) promise for taking action.

Considering the roles of teachers in a globalized world, teachers are not only responsible

for the academic achievement of their learners but also for preparing them as responsible

individuals in society (Pantić & Florian, 2015). Therefore, social justice is among the issues

that teachers should focus on, and teachers are the ones who could make a difference for their

students.

In the literature, Nieto (2010) stated that teachers should examine their thoughts and

attitudes towards others; and in this study, we found that the participants acknowledged that

they evaluated themselves, and the project created an awareness for social justice issues. This

issue is also related to the standards of the Learning for Justice research group. One of the social

justice standards was identity, and we found the participants could find an opportunity to reflect

on their attitudes and opinions on social justice. The most important component of the social

justice standards and Nieto’s (2010) guidelines was taking action against discrimination,

inequalities, prejudices, and stereotypes. Knowing the differences, being aware of the

inequalities, and being kind to people are not enough for individuals (Nieto, 2010). Individuals

are expected to take action for maintaining social justice. In this study, a theme related to this

point emerged - promise for taking action. The participants stated that they would be more

sensitive to social justice issues in their classrooms and future classrooms, which was the main

goal of this project.

Considering the studies in the literature, it was clear that there is a need for critical

pedagogy in teacher education and social justice is among the most important issues that should

be touched upon in the curriculum. Milner (2017) reported that pre-service teachers were not

prepared enough for social justice work. This was parallel with the pre-test results of the survey

in this study. Before the implementation, the perceived social justice levels of pre-service

teachers were lower than after the implementation. It was found that the weekly tasks used in

this study contributed to the social justice perceptions of the pre-service teachers. Moreover,

Pugach et al. (2019) mentioned that the inequities are increasing in this global world and one

of the reasons for these inequalities is based on the wars that have resulted in increased

immigration. In the context of our study, we noticed that pre-service teachers were aware of the

fact that there were some students from other nations and this diversity made teaching more

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challenging and demanding. Aronson et al. (2020) highlighted the importance of a whole

integration of this topic into the curriculum and they suggested reimagining the ways of

preparing pre-service teachers. In our study, we integrated social justice related tasks as a

project rather than using them as coursework for a single course. Teacher educators should

understand that a single culture-related course might not be enough to promote social justice

for pre-service teachers and that these issues need to be integrated into the whole teacher

education curriculum. Additionally, Pugach et al. (2019) reported that pre-service teachers’

being aware of their own identities and teachers’ understanding of their students’ identities

should be the starting point for learning and growth. In this study, we started the tasks with self-

introductions of the participants. Then, we continued the tasks with a question “Who are your

students?” which aimed at creating an awareness for the participants about their students and

future students so that they could be prompted to look for the diversity in their classrooms.

Finally, Lucas (2002) and Reyes et al. (2021) proposed co-teaching and collaboration to address

the question: “How can we promote social justice?”. This was the main framework for our

study. We, as the researchers, met from five different universities and designed a virtual

exchange project and we invited participants from different regions of Turkey and the US. The

participants worked in collaboration; they discussed critical topics; designed language teaching

materials and shared their posters with other participants. As stated in the literature, these kinds

of tasks are important and crucial for understanding each other.

Conclusion and Implications

In conclusion, we argue that the intercultural virtual exchange project had positively impacted

the participants’ perceptions of and engagement on social justice issues in the classroom as

evidenced in the statistically significant survey test results and participants’ self-

reported/perceived growth throughout the project. In terms of implications, we argue that the

number of virtual exchange projects can be increased so that teachers can find opportunities to

meet their colleagues from any region of the world and find some similarities and differences

between their contexts and the other teachers’ contexts. Teachers should also understand their

potential to change the world. The stakeholders of teacher education, such as policy makers,

teacher educators, in-service teachers and pre-service teachers should be involved in these

projects in the future. We are aware that these critical issues in education can be negotiated

through increased communication and the online platforms provide us many opportunities to

meet and share our experiences, problems, and solutions to these problems. This kind of virtual

intercultural collaborations will positively influence the pre-service and in-service teachers’

perspectives of social justice, who may otherwise not have the chance to meet like-minded

colleagues across the world.

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the teachers and teacher candidates who took part in this telecollaboration

project in Fall 2021 and Heather Baker for proofreading the manuscript before it was published.

We are also grateful to the RELO of the US Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, for their generous

support of the STEPS project (# S-TU-150-19-GR-009): Supporting Teachers’ Engagement in

Pedagogies of Social-justice: Collaborative project between five universities in Turkey and the

USA.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Appendices

Appendix A: Weekly Tasks

Weeks Activity Details

Week 1

Welcome Meeting Goal: To introduce participants to the project by sharing its main

goals, timeline, tasks, and technological requirements/tools.

Pre-survey Goal: To gather data about participating teachers’ initial

perspectives on Social Justice via a short survey instrument on

Google Forms.

Small groups meeting Once groups are formed, participants will be asked to meet online

in their small groups.

Goal: To ensure that participants have some “face” time to get to

know each other individually before they are expected to work on

the tasks collaboratively.

Edmodo Post Goal: To start a conversation on the relationship between self and

culture and reflect on the ways in which cultures concomitantly

include and exclude individuals.

PROMPT: Introduce yourself. Please introduce your daily routines

(work, school), your culture, your context? How could you describe

the majority cultures in your context and do you feel that you belong

to those cultures? Discuss why or why not. How could you describe

the experiences of people in your context who are marginalized or

minoritized in a community or broader society?

Week 2

Guest Speaker #1 Title: “Professional identity development in language teaching”.

Edmodo Post Goal: To understand the relationship between teacher identity and

student identities and explain its significance for their teaching

practice.

PROMPT: Who are your students? Do you have any background

information about your students’ parents, culture? Do you think

your values are similar to those of your students? Are all

students/parents equal in your context? Do you or your school

administrator do something in order to maintain equality among

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the students? Do minority students have access to resources

equitably? If not, what can you do as a teacher to achieve equitable

outcomes for student learning?

Week 3

Guest Speaker #2 Title: "Teaching: Servitude or Transformation?"

Sample Case

for Discussion

PROMPT: In the following scenario, how would you react if you

were the teacher in the classroom? Assuming that you were

Abdulaziz, could you write a short paragraph about a day of

Abdulaziz from his point of view (e.g., using I, me, my pronouns)?

Abdulaziz is a Syrian student who immigrated to a small town in

Turkey. He is accepted to a state school and he is the only Syrian

student in his class. His native language is Arabic and he does not

know Turkish or English. Neither his language teacher, Mustafa,

nor his classmates know Arabic and there is no common language

between them. Mustafa tried to communicate with Abdulaziz

several times but the student was not willing to take part in

classroom activities. For example, whenever the teacher gives

worksheets to the students, Abdulaziz takes it and understands

nothing. Since the teacher had other students, he could not focus on

only one student all the time. In time, the teacher gave up trying to

communicate and he behaved as if he was not in the classroom.

Poem The poem “Home” written by Warsan Shire will be shared at the

beginning of the week with the participants

https://therightsangle.wordpress.com/2018/02/06/home-by-

warsan-shire/

Edmodo Post PROMPT: Do you have any immigrant students in your

classroom? Do you have any neighbours coming from other

countries? Has immigration affected you/your life personally? If

so, how?

Have you ever felt marginalized in any context because of your

ideas, religion, ethnicity, your behaviors?

https://therightsangle.wordpress.com/2018/02/06/home-by-warsan-shire/
https://therightsangle.wordpress.com/2018/02/06/home-by-warsan-shire/

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Week 4

Guest Speaker #3 Title: "Trauma Informed Teaching to Promote Social Justice"

Sample Case for

Discussion

PROMPT: If you were the teacher in the following scenario, how

would you react? What do you think about Eduardo’s, Nancy’s, and

principal’s actions in this situation?

Nancy is a 4th grade teacher. Her student Eduardo is an EL from El

Salvador. Eduardo has a beginning English level proficiency but is

a rising star in Math. Eduardo takes standardized tests in English.

Nancy wanted to give him Spanish versions, but her principal didn’t

allow it. When students were taking the test, Eduardo opened his

dictionary and looked for a definition for a word. Nancy saw this

and told him dictionaries weren’t allowed and took the dictionary

away since they are not allowed during exams. What do you think

about her actions? What would you do if you were Eduardo’s

teacher?

Week 5

Guest Speaker #4 Title: 'Crossing the ‘border’: What kind of zones can we create for

the ‘incomers'?

Course Materials In this week, the participants will be asked to design a course

material that could be used in their classrooms/future classrooms as

a group work activity. The main objective for the material will be

to improve language skills of their learners while creating an

awareness about social justice.

These course materials (worksheet, reading passage, listening

material, short video clips, games, etc.) will be uploaded to a

Google Drive folder and shared with all participants for future use.

Week 6

One-hour training on how

to use Canva for designing

visual materials

Before the week starts, a one-hour Zoom session on how to use

Canva will be organized for all participants. One of the coordinators

will host this session. The participants will be able to create a poster

at the end of this one-hour session.

Note: This session will be recorded so that some participants who

could not join the session for some personal reasons or time zone

difference will have the chance to watch it again as needed.

Moreover, the participants will have to rewatch if they have some

technical difficulties while completing the task.

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Poster Design Task This poster design activity will be an individual task. The

participants will be asked to design a poster which will be a

response to the following prompt.

PROMPT: Who am I as the teacher or future teacher of minorities?

After the participants create their posters, they will be asked to add

a 5-minute voice over on their posters so that each participant will

have the chance to present their poster.

Finally, they will upload them to a Google Drive folder.

Edmodo Post As for the final Edmodo post, the participants will be asked to write

a post on the following question. It will also be an evaluation of the

project.

PROMPT: What have you learned in the past six weeks? Are you

planning to change anything for your teaching practices?

Post-Survey The survey on Social Justice will be administered as the post-survey

at the end of the project.

Closing Ceremony

This closing ceremony will be organized for all participants. A

convenient time will be found and the reflections of the participants

on the project will be asked. This activity will be the final task for

all participants. This meeting will be recorded and shared with the

participants and the US Embassy.

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Appendix B: Social Justice Survey

S
tr

o
n
g

ly
D

is
a
g

re
e

D
is

a
g

re
e

N
e
u

tr
a
l

A
g

re
e

S
tr

o
n
g

ly
A

g
re

ID
E

N
T

IT
Y

1. I have a positive view of myself, including an awareness of and comfort with my

membership in multiple groups in society.

2. I know my family history and cultural background and can describe how my own

identity is informed and shaped by my membership in multiple identity groups.

3. I know that all my group identities and the intersection of those identities create unique

aspects of who I am and that this is true for other people too.

4. I express pride and confidence in my identity without perceiving or treating anyone

else as inferior.

5. I recognize traits of the dominant culture, my home culture and other cultures, and I

am conscious of how I express my identity as I move between those spaces.

D
IV

E
R

S
IT

6. I interact comfortably and respect- fully with all people, whether they are similar to or

different from me.

7. I have the language and knowledge to accurately and respectfully describe how people

(including myself ) are both similar to and different from each other and others in their

identity groups.

8. I respectfully express curiosity about the history and lived experiences of others and

exchange ideas and beliefs in an open-minded way.

9. I relate to and build connections with other people by showing them empathy, respect

and understanding, regardless of our similarities or differences.

10. I understand that diversity includes the impact of unequal power relations on the

development of group identities and cultures.

JU
S

T
IC

11. I relate to all people as individuals rather than representatives of groups and can identify

stereotypes when I see or hear them.

12. I can recognize, describe and distinguish unfairness and injustice at different levels of

society.

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13. I can explain the short and long-term impact of biased words and behaviors and unjust

practices, laws and institutions that limit the rights and freedoms of people based on their

identity groups.

14. I am aware of the advantages and disadvantages I have in society because of my

membership in different identity groups, and I know how this has affected my life.

15. I can identify figures, groups, events and a variety of strategies and philosophies

relevant to the history of social justice around the world.

A
C

T
IO

16. I express empathy when people are excluded or mistreated because of their identities

and concern when I personally experience bias.

17. I take responsibility for standing up to exclusion, prejudice and injustice.

18. I have the courage to speak up to people when their words, actions or views are biased

and hurtful, and I will communicate with respect even when we disagree.

19. I stand up to exclusion, prejudice and discrimination, even when it’s not popular or

easy or when no one else does.

20. I will join with diverse people to plan and carry out collective action against exclusion,

prejudice and discrimination, and we will be thoughtful and creative in our actions in order

to achieve our goals.

Copyrights

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license (CC BY-NC-ND) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).