The five authors of this article designed a multicase study to follow recent graduates of an elementary preservice teacher education program into their beginning teaching placements and explore the ways in which they enacted social justice curricula. The authors highlight the stories of three beginning teachers, honoring the plurality of their conceptions of social justice teaching and the resiliency they exhibited in translating social justice ideals into viable pedagogy. They also discuss the struggles the teachers faced when enacting social justice curricula and the tenuous connection they perceived between their conceptions and their practices. The authors emphasize that such struggles are inevitable and end the article with recommendations for ways in which teacher educators can prepare beginning teachers for the uncertain journey of teaching for social justice.

The author's preservice program prepares both single and dual certification master's students to teach in inclusive classrooms. This article provides an overview of the context in which, and for which, the program was designed, a description of the program, including what the author means by inclusive education and critical special education, explanations of key pedagogical and assessment practices that she leans on to meet her goals, and concludes with an account of how the program came to be developed.

We examine edTPA (a teacher performance assessment) implementation at one private university during the first year that our state required this exam for initial teaching certification. Using data from semi-structured interviews with 19 teacher educators from 12 programs as well as public information on edTPA pass rates, we explore whether the edTPA served its intended roles as a gatekeeper to the teaching profession and a catalyst for curriculum change. Although the edTPA did not serve as gatekeeper in our context, we did find a wide variety of consequential program-level gatekeeping practices. To explore the test’s function as a curriculum improvement lever, we created weighted change scores to represent the range of edTPA-related curricular changes across 12 programs. We found a wide range of curricular responses to the edTPA, from marginalization of the assessment to deep edTPA integration in program coursework. Finally, we explore teacher educators’ analyses of the edTPA as an instructional tool.

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