The authors contend that studying emotional perspectives can facilitate understanding of the complexities of socially just teaching. They explore the intersection between emotions and socially just teaching via a case study of a White novice teacher at one urban school as she struggles to formulate socially just teaching practices. Drawing from feminist and critical theory, the authors propose the term critical emotional praxis to denote critical praxis informed by emotional resistance to unjust pedagogical systems and practices. The authors’ analysis may assist in the development of socially just teachers: First, emotions and their expression play an important, ongoing role in socially just teaching, and second, emotional negotiation related to socially just teaching can provide deeper understanding of possible change, perhaps even in counterresponse to wider social, political contexts of schools.

This essay, drawn from theory, research, and the author’s practitioner research as a teacher educator, proposes a framework to inform teacher educators’ conceptualization and implementation of socially just teaching. The framework suggests that building on dispositions of fairness and the belief that all children can learn, a socially just teacher will engage in professional reflection and judgment using both an individual and a structural orientation to analyze the students’ academic difficulties and determine the cause and the solution to those difficulties, realizing that both individual and structural realities affect students’ learning. The essay then suggests how this individual and structural framework can inform the content and teaching strategies teacher educators use to instruct preservice teachers in socially just education. Finally, recommendations for research and dialogue in the teacher education community are suggested.

This study of the enactment and disruption of Whiteness in two White secondary literacy teachers focuses on their life histories and their practice and policy in relation to students of color. Both teachers demonstrated some disruption of Whiteness as well as some continued enactment of Whiteness, despite their stated intentions. The findings indicate that neither an abolition of Whiteness nor a rearticulation of Whiteness includes a sufficiently complex understanding of how disruption of Whiteness is influenced by the inter-play of personal identity, the need to maintain personal congruence, and the cultural constraints of Whiteness. The author suggests that the inclusion of a psychological framework will be valuable in further exploration of the disruption of Whiteness.

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