Introduction to special issue: social justice and education.

When we first decided to do a special edition on social justice for the Journal of Educational Foundations we anticipated that doing so would generate a lot of discussion and dialogue about how social justice as a philosophical orientation and practice in education is influencing educational discourse and changing the landscape of the educational terrain as we know it. The call read:

   The term social justice has been used with
   increasing frequency and controversy. In the now
   well publicized and highly contested move, the
   National Council for Accreditation of Teacher
   Education (NCATE) removed the term social justice
   from its literature. Yet, many educators in schools
   of education continue to write about and espouse
   social justice as the foundation of their teaching
   practices. Despite the NCATE controversy and the
   proliferation of articles on social justice, the meaning
   of the term social justice is often left uninterrogated and
   unexplained. This special issue is designed to tease out different
   conceptualizations of the term in addition to discussions of how
   educators negotiate and enact their own commitments to social
   justice with colleagues and students. We conceive …