Teacher leadership: Leading for social justice in teacher education

In spite of the abundance of literature on teaching for social justice and a recent increase in discussions of the construction of teacher leadership, there is a dearth of studies that address the intersection of teacher leadership and social justice. Additionally, scholarship focused on teacher leadership tends to focus on teaching as measurable efficiency, a mainstream orientation toward teaching that can serve to reify the very kinds of inequities such reforms are designed to interrupt. Drawing from his own experiences as a teacher educator, the author argues that strong teaching is teaching for social justice and, similarly, that a teacher cannot be a leader unless she or he explicitly attends to questions of equity, access, and justice.