“I’m concerned about actually doing it”: The struggles of pre-service teachers becoming change agents

Abstract This paper reports the struggles of 24 pre-service teachers (PTs) while intentionally integrating anti-racist pedagogy in which they were trained in a secondary teacher education program. PTs participating in this study are from various disciplines (i.e. Science, Math, English and Social Studies). Our findings reveal a multitude of struggles that PTs face when designing and implementing social justice-oriented curricula at the middle school level. Specifically, PTs reflected on and wrestled with three major concerns: 1) PTs’ own identities of being White and/or new teachers when they engaged with diverse student groups; 2) parents’ misperception about Critical Race Theory; 3) a lack of support from leadership regarding social justice issues. Our research suggests that in order to be change agents, PTs need more support from teacher education programs on their teaching practice for the social justice issues in addition to theoretical training. We argue that university faculty, cooperative teachers, open-minded school leaders, and parents could all be involved in long-term efforts to reform schools so that we can improve education for all.