Coming to Care about Teaching for Social Justice: The Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education (1950-1964)

This article explores one teacher education program's experiment in "turning the souls" of its students to help them understand and care deeply about issues of race and social justice, as well as issues of environmental sustainability. The Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education, (1950-1964) a small, "reconstructionist" program, was based upon Deweyan principles of choice, discovery, and student-generated learning and had as its underlying tenet a commitment to "change the world." These goals created a tension between the value of student independence and the program's political values and commitments. Nonetheless, students discovered reasons for education that lay beyond themselves, their experiences, the classroom, and their traditional notions of school. By immersing students in experiences that moved them emotionally, exposing their own, often disturbing, limited and limiting assumptions, students developed a willing accountability for changing their world. They came to care about social justice. (Contains 29 notes.)