Teaching for Social Justice: the Promise of Transformative Expectations for Urban Chicanx/Latinx Youth

Drawing on the concept of transformative expectations—that is, the instructional practices that demonstrate teachers’ belief systems for the educational justice and empowerment of Chicanx/Latinx youth—this qualitative study explored the expectancy effects of nine classroom teachers with social justice commitments in a school district in California. Through semi-structured interviews, teacher journaling, and artifacts of classroom practices, this study points to the importance of teacher disposition and socialization in developing classroom expectations, as well as helps to conceptualize the expectancies of academic rigor, social capital, empowering curriculum, and teacher caring from perspectives of justice and their importance in supporting students to meet or exceed instructional goals. Applying figured worlds and transformative expectations as the study’s analytic frameworks, teachers reported these four expectancies as important strategies for bringing social justice into the classroom, thereby prompting discussions of the future directions of teaching for social justice.