Biography

Russell Cross is Senior Lecturer in Language and Literacy Education at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, where he coordinates teaching and research programs in CLIL, TESOL, and Modern Languages Education. His research focuses on teachers’ work and teaching, with particular attention to the social, cultural, and political dimensions of professional teacher knowledge and practice from a Vygotskian sociocultural perspective.

With Trevor Gale (Glasgow) and Carmen Mills (Queensland), Russell is Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Social justice dispositions informing teachers’ pedagogy in advantaged and disadvantaged secondary schools.

Session Details

This theory-focused session introduces a new concept—social justice dispositions—that we are using in our research to advance understandings of how educational advantage and disadvantage are enacted through teacher practice. Informed by the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu, we understand social justice dispositions as the tendencies and leanings that provide un-thought guidance for socially just practice.

We argue that this construct helps reconcile and account for the disjuncture often observed between what teachers claim (beliefs) and do (practice). Rather than suggesting that the dissonance between belief and practice lies in a deliberate intention to deceive—such as an unwillingness to admit a certain form of favouritism under interview conditions—we maintain that sometimes, perhaps even most times, the cause for this disconnect lies less in what teachers consciously claim or name as their beliefs, than an ‘unthoughtness’ behind how they are oriented to respond to certain social situations as practice.

Blending Bourdieu’s ideas with cultural historic activity theory, we consider the relationship between teacher disposition, contexts, and practice, to identify possibilities for new forms of more socially just practice as it relates to teachers’ pedagogic work in differently advantaged settings. We argue that this is valuable across all domains of educational practice, but especially for additional languages teachers working with students from CALD backgrounds, who might be marginalised due to differences between themselves and the mainstream, dominant cultural and linguistic group.