Developing Critical Praxis in an Online Social Justice Seminar

As the U.S. education system becomes increasingly standardized, corporatized, and fundamentally inequitable, practitioners and scholars have called for a more critical social justice perspective and practice. This presentation describes student experiences in an online critical pedagogy seminar taken as part of a professional practice doctorate designed to help practitioners cultivate and enact a social justice perspective. Student experiences were characterized as “intensifying” (gained language to articulate an existing critical perspective), “transforming” (shifted toward a critical perspective), and “informing” (participated but unlikely to change). Furthermore, the students highlighted particular aspects of the course content and pedagogy that made the course different from other courses and responsible for the pronounced impact the course had on them