Drawing on Social Justice Education: Creating Metaphorical Images to Foster and Assess Individual Transformation in Preservice Teacher Education.

“If I can make a difference in just one child’s life!” Such is the hope frequently voiced by young teachers-to-be. As a teacher educator devoted to social justice education, I must bite my tongue as inwardly I object: Just one child? The student whose sights are naively set on “just one child,” has far to go toward becoming a teacher who understands the systemic inequities in our world, and who is capable of confronting those issues in self, in the classroom, and in society. How to help this student, and the many like her, embark on the exhilarating but demanding, sometimes agonizing journey through self-transformation toward teacher-as-agent-of-change: this is the task. As with any task in education, it is helpful to have benchmarks, ways to assess progress. However, this inner transformative work does not lend itself to checklists and rubrics. This article describes a metaphorical imaging activity used in World Educational Links, a graduate teacher certification program, to help future social justice educators explore their relationship with society and their sense of interconnectedness and empowerment to effect change. The author investigates possibilities inherent in the activity for helping to assess individual transformation, as future teachers come to view their mission in terms not of “just one child,” not even “one child at a time,” but of engaging as teacher-activists in a collective movement for social change.