Episode Fourteen: Professor A.Lin Goodwin “Beliefs, Diversity and Social Justice for new teachers”

My guest in this episode is Professor A. Lin Goodwin. Professor Goodwin is Dean of the Faculty of Education in the University of Hong Kong and was previously the Evenden Professor of Education in Teachers College, Columbia. She is a renowned teacher education expert globally and has researched and published broadly on many aspects of teacher education and related topics. Lin’s research interests include teacher and teacher education, beliefs, identities and development, equitable education and powerful teaching for immigrant and minorities, youth, international analysis, comparisons of teacher education practice and policy on the particular issues facing Asian and Asian American teachers and students in US schools. I was very fortunate to have met and worked with Lin as part of the DEEPEN project ( Droichead: Exploring and Eliciting Perspectives, Experiences and Narratives) where she was a member of the international research advisory team that guided and supported the empirical work of the project that explored teachers’ lived experiences of the Droichead professional induction process in Ireland for newly qualified teachers. Lin has been inspirational in her work in teacher education and with newly qualified teachers and is an incredible mentor to students, newly qualified teachers and to teacher educators and researchers in the field of teacher education everywhere. It was a great honour for me to work with her on the DEEPEN project and also a great honour to have the opportunity to interview her for this podcast episode. In this episode Lin describes how her pathway into education started in the classroom but somewhat surprisingly that she “was not a person who always wanted to be a teacher, I do not come from a family of teachers”. She says that despite getting accepted on her choice course in the National University of Singapore that her mother had other ideas as she “always had a dream, to go away, she never went to University, she always had a dream for her children to go to university, and to go to university away from Singapore. So we had relatives in the US, and that is where I ended up.. ”. Her mother was quick to dismiss her efforts at writing poetry once she got to the US, something that Lin enjoyed and advised her that she thought that Lin “should think about teaching, because you've always been good with children. And, you know, it's nice steady work, you know, that sort of thing. And I think I was just tired. And I gave in, and probably was the best decision of my life.” Lin is a certified teacher both at both special education and general education and she describes education as being “an area of great creativity. It's an area of social justice, everything that you do, has an impact on society and on the future. So it is incredibly important work at the same time that it's incredibly difficult..”. Lin’s choice of title for her podcast episode (Beliefs, Diversity and Social Justice for New Teachers) was driven by the fact that for her “it really sits at the very heart of my work and my research. It was where I started my own research journey.” She remembers how during her undergraduate research work she “ kept coming up against this notion of beliefs. And the fact that, first of all, at that time, it was an understudied area. Now, it's an area that's, you know, quite substantively researched. But at that time, it was a very, very new idea that as teachers or as human beings, we come into any situation with a variety of beliefs and assumptions, and those come from our families, from our upbringing, from our experiences, none of us escapes them. So it's, it's human nature to come, [you know], with some, sort of internal, sometimes unconscious ideas about how things work.” She describes her research study and how she learned that it is not possible to be belief or value free. So that's one thing we need to sort of put aside, it is not possible to be completely neutral, there's no such thing, none of us is neutral. And even the things that we say are objective, someone decided on that objectivity, someone created something someone, you know, made a decision”. Lin believes that it is important that we examine and interrogate the concepts of beliefs, diversity and social justice in the teacher education space because the reality is that “that we live in a very unequal world. So we know that boys are treated a certain way, and girls are treated another way. We know that the colour of your skin, the address, where you live, how much money your parents have in the bank, the clothes that you wear, so many things influence how people treat you. And there's a lot of research speaking of sociology, there's a lot of sociological research that has looked at this phenomenon. So social justice requires that we become very conscious and, and actively resist some of the inequitable, racist biases that we believe that we bring with us. And again, none of us is immune, because we live in a very unequal world.” We also discuss diversity in the teaching profession and Lin points out that “the reality is that diversity in sort of the more traditional sense around racial, ethnic, and language diversity is particularly salient. Because of the ways we structure schools, and what is considered appropriate ways to speak, or appropriate ways to behave. And those sensibilities are always sort of culturally grounded. They are not innate. They're not part of you know, what every normal [quote], human being has. They are things that are cultivated and nurtured according to who you are and where you were brought up. So there are kids who come to school, and right away, they do not fit in”. She goes on to describe how she is currently having a conversation about immigrant students and how she and her colleagues are exploring a concept “that we're calling, you know, othering, newcomer pedagogy, ways in which teachers actively resist othering and think about how they create welcoming spaces for immigrant students. And we talked about the millions of ways in which a newcomer is othered. And it's not simply about the fact that you don't speak the language. Everything you do, makes you stick out like a sore thumb.” This is an absolutely fascinating podcast episode and Professor Goodwin is a truly inspirational teacher educator. Tune in to hear much more on this very exciting episode!