Urban Advocates for Young Children with Special Needs: First-Year Early Childhood Teachers Enacting Social Justice

This article shares the ways new early childhood teachers carry forward the social justice principles emphasized in their teacher education program into their actual practice. Their participation in a university-sponsored mentoring group served as the context for this study. Through an emergent themes analysis, we explored how they prioritized diverse learners' needs, learned to “work the system” to provide optimal special education services, struggled to make multicultural curriculum meaningful and realized the importance of working with families. Our findings also illuminate the ways that feedback from new teachers can enhance early childhood teacher preparation.