Middle Level Teacher Development for Advocacy: A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

In the realm of middle level education, advocacy is an integral aspect of school culture and community. Advocacy helps to foster a school environment characterized by a sense of respect and value for young adolescents and should take up an awareness of the social and cognitive characteristics of young adolescents. Advocacy competency is also a necessary teacher disposition to foster socially just and successful middle school cultures and climates. We conducted a systematic review of the literature guided by the following driving question: What does the research say about middle level teacher development and advocacy? Our review yielded 38 relevant sources and key thematic ideas across four thematic categories. We anticipate this review of the literature will be of interest to and inform middle level educators and researchers around equity- and justice-oriented middle level teacher development.

1. Introduction

Education is an oft-purported lever for social justice (SJ) and thus social change. Teachers, therefore, play an important role in social justice movements, and the decisions they make in their classrooms and schools have a tremendous impact on the pursuit of change efforts. What teachers choose to teach and not teach, support and challenge, center and marginalize, comply with, and defy has a powerful influence on what future generations will believe, think, and do. It is no wonder, therefore, that classrooms and curriculum have long been contested political battlefields. The education politics of the contemporary United States offer numerous alarming examples of attempts to control what can and cannot be taught in American public schools. The anti-critical race theory (CRT) movement, “Don’t Say Gay” legislation [1], and active “divisive” and “prohibited” concepts legislation are but a few illustrative examples of attempts to prevent educators from engaging in “critical conversations about race, gender, and oppression” [2] (para. 1). In the midst of these culture wars, teaching for educational justice thus requires educators to engage in advocacy for socially just teaching in the face of numerous challenges. This critical need for teacher advocacy in turn calls on the fields of teacher preparation and professional development to envision ways to prepare and support educators to be advocates in their spheres of influence.

1.1. Advocacy and Middle Level Education

In the realm of middle level education, advocacy is an integral aspect of school culture and community [3]. While teaching for social justice is important in all grade bands, the middle years, typically grades 5–9, are known to be an especially pivotal moment in development marked by rapid cognitive, social, and moral development [4]. The middle years, therefore, are an especially critical time for social justice teaching and, by extension, the teacher advocacy that such teaching approaches require [5,6]. In practice, within successful middle schools, advocacy is actionable and enacted as “an attitude of caring” [3] (p. 15) that helps to foster a school environment characterized by a sense of respect and value for young adolescents, youths aged 10–15 years. Advocacy at the middle level is ideally embedded in middle school organizational structures. For example, through effective advisory practices, teachers’ advocacy dispositions help to promote “social-emotional mentorship and support and a sense of belonging and community for young adolescents” [3] (p. 16). As part of advisory model advocacy in the middle school context, teachers liaise between and among schools, families, and communities; understand, respect, and affirm the multiple social identities of the young adolescents they advise; and engage in ongoing professional development about advocacy practices [3]. Advocacy at the middle level should also take up an awareness of the social and cognitive characteristics of young adolescents, such as the development of abstract thought, a heightening awareness of social identity, and an increasing sense of justice and injustice [3,4].

1.2. Advocacy and Middle Level Teacher Development

In the middle level education context, a commitment to advocacy is a necessary teacher disposition to foster socially just and successful middle school cultures and climates [2,5]. Middle level educators, therefore, must be prepared to be advocates for socially just teaching, which has broad implications for teacher preparation and professional development. According to the Association for Middle Level Education’s (2022) standards for teacher preparation, middle level teacher candidates are ideally developed to “serve as advocates for all young adolescents and for responsive schooling practices” [7] (p. 22). These teacher candidates are also “informed advocates for effective middle level educational practices and policies and use their professional leadership responsibilities to create equitable and just opportunities for all young adolescents” [7] (p. 22). Teacher advocacy in the contemporary educational context thus also illuminates the connection between schooling and the sociopolitical realm around issues of real-world social significance, such as equity/inequity, justice/injustice, bias, racism, and related social policies. Teacher educators, therefore, must consider how to prepare and support teachers in developing advocacy skills and dispositions that will prepare them for this work, including how to navigate the numerous political challenges of teaching for social change [6].

2. Materials and Methods: A Systematic Review

The aim of our review was to examine the existing literature around middle level teacher development spanning the publication years from 2015 to 2023, with a focus on advocacy. These years were selected for review, given that the prior Middle Level Education Research Special Interest Group’s 2016 research agenda covered a review of the literature from 2000 to the 2010s. For the purposes of our literature review, our definition of advocacy included “a consideration of critical pedagogy and its related advocacy dispositions, equity and social justice, antibias and antiracism advocacy, and a consideration of policy and policy advocacy” [8]. We conducted a systematic review of the relevant literature using these parameters guided by the following driving question: What does the research say about middle level teacher development and advocacy? To conduct this review, we considered peer-reviewed journal articles, conceptual pieces, and practitioner perspectives, reviewing the literature across the following databases: EBSCOhost, JSTOR, Scopus, Google Scholar, ProQuest (Eric), A+ Education, Humanities & Social Sciences Collection, Australia and New Zealand Reference Centre, Index New Zealand, MasterFILE, and ScienceDirect.

Given our focus on advocacy, we located sources using the following search terms: advocacy, policy advocacy, agency, critical consciousness, sociopolitical awareness, critical pedagogy, antibias/antiracism, social justice, equity, justice. We searched these terms in conjunction with keywords such as “middle level”, “middle grades”, and “junior high”, paired with “teacher education”, “teacher preparation”, and “teacher development”. Finding that early rounds of narrow keyword searches yielded very little about middle level teacher development and advocacy, exclusively, we moved through a variety of keyword combinations to broaden our search, and we identified 38 sources. We also allowed a few sources that were not specifically middle level-focused, but that addressed teacher development and advocacy very directly. Of the 38 sources, we found that the vast majority of the empirical pieces we searched used qualitative methods. There were also a number of theoretical/conceptual pieces that surfaced. Listed below, we note the number of pieces found through our search that were qualitative, quantitative, conceptual/theoretical, chronological overviews, and reviews of the literature.

• Qualitative: 27.
• Quantitative: 1.
• Conceptual/Theoretical: 8.
• Chronological Overview: 1.
• Literature Review: 1.

After collecting and organizing the body of the relevant literature, we reviewed each piece, first independently, then collaboratively, making notes with attention to published abstracts, methodological approaches, keywords, and emergent thematic ideas and findings. We then engaged in a form of qualitative coding to surface trends and recurring topics in the literature. Among the codes we ascribed to the pieces we reviewed were the following:

• Critical Practice, Critical Pedagogy.
• Culturally Relevant/Responsive/Sustaining Pedagogy.
• Policy and Licensure.
• Middle School Organizational Structures.
• Social Justice Education (SJE).
• Specialized Teacher Preparation.
• Antiracist Teacher Preparation.
• Dispositions of Middle Level Education.
• Critical Professional Development (CPD), Equity-focused Professional Development.

We used these codes to create thematic categories, presented and explained in the Results Section.

As we analyzed the body of the literature curated through our search, we also noted trends in geographic regions (e.g., heavy representation of the southeast as a research setting), as well as topical opportunities for further field literature development. Topics for further development included the literature around middle level teacher development for critical practice; middle level teacher development for equity and social justice; and middle level teacher development around educational policy and policy advocacy [8]. See

Table 1. Summary of the reviewed literature.

Author, Year	Publication Outlet	Method/Study Design	Key Ideas/Findings/Scholarly Contributions
Andrews, P. G., & Leonard, S. Y. (2018)	Education Sciences	Qualitative, Ethnographic Multi-Case Study	Graduate students in a middle grade program were influenced by participation in community-engaged scholarship.
Milton-Williams, T., & Bryan, N. (2016)	Urban Education	Qualitative	Provided recommendations for programs of teacher preparation around support and retention of Black male middle school educators.
O’Sullivan, M., & Niemczyk, E. (2015)	Comparative and International Education	Qualitative	Researchers engaged a mentorship model to engage teacher global consciousness.
DeMink-Carthew, J., & Bishop, P. A. (2017)	Middle School Journal	Qualitative	Underscored the importance of middle level preservice teachers’ preparation to include a focus on reform-oriented advocacy.
Roberts, T., & Pachnowski, L. M. (2020)	Ohio Journal of School Mathematics	Conceptual	An overview of Ohio’s teacher licensure models, focusing on middle grades.
Bennett, C. A., & Martin, K. (2018)	Middle School Journal	Qualitative	The use of advisory programs to support a sense of school safety and belonging within a middle school.
Howell, P. B., Cook, C. M., Miller, N. C., Thompson, N. L., Faulkner, S. A., & Rintamaa, M. F. (2018)	RMLE Online	Qualitative, Descriptive, Pragmatic	Explored middle level credentialing across the U.S., highlighting inconsistencies across the following areas: credentialing authority, credential name, grade bands, overlapping credentials, testing requirements, and field experience requirements.
Aydarova, E., Rigney, J., & Dana, N. F. (2022)	Teachers College Record	Qualitative, Multiple Case Study	Examined teacher educators’ advocacy efforts to find a variety of policy advocacy approaches employed by teacher educators and illuminated existing challenges.
DeMink-Carthew, J. (2018)	Middle School Journal	Qualitative	Presented a teacher educator’s pedagogical approach to teacher preparation for social justice education and advocacy.
Andrews, P. G., Moulton, M. J., & Hughes, H. E. (2018)	Middle School Journal	Conceptual	Explored a reconceptualization of middle grades teacher education programming at a research-intensive public university.
Virtue, D. C., & Pinter, H. H. (2023)	Education Sciences	Qualitative, Single, Instrumental Case Study	Offered implications for responsive programming in middle schools,
Andrews, G., & Leonard, S. Y. (2023)	Education Sciences	Qualitative, Phenomenology	Examined preservice teacher candidates’ lived experiences while engaging in critical consciousness, providing implications for programs of teacher education.
Hackett, J., Behizadeh, N., Hobson, M., Summers, A., & Ford, J. (2022)	Urban Education	Qualitative	Explored the impact of educators around community-embedded experiential learning.
Ranschaert, R., & Murphy, A. (2020)	School-University Partnership	Qualitative	Described teacher preparation course designs using a professional development school model.
Cook, C. M., Howell, P. B., & Faulkner, S. A. (2016)	Middle Grades Review	Conceptual	Argued for specialized teacher preparation in middle grade education.
Marilyn Cochran-Smith (2020)	Action in Teacher Education	Chronological Overview	Provided an overview of 40 years of advocacy- and social justice-oriented teacher preparation work.
Crosby, S. D., Howell, P., & Thomas, S. (2018)	Middle School Journal	Conceptual	Discussed trauma-informed education as part of social justice teaching for the middle grade context.
Díaz, C. C. (2023)	Middle School Journal	Conceptual	Examined teacher education strategies for decentering whiteness.
Sarah J. Kaka, Michele M. Nobel & Jennifer G. Lisy (2022)	The Teacher Educator	Conceptual	Described the work of a teacher education program toward antiracism.
Gallagher, J. L., & Farley, J. (2019)	Middle Grades Review	Qualitative, Multi-Case Study	Found that preservice teachers can understand their advocate identity through curriculum and instruction, with connections to preservice teachers’ lived experiences prior to their teacher preparation programming.
Bancroft, S. F., & Nyirenda, E. M. (2020)	Journal of Science Teacher Education	Systematic Review of the Literature	Provided guidance about equity-oriented professional development with suggestions for future research in this area.
Strom, K., & Martin, A. D. (2016)	Policy Futures in Education	Qualitative, Case Study	Examined a first-year teacher’s work in social justice pedagogy, finding his practice to be influenced by external and internal challenges.
Williams, T. M. (2018)	RMLE	Qualitative	Illuminated culturally responsive caring as a framework for just teaching in the middle grade setting.
Ruppert, N. (2020)	Current Issues in Middle Level Education	Qualitative	Examined middle school educator dispositions toward advocacy for future programming.
Lipscombe, K., Tindall-Ford, S., Grootenboer, P. (2019)	Educational Management Administration & Leadership	Qualitative, Case Study	Found middle level leaders to be influential in advocacy efforts, but influenced by higher administrative support and relationship.
DeMink-Carthew, J. (2016)	Middle Grades Research Journal	Qualitative	Examined a framework developed by the author (Reform-Oriented Collaborative Inquiry) to understand challenges and benefits for preservice middle level student teachers.
Kohli, R., Picower, B., Martinez, A., & Ortiz, N. (2015)	International Journal of Critical Pedagogy	Qualitative	Analyzed critical professional development practices across three organizations, affirming the possibility for teachers to be agentive in their own justice-oriented professional growth.
Picower, B. (2015)	Radical Pedagogy	Qualitative	Focused on a critical professional development experience, illuminating possibilities for reforming traditional professional development with a social justice lens.
Freidus, A. (2020)	Teachers College Record	Qualitative	Explored social dynamics in a middle school community with shifting racial dynamics, finding teachers frequently sought to decenter whiteness in the classroom as part of their practice, and providing implications for school leadership and critical professional development.
López, F. (2017)	Journal of Teacher Education	Quantitative	Examined teachers’ asset-based pedagogy beliefs and behaviors are associated with students’ ethnic and reading achievement identity, revealing a connection to teachers’ critical consciousness.
Warren, E. A. (2023)	Middle School Journal	Conceptual	Discussed the use of counter-narrative in the middle level curriculum to disrupt deficit ideology about young adolescents.
Ellerbrock, C. R., & Vomvovidi-Ivanovic. (2022)	Middle School Journal	Qualitative, Case Study	Examined middle level math teachers’ practices around communities of care in the classroom, finding connections to responsive and socio-emotionally affirming classroom environments.
Shockley, E. T., & Ellis, V. M. (2022)	Middle School Journal	Qualitative, Case Study	Explored middle school teachers’ beliefs about their social justice education practices, revealing emphases on student-centered practice and counter-narratives.
Styslinger, M. E., Stowe, J., Walker, N., & Hostetler, K. H. (2019)	The Clearing House	Qualitative	Examined teachers practices for cultivating students’ critical consciousness, with connections to teachers equity-oriented identities.
Behizadeh, N. (2023)	Teaching and Teacher Education	Qualitative, Case Study	Examined preservice teachers’ challenges in critical pedagogy, revealing both external and internal barriers to the work.
Huang, T., Zhou, J., Chen, S., & Barnett, E. (2023)	Middle School Journal	Qualitative	Explored preservice teachers’ practice in antiracist pedagogy, providing implications for programs of teacher education.
Pantić, N. (2015)	Teachers and Teaching	Qualitative	Examined influences on teacher agency around social justice education, with implications for future inquiry and programs of teacher education.
Buchanan, R. (2015)	Teachers and Teaching: Theory and Practice	Qualitative	Examined teachers’ construction of self-understandings around professionalism and agency in the current educational context, with implications in the area of teacher identity.
Ranschaert, R. (2021)	Middle Grades Review	Qualitative	Explored preservice teachers’ development in justice-oriented practice in relation to complex external narratives, with implications for future research and programs of teacher education.

for a summary of the reviewed literature.

3. Results: Key Themes and Ideas in the Literature

Leveraging the organizational work of our coding process, we then engaged collaboratively in the synthesis phase of understanding thematic categories across the curated body of the literature, looking for trends, gaps, and recurring ideas. Through this process, we identified the following thematic categories:

• Essential Advocacy Skills and Dispositions.
• Pedagogical Practices for Teacher Advocacy.
• Social Justice Education.
• Specialized Teacher Development for Middle Level Education and Advocacy.

In the section that follows, we summarize the key ideas and sub-themes that emerged within these thematic categories.

3.1. Essential Advocacy Skills and Dispositions

Essential advocacy skills and dispositions emerged in the review as an important thematic category. Recurring threads were the ideas that pre- and in-service teachers should engage in intentional and explicit teacher development around advocacy competencies, and a critical consciousness is necessary to support teachers’ critical action through engagement in advocacy initiatives.

3.1.1. Essential Advocacy Skills

DeMink-Carthew and Bishop [9] examined the essential skills necessary for middle level preservice teachers’ (PSTs) development of advocate identities, pushing beyond dispositions of “passion” for the work. Acknowledging the challenges inherent in implementing reform-oriented advocacy initiatives in PST roles, DeMink-Carthew and Bishop [3] identified the following essential advocacy skills: “(1) building rapport; (2) educating, not intimidating; (3) anticipating concerns; (4) reflecting before reacting; and (5) establishing communication norms” (p. 14). They concluded that programs of teacher preparation should embed learning around the sociopolitical climate as well as opportunities for the development and negotiation of PSTs’ advocate identities.

3.1.2. Essential Advocacy Dispositions

Delving into the need for teachers to develop and act with a critical global consciousness as an advocacy disposition, O’Sullivan and Niemczyk [10] conducted a qualitative study through an interpretive research approach to mentor in-service teachers toward engagement with “transformative values (that) challenge the dominant ‘help the poor’ model of North-South engagement” (p. 2). This study underscored the necessity for teacher development opportunities to support competencies in critical advocacy. Similarly, Andrews and Leonard [11] conducted a phenomenological study in which they “explored preserve teachers’ lived experiences of engaging in critical consciousness as they move(ed) through their first semester in the context of a middle grades teacher education program that purports to be equity- and social justice-oriented” (p. 4). They found that teachers’ social identities are relevant in the implementation of pedagogies for critical consciousness, noting that any teacher development “interventions are less likely to have an impact if we ignore who the teacher candidates are and how they experience their own efforts to develop critical consciousness” (p. 16). They also emphasized the need for intentionality, identity work, and teacher educator responsiveness.

Also, taking up essential advocacy dispositions, Shockley and Ellis [12] conducted a qualitative study of middle level teachers who identified as SJ educators practicing in a demographically diverse, metropolitan district. They considered teachers’ beliefs and self-reported engagement with SJ initiatives in the classroom. Shockley and Ellis [12] found that “the practices of these social justice educators center students’ perspectives, propose culturally sustaining choices, provide access to multicultural resources, and offer a space for counternarratives and revisionism in their classroom” (p. 3), thus providing pedagogical recommendations for middle level teacher development. Similarly, through a qualitative study of PSTs’ clinical placement practices within a professional development school, Ranschaert and Murphy [13] affirmed the need for PSTs to enter the field with equity-oriented dispositions, supported by a critical consciousness that empowers them to “confront oppressive systems and practices” (p. 99), making connections to the need for intentionality and strategic planning in teacher education practice to facilitate advocacy competency.

Williams [14] conducted a life history study of African American teachers, a study that “illuminated how culturally responsive caring can and should be foundational to successful teaching” (p. 1) that supports the full humanity of young adolescents. Williams [14] took up a “caring framework” that included the following themes:

…otherparents or fictive kin, taking time to know students without judgment, appreciating the knowledge in students’ communities, believing in students’ brilliance and holding them accountable in warm yet demanding ways, teaching racial history and teaching students to speak back to negative profiles that define them and never sugarcoating injustices but teaching for success (p. 1).

The study findings and Williams’s [14] emphasis on culturally responsive caring provide disposition-focused recommendations for middle level teacher development. Also, taking up ideas about care in the classroom, Ellerbrock and Vomvoridi-Ivanovic [15] conducted a case study about novice middle school teachers’ efforts to “establish communities of care that set the stage for responsive middle level mathematics teaching” (p. 12). This study affirmed the importance of teachers’ asset lenses and advocacy for student wellbeing as a means of communicating care.

Studies across this thematic category, Essential Advocacy Skills and Dispositions, collectively affirmed the work of teacher development for advocate identities while illuminating a need for building and sustaining teachers’ critical consciousness. We also found that approaches to the development and expression of advocacy skills and dispositions varied both by context and by overarching teacher development foci.

3.2. Pedagogical Practices for Teacher Advocacy

Pedagogical approaches for advocacy-focused teacher development represent a second sub-theme in the literature. This literature focused on fostering teachers’ advocate identities and critical consciousness. It also explored service-learning and community partnership, as well as culturally relevant, responsive, sustaining, and asset-based practices.

3.2.1. Service-Learning and Community Partnerships

In the literature around middle level teacher development and advocacy, the pedagogical practices of service-learning emerged as significant. Andrews and Leonard [16] employed critical service-learning as a pedagogical approach to foster an examination of root causes of social injustice with middle level educators. They noted that “developing critical service-learning projects with educators—rather than for them—supported participants’ critical consciousness” (para. 1). This study illuminated the power and possibility of community-engaged scholarship to support middle level teachers’ critical consciousness development toward advocate identity. Also focusing on service-learning, O’Sullivan and Niemczyk [10] investigated an international service-learning program in Nicaragua that engaged Canadian teachers in a “Freirian pedagogy designed to encourage participating teachers to develop (critical) global consciousness” (p. 2). This study underscored the intention of the service-learning pedagogy to “prepare students to view social change…as an interconnected global struggle” (p. 11), thus also illuminating the potential for this pedagogy to support teacher development of advocate identities.

Ranschaert and Murphy [13] examined their teacher education practices in building a community partnership between a university program and a community middle school. They “sought to build preservice teachers’ asset orientations and critical consciousness while simultaneously providing meaningful contributions to the middle school students, faculty, and staff” (p. 87), leveraging a professional development school model and reciprocity with the community. Ranschaert and Murphy [13] emphasized a need for teacher educators to continuously scaffold PSTs’ learning around equity-oriented teaching in response to biases and tendencies toward resistance and to strengthen critical consciousness. They also illuminated the possibility for the professional development school model and community-engaged learning to provide field-based opportunities for PSTs to practice their advocacy skills and identities.

3.2.2. Culturally Relevant, Responsive, Sustaining, and Asset-Based Practices

Taking up the significance of culturally relevant practices (CRPs) in middle school teacher pedagogies, Milton-Williams and Bryan [17] examined the pedagogical approaches of a Black male middle school teacher with attention to the teacher’s development of critical consciousness in Black male students and the teacher’s advocacy work for and with Black male students at the site. Milton-Williams and Bryan [17] concluded that not only were the teacher’s culturally relevant pedagogical practices drawn from his “experiential communal and cultural knowledge” (p. 55), but also the ideals of CRPs are foundational to educators’ broad development of advocacy competency around perspective building, essential practices for socially just education, and a strong self-efficacy for advocacy engagement. Also considering CRPs, Virtue and Pinter [18] conducted a case study to understand teacher approaches to responsive instruction within a laboratory middle school. While Virtue and Pinter [18] initially defined “responsiveness” broadly, led by a focus on middle level developmentalism, they explained that there was an embedded focus on cultural responsiveness as part of critically defining responsive teaching and learning for the middle grades [3]. The findings of this study implied that the following conditions support middle level teacher responsiveness in the classroom: (a) a holistic approach to young adolescent education; (b) school faculty and staff with a commitment to continuous improvement; (c) educators’ exhibition of theoretical pragmatism in their pedagogical practices, programs, and policies; and (d) preservice teacher engagement in immersive field experiences. These findings also suggest that teacher development experiences for culturally responsive teaching, with connections to advocacy competencies, must be intentionally designed and are ideally supported by the middle school culture and community.

Díaz [19] emphasized the urgency for middle level programs of teacher preparation to develop teachers’ critical consciousness and advocate identities with an emphasis on culturally sustaining practices. Díaz [19] underscored a de-emphasis of self and whiteness in teaching practice, with an unpacking of teacher tools to perceive historical social structures that uphold status quo cultures of bias in the middle level classroom. Díaz [19] suggested that middle level teacher educators should first, themselves, develop tools of disruption for whiteness in schooling, and then move this awareness and action to teacher development pedagogies in culturally sustaining practice to support PSTs’ development of their advocate identities. Also emphasizing critical consciousness and awareness, López [20] conducted a study to understand “how teachers’ asset-based pedagogy beliefs and behaviors are associated with Latino students’ ethnic and reading achievement identity” (p. 194). López concluded that teachers’ critical awareness is connected to both achievement and identities for historically marginalized youths, amplifying a strong argument for attention to asset-based pedagogies as part of advocacy preparation in programs of teacher education.

Studies in this category, Pedagogical Practices for Teacher Advocacy, focused collectively on fostering teachers’ advocate identities through service-learning, community-embedded practice and attention to culturally sustaining, relevant, and responsive approaches. These practices were applied differently depending upon the context of study and study participant identity. Similar to studies in the thematic category, Essential Advocacy Skills and Dispositions, studies in this category also pointed to critical consciousness as important.

3.3. Social Justice Education

A third thematic category that presented as a trend in the literature was social justice education with connections to teachers’ advocacy orientations. Sub-themes in this area were equity- and justice-oriented teacher development and teacher development for antiracism and liberation. Across these sub-themes, given the range and volume of the literature represented, it is apparent that there is researcher interest and knowledge generation in this area, yet the work of SJE and critical pedagogy present persistent challenges that are both individual and systemic, internally driven and externally situated [6,21].

3.3.1. Equity- and Justice-Oriented Teacher Development

Andrews et al. [22] examined their middle grades education program at a public university in the southeastern U.S., with an eye toward tenets of critical pedagogy as an aspect of justice-oriented teaching. Andrews et al. [22] concluded that they would add a course to the middle grades program to address a commitment for teachers to “take action to both resist and advocate” (p. 4) around issues of equity in schooling. In a discussion of conclusions, they described the complexity of SJ teacher education and the need for continuous striving around curricula to support teachers’ advocacy competencies. Also researching in teacher education, Andrews and Leonard [16] conducted a phenomenological study to examine the narratives of 20 teacher candidates around their enactment of critical consciousness as part of their teacher education coursework. They identified a need for justice-oriented teacher development to “help teacher candidates and practicing teachers move to critical action by offering resources and opportunities to develop language for calling in and calling out bias and using the power of teacher talk to support responsiveness and equity in classroom spaces” (p. 17). This finding suggests that middle level teacher development for advocacy can be supported through pedagogical resourcing, in-classroom practice and the provision of learning conditions for engaging through action. Andrews and Leonard [16] also illuminated an opportunity for middle level education researchers to continue identifying promising practices in this area by examining teacher and teacher candidates’ lived experiences when confronted with in-the-field advocacy scenarios. Similarly, Styslinger et al. [23] examined pedagogies for critical consciousness, considering teachers’ implementation of SJ teaching practices. Their findings affirmed the complexity of SJ teaching, while showing that teachers can make intentional-in-the-classroom decisions that heighten students’ critical engagement with text and curricula. All of these studies highlight the need for intentionality in middle level teacher development practice to support advocate identity.

With a focus on social justice education for middle grades education, DeMink-Carthew [24] identified promising teacher educator practices to prepare teachers for social justice advocacy and teaching design. Putting forth a three-phase planning process for a social justice education unit, DeMink-Carthew [24] identified the following as necessary phases: (1) investigating the SJ issue, perspectives, and those working around the issue; (2) designing “a plan for raising awareness and taking action” (p. 29); and (3) enacting the plan. This study provided advice for addressing common fears, tensions, and challenges that pre- and new in-service teachers might encounter in SJE teaching, pointing to the necessity for teacher educators both to prepare preservice middle level teachers with the technical skills of SJE teaching and to anticipate problems, concerns, and misconceptions as teachers work to step into their advocate roles. In a different study, DeMink-Carthew [25] also examined teacher candidate education reform-oriented practices in the clinical context, putting forth a “reform-oriented collaborative inquiry (ROCI)” framework. Despite identifying challenges in the work such as misalignment between the teacher candidates’ preparation contexts and middle school contexts and the work of encouraging teacher candidates to try out SJ approaches to teaching, DeMink-Carthew [25] noted that teacher candidates benefitted from ROCI in that they were sustained in their advocacy mindsets, gaining a sense of confidence in the work. This study implies potentiality in teacher education contexts for supporting candidates’ advocate identities during clinical experiences by providing sound pedagogical structures to scaffold the practice.

Also focusing on SJE and the middle grades education context, Crosby et al. [26] discussed instructional practices in trauma-informed teaching, making connections to SJE and strategies for teacher advocacy. Crosby et al. [26] concluded that not only do trauma-informed pedagogical practices support the socioemotional needs of young adolescents, but also these practices take up tenets of SJ that are necessary for teacher advocacy in the school context. They recommended that teachers “attend to the curriculum as well as the school and classroom environments (to) provide safe, equitable, and meaningful learning experiences connected to their students’ lives” (p. 22).

Gallagher and Farley [27] conducted a multi-case study of teacher candidates in a middle grades social studies methods course, seeking to understand how teacher candidates “understood their role in supporting the democratic aims of middle grades social studies” (p. 1). They found a connection between preservice teachers’ conceptions of their advocate roles and aspects of their prior lived experiences. They also identified significant variability in teacher candidates’ capacities to identify advocacy actions and opportunities, emphasizing the need for teacher educator intentionality and strategic planning in this area. Gallagher and Farley [27] also suggested that “opportunities to create heuristics might provide teacher candidates a chance to explicitly connect the ways they are making sense of their past, present, and future as upstanders” (p. 14).

3.3.2. Teacher Development for Antiracism and Liberation

Taking up principles of liberatory education, Hackett et al. [28] designed a teacher collaborative practice between middle level education faculty at a public institution, middle level school-based faculty, and a community-based organization in Atlanta. In examining the effort, their findings emphasize an urgency to “center community in educator development” (p. 1) for advocacy competency. Hackett et al. [28] also emphasized the need for “future research in liberatory teacher education collaboration (to) examine how (young adolescent) students react to the lesson designed by collaborat(ives) in terms of (students’) critical consciousness development, identity development, and academic achievement” (p. 27). This finding points to an important and necessary connection between the work of teacher development for advocacy and implications for young adolescents as potential change agents, themselves, in the context of schooling.

Kaka et al. [29] explored a U.S. teacher preparation program’s journey toward antiracism, focused on a P-12 teacher preparation context. Kaka et al. [29] affirmed the responsibility of teacher educators “to prepare teachers that [sic] are effective in creating classrooms that are safe, inclusive, and equitable” (p. 387), noting the importance of both teacher preparation curricula and opportunities for “equity, advocacy, and commitment to change agency” (p. 389). In a discussion of lessons learned, Kaka et al. [29] noted the need for teacher educator advocacy around SJ issues that impact the education context, such as assessment-based gatekeeping measures to program entrance. They also emphasized the necessity for teacher educators to leverage collaboration, modeling of practice for PSTs, and building a teacher educator knowledge base about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion to effectively lead classroom conversations about disrupting the status quo. This study illuminates the importance of teacher educators’ critical roles in developing PSTs’ advocate identities. Also, working in teacher preparation, Huang et al. [30] conducted a study of 24 preservice teachers integrating antiracist teaching practices as part of their coursework. They concluded that PSTs’ challenges were aggregated around the following categories: “(1) PSTs’ own identities of being White and/or new teachers when they engaged with diverse student groups; (2) parents’ misperception about Critical Race Theory; (3) a lack of support from leadership regarding social justice issues” (p. 37). These findings suggest an opportunity for programs of teacher education to engage PSTs in critical identity work and strategy finding for navigating perceptions and conditions that discourage and counter advocacy in school settings.

Freidus [31] conducted a qualitative study in a New York City middle school undergoing a racial demographic shift with a growing White student population in a school setting that previously largely served students of the global majority. Freidus [31] sought to understand teachers’ advocacy strategies in this socially and politically tense context around the 2016 U.S. election. Friedus (2020) found that, despite tensions, teachers’ dedication to “developing students’ cultural competencies and critical consciousness” (p. 1) in this setting and teachers’ activism and advocacy for historically marginalized students in the school were effective strategies for navigating social tension. This study implies that teacher development for advocacy might include the affirmation, support, and sustaining of teachers’/teacher candidates’ existing advocacy identities.

In this thematic category, Social Justice Education, there was a depth of advocacy-relevant studies representing a range of justice and equity issues. The breadth of research conducted in this category indicated a trend in middle level education social justice research, illuminated a field movement around teacher preparation with social justice education in view, and pointed to a persistence of systemic injustice in the context of 21st-century U.S. society and education.

3.4. Specialized Teacher Development for Middle Level Education and Advocacy

A final theme in the literature was the idea that middle level teacher development includes specialized advocacy practices for the middle level education context. In particular, this idea showed up in advocacy around middle level organization models and policy advocacy for the middle level education context. Critical professional development to support and sustain teachers’ advocacy identities was also a sub-theme in this category.

3.4.1. Middle School Organizational Models

Bennett and Martin [32] described advisory practices as a middle school organizational structure with the potential to support and sustain teacher advocacy for young adolescents. They discussed the development of a culturally responsive advisory program in a diverse suburban community, wherein teachers and school leaders “set out to reclaim the advisory block to make it more relevant to culturally, linguistically, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse students” (p. 33). Their findings illuminated the complex, challenging, and consuming nature of the work; the value of patience and persistence in the effort; and ultimately the need for systematic and in-depth planning for culturally responsive advisories ahead of initiating the work.

3.4.2. Policy Advocacy for Middle Level Education

Roberts and Pachnowski [33] examined the importance of middle level licensure in a U.S. midwestern state. Discussing a trend toward school reorganization that essentially eliminates the middle level grade bands, they acknowledged both a content knowledge threat and a threat to effective middle level teacher development. The work of Roberts and Pachnowski [33], itself, is an artifact of middle level teacher educator advocacy for the profession and for middle level education broadly, and thus provides a model for focused policy advocacy. Similarly, Cook et al. [34] also differentiated middle grade education pedagogically from both elementary and secondary grades, highlighting the advocacy legacy of middle grade education leaders for the establishment of middle schools, thus demonstrating that not only is advocacy competency a necessary teacher development competency in the field, but it is part of the fabric and backdrop of the profession, itself. Also delving into middle level licensure and credentialing, Howell et al. [35] reviewed publicly available documents across U.S. states to explore models of middle level licensure. Their findings revealed significant variations in the following technical areas: “(a) credentialing authority, (b) credential name, (c) credential grade bands, (d) extent of overlapping credentials, (e) testing requirements, and (f) field experience requirements” (p. 2). This study implies a threat to middle level education as a unique field with attention to “knowledge, skills, and dispositions” (p. 9) specific to middle level teacher knowledge and pedagogies for young adolescent development. Howell et al. [35] thus advocated for greater attention to policy regulation to ensure effective middle level teacher preparation across state and national programming. These studies underscore both the importance of attention to policy advocacy in middle level teacher development and the need for teacher educators to participate and lead in educational policy advocacy [36].

3.4.3. Critical Professional Development

A third sub-theme in this category was critical professional development, focused on in-service teacher development for advocacy. Kohli et al. [37] described CPD as professional development in which “teachers are engaged as politically-aware [sic] individuals who have a stake in teaching and transforming society” (p. 7). Taking up this description of CPD, Warren [38] explored “the use of counter-narrative in curricula to shift teachers toward transformative pedagogically productive talk and away from damage-centered narratives and deficit constructs of students” (p. 14). Warren [38] suggested the use of lived experience counter-narratives for both teachers and young adolescent students in classroom spaces as a means of disrupting misrepresentations of the historically marginalized and to promote both a humanizing school culture and shared empathy. This study implies the power of teacher dialogue as both a tool that can perpetuate deficit social ideas and disrupt them, thus providing implications for teacher development with an advocacy focus.

This final thematic category, Specialized Teacher Development for Middle Level Education and Advocacy, emphasized the unique and urgent need for advocacy competency as part of middle level teacher development. Cutting across models of middle level organization, critical professional development, and middle level education policy, studies in this category illuminated the interconnectedness of practice and conditions created and sustained through legislation and policy while foregrounding teacher advocacy development.

4. Discussion

Much can be learned from this systematic literature review regarding middle level teacher development for advocacy. First, the breadth of the literature, especially in the pedagogic practices for teacher advocacy category, illustrates the variety of practices and approaches that can be taken to support middle level teacher development for advocacy. While this suggests that there is no agreed-upon preferred method in the field, the existing literature offers multiple pathways to promote teacher advocacy, which provides a greater opportunity for teacher educators to select approaches that are most appropriate for their specific needs and context. Second, across the findings, it is clear that there is a need for intentionality in advocacy work, including the importance that teacher educators continue to engage in self-work and learning regarding both young adolescents and social justice. Many of the studies reviewed, both in terms of pedagogical practice and essential dispositions, indicate the necessity of critical consciousness. Embedded in these recommendations is a call for critical self-awareness and the disruption of implicit biases that guide perspectives in the work [10,13,16,19]. And lastly, it feels important to note that social justice education was a well-represented theme in the literature, in terms of research volume and focus, which we believe speaks to the value and necessity of this topic to the field of middle level teacher education. This further underscores the important role of middle level educators in the pursuit of social justice and the responsibility of teacher educators to support preservice and in-service teachers in developing as advocates.

Our literature review also has several limitations that are important to name. First, like all literature reviews, our findings are limited by the time frame for our review search window (from 2015 to 2023), an era that included a global pandemic, deep sociopolitical polarities both globally and in the U.S. context, and persistent systemic injustices with subsequent social reckonings. Given that the field is constantly changing in response to rapidly shifting trends in sociopolitical issues, we recognize that this means that, by the time this work is published, there will already be new scholarship and political events reshaping our understanding of the topics at the heart of this review. Second, our review is also limited by our methodological approach and search terms, which impacted which ideas were included and excluded in our findings. We recognize that other approaches may have yielded different results and sources. And lastly, given the geographic patterns in our findings (i.e., the majority of the research was situated in the southeast), we wonder about the transferability of findings across geopolitical contexts and acknowledge that different contexts might call for different approaches not yet represented in the literature.

Given our findings and some of the limitations of this review, we can envision several new directions for future research on middle level teacher development for advocacy. Methodologically, it is worth noting that much of the scholarship we found was qualitative. We therefore recommend future studies that employ mixed methods and quantitative methods to investigate questions that have yet to be explored. Additionally, given the focus in middle level education on youth empowerment, we recommend more youth participatory studies. We envision that such studies could be used to illuminate youth perspectives on topics such as teaching for social change, teacher advocacy, and social justice education. Given the lack of geographic diversity in the literature, we also recommend further studies in geographic areas that are currently underrepresented in the literature. Such studies would deepen our understanding of the contextual nature of middle level teacher development for advocacy while also offering approaches that are relevant to the needs of under-researched regions. And lastly, given the largely descriptive and practical nature of the studies in this review, the current literature does not speak substantively to the impact of the work. While we recognize the social and historical complexity of understanding impact in this way, we recommend future studies that begin to explore potential outcomes of specific approaches to middle level teacher development on the broader goal of advocacy and social change.

Middle level teacher development for advocacy is of critical importance to the pursuit of social change in education and, more broadly, society. At the middle level, this means that educators and teacher educators have a responsibility to advocate for all young adolescents, which in turn calls on them to advocate for socially just teaching practices. The spirit of middle level education is inextricably connected to this responsibility. Despite a trend in social justice advocacy in programs of teacher education, social inequities persist, and there is an urgent need for continued work at the intersection of middle level teacher development and advocacy for socially just education systems and society [39]. Given the critical importance of this work in this sociopolitical moment, we hope that the findings of this review will serve as a valuable source of both information and inspiration to fuel new scholarship and teaching approaches centered on middle level teacher development for advocacy.