Listening to many voices: Enacting social justice literacy curriculum Thea Williamson The University of Texas at Austin, College of Education, Department of Curriculum and Instruction,1912 Speedway Stop D5700, Austin, TX, 78712-1293, United States highlights  Key influences on teacher decision-making: students and colleagues.  Resistance to standardized curriculum is possible even for early-career teachers.  Social justice teaching in action: challenges, obstacles, tensions and sources of support.  Longitudinal study following secondary pre-service teachers into their first years in the field.  Discourse analysis using Bakhtin's theories of social heteroglossia and reported speech. article info Article history: Received 23 February 2016 Received in revised form 18 September 2016 Accepted 1 October 2016 Keywords: Social justice English education Secondary education Urban schools Educational change Teacher decision-making abstract This study seeks to understand what struggles an equity-minded English teacher encountered while enacting social justice curriculum and pedagogy. Data indicated the primary factors that influenced the teacher's understandings were her students and grade-level colleagues, not administrative mandates or the state standardized test. An additional finding was that the conflicts that Octavia anticipated as a pre- service teacher (competing reform agendas) were less relevant than concerns about reading materials and text selection. The study indicates a need to shift attention to less-commonly studied factors in teacher decision-making: quality instructional resources, interpersonal relationships, and ideologies about curriculum. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction: the need for school change Linguistic standardization, racial and class discrimination, hi- erarchical teaching and learning structures, and rigid curriculum structures have been longstanding injustices in schools, particu- larly in the United States. Endemic disparities in education become particularly problematic in the context of an English Language Arts class, because of its focus on language. As scholars of linguistics and culture have documented extensively, there are strong ties between language and cultural identity, which have significant implications for students who are punished for using non-dominant languages in school settings (Ball, 2009) or positioned as deficient because their language practices do not conform to a dominant variety (Hymes, 1972; Janks, 2000; Kinloch, 2010; Valenzuela, 1999). Additionally, despite a contentious disciplinary history and lack of consensus of what counts as “English” as a discipline in university contexts, secondary English curricula tend to focus on White Anglo literary traditions and formulaic writing tasks done in academic language (Heller, 2010). 1.1. Responses to educational inequity In the face of these hegemonic traditions, progressive educators from Dewey (1938) to Freire (1970) and contemporary activists in education and literacy (Comber, 2015; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014) have consistently called for new ways of doing school that value students' interests and diversity. Yet despite this persistent work, educational achievement in literacy remains static across the United States, and some racial disparities in achievement E-mail address: theaw@utexas.edu. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2016.10.002 0742-051X/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Teaching and Teacher Education 61 (2017) 104e114