Bree Picower

Teacher Activism: Enacting a Vision for Social Justice.

This qualitative study focused on educators who participated in grassroots social justice groups to explore the role teacher activism can play in the struggle for educational justice. Findings show teacher activists made three overarching commitments: to reconcile their vision for justice with the realities of injustice around them; to work within their classrooms to create liberatory space; and to work collectively against oppression as activists. To enact these commitments, they engaged in particular practices common across the teachers despite their years in the classroom or their geographic location. A framework of teacher activism is revealed through the commitments and practices of the teacher activists, which can help support other teachers who are interested in working toward equity and justice in their classrooms and in the streets.

You Can’t Change What You Don’t See: Developing New Teachers’ Political Understanding of Education

Many teachers who enter the profession to “make a difference” do not realize education is a highly political field. This qualitative study examined how teacher education can support new teachers to develop a critical sociopolitical analysis of education. The findings indicate through a year-long course of study, teachers developed two new awarenesses about education. They (1) recognized that everything within education was political and because of this they (2) realized that they had more to learn. The overarching awareness about the political nature of education supported them to recognize four connected insights: (1) certain groups benefit from current structures while (2) others are oppressed, (3) parents and community members should have power in educational decisions that affect them, and (4) race plays a systemic role in all of the above. Within the awareness of realizing they had more to learn, three new stances emerged. Teachers started to (1) reexamine their prior knowledge, (2) realize they needed to hear multiple perspectives before forming opinions, and (3) analyze the political motivation of people providing information. By recognizing that everything is political and by taking a questioning stance, the findings indicate that the teachers reframed their analysis in five key ways. Teachers (1) moved from a focus on individual blame to a focus on systemic inequality; (2) from an ethnocentric perspective to culturally relevant pedagogy; (3) from viewing teachers as holders of power to facilitators who share power; (4) from seeing community deficits to seeing strengths; (5) and from feeling isolated to feeling connected.

“Run Like Hell” to “Look Before You Leap”: Teacher Educators’ Responses to Preparing Teachers for Diversity and Social Justice in the Wake of edTPA

The context and content of teacher education is continually impacted by political and policy shifts. One of the latest mandates to impact teacher education is an external evaluation called the edTPA. This assessment aims to determine a teacher candidate’s readiness for teaching and is being used as a certification requirement in some states. This chapter presents results of a study conducted with teacher education faculty to understand how edTPA impacts the work of preparing teachers for social justice. The study examined online survey data from higher education teacher educators who are currently using edTPA. While the results of the survey showed that some within the teacher education community welcomed the ensuing programmatic changes, most voiced concerns about a variety of changes that came with implementation.

Active Solidarity: Centering the Demands and Vision of the Black Lives Matter Movement in Teacher Education:

In the era of Black Lives Matter (#BLM), urban teacher education does not exist in isolation. The White supremacist, neoliberal context that impacts all aspects of Black lives also serves to support antiblackness within the structures of teacher education. In this article, the authors, who are grounded in a race radical analytical and political framework, share a vision of what it means to be an urban teacher who actively understands and teaches in solidarity with #BLM. The authors unpack their theoretical framework and the vision of #BLM while examining the state of teacher education in this era of neoliberal multiculturalism. The authors contemplate what a race radical, #BLM-aligned, approach to urban teacher education might look like. The article concludes by addressing ways that teacher educators must be in active solidarity with the #BLM movement to better prepare teachers who understand that the lives of their students matter within and outside of their classrooms.

We Are Victorious: Educator Activism as a Shared Struggle for Human Being.

Abstract This article shares national models of educational activism that center the experiences of People of Color but are diverse in that they serve students, parents, preservice teachers, teachers, and/or community educators and meet frequently in small groups or annually/biannually. Included narratives embody the humanization process, and situate that in the purpose of each project. Our aim is to complicate and extend the definition of activism as a shared struggle for the right to feel human.

Tools of inaction: the impasse between teaching social issues and creating social change

Within the field of teacher education, increased emphasis has been placed on social justice education (SJE). This qualitative study examined a group of beginning teachers who voluntarily participated in a social justice critical inquiry project (CIP). The findings indicate that while many of them were successful at teaching social issues, they provided few to no opportunities for their students to engage in social action and they themselves did not participate in activism. To explain this, the participants used the following four tools of inaction: tools of substitution, postponement, displacement, and dismissal. These tools relieved the tension of not taking action and allowed the participants to postpone, justify, or redirect the responsibility of becoming active in struggling for sustainable social change. Understanding the use of these tools can help teacher educators to understand the process of development of social justice educators.