Decolonizing Teacher Education: The Role of Teacher-Led Political Education in the Formation of Teachers as Community Organizers

• In Event: Reclaiming Social Justice Teaching, Curriculum, and Teacher Education: The Centrality of Grassroots Community Organizing

Abstract

In 2007, two years after the A.R.E. Los Angeles Chapter was constituted, A.R.E. members began the process of reclaiming their own teacher education through political education, a particular form of popular education where educators develop a language of critique (Giroux, 2001) and are apprenticed into the practice of community organizing. The need for A.R.E. members to develop their own teacher education grew out of the general lack of university and district-based credentialing programs in preparing urban educators for working with Raza and Black communities. Based on a three year auto/ethnography of my participation in social justice projects within A.R.E. this study explores the development of grass-roots political education within A.R.E. and how it mediates the formation of teachers as community organizers.

Expanding on documentary accounts of social justice teacher education (Finn & Finn, 2007; McDonald, 2007; Zeichner, 2009), this study looks at the mediation of political education, detailing its formation, within grass-roots spaces. I use an activity-theory framework (Engeström, 1999) in analyzing the expansion of political education as cultural activity. Moreover, I draw from De Lissovoy’s (2010) theorizations of critical teacher education as centering the development of a “new teacher subject’ as a way of understanding the relational nature of the teacher as “community organizer.”

Auto/ethnographic in intent, this study build from a set of interpretive strategies such as ethnography, self-reflection, interviews, and documentary analysis, in understanding community organizing processes from the perspective of my participation in political education projects within A.R.E. Data are drawn from three years of participation in political education projects. I use fieldnote observations and video data of Reading Circles, Noches de Cine, political education segments within chapter monthly meetings, and our annual conferences. In-depth interviews were conducted with seven A.R.E. members who participated in political education projects.

Political education with A.R.E. is mediated by a complex set of deliberately structured projects, such as Noches de Cine, Reading Circles, political education segments, and annual conferences. This study argues that the mediation of political education must be understood relationally, that is as a constellation of practices. Although not defined as a deliberate space that mediates political education, grass-roots activism and campaign development function dialectically in relation to political education: political education mediates grass-roots activism and grass-roots activism in turn becomes a form of popular, political education. Second, grassroots, social justice teacher education in A.R.E. converges with anti-colonial discourses, generating a contradiction with the instrumental, neo-liberal, and colonizing discourses of public school settings. The study concludes that the teacher as “community organizing” is a new paradigm in social justice teacher education.

Moreover, this study is of significance to scholars interested in understanding how grassroots projects, such as political education, are mediated. By centering the role that community based organizing plays in generating a historically new and counter-hegemonic teacher movement for social justice, this study pushes the fields of Critical Pedagogy and Social Justice Teacher Education to decolonize our conceptions of social justice teaching and the im/possibility of liberatory education undertaken within/against institutional sites.

Author

• Miguel Zavala, California State University - Fullerton