Attention Teacher Educators and Future Teachers: It's Time for Direct Action

• In Event: Students Resisting the edTPA: How Future Teachers Are Supporting Diverse Democracies

Abstract

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks to so dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored….The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. (Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1963, “Letter from Birmingham Jail”)

1. Theoretical Framework and Objectives

Where injustices exist and there has been a refusal to negotiate, King (1963) explains in the above lines, direct action becomes necessary. It could be said that during the current 2015-2016 school year, American teacher education is experiencing both injustice and a refusal to negotiate (Brass, 2015; NAME, 2014) and that, therefore, the time for King-esque nonviolent direct action has arrived.

In this paper, a team of four undergraduate teacher education majors and a faculty advisor explores the concept of direct action and discusses its promise as a tool for social justice within university, state, and national contexts. The team seeks to share its efforts and results and to engage in inquiry about direct action with the broader teacher education community in keeping with AERA’s commitment to feature “new forms of engagement [for public scholarship]…in a wide variety of public spaces, including…activities that position research to inform civic participation, engagement, and organized action” (AERA 2016 Call for Submissions, p. 2).

2. Methods and Data Collection

Student direct action at the presenters’ university was born from the ineffectiveness of faculty members’ multiple written campaigns. Over several years, faculty activists sought to halt state and federal TPA policies with once-successful tools that appear to have lost their worth: white papers, letters to government officials heavy with dozens of signatures, personal letters to educational policymakers and organizations, participation in town hall meetings and public comment periods. As faculty members’ frustration with what Freire (1970) and King (1963) name “monologue” grew and the state passed a TPA law, students began to organize. In Fall 2014, a sophomore registered a new campus organization for teacher education majors, and the group soon honed in on TPAs.

From Spring 2015 through Spring 2016, this group, with a faculty advisor, has been engaging in auto-ethnography, a research method that “seeks to describe and systematically analyze personal experience in order to understand cultural experience” (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). Participants are engaging in direct action (see, for example, Figures 1 and 2) and are writing vignettes and reflective memos concerning insights and inquiries raised by their experiences and in dialogue with current research and education policies.

3. Results and Significance

At AERA 2016, these undergraduates will report the results of and their reflections on the direct action in which they plan to be involved during the pivotal 2015-2016 school year, when their university must confront the new state TPA requirement. Their voices are important in informing the next chapter of student-led work toward educational justice.

Authors

• Deborah A. Bieler, University of Delaware

• Ryan Faries, University of Delaware

• Stephanie Jennis, University of Delaware

• Sydney Palmer, University of Delaware

• Samantha Scarpone, University of Delaware