Critical Professional Development as Dialogical Action: Centering Teachers' Social Justice Needs

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel theorizes a model of critical professional
development (CPD) where teachers are engaged as politically-aware individuals who have a stake in teaching and transforming society. Illuminating three US based case studies of CPD that emerged in response to the unmet needs of justice-oriented teachers- The People’s Education
Movement, New York Collective of Radical Educators’ Inquiry to Action groups, and the Institute for Teachers of Color Committed to Racial Justice (ITOC)- this panel uses Freire’s (1970) framework of dialogical action to analyze shared critical practices.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Paulo Freire, Critical Pedagogy, and Emancipation

Chair

• Steven Moreno-Terrill, University of California - Riverside

Papers

• Toward Cooperative Spaces for Learning: Teacher-Led Inquiry to Develop and Support Critical Educators - Antonio Nieves Martinez, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• The People United: Unity as a Tenet of Critical Professional Development - Bree Picower, Montclair State University; Natalia Ortiz, City University of New York

• Cultural Synthesis: Racial Justice Professional Development for Teachers of Color - Rita Kohli, University of California - Riverside

Discussant

• Antonia Darder, Loyola Marymount University