AAH! Apprehension, Agency, and Hope Make Me a Teacher Activist

• In Event: 66.032 - Pondering Pedagogies of Teacher Activism: Purpose, Power, and Possibility

Abstract

Attempts to codify teaching practices into step-by-step methodologies oversimplify the nuanced work of education. Reformers searching for technical solutions to the challenges of education look for methodological approaches that prescribe particular, often rigid, teaching practices, overlooking the routinely ambiguous and dialectical nature of human action. However, Grumet (1988) stresses the importance of “body knowledge,” pedagogy that stems from lived experience and life history, which are often sidelined by masculine epistemologies focused on mechanistic predictability and control. Additionally, treating teaching merely as a technical enterprise obfuscates the sociocultural and political realities that give rise and shape to the challenges that many educators seek to address (Bartolomé, 1994; Giroux, 1992; Simmons, 2013a). This paper does not seek to codify a methodology of teacher activism, rather it seeks to understand the pedagogy that undergirds the work.

For teacher activists, pedagogy is articulated through a commitment to education as a practice of freedom and possibility and the creation of a new just world. A commitment to bring a new world into being implicates life experiences as mothers (and fathers) and daughters (and sons), which provide literal and metaphorical reference points to projects of procreation and reproduction (Grumet, 1988). This commitment also leads teacher activists to honor the complex personal and political realities of teaching and learning by engaging in critical dialogue and reflection focused on issues of power, agency, morality, democracy, justice, and change (Giroux, 2007). An effort to understand the pedagogy of teacher activism rests upon the exploration of why and how teacher activists ground their praxis in private and public arenas.

Drawing from data collected (20 interviews, over 160 hours of observation, and dozens of documents) for the development of in-depth portraits of four teacher activists from New York City, the author develops a pedagogy of teacher activism focused on three areas: 1) purpose; 2) power; and 3) possibility (see figure 1). The life journeys of each teacher activist move them from moments of anxious apprehension to more critical understandings of the world that precipitate an angry apprehension to inform purpose. Teacher activist purpose is then fulfilled by an engagement with power in attempts to challenge and shift dominant power relations through forms of creative, resistive, and relational agency. The agency of teacher activism is sustained by a sense of critical hope that a new world is possible. This hope and possibility, in turn, help teacher activists renew their purpose.

Sadly, in recent years mainstream education reform has underscored an increasingly technical focus on teaching and learning that ignores the fluidity and dynamism that the pedagogy for teacher activism relies upon. The pedagogies stemming from such a focus will not be transformative, engaged, creative, critical, or humanizing. Prevailing pedagogies that align with the current reforms lack the imagination for what might be possible if we pursue education for freedom, justice, and liberation. Teacher activists offer an alternative to the tide of reform that has left so many educators, students, families, and communities dissatisfied in its wake.

Author

• Keith C. Catone, Roger Williams University