Solidarity as Praxis: Injury, Healing, and Hope in Teacher Education

• In Event: 30.080 - Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: 30.080-4 - Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Building for Transformation

Abstract

Objective
In this paper, I draw on my experience as a teacher educator and Muslim woman of Colour in a one-year pre-service teacher education program (formerly) offered by a predominantly White Faculty of Education in Toronto, Canada. I reflect on my relational encounters with teacher candidates, who transformed my understanding of the “teacher-student” dichotomy by committing to work with me in solidarity despite aggressive resistance to anti-oppressive praxis, particularly to anti-racist education. In our encounter, we met somewhere halfway, as teacher-student power relations inversed from asymmetrical to symmetrical.

Theoretical Perspective
The following passage in Paulo Freire’s seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) comes close to capturing this relational shift:
Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is [herself] taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. (p. 80).
Working conscientiously and strategically with and for each other, we discussed how to engage in anti-oppressive praxis despite aggressive resistance. As Freire (1970) writes,
Solidarity requires that one enter into the situation of those with whom one is in solidarity; it is a radical posture… True solidarity with the oppressed means fighting at their side to transform the objective reality, which has made them these “beings for one another.” (p. 49)
For Freire solidarity entails the acknowledgement of liberation as a collective project requiring dialogic teaching learning and critical consciousness of the ties that bind the oppressor and the oppressed together. The candidates and I were experiencing the classroom environment as oppressive, and we became “beings for one another.” While I learned from all of the candidates in the cohort, my encounter with “allied” candidates has been hopeful.

Methods
Grounded in auto-ethnographic methodology, I draw on my experience as a teacher educator in a one-year pre-service teacher education program offered by a predominantly White Faculty of Education in Toronto, Canada. In particular, I reflect on my relational encounters with teacher candidates, who transformed my understanding of the “teacher-student” dichotomy by committing to work with me in solidarity toward racial justice. My construction of narratives is informed by critical race theory and the theory and practice of critical pedagogy.

Conclusions
Finally, I reflect on solidarity as praxis in and through the creation of protected spaces outside of the classroom exclusively for candidates who identify as people of Colour, where they can have reprieve from the White gaze and discursive violence often perpetuated by antiracism education in settings dominated by White and middle-class students, in which their interests could be foregrounded in a predominantly White faculty of education, and where they can engage in personal and collective processes of healing injuries inflicted in oppressive classrooms and educational systems.

Significance
The notion of solidarity is relatively under-theorized in critical educational literature. This paper provides evidence of and argues for possibilities of solidarity as a strategy for transforming human relations within classrooms, and toward racial justice.

Author

• Sameena Eidoo, University of Toronto