Mediating Teacher Positionality: Intersectional Understandings of Who We Are

• In Event: 14.034 - Teachers: Sources of Resistance, Sources of Support?

Abstract

This paper explores the narratives educators in a graduate level critical multicultural education course reveal related to their own positionality. The term positionality acknowledges a person’s intersectionality and how we are all raced, classed, gendered and that these identities are contextual, relational, and fluid. Critical educators recognize that we all have multiple positionalities (i.e. multiple factors that contribute to our overall identity), that reflect our unique worldview and biographical experiences, which in turn affect how teachers practice instruction. This makes understanding ourselves and others complex because of how, teachers’ and students’ negotiate, contest, and mediate their identities in and through the process of schooling.

Authors

• Brittany Alexis Aronson, Miami University - Oxford

• Esther Alice Enright, Boise State University

• Tasneem Amatullah, Miami University - Oxford