State Sanctioned, Teacher Enacted: The Racial Violence of Teach Like a Champion–Driven Pedagogy

• In Event: 14.045 - Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: 14.045-11 - Support, Relationships, and Discourse: Teachers and Teaching for a New World

Abstract

Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion is a widespread tool across the education system. It is the closest the thing the nation has to a national pedagogical system. This paper presents a critical discourse analysis of Teach Like a Champion. We argue that that the governing logic of the techniques presented in the book is not of instructional efficiency or academic achievement, but of the surveillance, control, and punishment of students of color. Using David Stovall’s (2016) construct of the school-to-prison nexus, we identify Teach Like a Champion not as a tool for academic achievement, but rather one for conditioning and normalizing students to the shared structures of violence within the school-to-prison nexus.

Authors

• Wagma S. Mommandi, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Jason Buell, University of Colorado - Boulder