AERA Presidential Address (#AERAPres)

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Teaching has enormous potential for contributing to the development of a just society and supporting the flourishing of historically marginalized groups, but it has instead often reproduced inequality and reified injustice through the discretionary spaces that are inherent in teaching. These discretionary spaces enable teachers to adapt to their contexts, communities, and children, but also make classroom practice vulnerable to actions and decisions that perpetuate oppression. In the face of persistent institutionalized racism, it is a moral imperative to develop the teaching profession to function in ways that will reliably advance racial justice around the globe for individuals and communities who are persistently marginalized. Working to make teaching a force that can regularly disrupt the injustices that persist in and through teaching practice requires facing and managing tensions between constraint and discretion, as well as between professional boundaries and autonomy. I will argue that this demands distinguishing between what has been and what could be, while critically and honestly acknowledging real challenges and dilemmas. Making the transformative power of the profession more than a dream, but a practical possibility, depends on a wide range of scholarship as well as the conscious exercise of radical imagination for what teaching, and thus, public education could be and do.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chairs

• Suzanne M. Wilson, University of Connecticut

• Carla D. O'Connor, University of Michigan

Papers

• Just Dreams and Imperatives: The Power of Teaching in the Struggle for Public Education - Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor