Enacting Humanizing Pedagogy as a Move Away From Damage-Centered Teaching in the Teacher Education Classroom

• In Event: 21.029 - Thinking Beyond Damage-Centered Teaching: Enacting a Humanizing Pedagogy in Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper explores a conceptualization of humanizing pedagogy in a teacher preparation program based on the teaching experiences of five teacher educators. In our best efforts to raise pre-service teachers’ critical consciousness regarding the historical and contemporary inequities in the P-12 educational system and equip them to embody pedagogies and practices that counter those inequities, the curricular and field experiences that are provided sometimes reinforce the deficit mindsets that students bring to the teacher education classroom. Despite social justice-oriented teacher educators’ best intentions of creating humanizing experiences for future teachers, such experiences can nevertheless have harmful results that negatively impact pre-service teachers’ ability to successfully teach culturally diverse youth in a multitude of learning contexts. In this paper, I propose a humanizing pedagogy for teacher education that can help to interrupt/reverse/refuse negative impacts.

First, I define a humanizing pedagogy in teacher education by building upon the work of critical scholars who have thought deeply and written about the process of humanization (Bartolomé, 1994; del Carmen Salazar, 2013; Fanon, 2004; Freire, 1970). The teacher educator who enacts humanizing practices in the classroom is consistently and continually working to help preservice teachers develop and maintain mindsets and practices that foster learning environments where the needs of whole students are considered and addressed (Authors, 2016). In doing so, the teacher educator is working to live her/his full humanity, recognizing that this process requires ongoing self-reflection in order to model pedagogical practices that future teachers should employ.

I then suggest the concept of damage-centered teaching to build the case for humanizing pedagogy’s existence in teacher education. I draw from Tuck’s (2009) concept of damage-centered research to consider how teacher educators’ practice can evidence damage-centered teaching, often in its best efforts to evidence pedagogies that are affirming and liberating for pre-service teachers. I conceptualize damage-centered teaching as a pedagogical enactment of instruction that aims (intentionally or unintentionally) to utilize the life and school experiences of historically marginalized peoples, communities, and lands as a basis for helping primarily white, middle-class, able-bodied, cisgendered, heterosexual, native English-speaking, Christian preservice teachers gain heightened critical awareness about issues of race, culture, and power in society and schools and a heightened disposition and advocacy orientation for social justice teaching. This pedagogical approach also centers community members’ long-term marginalization, exploitation, and subjection to micro- (interpersonal and communal) and macro- (systemic and institutional) level mistreatment and violence as a way to shift deficit thinking and change hearts and mindsets of preservice teachers to focus on equity and justice in schools.

Finally, I discuss the competencies that students explore in the prerequisite social foundations of education course in my university’s teacher education program to provide context for the program’s efforts to develop asset- and social justice-oriented preservice teachers and to acknowledge the continual work that our teacher preparation program engages to ensure these competencies are interrogated across the lifespan of the program. The paper concludes with a brief description of the four tenets of humanizing pedagogy.

Author

• Dorinda Carter Andrews, Michigan State University