Telling Our Own Story: Curricular Lessons From the #RedforEd Campaign

• In Event: 35.024 - Our Stories, Our Voices: Testimonios and Critical Narratives for Justice

Abstract

This essay turns to Arizona’s recent #RedforEd campaign and uses Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia to argue that the teaching profession is in the making through the arguments teachers make for themselves and that these arguments are curricula for pre-service teachers. The truth that participating teachers enunciated during this campaign calls pre-service teachers to give an ethical account of themselves as future professionals but also produces conditions for educational life as participating teachers’ lived experiences revitalizes the future possibilities of educational foundations courses as places of unspecified risk where conduct and belief can be practiced toward an affirmative biopolitics that countermands decades of neoliberal “reforms,” which have required teachers to conduct themselves entrepreneurially rather than ethically.

Author

• Benjamin Kearl, Purdue University Fort Wayne