Shifting Preservice Teachers' Attitudes Toward Classroom Management: A DisCrit Solidarity Approach to Secondary Education

• In Event: 31.063 - "Whose Truth(s)?" Advancing DisCrit Solidarity in Research and Practice to Disrupt Educational Inequities

Abstract

Objectives
In the post-truth era when issues of achievement gap, disproportionality, and the school-to-prison pipeline are discussed, they are often positioned as unyielding disparities. Consequently, educators feel increasingly powerless and unequipped to reduce such systemic inequities. This paper refutes this post-truth paradigm of racial disparities as unavoidable, by advancing a Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) intersectional approach to classroom and behavior management for teachers in secondary education (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013; 2016). The paper aims to demonstrate DisCrit’s potential to prepare future teachers to create learning environments that encourage positive social interactions and active engagement in learning focused on creating solidarity in the classroom instead of management. This results in enabling curriculum, pedagogy, and relationships that are rooted in expansive notions of justice.

Theoretical Perspectives
DisCrit illuminates how ability is distributed and withheld based on race through policies and practices, and recognizes interlocking oppressions faced by students at the interstices of multiple differences (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013; 2016). The closer a student is to a desired norm (e.g. white, male, cis-gender, heterosexual), the more the student is imagined as capable and less subjected to discipline. Thus these students closest to the desired norm are supported in a myriad of ways. A DisCrit Solidarity approach to classroom management then highlights how to enable more students and assists educators in “situating students' actions in the classroom as strategies of resistance, […] and teaching them how to channel resistance to dismantle systems” (Annamma & Morrison, 2018, p. 76).
Methods and Data Sources
This qualitative study, conceived as critical naturalistic research (Bhattacharya, 2017; Lincoln & Guba, 1985; Skrtic, 1985), was conducted with approximately 40 undergraduate teacher candidates enrolled in a classroom management course reconceptualized through DisCrit Solidarity (Annamma, 2018). The data collected were assignments and in-class activities artifacts, and in class observations (Taylor & Bogdan, 2016). The analysis presented in this paper is based on artifacts, assignments, and observations consisting of initial, changing and final pedagogical philosophy of 10 randomly selected students.

Substantiated Conclusion and Scholarly Significance
Initial findings of our document analysis highlight three major shifts in pre-service teachers’ pedagogical philosophy:
1. From managing students to promote success, to building relationships based on solidarity and clear communication with all students and their families;
2. From not being aware of the consequences of discipline to using discipline as a tool for leaning, not for punishment / being cognizant of teachers’ bias (es);
3. From considering inequities as natural to understanding of enabling and disabling processes leading to the exclusion of multiply-marginalized Students of Color.

This study expands generalizable knowledge in the field of classroom management, contributing to a shift from an individualist, psychological approach (Brophy, 1988) to an intersectional and interdisciplinary one, rooted in solidarity. The findings shed light on how to prepare pre-service teachers for their experiences in the field and equip them to disrupt educational inequities through building powerful relationships, which enable multiply-marginalized students.

Authors

• Valentina Migliarini, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna

• Subini Ancy Annamma, The University of Kansas