A Classroom Community Effort: Co-Planning Ecology While Collectively Disrupting Power Hierarchies

• In Event: 43.077 - MTCC Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: 43.077-10 - Social Justice Leadership, Leaders, and Disrupting Power

Abstract

Using critical participatory ethnographic methods, we analyze how a classroom community sought to disrupt power dynamics grounded in white supremacy through co-developing an ecology science unit. As a class community, we highlighted that power dynamics were made visible in classrooms by paying attention to whose and what ideas were taken up, what students, expertise and ways of being were recognized, how roles within groups changed or were disrupted, how decisions were made in groups and who was disciplined or rewarded. By creating this framework together, the class community was better able to pay attention to the ways power especially white supremacy were operating within the classroom and actively take steps to support a restructuring of classroom power hierarchies.

Author

• Kathleen Schenkel, Michigan State University