Who Taught You? Toward an Expansive Understanding of Pedagogy

• In Event: This Bridge Called My Back: Building Women of Color Resistance in Academic Spaces

Abstract

What does it mean to be a teacher? This exploratory paper interrogates standardized approaches (Kumashiro, 2001) to classroom instruction and training regarding pre-service teachers of color and teacher educators of color by focusing on experiential-based knowledge traditionally marginalized groups bring to teacher education (Berry, 2005; Dickar, 2008; Evan-Winters & Hoff, 2011; Williams & Evans-Winters, 2005; Yosso, 2005; Kohli, 2009). I evoke a neoliberal critique to unpack the design and facilitation of teacher education, namely, discourses concerning schools’ promotion of business management models, high expectation(s) of state learning standards with corresponding curriculum, emphasis on both student and teacher mastery as efficiency rather than effectiveness, and ultimately targeting the failure of individuals over any systematic analysis (Stovall, 2014). Utilizing Christian’s race for theory treatise (1987) and epistemic advantage emerging from women of color (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997), I embrace narrative inquiry (Brown, Carducci, & Kuby, 2014; Richardson, 2013; Leavy, 2015) to highlight ancestral knowledge stories for cartography or map-making towards an alternative future withstanding institutional regulation (Ahmed, 2012) beholden to neoliberal structures.

Departing from traditional positivist methods of educational research, I integrate the affective or sensory feeling as knowledge (Christian, 1987) by intentionally concentrating on how particular lived experiences are dismissed or silenced in teacher education curriculum including overt, societal, and hidden perspectives (Smith, Yosso, & Solorzano, 2007). I seek to conceptualize pedagogy, the practice of teaching and interactions when learning transpires, broadly. Rooted in Black feminism (Bambara, 1970; Collins, 2000; Combahee River Collective, 1978; hooks, 1993; Walker, 1983) as a social justice framework, I designate specific personal moments and stories as inherently curricular in nature via autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014). By doing so, I highlight the convergence of teaching tools and lessons as well as contradictions exposed during my pre-service teacher status and teaching assistant (TA) position(s), respectively, as formal, university training juxtaposed to the erasure of my lived experiences and positionality, as someone who is deemed “at risk” by the Nation at Risk: The Imperative of Educational Reform (1983) report released during the Reagan administration. Recognizing education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006) as an accumulation over time and connected to the public good, I offer an alternative perspective on how teachers are socialized, thus transgressing the boundaries of the teaching profession (hooks, 1993; Goldstein, 2014) as not being universal, solely within a College of Education, but rather conceiving of multiple educative practices.

Author

• Tiffany Octavia Harris, University of Illinois