Designing Teacher Education to Disrupt the Reproduction of Oppression in Practice

• In Event: Attending to the Political and Ethical Dimensions of Teacher Learning

Abstract

How can teacher education support beginning teachers to develop the critical and practical resources to deliberately disrupt the reproduction of oppression in practice? In tackling this question, our work is framed by a set of premises about the historical, political, and social contexts of schooling, teaching and learning, and subject matter—and the taken-for-granted ways in which these permeate normalized practice.

We argue that even when efforts are made in teacher education to introduce teacher candidates to the political and ethical dimensions that shape the contexts of teaching and learning in schools and reflect and reproduce patterns of institutional and structural oppression, the power of the taken-for-granted everyday nature of practice often overtakes these efforts. Beginning teachers—and their students—are left reeling in the gap.

Teacher candidates learn about structural inequality and institutional and systemic racism in foundations courses and disciplinary content in their arts and sciences courses. They learn aspects of “culturally relevant pedagogy,” which is variously re-interpreted (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2019), and other aspects of social justice or equity in methods courses. They hear the importance of taking strengths-based approaches to learning about students’ “funds of knowledge” (Moll, 1992) and about supporting all students’ participation. Rarely is attention to content, justice, and teaching systematically and critically intertwined in their opportunities to learn. Also lacking are the connections between macro-level structures (e.g., historical legacies of slavery and institutional racism), meso-level analyses (e.g., school culture, leadership, relations between families and schools), and micro-level dynamics of interactions and specific disruptive teaching practices. When these connections are left to beginning teachers to figure out in practice, what they produce is often rooted in their own individual experiences and beliefs, and not in the knowledge and skill needed to do something different from dominant, culturally embedded habits of teaching and learning. Because teaching is dense with discretionary spaces (Ball, 2018), teachers’ individual actions are inevitably shaped by habits of racism (Ngo, 2012; Noel, 2018) and the unquestioned normality of Whiteness that permeate our society.

In our work, we focus on specific patterns that connect macro- and meso-level analyses with the micro-level dynamics of classrooms, and support beginning teachers to learn to see these, and to understand and break the associated dominant habits of Whiteness that shape interpretation and action (Noel, 2018). Our project is to link political and ethical vision and commitment with the hard work of unlearning the ways in which oppression is stitched into practices of teaching and learning and to learn alternative practices that counter these. The challenge of doing this is complex because oppression is embedded not only in “normalized” practice (e.g., tracking, classroom management, “differentiation”) but also often in supposedly “liberatory” reforms (e.g., student-centered group work, place-based and community-embedded curriculum).

In this presentation, we will explain the premises that underlie our design, and provide detailed case examples of our work with teacher candidates on two patterns of practice––(1) views of “ability” and (2) punishment practices (Milner, 2018)––situated concretely in our work in elementary mathematics teacher preparation.

Authors

• Deborah Loewenberg Ball, University of Michigan

• Rosalie DeFino, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Lauren H. McMahon, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Lindsey Mann, University of Michigan

• Darrius D Robinson, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

• Amber Willis, The University of Michigan

• Charles Wilkes II, University of Michigan