Cultivating "Badass Teachers": Activism Literacies as Technologies for Preparing Teachers to Disrupt Whiteness

• In Event: Critical Perspectives in Teacher Education: Wrestling With Controversy, Opposition, and Indifference

Abstract

This presentation explores the ways to move pre-service teachers from the voyeuristic white gaze and saviorist impulses in working with vulnerable communities to conspirators who recognize and value the fight for equity, opportunity, and liberation as essential aspect of what teachers do. Teachers stand at the frontlines of movements for social change. At the same time, they serve in a profession that is historically and increasingly stigmatized and grounded in systems of white supremacy and racial oppression. This presentation argues that teachers are not simply cogs in the great wheel of orthodoxy, but rather have the potential to act as agents of change, capable of reimagining history and dismantling systems of oppression.

Author

• Laura A. Roy, La Salle University