On Cocoons, Consciousness, and Courage: Preparing Justice-Oriented Teacher Educators Through Critical Pedagogies

• In Event: Volcanic Disruptions: On the Intersectional Synergy of Theater of the Oppressed and Teacher Education

Abstract

This paper reports on a three-year project in which justice-oriented novice teacher educators engaged in Freirean (1970) culture circles and Boalian (1979) Theatre of the Oppressed or teatro. Our engagement centered on a collaboratively-constructed generative theme: “The difficulty of having critical conversations in practice if/when teachers have not unpacked their own biases, assumptions, knowledge, and beliefs surrounding students, families, and communities.” Anchored by this theme – which emerged from our collective experiences in K-12 classrooms, schools, districts, and higher education – we demonstrate how culture circles and teatro operated as a sort of cocoon (Gándara, 2008), a protected and protective space that nurtured transformative learning along participants’ paths to becoming justice-oriented teacher educators. Specifically, we explore how culture circles and teatro’s cocoon-like conditions supported participants to recognize the centrality of courage in teacher educators’ efforts to challenge deficit ideologies, while also providing structures for experiencing with support and buffering, the often-wrenching reality of embodying and enacting courage when faced with hateful remarks about children and families from minoritized communities.
To illustrate these findings we offer a detailed examination of our dialogue surrounding, and our teatro re-imaginings of, an incident that occurred in Author 3’s teachers’ lounge, where a colleague disparaged a group of Latinx parents who advocated for a change in school policy. In the conversation, Author 3’s colleague said, “I don’t know why they’re letting peasants make decisions about education,” among other deficit-laden comments. We focus on our engagement around Author 3’s experience due to the incident’s resonance with participants – as uncovered during analysis of data that included field notes and video recordings of our gatherings, participants’ written reflections, and interviews. Through examining our sensemaking around Author 3’s encounter, we draw connections between participants’ developing understandings about and enactments of courage, and their developing understandings about the challenge and value of balancing patience and impatience (Freire, 2016) in the facilitation of teacher learning, particularly when deficit ideologies are at play.
In the paper, we argue that culture circles and teatro are especially well-suited to the preparation of justice-oriented teacher educators, because these pedagogies are designed for use with adult learners and they have decidedly disruptive aims, including the cultivation of individual and societal transformation through disciplined reflection and action. In other words, critical pedagogies encourage questions about why and how particular conditions have come to be, and why and how these conditions and structures might be disrupted in efforts to change the world. In the paper, we suggest that these aims, along with the humanizing learning conditions that culture circles and teatro provide, position teacher educators to engage in transformative learning so that they might then transform the field of teacher education from within (Ellis & McNicholl, 2015). Ultimately, our findings contribute to the expanding knowledge base regarding the preparation of justice-oriented teacher educators (Authors, 2019; Souto-Manning & Martell, 2019), which stands in contrast to the limited resources and research that historically have accompanied teacher educator development and learning (Ellis & McNicholl, 2015).

Authors

• Jamy Stillman, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Kathryn Ahmed, Hunter College