Socially Engaged Educators: Grassroots Teacher Organizing to Reenvision School Safety

• In Event: Stakeholder Examination of Equity Concerns, Student Learning, Safety, and School Policing

Abstract

This paper provides a shared, first person account of the development of coalitions between teachers, students and community organizations to remove police from school campuses. Our account shares a first person perspective of a teacher engaged in a grassroots effort to change safety and policing practices in their district. The paper details the teacher's initial concerns, roadblocks and challenges, as well as the eventual development of alliances with social justice organizations and student-led groups from the perspective of teachers. The writing and the work itself is inspired by Critical Pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2005), and uses the qualitative research method of participatory action research to meaningfully engage with educators' lived experience within a social movement context. Initially, our group focused on how to create more culturally relevant and responsive classrooms on our respective campuses. Our commitment to the ongoing study led us to make connections between what was happening within classrooms and the broader school campus, and ultimately the entire community. Our account shows how, despite differences between groups in terms of age, power, and sometimes race/gender/sexuality, alliances were developed resulting in successful social actions to change discourses and understanding of safety, and the role of police on school campuses. Key findings: This paper is a practitioner/first person account that details the centrality of initial commitments of a small group of teachers to study together and to interrogate their own roles vis-a-vis the reproduction of social inequalities. This two-fold commitment enabled teachers to engage in principled disagreement both within the group and with other organizations in the coalition. Other key elements were: the prioritization of creating a liberatory space within meetings to facilitate hearing the voices of historically marginalized group members; active co-participation in the social actions led by coalition members; and the ongoing articulation of group agreements. Our primary aim in writing about our work is to contribute to research on grassroots organizing and social justice work among teachers in the hopes of aiding in the creation of equitable and libratory educational context across the nation.

Author

• Rebecca James Peeples, Los Angeles Unified School District