The Personal Is Pedagogy

• In Event: Activist Stance in an Uncertain Educational Future: Foreground Personal, Develop Sense of Place, Build Context

Abstract

Objective
This paper centers on two social justice scholars of Color (co-authors) critically reflecting on our efforts to redesign, and implement, an upper division pre-service teacher focused course ‘Education and Diversity’ (E&D) at a predominately white institution. Our personal journeys as people from diasporic and transnational families are intrinsic to our pedagogy. We witnessed previous iterations of this course oversimplifying and/or negating issues of race, immigration status, islamphobia. We understood this as the product of white supremacist colonialist foundations and ongoing influence within teacher education courses. Therefore, our reimagining of the course, acting as lead instructors, and sharing those experience in this work represents a challenge to “logic of slavery, genocide, and orientalism” (Smith, 2013, p. 88), which seeks to commodify, erase, and violently target Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and immigrant people.

Perspectives
We and rely on Critical Race Theory’s (CRT), stance on the importance of experiential knowledge to develop praxis that holds us as educators accountable to enact transformative, social justice education. More specifically, we focus on our epistemological decision to have counterstories on global Blackness, undocumentation, and transnational families form a central part of our class. Moreover, we also highlight the important role that our camaraderie played in improving our pedagogy for this type of the course. We view our critical, decolonizing pedagogy as transgressive, activist, and as experience has taught us, potentially threatening to our careers and personal safety.

Methods and Data Sources
Counter-storytelling tradition has a rich history and continuing significance in African American, Asian, Latinx, Native American and immigrant communities among others. In educational research and practice, counter-storytelling may be used to transmit important life lessons, dispel deficit-based majoritarian stories, engage in individual and group conscience, as well as “strengthen traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance” (Ladson-Billings, 2003; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). On one level, our reflections on teaching the E&D class serves as a counterstory about realities POC face when teaching a diversity course. On another level, our counterstories also serve as an example for educators committed to incorporating their academic and experiential knowledge into their teaching. In both instances, the function of the counterstory remains constant: to reinforce learning by valuing the voice and experience of others (Ladson-Billings, 1998).

Significance
As research indicates, scholars of color fare better when they can depend on the support of one another in the otherwise isolating space of academia (Squire & McCann, 2018). Especially considering our vulnerable position as POC teaching a diversity course, our ambitious and loving critical redirection of the E&D class was by its nature disruptive of the status quo. This paper is significant firstly for its documentation of the presence, persistence, and impact of POC in education generally and academia in particular. Secondly, it is significant in its contribution to scholarship in areas of decolonizing teacher education and critical race pedagogies. Relatedly, we hope that our critical reflections (counterstories) inspire upcoming and practicing scholars of color who are similarly impacted by the devastating logics of white supremacy, to continue in this most important liberation work.

Authors

• Luis Fernando Macias, California State University - Fresno
  Presenting Author

• Carlotta Penn, The Ohio State University
  Presenting Author