Looking for "the Other Side": Teachers' Responses to Neutrality Pressures in the Implementation of a Justice-Oriented Curriculum on Police Torture (Poster 47)

• In Event: Promising Scholarship in Education Research: Dissertation Fellows and Their Research

Abstract

In 2017 Chicago schools launched a mandated social studies curriculum examining the history of racist police torture and the movement for justice. Teachers were provided with limited professional development opportunities to learn about the history, instructional materials and embedded pedagogies. This study considers the experiences of educators tasked with implementing the curriculum across a variety of school contexts where teachers, students, and community members held varied and sometimes conflicting perspectives on histories of racial injustice and police violence. Through semi-structured interviews with 34 implementing teachers, I examine how this cohort of educators made sense of both the curricular goals and their unique implementation environments. Further, I explore if and how teachers adjusted the curriculum to meet the perceived needs, interests and concerns specific to their contexts. In this poster session I will share emergent findings that suggest that teachers, across contexts, grappled with a perceived need to maintain “balance” and “neutrality” in their implementation approaches. This pressure often led them to modify both their own pedagogical approaches as well as the curriculum itself. I show how some of these modifications risked closing off opportunities for students to explore the full range of complex issues and pedagogies embedded within the curriculum. Implications for curriculum development and teacher learning design to address histories of injustice will be discussed.

Author

• Jessica Marshall, Northwestern University
  Presenting Author