Toward a Critical Intersectional Theorizing for Justice in Teacher Education

• In Event: Borderlands: Constructing Educational Possibilities Across P–20 Systems: A Structured Conversation Between Educational Leadership and Teacher Education

Abstract

A white privilege framework (McIntosh, 1988; Wise, 2004) has dominated antiracist work in U.S. teacher education. This framework tends to flatten and simplify how whiteness and white racial identities are conceptualized, with dire consequences for how antiracist pedagogies and curricula are imagined and pursued with future teachers. Without examinations of how social class, gender, place, etc., intertwine with race and impact future teachers and their learning—in other words, without more intentional and explicit critical intersectional theorizing that explicitly “de-centers whiteness” in the preparation and support of teachers—efforts to improve the education of children in our schools will founder. Teacher educators should take inspiration from liberatory work in areas such as racial literacy, abolitionist teaching and organizing, anti-poverty movements, critical research traditions, humanizing pedagogies – all to the end of supporting and nurturing teachers to embrace a critical, emancipatory vision of schooling (Paris & Alim, 2017).

Several teacher education programs provide examples: 1) In a graduate level-two year residency as school-university partnership, teacher educators drawing on interviews of faculty and students, student portfolios, and a decade of iterations of program curriculum show that teacher education programs can be fertile contexts for pre-service and novice teachers to develop professional relationships premised on mutual vulnerability and humanizing of one another, substantive intellectual and emotional challenge, and deep connection with professional peers. 2) In a Hispanic-Serving Institution which still has most of its teacher candidates coming from largely homogeneous and monolingual backgrounds, teacher educators are tasked with recruiting prospective teacher candidates by engaging with local immigrant communities and organizations to both diversify the local teaching force and to provide opportunities for historically minoritized populations to attend college and consider teaching as a profession that can change their lives and communities. 3) In a community college, early childhood teacher education program in downtown Chicago, one program rewrote its conceptual framework to better reflect the teacher candidates as well as the children and families they serve. The updated framework considers intersections of students’ lived experience and is deeply connected to actions that support real-life issues of survival such as food and housing security, healthcare, safety from violence, and high-quality early childhood education. Our experience has taught us that it is not enough to have commitments, we need to organize our learning environments in ways that allow us to live those commitments in community and evolve our practice in response to our learning, our changing socio-political circumstances, and the experiences and voices of our students. 4) A national teacher residency program that begins with a Community Walk assignment to focus students on identity and assets within their communities carries the Funds of Knowledge identified in this initial assignment forward to both inform and shape the curriculum so that each teacher is responsive to their local context. In all, we find that when teacher educators choose to think and act “a different way,” novice teachers are given the green light to practice the discipline of hope, enact joy, and live into their imagination, which inevitably shapes their students’ learning.

Authors

• Timothy J. Lensmire, University of Minnesota

• Charlotte E Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania

• Sonia M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania

• Ed Brockenbrough, University of Pennsylvania

• Jessica Whitelaw, University of Pennsylvania

• Frances OC Rust, University of Pennsylvania

• Fernando Naiditch, Montclair State University

• Carrie A. Nepstad, City Colleges of Chicago

• Frank Pignatosi, New York University