“Is This How It’s Always Going to Be?” Speculative Teacher Education Toward Liberatory Praxis (Poster 8)

• In Event: Designing for Racial Justice Through Speculative Pedagogies: Learning to Build Liberatory Futures

Abstract

Objectives
This paper engages in a speculative praxis with(in) teacher education, centering community, reflection, and action toward the (re)imagination of how to prepare and support pre-service teachers (Author & Author, in press). Based on a year-long ethnographic study, we leverage a speculative praxis, grounded in speculative pedagogies (Garcia & Mirra, in press), to call for teacher educators to draw on their past, present, and future selves in an act of vulnerability and reflection of individual and collective challenges and possibilities toward speculative approaches to teacher education.

Theoretical framework
We build on Garcia and Mirra’s speculative pedagogies (in press), which serve as “expansive, creative forms of meaning making and communication aimed at radically reorientating the nature and purpose of shared democratic life toward equity, empathy, and justice” (Mirra & Garcia, 2020, p. 297). We coupled this with Indigenous (Grande et al., 2015; San Pedro, 2015) and Black (Hartman, 2019; Otieno, 2018) epistemologies to inform the speculative praxis of creating meaning, knowledge, and illuminating alternative present and future lifeworlds rooted in collaborative struggle and possibility. This speculative act provides an approach to communal praxis rooted in reflection, (re)imagination, and action in teacher education.

Methods & Data
We employ a co-autoethnographic (Coia & Taylor, 2009) approach to counter the trend to work individually within the academy, recognizing that “identity is dialogical [and] we maintain our identity in relation to others” (p. 3). Specifically, we reflect on the 2021-2022 academic year and our involvement in two racial affinity groups for pre-service teachers (one white and one for people of color). We draw from ethnographic fieldnotes and qualitative interviews with twenty participants.

Results
Our co-autoethnographic analysis revealed that while we both engaged in the “shadow work” of subversion within oppressive educatioal institutions (Arellano et al., 2021), all rooted in a speculative praxis of (re)imagining and (re)configuring our work with future teachers, our individual approaches toward our collective goal differed. We both drew on and (re)oriented on past, present, and future experiences to (re)imagine our individual, interpersonal, and institutional work with future teachers. Author one, a Black woman, drew on her Black (other)mothering experiences to center a Black feminist apaproach to her relational work with future teachers, and nurturing dialectical relatitonships in which participants were able to foster a reciprocal partnership rooted in politicized care. Author two, a first-generatioin Latino, drew on his experiences of being pushed out of high school to center an explicitly activist approach, in which he focused on the what and how regarding the work of participants (e.g., curriculum and instruction in student teaching placement settings; organizing and activism in teacher education settings).

Scholarly Significance
This paper provides examples of how to begin to operationalize a speculative praxis in one’s work with pre-service teachers of color. Toward this end, we can begin to dismantle racial injustice and construct educational possibilities in the preparation and support of future teachers, and by extension, their work with K-12 students of color and other marginalized youth.

Authors

• Kristen Jackson, Stanford University

• Rubén A. González, University at Buffalo - SUNY