Critical Witnessing in Teacher Education Research: Acknowledging Identity and Power

• In Event: Building Otherwise Multilingual Educational Research: Examples From the Field

Abstract

Decolonizing, feminist methodologies shift the stance of the researcher from one of “researching on,” to standing with or building knowledge with (Tuhiwai Smith, 2010). Yet, much research in teacher education takes a more traditional stance, preserving the researcher as “objective” and teacher candidates as “subjects.” As multilingual educators, engaged in bilingual teacher education, we seek to attend to how multiple identities, including race, language, gender, (im)migration history and others intersect in the lives of our teacher candidates (TCs) and in our own lives. Thus, we also make use of the concept of raciolinguicized subjectivities to highlight the intersections and co-constructions of race and language in our identities (Daniels & Varghese, 2020).

Building on the concept of “critical witnessing” (Dutro, 2009), this paper forwards a methodology of critical witnessing in teacher education research. In the paper, we present three poems we composed to highlight significant moments witnessed in our work as critical teacher educators. We then analyze and discuss our role as witnesses to teacher candidates’ “everyday testimonies” (Dutro, 2009) and elucidate the presence and impacts of our various positionalities as a means of practicing this critical witnessing in community with ourselves and the TCs. In other words, we presented our reflections on acts of critical witnessing through poetry as we explored an experience of critical witnessing where students stepped into a space created in part by their instructors’ radical vulnerability (Nagar, 2014). Although our poems were composed by single authors, they tell collective stories and relate to histories and realities that we question and critique. Our poems and their analyses highlight the central roles of both intersectional identity and emotion. We each reflect on our intersectional identities and raciolinguicized subjectivities, considering how social power shaped our understandings and reactions (Crenshaw, 1993; Daniels & Varghese, 2020). This process entailed powerful and complex emotions, demonstrating points of deep resonance with our students and points of departure (Dutro, 2011). One theme that emerged across these moments of critical witnessing was our emotional connection to mothers and mothering, indicating potential emotional overlap between our experiences of mothering and teaching. We also noted that our emotions in the poems and our reflections, particularly of sadness, fear and anger, drove us to imagine new futures and express possibilities of liberation. This indicates that deep emotional engagement and vulnerability paired with reflection on identity could be key to engaging in advocacy working towards change with our students (Benesch, 2020). We suggest that critical, shared dialogue and ongoing acknowledgement of power is one means through which teacher educators can take a decolonizing stance in research and writing about and with their teacher candidates. Additionally, our work indicates the importance of collectivity and collaboration, particularly in surfacing the sociopolitical nature of testimonios (Passos DeNicolo & Gónzalez, 2015).

Authors

• Rachel Snyder Bhansari, Portland State University

• Grace Cornell Gonzales, University of Washington

• Patricia E. Venegas-Weber, University of Washington