From What Is to What Should Be: Possibilities for an Intersectionally Racially Just Teacher Education Professoriate

• In Event: Visions of a Racially Just Teacher Education Professoriate: Future Dreaming for Meaningful Change

Abstract

Objectives
As a multi-institutional community of practice, the teacher education professoriate spans nations, cultures, and institutional bodies yet manages to consistently engage in oppressive, dehumanizing practices that limit the reach of our research, teaching, and service. This autoethnography asks what my life experiences before, inside, and outside of the teacher education professoriate can suggest about possibilities for an intersectionally racially just future for the teacher education professoriate.

Perspectives
This study utilizes critical race theory’s conceptualizations of majoritarian stories and counter-storytelling (Gillborn, 2005; Love, 2004; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) as a conceptual tool to analyze the data. Further, drawing from post-human feminism (Braidotti, 2022), this study attends to what has been in an effort to generate imaginative new possibilities for an ethically-grounded, equitable, and intersectionally racially just future for the teacher education professoriate.

Methods and Data Sources
This autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Denzin, 1989; Reed-Danahay, 1997) is grounded in the process of reflective journaling. I have captured what I consider salient moments from my childhood, family background, education, experiences as a teacher and my work as a teacher educator. These salient moments are the ones that linger, that are repeatedly conjured up in my memory as holding a particular meaning, though that meaning is not always clearly obvious. The salient moments that were included in this study are both my memories as well as the narratives told to me about my ancestry and family history and include my feelings and perceptions around these moments, not just the memory of what occurred or was said. I recorded dozens of salient moments then analyzed them by coding for the narratives that emerged attending to both majoritarian stories and counter-narratives. From this analysis, a vision for a future intersectionally racially just teacher education professoriate emerged.

Results
Majoritarian stories around what knowledge matters, which practices are valued, who counts, and what is rewarded in the teacher education professoriate emerged and complexly intertwined to generate a comprehensive picture of an inequitable, racially stratified status quo that I have both shaped and been shaped by. These racist, gendered, ableist, and classist narratives linked to my life before, inside, and outside of the teacher education professoriate illustrate what must change in order for the professoriate to be intersectionally racially just. Specifically, a future grounded in policies and practices that emphasize collaboration over competition, elevate the rigor and impact of the scholarship of teaching, and expand notions of meaningful research and knowledge generation are necessary to create new possibilities for an intersectionally racially just teacher education professoriate.

Scholarly Significance
Rather than continue to replicate the oppressive practices that have governed the professoriate across disciplines for centuries, the teacher education professoriate with our extensive anti-oppressive knowledge base, knows and can do better. This study contributes to a much-needed transition where we move as a professoriate from what has been to what should be—a complex, ethically-grounded, intersectionally racially just teacher education professoriate where human and non-human entities and elements (e.g., teaching and learning) reciprocally thrive.

Author

• Kara Mitchell Viesca, University of Nebraska - Lincoln