Creating a Culture of Joy, Imagination, Vulnerability, and Uncertainty in Teacher Education

• In Event: "Showing Up" for Students, Schools, and the Profession: Critical Practitioner Inquiry in Justice-Centered Teacher Education

Abstract

As a program faculty, we have explicitly moved toward refining our program structure, pedagogy, and curricular approach to specifically embrace what we call justice-centered reflective practice. This is not a ‘fixing’ of teacher education, rather, we think of it as ongoing redirection of our work as teacher educators that is embodied in shared struggle, collective reflection, and communal aspirations for a world based on love and humanization rather than exploitation and colonization (Greene, 1995; Love, 2019; Muhammad, 2023). This presentation describes our program’s use of critical practitioner inquiry as a key means of establishing a culture of joy, imagination, vulnerability, and uncertainty.

Justice-centered reflective practice positions teachers as producers of critical knowledge empowered to make classrooms sites of humanization and connection (Ayers, 2004), a task that is particularly challenging in a competitive, exploitative system of racial capitalism designed to alienate us from one another (Kaba, 2021). We take inspiration from a wide range of liberatory work in areas such as racial literacy, abolitionist teaching and organizing, anti-poverty movements, critical research traditions, and humanizing pedagogies. Our work is rooted in a hopeful belief about the collective power and capacity of the mind, heart, and imagination to solve complex problems of educational practice and to advance equity and social change through the everyday work of teaching and learning. It rests on the assumption that, in order to reflect upon the harm we have (unevenly) experienced due to racial capitalism, we must notice how that harm shows up in our bodies and trace how it mediates our relationships with others (2014). Engaging in personal and collective “excavation” reveals a connection between our own experiences of harm and the political economy of education (among other social institutions) to (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021).

Though the work of relationship building can sometimes seem chaotic and spontaneous, we approach this work in ways that are both strategic and systematic, establishing a foundational ethos of connection and critical care (Carter Andrews et al., 2021). This reshaping is an intentional and visionary way of disrupting the highly individualistic cultural myth of teachers as self-made, i.e. the notion of “the natural teacher” (Britzman, 2003, p. 230), and instead create opportunities to imagine a different type of teacher whose orientation is grounded in community, vulnerability, and love.

In our program, these values manifest prominently in the process of guiding our novice teachers through their year-long practitioner inquiry project, during which they work collaboratively to critically explore and act on a problem of practice. The inquiry project puts our students in a position of having to embrace uncertainty and be vulnerable, while also deriving a sense of joy and satisfaction from being in conversation with others to stretch our collective imagination about what is possible in teaching. We think of this vision of liberatory teaching as aspirational - as an ongoing process of creation and re-creation, a form of “freedom dreaming” (Love, 2019) that allows teachers to lean into creating a new future for education to produce a meaningful, deeply connective, and transformative community of educators.

Authors

• Jessica Whitelaw, University of Pennsylvania

• Vinay Mallikaarjun, University of Pennsylvania

• Sonia M. Rosen, University of Pennsylvania

• Charlotte E Jacobs, University of Pennsylvania

• Frances OC Rust, University of Pennsylvania