A Case Study of Freedom Dreaming With Teachers of Color

• In Event: “They’re Telling Us Not To”: Teaching for Racial Justice During Times of Censorship and Bans

Abstract

Purpose
This paper asks what are the offerings and constraints of Freedom Dreaming as a tool to learn about how teachers of Color make sense of their own experiences and their students’ experiences in education to envision new possibilities for their teaching practice and schools.

Theoretical Framework
As Ruha Benjamin (2022), wrote: "Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within." Benjamin’s words echo the ethos and concept of freedom dreaming, a practice of imagining worlds where current structures of oppression do not exist (Kelley, 2002). The practice of freedom dreaming has been associated with different approaches to teaching and pedagogy including abolitionist teaching, a liberatory pedagogy that humanizes children and disrupts and dismantles racist systems (Love, 2019) and fugitive pedagogy, a liberatory vision of schooling and the world (Givens, 2021). Recognizing how freedom dreaming has been a helpful method for educational researchers and the different communities they’ve worked with (DeMartino et al., 2022; Neal & Dunn, 2020; Toliver, 2021), I include freedom dreaming as a method of mapping that explicitly attends to the concept of sustaining futures and elevates what teachers of Color believe are necessary next steps and goals for education.

Method
This project takes a qualitative case study approach (Yin, 1994). I look at the mapping tool of Freedom Dreaming as a case, how two teachers take up the tool, the artifacts generated from each session, and their discussion and reflections about the process. The unit of analysis is each teacher and their responses. I use purposive sampling and specifically sought out expert informants to garner whether further study using methods of freedom dreaming would be worthwhile. The two participants in this study, JT and Mysteria, are Black teachers in two metropolitan districts in the Midwest with a combined 45 years of teaching experience. I conducted 1:1 interviews and facilitated focus groups that involved counterstorytelling and freedom dreaming (DeMartino et al., 2022; Delgado, 1989; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Toliver, 2021). The data sources included recorded videos and transcripts of the interview and focus group sessions, artifacts from the freedom dream mapping exercises, and surveyed reflections following the mapping activities about the process.

Findings
My findings suggest that freedom dreaming: 1) served as a tool for learning further about the impact of systems on teachers’ and students’ experiences and teachers’ visions for more humanizing and supportive structures within schools that center their Students of Color, 2) allowed teachers to identify issues and call for solutions that address well-being and racial injustice systemically, and 3) encouraged teachers to think differently about their current teaching practice. Both teachers used their freedom dreams to think about ways that schools can create structures for their students that are more supportive, humanizing, culturally relevant, and racially just. Freedom Dreaming as a tool has the potential to support teachers with envisioning more humanizing and supportive structures within schools and possible liberatory futures for their students.

Author

• Sarah Day Dayon, University of Michigan