Revisiting, (Re)Membering, and Reimagining Possibilities: Midrashic Encounters Between a Former Teacher and a Former Student

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 8:00 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Inquiry Driven by Cultural Ways of Knowing (Table 6)

Abstract

This study introduces a Midrashic research method to revisit a moment where youth and educators resisted a school policy. Looking back-together, a former public-school educator and student engage Midrashic encounters to (re)member agency and hope within hostile schools. When administration banned durags, Black students, youth of color, and white student allies approached educators with concerns, calling-out disproportionate consequences for students of color. Student-activists and educator-accomplices organized actions, overturning the policy. In conversation with dialogical encounters in qualitative research: collaborative autoethnography, Projects in Humanization, and collective memory work, and building from the Judaic practice of midrash—this study repositions researcher and participant as subjects together-in a research process that documents oppression and resistance in schools while reaching towards humanizing educational possibilities.

Author

• Dana Altshuler, University of Massachusetts - Amherst