Leveraging Critical Participatory Action Research for Remedy, Repair, and Justice

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 2-3
  In Roundtable Session: Middle Level Research on Teacher Development (Table 4)

Abstract

The 2025 AERA meeting theme calls upon educator-researchers to resist legislation, policy, and censorship that endangers scholarly teaching and suppresses the role of education in the realization of democratic ideals (Scott, 2024). These sociopolitical pressures complexify the work of teaching and implore collaborative inquiry. Our study took up a multi-stage design in CPAR to understand the experiences of middle level educators in enacting critical pedagogies across interdisciplinary contexts. Purposes of our study are to create strategic knowledge around the critical incidents that occur in today’s tumultuous educational context. Our preliminary meaning-making unearthed tensions and challenges in the work, as well as our incidents of emotionality and strategies for pedagogical resistance in contexts that codify socially unjust curricular concepts.

Authors

• Kristie W. Smith, Kennesaw State University

• Jillian Carter Ford, Kennesaw State University