Provoking Discomfort: Leveraging Extraordinary Pedagogies to Navigate Cognitive Dissonance in White Preservice Teachers

• In Event: Extraordinary Pedagogies: An Endarkened Feminist Approach to Revolutionizing Teacher Consciousness

Abstract

As the student population in the U.S. PK-12 schools becomes increasingly diverse, many white preservice teachers struggle to develop the strength and stamina required to confront these “controversial” topics, often bypassing discomfort. This avoidance not only perpetuates systemic inequities but also leads to breaches of confidence, lack of intimacy, and degradation of trust between teachers and students. These outcomes disrupt the teaching and learning process, particularly for students with multiple marginalized identities, further reinforcing the need for critical self-reflection and accountability within teacher education programs (Staples-Dixon, 2024). This study examines how the approaches outlined in Extraordinary Pedagogies deliberately provoke the cognitive dissonance required for white preservice teachers to engage deeply with issues of identity and marginalization. Multi-level interventions are required for the provocation of “existential threats” (Staples-Dixon, 2024) are required to hold students accountable to their engagement with dissonance and discomfort. Through personal reflection on two composite cases, two current TA’s for the course highlight commonalities in how dissonance and resistance to engagement are expressed by students and provide insight into the strategies used to maintain active engagement with the concepts throughout the course.

Authors

• Helen Miriam Ruzicka, Pennsylvania State University

• Samrat Sharma, Pennsylvania State University