Reimagining Pedagogy: Teacher Agency, Spiritual Inclusion, and Community-Centered Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session explores how Teachers of Color enact agency, activism, and leadership through liberatory, community-rooted, and spiritually inclusive pedagogies that disrupt dominant educational norms. Drawing on frameworks such as abolitionist pedagogy, veiled and fugitive pedagogies, and M(other)work, presenters use qualitative methods—including student surveys, narrative inquiry, and collaborative reflection—to examine how educators challenge Eurocentric, carceral, and secular ideologies in classrooms. Evidence across the four papers reveals how care, cultural identity, and student-faculty co-creation foster healing-centered and justice-driven learning. Collectively, these studies extend critical literature on teacher leadership and Ethnic Studies by advancing culturally situated, humanizing practices that reimagine educational spaces as sites of transformation, solidarity, and freedom dreaming.

Sub Unit

• Division K - Teaching and Teacher Education / Division K - Section 02: Teacher Agency, Activism, and Leadership

Chair

• Saugher Nojan, San Jose State University

Papers

• Insights from Radical Ethnic Studies: Creating Educational Spaces in Support of Student Holistic Ways of Being - Christine Vega, San Jose State University; Marcos Pizarro, California State University - Los Angeles

• Veiled Pedagogy : How Spirituality and Religion Affect the Classroom Space - Saugher Nojan, San Jose State University

• “Love, Study, Struggle”: Fugitive Pedagogy in An Asian American Studies Classroom - Lawrence Lan, San Jose State University

• “Beyond These Campus Walls: Building & Expanding the Bulosan Center Internship Program Beyond the University” - Wayne Jopanda, University of California - Davis

Session Organizer

• Saugher Nojan, San Jose State University

Discussant

• Marcos Pizarro, California State University - Los Angeles