(Re)Narrating Resistance in Teacher Education: Testimonio as Pedagogy

• In Event: Temporal Geographies of the Teacher Education Curriculum: Interrogating Past-Future Curricular Worlds

Abstract

This conceptual paper discusses possibilities for interrupting defanged and domesticated social justice narratives in teacher education. This paper begins with a rationale and discussion of why faculty of Color committed to justice must confront the Western epistemologies underlying mainstream or “normal” social justice narratives. Doing this requires (re)narrating what counts as resistance and confronting the “violences” in dominant narratives (Fricker, 2007). Building on this provocation, this paper proposes that faculty challenge the monopoly on social justice in teacher education controlled by Western modes of neoliberal reason. An underlying assumption of this paper is that Testimonios, can help faculty support undergraduate students as they engage in thinking that goes beyond binaries and myopic scopes of “diversity and inclusion.”

Author

• Ramon Vasquez, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities