Breaking Good: The Teacher as Complicit With the School-to-Prison Nexus

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Becoming a "Good" Teacher: Teacher Perspectives and/on Student Learning

Abstract

Using Educational Criticism, I audited a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) Training in a city’s police department to consider how the intentions, operation, and reception of the training evinced or contested violence, dehumanization, and whiteness. To analyze the training, I utilized Fanon (1963/2004) and Wynter’s (2003) conceptualization of overrepresented Man as white, bourgeoisie, able-bodied, and cisgender to consider how the training oriented toward various groups of people as normative or deviant. In this paper, we discuss a key thematic from the police CIT Training, the dichotomoy of good and bad, within the context of schools to help us understand the ways teachers position themselves as good and analyze widely circulated teaching strategies for the good/bad binary.

Authors

• Tara Meister, Pacific University

• Carrie S. Larson, Pacific University Oregon