"This Is Our Fight": Stories of Radical Care and Subversive Teaching

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 9
  In Roundtable Session: "The Only Light We've Got": Storytelling and Critical Literacies as Method and Antiracist Praxis

Abstract

Context and Purpose
We are in a moment of abundant possibilities in educational research, with myriad innovative research methods and pedagogies centering racial justice. However, empirical questions remain in regards to understanding: Who are the teachers transgressing pedagogical boundaries and actualizing these theoretical considerations for racial justice? -- and how are they doing so? This paper draws from a qualitative dissertation study utilizing interviews with K-12 teachers engaging with antiracist practices in their classrooms. Using methods of grounded theory, storytelling is privileged, drawing from Charmaz’s (2006) call for engaging in interviews so that participants can “break silences and express their views” (p. 27).

Theoretical Framing and Methods
As this study centered the complex and diverse ways K-12 teachers critically interrogate racism, critical theories of race were needed as interpretive frames. For this, how participants discussed the problems of racism and white supremacy in their classrooms, school sites, and education writ large, were analyzed through critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness studies (CWS). The tenets of CRT ground the analysis of racism as endemic to the schooling system -- as in U.S. society -- through the mechanisms of race-evasive policies, the promotion of “meritocracy,” and whiteness as property (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). CWS as an analytic tool hones in on the pervasive ways that whiteness manifests through epistemologies of whiteness in curriculums and school discourse, and performances of whiteness weaponizing denial (Matias & Newlove, 2017). However, in a study looking at what teachers actually do, a theory of praxis was needed. Love’s (2019) work on abolitionist teaching provides the bridge between theories, centering the relationality and positionality of teachers engaging in antiracist work, a politics of refusal, and a pedagogy of freedom dreaming.

Upon selecting interview questions to ensure participants could speak to their experiences (Charmaz & Belgrave, 2012), teachers were invited to consider the above theoretical framework -- allowing for additional analysis from the participants. Rather than an imposition, more themes emerged from the data as participants could “share significant experiences and teach the interviewer how to interpret them” (Charmaz, 2006, p. 27). Whereas theoretical frameworks and research questions often remain hidden to participants, engaging this as an overt part of the study invites them to say for themselves whether the researcher’s selected frames are meaningful to them -- which is central to the work of humanizing research (Paris, 2011).

Scholarly Significance and Findings
Storytelling methods in dominant research paradigms are often positioned, and analyzed, as individualistic -- offering narrow views of meaning-making. Conversely, dialogic methods return us to how we make meaning collectively, recentering the participant as a subject who can speak back to the researcher’s paradigm, rather than an object of detached analysis. Through these methods, the findings reveal rich teaching practices, complexifying what we might think of as “antiracist.” These include acts of healing-centered engagement, radical care, the facilitation of student activism, and explicit resistance to white supremacy. Through their storytelling, teachers revealed shortcomings in teacher education programs and school-led professional development, raising implications for those working with preservice and in-service teachers.

Author

• Peter Newlove, University of Colorado - Denver