Subversive World Building: How Classroom Educators Enact a Feminist Ethic of Care

• In Event: Engaging an Ethics of Care in Crises and Classrooms

Abstract

Democratic education theory suggests that schools as sites to promote values of equity and shared-living, but schools more aptly function to maintain racialized and gendered hierarchies. Embracing repair through the process of imagining new worlds, this qualitative study employs critical interpretations of space and a feminist ethic of care to examine how social relations form with five classroom teachers. Employing a multi-modal method, we explore the narratives that educators tell themselves about how they create spaces of student agency. Preliminary findings suggest two emerging themes: Subversive space-making to enact a feminist ethics of care and defining classroom techniques against compliance-based schooling. Implications point to the need for educators to build classroom spaces alongside youth to subvert the carcerality of schools.

Authors

• Ryan Oto, University of Minnesota

• Jesus Tirado, University of Georgia