When I Unhooked, I Changed the Way I Teach for a Just Society

• In Event: 60.055 - Unhooking From Whiteness: Autoethnographic Approaches Toward Education as Freedom Dreams Through the Abolition of Liberalism, Meritocracy, and Color Blindness in U.S. Teacher Education

Abstract

The second paper, When I unhooked, I Changed the Way Teach for a Just Society, presents the narrative of a Black professor of education sharing his “unhooking” and how his approach to teaching in learning changed for a “just” society. The internalization of Whiteness framed his philosophy when he first started to teach. He first started teaching in Mississippi right after he graduated from Mississippi State. Because of this Whiteness internalization, he felt that in order for students of color to be successful, they are going to have to learn how to play the game, which meant in his mind basically not acting Black (Fordham, 1988, 1996; Foster 1990, 1994). He was looking at the students in a deficit mode, that the reason why the students of color in his classes were not successful was their fault: assumptions of inferiority based on class and race (O’Connor, 2006). His approach changed after he enrolled in the master’s program at the University of Utah. It was the professors in the department who provided him with a framework where he began criticizing the system and how it was problematic for him to be critical of the students. If he was going to truly be an advocate for students, students of color in particularhe was going to have to critique liberalism and recognize the experiences that his students brought to classroom. It was through this framework where his pedagogy changed. He began teaching students how to fight within the system (transformative resistance) and be critical of their oppression, even if it was hidden behind equality and universality. Recognizing the difficulty in the task, his belief is grounded firmly in “if a person does not stand for something then the person will fall for anything” (Harris, 1995; Hayes & Juárez, 2009; Hytten &Warren, 2003; Kendall, 2006; Leonardo, 2009).

Author

• Cleveland Hayes, University of La Verne