The Transformative Lives We Lead: Making Teacher Education Ours

• In Event: 30.080 - Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: 30.080-4 - Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Building for Transformation

Abstract

Objectives
Many critically conscious teacher educators find themselves disappointed with the racial hostility they are faced with when they eventually take on positions at their respective institutions. This disappointment seems daunting and many of these teacher educators remain passive as they wait to presumably transform these spaces when they secure tenure, or a critical mass of like-minded, anti-oppressive colleagues somehow increases. These are some of the recurring messages teacher educators raise when seeking advice about confronting white supremacy at their universities. Listening to their dilemmas, and reflecting on my own experiences as a teacher educator, always raises some interesting research questions for me: What does it mean to navigate our realities as racially humanizing teacher educators?

Theory, Methods and Data
In this paper, I use autoethnographic inquiry (Alexander, 1999 & 2005) to examine the ways my experiences as a teacher educator at a traditional, private, Catholic Jesuit, and predominantly White institution can address some of the concerns raised above. Traditional data collection strategies were used to collect six years of data in the form of field journals, artifacts, and interviews. To analyze data, I utilize Charmaz's (2006, 2009) constructivist version of grounded theory. A lot of analytical time was spent extensively doing initial/open coding – doing incident-to-incident comparisons, looking for similarities and differences to make analytic sense of the data and to develop more focused codes. I also locate my participants in our social world where I examine external forces of social control so that I can more richly capture our individual and collective subjectivity. Blending Gramsci’s (1971) war of position, Marx and Engels (1964) class struggle, and Althusser’s (1971) ideological state apparatus (ISA) as lens to examine the data provided the analytic basis to render recurring themes, not concepts and categories, and substantiate these theories with participant narrative and rich, accurate detailed descriptions.

Findings
My findings examine ways that socially transformative teacher education does not come after contradictions have been confronted – it comes hand and hand with it. It explores how when we find ourselves in circumstances and conditions that are unfavorable to our struggle, our job as teacher educators is not to find ways to be maladjusted to the social suffering inside our profession.

Significance
This paper – a case study in many ways – problematizes how many teacher educators think they are being anti-oppressive by identifying and analyzing the inequitable aspects of their jobs, but when they do not commit to applying this analysis to actual transformation then they are simply contributing to the existing inequities. Our responsibility, the findings suggest, is to work collectively to transform our institutions so that they are less hostile to our humanity, our practice, and our purpose. The paper, in essence, argues that this must be the transformative teacher education lives we lead.

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco