Waking Each Other: Reflections on Hope From a Teacher Education Classroom

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Living the Dystopian-Utopian Tension as Praxis: Transformative Dreaming With/in/for Education and Educational Research

Abstract

With the election of Donald Trump, harassment, violence and bias skyrocketed in k-12 spaces (SPLC, 2017). Although resources exist to help teachers navigate through hate in schools (e.g. Teaching tolerance, n.d.; GLSEN, n.d.) students in my teacher education classes were anxious to address the challenge of “what shall we do about this?” directly and creatively. As they brainstormed - seeking information in and about their communities – and then labored, revised and ultimately showcased a range of arts-based social justice oriented work, they shone a light on the what future can look like. The purpose of this paper is to use autoethnography to share my journey with these students to provide evidence of why, despite these dark times, in teacher education classes I find reasons for hope.

This paper is predicated on the work of critical pedagogues who embrace narratives and the aesthetic in teaching. Critical pedagogy calls for an ongoing analysis of harm (Kincheloe, 2008), which requires students to “come to terms with their own power as critical agents” (Giroux, 2007, p. 2). In modern parlance critical pedagogy is aligned with being “woke,” and then sharing and acting on this knowledge. Freire (1998) argues that educators should disrupt oppression by creating new knowledge, while speaking from (and to) the heart. Accepting this challenge entails battling disengagement by embracing aesthetic epistemologies (Greene, 1995) and letting go of attachment to traditional ways of understanding and practicing teaching (hooks, 1994; Kress, 2011). I utilize autoethnography as “critical enquiry that is embedded in theory and practice” (McIlveen, 2008, p. 3) as I describe specific classroom experiences with arts-based teaching. Autoethnography involves first person narratives that offer insights on the meaning of experience through self-reflection (Ellis et al., 2010; Doty, 2010). Using this method I foreground emotional resonance, pull away from “academic tourism” (Pelias, 2003), delve into and share the meaning of a lived experience.

Participant-observations and journals facilitate turning the anthropological lens inward (Hughes, Pennington, & Makris, 2012). To this end my data was collected from a teaching journal that focuses on teaching during the 2016-2017 school year. This journal includes my reflections on student assignments, classroom interactions and written student feedback. Witnessing the sophistication of the posters, songs, paintings, fliers and activities designed against hate and made by teacher education students, led to a renewal of my optimism. As I presented students with information that awakened them to the need to act against oppression in schools, they in turn awakened me to forms that critical pedagogy can take in the next generation of teachers, thereby creating an upward spiral of hope. Stories that journey through hope are of scholarly significance as “hope as an ontological requirement” (Freire, 1998, p. 44). It allows us to believe that a better world is not only possible, but also attainable. The significance of this personal teaching narrative lies in the possibility to no longer despair at the new levels of hate manifesting schools, and to instead know that resistance is afoot.

Author

• Carolyne Ali-Khan, University of North Florida