"Education Without Boundaries": Human Rights, Teacher Education, and Literacy Pedagogy

• In Event: Teacher Educators Creating Critical and Anti-Oppressive Alternative Spaces Within University-Based Programs

Abstract

Objectives: There is an ongoing emphasis in teacher education programs to prepare teachers for diverse classrooms, but too often the emphasis on “diversity” can become divorced from the social justice struggles many families and students experience. This presentation, based on a six-year participatory research partnership between a university and a diverse Catholic parish, school and community center, explores how education students and teacher educators can learn from and alongside diverse 21st century youth and families to create learning opportunities that are attuned to community and coalitional agency (Zeichner, 2015). In particular, I explore the ways human rights thinking, a meta-narrative invoked by participants at the research site, can inform university-community partnerships and literacy teacher education.

Theoretical framework: This presentation pairs sociocultural literacy frameworks (Street, 1995) with realist theories of identity that underscore the knowledge of historically minoritized communities (Mohanty, 1997; Moya, 2002).

Methods/Data sources: The research partnership with St. Frances Cabrini utilized practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) and ethnographic (Heath & Street, 2008) methods. Data sources consisted of: fieldnotes of participant observation across the various dimensions of the partnership, transcripts of recorded meetings, artifacts (e.g. planning documents, student work from inquiry communities, written communications), and researcher reflective memos. Data was analyzed thematically in a recursive and iterative process (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to develop codes about how participants use language and literacy to negotiate cross-cultural collaboration around educational access and immigrant rights—with a particular focus on human rights tropes.
Findings and Significance: In this presentation I specifically examine the possibilities and critiques of human rights thinking and its implications for teacher education and literacy pedagogy (Moyn, 2012; Mullins, 2015). I offer an understanding of human rights not solely as a power exercised by the state, but as practices enacted collectively on the ground by activists, practitioners, community members, parents and students as they strive to gain recognition for their struggles for access and equity.
I conclude by offering recommendations for researchers and teacher educators who wish to promote education “without boundaries” in their own community-based partnerships. These recommendations include the following: The urgency for educators to adopt an advocacy stance in their work with immigrant and minoritized students; the need to build off the personal and collective agency and activism already present in communities; the role that critical literacy (Janks, 2000) might play in helping both teachers and students unpack dominant discourses that scapegoat and criminalize youth; the value of directly inquiring into human rights issues, particularly but not exclusively those that impact families; the importance of both teachers and students to investigate how our various individual and group histories interconnect and intertwine; and, finally, the importance of partnerships and collaborative research methodologies (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Mirra, Garcia & Morrell, 2015) that foster the “right to research” (Appadurai, 2006), the capacities for all human beings to generate knowledge around issues of equity that impact them.

Author

• Gerald Campano, University of Pennsylvania