Working Towards Fostering Culturally Responsive Classrooms: Illuminating the Risky Work of Teaching in the U.S. and Brasil

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Education across the African Diaspora: Emerging Research Perspectives, Practices, and Connections

Proposal

This paper examines equity-focused STEM teaching and learning across PK-20 settings. My research contributes to critical scholarship in and outside of STEM education where scholars seek to understand how learning occurs across contexts and attends to issues of power, race, and culture. As a trained learning scientist, my research is grounded in asset-based approaches and sociocultural theories of learning that emphasize that learning and developmental processes are intertwined and mediated by social and cultural activities and practices. My onto-epistemological stance assumes that multiple ways of knowing and being are based upon learners’ cultural practices, which we must recognize and build upon to co-construct knowledge. My research primarily focuses on teacher learning processes and learning environments with attention to issues of equity. Using a justice-oriented equity lens, I examine racialized learning environments and how we can transform educational settings such that all Black learners have opportunities to thrive.

I seek to engage in work that highlights Black joy, liberation, and brilliance in education. My work is inspired and shaped by my intergenerational knowledge of teaching and learning and my lived personal, educational, and professional experiences. I come from a family of teachers; in addition to my mother, both my maternal and paternal aunts and uncles were educators. We take the work of teaching seriously in my family, and I have always seen teaching as a political act, especially since my critical consciousness development began at an early age (Author, 2021). As such, I understand deeply how teaching is a form of protest and provides space for individual and collective efforts to challenge the status quo. Our current sociopolitical climate, wrought with anti-CRT, anti-DEI, anti-trans, and other anti-“woke” legislation and practices (e.g., Anderson, 2021; Kreiss et al., 2021; Ray & Gibbons, 2021), makes engaging in this work even more necessary, riskier, and timely (Author, 2022; Boveda & Boveda, 2023; Morton, 2023). To this end, in this presentation I share findings from studies of teachers in the U.S. and Brasil as they develop understandings of and learn to teach in culturally responsive ways. This presentation will highlight the important and difficult work teachers do to “bring about more just and inclusive educational futures” for Black children across the Diaspora.

Author

• Tia C. Madkins, The University of Texas at Austin