Disrupting Evasion Pedagogies

ABSTRACT

As we have researched in schools and reflected on our own teaching, we have come to recognize the lie and our untruthfulness that permeates many of our cultural scripts (Gutierrez et al., 1995) and practices as teachers. It is within these cultural scripts and practices that inequity is perpetuated and humanizing learning evaded. Thus, what we term evasion pedagogies, serve to sustain the status quo and are powerful tools to maintain oppressive projects like white supremacy, heteronormativity, gender binaries, patriarchy, ableism, classism, and linguicism. In this piece, we examine the notion of evasion pedagogies as a powerful lie in practice that needs to be disrupted in teaching and learning across grade levels and contexts. Then, we draw on decades of research to illustrate how existing scholarship offers meaningful opportunities to disrupt evasion pedagogies by focusing on humanization.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical theory
• equity
• humanizing pedagogies
• racial justice

Notes

1. Zavarzadeh (1992) discusses “parapedagogy” as “evasion” as a “bracketing” of the learner’s whole self. Our use of the term is distinct in that we focus on the evasion of equity through pedagogy.