Collaborating Towards Humanizing Pedagogies: Culture Circles in Teacher Educator Preparation

ABSTRACT

This paper describes how we, a group of 7 emerging teacher educators, took up a critical inquiry framework to collaboratively generate knowledge through dialogic reflection on practice across educational contexts. We participated in culture circles and teatro as a practice of teacher education that centers love and humanizing practice. Together throughout the semester, we engaged in problem-posing and dialogue in order to collectively problem-solve around a generative theme: Humanity is non-negotiable in teaching and teacher education. In this paper, we include our reflections on one dilemma of practice to illustrate ways to transform teacher education to include humanizing practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ In her work exploring decolonizing methodologies, Patel (2016) pushes us to question why we take up the research we do, who that research will benefit, and how we might use our work to honor and prioritize knowledge that disrupts hegemonic understandings of the world. In pairing an inquiry-as-stance approach with critical theory, we move toward questioning not only our praxis but also the ways that our work might disrupt or reinforce systems of oppression.