Transforming Our Mission: Animating Teacher Education through Intersectional Justice

Abstract

Teacher education programs often focus on developing teaching professionals and leaders committed to advocating for students, yet pervasive deficit mindsets reinforce and (re)produce societal inequities. In this paper, we outline why and how a turn towards justice in teacher education is an appropriate strategy to reduce harm and marginalization in contexts of K-12 schooling. We argue that a justice-grounded teacher education mission must be aligned with the individual oath teachers take, and introduce four pedagogical stances through which intersectional justice can be integrated as a critical lens for – and key component of – teacher education. Finally, we share examples of how an intersectional justice mission for teacher education looks in practice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional Resources

1. Annamma, S. A. (2018). The Pedagogy of pathologization: Dis/abled girls of color in the school-prison nexus. New York, NY: Routledge.

In this book, Annamma traces the education trajectories of 10 disabled girls of color from public schools to incarceration. The girls and Annamma unearth a pedagogy of pathologization that followed them through schools and prisons; and offer a pedagogy rooted in the girls’ strategies of resistance as a liberatory alternative.

2. Annamma, S. A. & Morrison, D. (2018). DisCrit Classroom Ecology: Using praxis to dismantle dysfunctional education ecologies. Teaching and Teacher Education, 73, 70-80.

In this article, the authors identify a classroom ecology of pedagogy, curriculum, and behavior management that have been rooted in surveillance, labeling, and punishment. They argue for fixing dysfunctional classroom ecologies instead of blaming students for inequitable outcomes for youth of color. Alternatively, the develop a DisCrit Classroom ecology reimaging pedagogy, curriculum, and solidarity with students.

3. Winn, M. T. (2018). A transformative justice approach to literacy education. Journal Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 62, 219-221.

In this article, the author explores how teachers can sustain students’ multilingual literacies and reimagine literacy learning across multiple contexts in conversation with researchers, practitioners, and communities.

4. Winn, M.T. (2018). Justice on both sides: Transforming education through restorative justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

In the book, Winn builds on the idea of restorative and transformative justice principles and weaves in how to apply these concepts to a classroom. Winn provides understanding of how the paradigmatic shift and values of restorative justice can remedy inequities.

Notes

¹ To understand how teacher education has enforced Whiteness, we draw from Maitas & Liou (2015) who seek to name and disrupt “the centrality of Whiteness in teaching by questioning what constitutes normalcy and how teachers implicitly and explicitly participate and reproduce it” (p. 610).

² Lalvani, Broderick, Fine, Jacobowitz, & Michelli (2015) note, “despite a general acknowledgement in (Social Justice Teacher Education) about the non-neutrality of the institution of education, there is a relative silence on the issues of disability oppression and ability-based segregation in schools”.

³ Staley & Leonardi (2016), note that in schools a “heteronormative framework constructs and strictly regulates a set of rules in which heterosexuality is the only acceptable sexual orientation, and gender conformity, or rigid adherence to the gender binary’s construction of masculinity and femininity as discrete and dichotomous categories, is the only acceptable way of performing gender” (p. 211). Alim, Lee, Carris & Williams (2018) build on this to note that cis-heteropatriarchy is,“an ideological system that naturalizes normative views of what it means to ‘look’ and ‘act’ like a ‘straight’ man and marginalizes women, femininity, and all gender non-conforming bodies that challenge the gender binary” (p. 59).

⁴ This teacher education mission was largely drawn and adapted from the following collaboration: Annamma, S., George, A., Jackson-Roberts, C. Jimenez- Silva, M., Souto-Manning, Velasquez, R., M. Winn, L.T. & Winn, M. T. (2017). Trans/forming our profession: Centering justice in teacher education. Presented at the Toward a Transformative Justice Teacher Education Research Convening, Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center, University of California, Davis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Subini Ancy Annamma

Subini Ancy Annamma is an Associate Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Education. Maisha T. Winn is the Chancellor’s Leadership Professor and the Co-Founder and Co-director (with Torry Winn) of the Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center in the School of Education at the University of California, Davis.