"I Chose to Be Here": Beginning Urban Activist Teachers and the Politics of Teaching for Change

This exercise of the researcher self explores relationships materializing in manuscript preparation, suggests that conflict-site research is more of a social and affective experience, from proposal to manuscript preparation, than most researchers realize. Outside of clinical and ameliorative approaches, little educational research focuses on ongoing, unresolved conflict. Even less sheds light on the experience of the conflict-site researcher. Here, I show how texts of other conflict-site writers accompanied my process of manuscript preparation, just as activist teachers I observed during the field work phase stood among peers when protesting and facing police repression. Correspondingly, I discuss an intertextual approach of reaching out to others and drawing on published stories while composing the main narrative of my manuscript, Movements on the streets and in schools. I call this practice conrading based on my turning to Anna Tsing and W. G. Sebald who had turned to the stories of Joseph Conrad in their books. As I called upon other authors who wrote about conflict in my assembling a social movement-based manuscript, moving forward, I suggest the uptake of social and textual relationships will become important when researching in times and spaces of pandemic, state repression and institutional defunding.

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Beyond the Classroom: Progressive Activist Teachers and Images of Experience, Meaning, Purpose, and Identity

Images of Schoolteachers in America ◽

10.4324/9781410600509-12 ◽

2000 ◽

pp. 127-144

Keyword(s):

Activist Teachers

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Rooted Pedagogies: Black Women Activist Teachers Planting Seeds

European Scientific Journal ESJ ◽

10.19044/esj.2018.v14n19p36 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 14 (19) ◽

pp. 36

Author(s):

Yvette Pierre

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Black Women ◽

African American Women ◽

Thinking Skills ◽

Critical Thinking Skills ◽

Future Research ◽

American Women ◽

Cultural Frameworks ◽

Activist Teachers ◽

Black Women's Activism

The history of activism on the part of African American women has laid the foundation on which contemporary African American women activists and scholars have developed theories, critiques, and cultural frameworks that challenges pre- established paradigms and epistemologies. This paper focuses on extending the research that begun on African American teacher activists to gain sufficient insight into their political perspectives and how their perspectives were manifested in their personal and professional lives to influence their role as a teacher. This study was informed by black feminist epistemology and it employs portraiture as its research methodology. Data analysis yielded significant findings. The subjects of the study considered those life experiences to be most significant that contributed in developing their critical consciousness as children through the influence of their family, school, and community. Each teacher pointed to the need to teach critical thinking skills so that students of color will be able to establish their places in the world as productive citizens. The pedagogical approaches of the black women activist teachers were theorized and it emerged as a model of Rooted Pedagogies grounded in the historical tradition of black women’s activism. Furthermore, the implications for teacher education and practice were discussed, alongside with the recommendations for future research.

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