This interview project began with a daughter’s innocent desire to ask “Why?” but we find ourselves in an ever-looping liminality that recognizes both the impossibility of such innocence and the power of an “ability to live on the boundaries” of wanting-to-know and never-knowing. This article concludes by considering the implications of maintaining such a space within the context of a qualitative inquiry course and within the scholarly and personal engagements between a qualitative inquiry instructor and student. We examine the ways that this liminal space has shaped our co-writing, our course-based co-learning, and our interactions and has helped to support a “pedagogy of vulnerability” based on (intentional and unwanted) liminalities within Stephanie’s qualitative inquiry courses.

No abstract

No abstract

Purpose This paper aims to examine how two White teachers, experienced and award-winning veteran educators, navigated issues of race, class and privilege in their instruction, and ways that their efforts and shortcomings shaped both teacher agency and classroom spaces. Design/methodology/approach This study’s methodology centers participants’ experiences and understandings over the course of two years of interviews, classroom observations and discussion groups. The study is conceptually informed by Sara Ahmed’s argument that social justice is often approached as something that education “can do,” which is problematic because it assumes that successful enactment is “intrinsic to the term.” Discussing and/or intending social justice replaces real change, and those leading the conversations believe that they have made meaningful differences. Instead, true shifts in thinking and action are “dependent on forms of institutional commitment […and] how it [diversity/social justice] gets taken up” (p. 241). Findings Using an in vivo coding approach – i.e. using direct quotations of participants’ words to name the new codes – the authors organized their findings into two discussions: “Damn – Every Time I’m with the Kids, I Just End Up Feeling Frozen”; and “Maybe I’m Just Not Giving These Kids a Fair Shake – Maybe I’m the Problem”. Originality/value The participants centered a participatory examination of intersectionality, rather than the previous teacher-mandated one. They “put into action” -xplorations of intersectionality that were predicated on students’ identities and experiences, thus making intersectionality a lived concept, rather than an intellectual one, and transforming students’ and their own engagement.