When Shutting the Door Won’t Do: Teaching With the Specter of Community Backlash and the Implications for Teacher Education

Abstract

Recently, numerous news stories have detailed the ways teachers across the country have been disciplined for addressing issues of oppression and justice in their schools. This paper engages poststructural discourse analysis to consider data from a year-long study of recent graduates of a justice-oriented teacher education program during their first year teaching, examining the ways that stories of community backlash functioned to discipline early career teachers to behave in particular ways. I theorize that these stories serve to discourage teachers from pursuing justice-oriented work in the classroom and that such discourses must be addressed in teacher education programs to prepare preservice teachers for the political realities of entering classrooms in the United States in the current cultural moment.

Leaning Into Difficult Topics: Inquiry Communities as Teacher Professional Learning for Turbulent Times

“…This study responds to calls for teacher educators to prepare teachers to engage in difficult topics (Carter Andrews et al, 2018;Nganga et al, 2020), finding that inquiry stance provides a strong theoretical basis for such preparation. In this regard, the study's findings contrast with Ranschaert's (2023) description of the inability of teachers prepared to be justice-oriented "to be both an outspoken advocate for justice and politically neutral in the classroom" (p. 379). Although the present study's participants negotiated apprehensiveness similar to Ranschaert's participants, several nevertheless began to engage justice-oriented issues through an inquiry stance, such as Nora's openness to addressing LGBTQ topics.…”