Teaching in the Service of Fugitive Learning

In educational scholarship, abolition and fugitivity have been used to theorize youth literacy practices (The Fugitive Literacies Collective, 2020), teaching in solidarity with Black and brown communities (Love, 2019), and learning as an act of rebellion within the oppressive structures of schooling (Patel, 2016; 2019). Additionally, recent works in sociology (Shedd, 2015) and anthropology (Shange, 2020; Sojoyners, 2016) have thoughtfully and comprehensively documented the ways in which the disciplinary mechanisms of schools serve to contain, surveil, and expunge Black students. This paper draws on these recent scholarly interventions as a lens through which educators might engage with the students who and schools in which they teach. Patel (2016) suggests that authentic learning in schools structured by racial capitalism is a “fugitive act”—elusive, subaltern, and, as a result, under-theorized” (Patel, 2016, p. 397). What “fugitive acts of learning” take place in our schools? What relationship to these practices can teachers adopt so that we might “serve and shield” these spaces of “unruly learning” (Patel, 2016, p. 400)?

Queering Elementary Education: A Queer Curriculum for 4th Grade

This project explores the positioning of queer students and queer curriculum in schools with a specific focus on elementary education. Using intersectionality as a guiding framework along with queer theories, educational theories, and feminist theories, this project examines and critiques how queer subjectivities have (not) been included in schools via curriculum for elementary school children. In an effort to better understand how educators have been successfully incorporating queer topics into their classrooms, this study uses qualitative research methods, specifically semi-structured interviews with teachers in New York City. The findings from this study have been used to create a 23-lesson curriculum for 4th grade teachers that investigates bodies, puberty, sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. Furthermore, the curriculum uses an intersectional lens to explore how various identities such as race, gender, ability, sexuality, and religion intersect to inform understandings of privilege and discrimination.

The Erasure of Black Women

To what do we owe Black women? Everything. To be Black and female in America means that you are ignored, silenced, and sometimes erased. the very fabric of history would be quite different for all of us without the contributions, tears, blood, and love of Black women. As a result of the intersection of patriarchy and white supremacy, Black women are too often left exhausted, overworked, and left out of the historical narrative. This multi-modal creative work is a call to action to end the erasure of Black women with scholarship, visual art, and poetry.

'Don’t Worry, I Got You. You Can Do This': A Student-Centered Approach to Reimagining College Access

As high school college counselor caseloads increase, they have less time for consistent one-on-one counseling to support students with college planning. Thus, for many students – particularly those in large or under-resourced schools – the process is depersonalized, focused on simply distributing information. Drawing on narrative and ethnographic research, this paper explores a unique program that positions young people as paid college access professionals in their schools. Findings show that these students – Youth College Counselors (YCC) – make college planning a more student-centered, meaningful experience. Strategies YCCs engage with to support peers are examined to shine a light on how YCCs use their unique position inside schools to rethink college planning. YCCs resist a dominant narrative of young people, particularly those who live in marginalized communities, as objects onto which policy happens, and instead serve as school change actors. Findings suggest that high schools must create space in policy and practice to thoughtfully position students as agents of school change.

Down the Rabbit Hole: A Fantastical First Year of Teaching

Interviews and observations of first year teachers in the northeastern United States were used to construct a comic. The comic communicates the excitement, fears, and competing demands of a beginning teacher. The dialogue and setting are presented as surrealist to help the reader gain an understanding of the affective realities that the teachers expressed when describing their early teaching experiences. This approach allows for the multiple dimensions of the teachers’ lived experiences to be experienced in ways that a traditional text does not allow. The work takes a critical look at the transition of beginning teachers into their careers and is meant to trouble notions of standardization in both teacher preparation and curriculum design. This arts-based approach recognizes performance as both a method of investigation and representation (Worthen, 1998). Given that public education is often a prominent part of societal discourse, this modality allows the reader the opportunity to make meaning of the data by experiencing the words on the page (Leavy, 2009). The illustrations allow the reader to experience the words differently than traditional text. In this way, dramatizing the data is a form of critical pedagogy (Denzin, 2006).

The Case for Care: Multiyear teachers are the future of mobilizing care in education

Care is essential to the healthy development of children. If care is not provided within the child’s home, the second most influential sphere within a child’s life where care can be enacted is the school. Community psychology and motivational psychology shed light into how teachers can use care to understand the child as a part of their community and use this understanding to enhance the child’s ability to learn. Education researchers have studied caring teachers to define what care looks like in practice: getting to know students personally, listening to the wants and needs of the child, their parents and the community, and using that information to aid the student in their studies. A multitude of studies have shown that these practices have measurable positive effects on students. When a teacher displays traits that their students define as caring, student achievement increases. Therefore, care is a clearly definable and measureable educational strategy that raises student achievement and should be institutionalized through education policy. Small schools and small class sizes are both effective methods of promoting care in education. However, multiyear teachers (looping) have been shown to increase student enthusiasm, parent involvement, teacher productivity and student achievement and can be implemented with no extra cost to the school. Looping is an academically effective and cost-effective way of mobilizing care in public education as supported by psychology and education research.

“Some Teachers Just Simply Care”: Respect in Urban Student-Teacher Relationships

Teachers are ethically obligated to care for their students. One overlooked means of demonstrating care is through respect. However, because respectful behaviors are culturally dependent, exploring experiences of respect from students of color is needed to provide insight into student-teacher relationships. To understand students’ experiences of respect from teachers in the school setting, we interviewed 12 adolescents and emerging adults of color (M age = 17, SD age = 1.81) who attended Urban schools, about their experiences of respect from their teachers. We deductively and inductively coded the interviews separately for definitions of respect and experiences of respect from teachers using six themes of respect. Ultimately, youth often defined respect as the golden rule and politeness. However, when discussing instances of respect with teachers, youth described teachers demonstrating care for students’ personal lives and academic success. Our findings suggest that students identify behaviors associated with care as respectful, which diverge from decontextualized definitions of respect. Policy changes should focus on promoting student-teacher relationships, focusing on culturally sensitive teaching and caring for students. Specifically, policy should support classroom level changes, such as the co-construction of respect expectations between students and teachers.

Discipline Policies in Urban Educational Contexts: Approaches, Barriers, and Restorative Justice

Beginning in the late twentieth century, a surge in school violence associated with racism and urban poverty has sparked increased use of punitive approaches to school discipline, and these high-stakes approaches have become normalized in school districts nationwide. “Discipline” at the classroom and school level, understood as the procedures and interactions between students and teacher surrounding behaviors deemed inappropriate, have historically been grouped into two domains: punitive discipline and restorative justice. Punitive justice methods increased their domination in urban classrooms throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s but in the last decade or so, a new wave of conflict-resolution-based discipline has emerged in the form of restorative justice practices. In this paper, I will outline the pedagogical bases and development of each approach and, based on data and scholarly analysis, contend that restorative justice techniques are more effective in lowering instances of misconduct and creating a successful learning environment. I will present statistics on the effect and success levels of each, as well as case studies exemplifying the implementation of each discipline strategy. In my analysis of punitive discipline, I will, in part, focus specifically on the argument that these policies are particularly detrimental to boys of color. I will then pose the question: If the research is so conclusive, why aren’t more schools transitioning from punitive discipline to restorative justice techniques? I argue that the foremost barriers to this transition are an ill-placed emphasis on safety in schools, and an unfounded perception of racial threat to order in the classroom.

African American English And Urban Literature: Creating Culturally Caring Classrooms

Language and literacy are a means of delivering care through consideration of students’ home culture; however, a cultural mismatch between the predominantly white, female educator population and the diverse urban student population is reflected in language and literacy instruction. Urban curricula often fail to incorporate culturally relevant literature, in part due to a dearth of texts that reflect student experiences. Dialectal differences between African American English (AAE) and Mainstream American English (MAE) and a history of racism have attached a reformatory stigma to AAE and its speakers. The authors assert that language and literacy instruction that validates children’s lived experience mediates this hegemony, leads to empathetic relationships between teachers and students of different cultural backgrounds, and promotes academic success. This paper seeks to 1) dissect the relationship between academic achievement and affirmation of student culture through language and literacy instruction, 2) enumerate classroom strategies that empower students and foster the development of self-efficacy 3) identify ways teachers might weave value for diversity in language and literacy into a pedagogy of care for urban classrooms.