Building a “Lifetime Circle”: English Education in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter

Abstract

This article argues that, to prepare teachers in the era of #BlackLivesMatter, there must be a radical reframing of teacher education in which teachers learn to disentangle their teaching from the culture of Mass Incarceration and the criminalization of Black and Brown people in the context of the United States in their practice. Using a restorative justice paradigm, I seek to understand in what ways, if any, teacher training, specifically of English teachers, can address issues of Mass Incarceration and how teacher preparation can support preservice teachers to resist colonizing pedagogies and practices that privilege particular ways of knowing and being that isolate particular youth.

Everyday Stories for Everyday People: Communal Responsibility and Nepantla Literacies in Early Childhood Education

“…Like many before us (e.g., Anzaldúa, 1987; Dyson, 2016; Fine, 1994; Gutiérrez, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Winn, 2018), we find it useful to explore practices that thrive in the boundaries—in other words, the literacies that occur in conversation between everyday practices and formal ones, between Self and Other, and between teacher and researcher and student. In these rich learning spaces, teaching and learning goes beyond technical literacy skills and teacher-centered practices that are traditionally privileged in schools, and instead focus on helping students “create new identities and new forms of social action” (Lizárraga & Gutiérrez, 2018).…”

“…We situate our understanding of literacy teaching and learning in a view of literacy as a social, cultural, and historical practice (Vygotsky, 1978) that is inherently political (Freire, 1970; Gutiérrez, 2008). We are interested in tapping sociocritical literacy (Gutiérrez, 2008; Winn, 2018) that connects to students’ sociohistorical lives, and engages children in embodied practices that bridge everyday literacies with more traditional school-based ones. We ask ourselves the following question: How can we teach children writing in humanizing ways that center collective responsibility?…”

“…Valuing students’ multiliteracies and out-of-school knowledges has potential to promote “educational dignity” because adults and children, work side-by-side distributing expertise and blurring boundaries between teachers and students. This type of educational stance can open pathways for the young to become “agents and contributors to their own learning” (Lizárraga & Gutiérrez, 2018, p. 41) and can lead students to become civic actors in the classroom and beyond (Winn, 2018).…”

“…Remembering and re-centering historical and experiential knowledge of historically marginalized communities through their own stories is a way that educators can open space for counterstories that resist dominant discourses of mainstream schooling. A curriculum of remembering and counterstories helps teachers and students develop cultural competencies through culturally relevant (Ladson-Billings, 2006) and emancipatory (King & Swartz, 2016) pedagogies that can increase student agency and motivation (Gutiérrez, 2008; Winn, 2018).…”

“…We ask how a drama-based, story-centered pedagogy can support a community of writers and possibly open a Third Space in the classroom that nurtures a sense of communal responsibility, an important element of Afrocentric praxis. We hope to understand how children “performing or embodying original texts might inform how they view themselves as readers, writers, thinkers, and doers” (Winn, 2018, p. 256).…”