Abstract
The Atlanta Schools Critical Education Network for Distinction (ASCEND) is an ongoing interdisciplinary coalition supporting the critical consciousness of social justice educators. ASCEND partners include: (1) activist faculty from two university departments: Middle and Secondary Education and African American Studies; (2) a justice-oriented community-based organization; and (3) local public middle school faculty. This paper analyzes ASCEND's impact on deepening urban teachers’ awareness of, and attention to, local injustices within their curriculum, and initial application of critical pedagogy. Major findings capture the impact of providing experiential educator learning opportunities outside of schools and the urgency to center community in educator development.
Keywords
Liberatory Teacher Education
Decades through a neoliberal reform experiment on public education, widespread decontextualized and reductive policies impact everything from curriculum standardization (Martin et al., 2020; Knoester & Au, 2017), charter school and school voucher expansion (Chapman & Donnor, 2015; Heilig et al., 2016, Heilig, 2018; Harvey, 2018), competitive teacher evaluation (Milner, 2013), to fast-track teacher licensure “gimmicks” (p. 88; Love, 2019). These policies are branded as ways to improve student achievement and teacher professionalization, but within their market-based educational landscape (Bruff, 2019), teacher education—and specifically educator professional development—has often been reduced to technical training by “outside experts with little knowledge of local conditions who present irrelevant, sometimes amusing, often boring prepackaged information” (Wilson & Berne, 1999, p. 174). Kohli and colleagues (2015) refer to this common professional development approach, which attempts to simplify the complexity of teacher learning-practice (Strom & Viesca, 2021), as “anti-liberatory,” arguing that “current [professional development] does not involve teachers in the process of examining the pressing issues they or their students face in schools, nor does it elicit teachers’ professional expertise, interests or needs,” and neglects to see teachers as “politically-aware individuals who have a stake in teaching and transforming society” (p. 9).
Several scholars have recently offered hybrid, humanizing, and democratizing teacher education approaches to combat dominant neoliberal policies in teacher education (Acosta et al., 2018; Carter Andrews et al., 2019; Cutts, 2020; Kohli et al., 2015; Murrell, 2001; Napolitan et al., 2019; Zeichner, 2019). These approaches are antithetical to neoliberalism by positioning teachers as knowledgeable, agentic, and autonomous curriculum creators, which can potentially lead to more liberatory instructional practices (Kohli et al., 2015; Zeichner, 2019). Though many ways to enact liberatory teacher education exist, we offer a unique approach by weaving together three theoretical frames from the literature: enacting ontological and epistemological plurality; critical pedagogy; and place-based experiential learning. In this study, we utilized these three conceptual tools to design, enact, and study a liberatory teacher education collaborative for English language arts and social studies teachers in Atlanta, Georgia. Next, we briefly introduce each thread and elaborate further on each in the theoretical framework section.
The first conceptual thread is enacting ontological and epistemological plurality, drawn from Carter Andrews and colleagues’ (2019) principles of humanizing teacher education. Engaging this principle can decolonize knowledge (Dominguez, 2017) by requiring teacher education to expand the traditionally narrow university—school dyad. A plurality is also interdisciplinary by assembling additional people, perspectives, languages, cultural practices, and/or modalities to educate teachers. Acosta and colleagues (2018) also argue teacher education must integrate critical disciplines (i.e., Black, ethnic, and gender studies, indigenous studies, disability studies, etc.) alongside community partners because of their varied and neglected epistemological orientations to education and teacher education.
Our second mobilized thread is critical pedagogy, which we use broadly to encompass instructional strategies for liberatory teacher education. While teachers may learn about history and deepen critical awareness of political action from including cross-disciplinary organizations and enacting plurality, critical pedagogy offers instructional practices and strategies for educators and students to act against those structures while simultaneously developing traditional academic skills. Here, teachers can utilize instructional practices, such as problem-posing literacy practices and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2016), to address academic skills while resisting narrowing curriculum (Freire, 1970/2000).
The third thread is a neglected but powerful way to contextualize teacher education content, but also emphasizes teacher learning and practice: experiential, place-based education. Experiential placed-based teacher education involves physical kinesthetic movement while also honoring local education stakeholders, local contextual needs, and educators’ practice to foster critical inquiry and consciousness (Harfitt, 2019; Napolitan et al. 2019).
We argue liberatory teacher education can be realized by weaving the three conceptual threads of enacting epistemological and ontological plurality, critical pedagogy, and experiential, place-based education, and this article describes the successful evolution of a liberatory teacher education coalition informed by those threads and formed to resist decontextualized and a-historic neoliberal reforms. For us, resistance is seen as deepening educators’ critical consciousness and improving their ability to design, implement and reflect upon critical, contextualized curriculum (Biesta & Stengel, 2016; Freire, 1970/2000, 1973; Hooks, 1994). Here, we draw attention to the Atlanta Schools Critical Education Network for Distinction (ASCEND), an interdisciplinary, community-based teacher education coalition designed to impact teachers’ critical consciousness and critical instructional practices—cornerstones to critical inquiry and civic engagement. Coalition members include staff and faculty from an urban traditional public middle school, a minority-serving university (teacher education and African American studies departments), and a justice-oriented community-based organization. We asked the following research questions to better understand this ongoing endeavor:
How can a liberatory teacher education collaborative be developed in Atlanta, and what does its design look like? How does engagement in a liberatory teacher education collaborative impact teachers’ critical consciousness and teaching practices?
ASCEND Theoretical Framework: Weaving Strands of Liberatory Teacher Education
Theorizing teacher education is a multifaceted pursuit. Recently, educational theorists have presented compelling arguments that complexify relatively established notions of the sociocultural nature of learning (Nasir et al., 2021), the expansion of human activity within and across institutional systems (Engeström & Sannino, 2021), and non-linear conceptualizations of teacher development and “teacher learning-practice” (Strom & Viesca, 2021). In a similar vein, to complexify theories of critical or liberatory teacher education is to consider the involvement of humans, with their dynamic social, emotional, and cognitive processes, who learn in and across activity settings that are “power-laden, historically located, and weighted with histories of oppression and/or freedom,” (Nasir et al., 2021, p. 560). Therefore, we attempt to theorize the complexity of individual teacher learning in the current era of hyper-standardization and ubiquitous neoliberal education reform.
We draw on the aforementioned three conceptual threads of epistemological and ontological plurality, critical pedagogy, and place-based experiential learning (Figure 1) to design, enact, and analyze a liberatory teacher education. In this section, we dig deeper into past conceptualizations of liberatory education and teacher education to then detail further the three threads informing our conception of liberatory teacher education.
ASCEND's three conceptual frameworks strands woven together.
Critical educational scholars including Murrell (2001) discuss a need for critically conscious community teachers to be knowledgeable of local oppressive conditions and barriers. Seider and Graves (2020) outline the ideological, institutional, internalized, and interpersonal constructs of one's critical consciousness to develop one's knowledge of, and ability to, see and explain when, where, and how these barriers interact (Rooks, 2017). In Teaching to Transgress, hooks (1994) describes education as the practice of freedom and liberation, contrasting this with education to obey and follow authority. hooks writes liberatory education “connects the will to know with the will to become” (p. 19), which applied to teacher education means knowledge must help teachers become owners of their practice. In “A Talk to Teachers,” Baldwin (1963) articulates a purpose of education aligned with liberation, writing, “The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions” (para 2). Biesta & Stengel (2016) refer to liberation as “subjectification,” which they define as “the way in which education contributes to how [learners] can be subjects in their own right, rather than objects of the acts of others” (p. 26). Importantly, all these articulations of liberation center on teacher autonomy.
Thus, when we seek to support teacher liberation through collaborative, interdisciplinary, place-based education, our goal is teachers articulating their power to enact their desired pedagogy—to be decision makers and curriculum creators. As an outcome, liberatory teacher education would look like autonomous teachers determining their own instructional goals and informed by their experiences, their students’ funds of knowledge and communities’ knowledge (Hyland & Meacham, 2004), and their critical and contextualized appraisal of theory, research, and best practices. Teachers must be positioned as subjects of their own destiny, not objects of teacher educator indoctrination or the indoctrination of others (Kohli et al., 2015).
Other scholars emphasize critical consciousness as having three elements: critical awareness of systems, critical awareness of self, and an iterative cycle of reflection and action (El-Amin et al., 2017; Apple & Au, 2009; Bartolomé, 2004; Freire, 1973; Hooks, 1994; McDonough, 2009). Critical awareness of systems can require examining oppressive power relations and structures within society while critical awareness of self requires examining one's own intersectional identity, privileges, biases, and experiences with oppression. In this study, we included enacting critical pedagogy as a part of critical consciousness. Yet liberation and critical consciousness development cannot be the only goals of teacher education. In our view of liberatory teacher education, technical instructional practices are also embedded. Biesta and Stengel (2016) refer to this concept as educators’ “qualification and socialization” for liberatory practice and were key considerations in ASCEND activities and learning goals. Next, we explore how enacting epistemological and ontological plurality, critical pedagogy, and experiential place-based learning support liberatory teacher education.
Enacting Epistemological and Ontological Plurality
Since institutions and people representing those institutions honor and embody different ways of knowing and being, Carter Andrews and colleagues (2019), Zeichner (2019), and Zygumunt and colleagues (2020) call for universities and school districts to expand partnerships for teacher learning. Carter Andrews and colleagues (2019) argue that by enacting epistemologically and ontologically plurality, teachers learn by interacting with multiple modalities, thus, “forcing teachers to “engage with and through the body” therefore “resisting Eurocentric binaries” (p. 22). Zygumunt and colleagues (2020) write that “community-engaged pedagogies” require teachers contextualize their children's lived experiences thus “undergoing a process of disequilibrium and disillusionment as they learn about the legacies and current realities resulting from societal oppression” (p. 1305). The authors contend that faculty and community leaders are uniquely positioned to support the cognitive, emotional, and spiritual impact of worldview reshuffle.
By incorporating non-traditional partners for collaboration, such as equity-oriented community organizers with roots in experiential education and Ethnic Studies scholars specializing in the history of Atlanta, a more liberatory teacher education aspiration can be realized. Because of their critical orientations to context, content, and learning methods, interdisciplinary partners can support educators with the knowledge and skills to interact and learn with community (Biesta & Stengel, 2016). For these reasons, our model emphasized the collaborative aspect of interdisciplinarity to include teachers, administrators, university professors, and community members.
Critical Pedagogy: Black Studies Orientation and Critical Composition Pedagogical Practices
Since teachers must exhibit content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and best teaching practices—itself a contested term—Critical Composition Pedagogy (CCP; Morrell, 2008) is employed to address technical aspirations of critical pedagogy in English language arts and social studies classrooms where textual production is emphasized. CCP includes elements of dialogism, historicity, problem-posing, emancipation, and praxis and falls under the broader umbrella theory of critical literacy (Janks, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 2016; Lee, 1992; New London Group, 1996; Sealey-Ruiz, 2016).
While seeking change, students engage with writing and spoken words across multiple modalities and instructional levels to interrogate their context and history for oppressive signs, symbols, language, and habits impacting their experiences (Young, 1990) and to celebrate their personal and cultural history, joy, and resistance. Of course, the application of this material in the middle school classroom is contingent on teachers’ own critical consciousness, their willingness to integrate such content in the classroom, and their ability to support students to meaningfully engage with the material. Therefore, CCP is presented alongside the critical discipline of Black Studies, which also supports ASCEND's place-based nature.
King (2017, 2005) posits Black Studies as centering “liberating knowledge” and content to illuminate and sharpen all students’ “critical consciousness,” irrespective of racial identity (p. 948). King describes the introduction of this material to “unsettle the ideological knowledge (e.g., epistemological ignorance) that has shaped consciousness or lack thereof.” King continues, “a first premise of this pedagogical approach is that racism is a form of knowledge that constrains human freedom, not just Black people's freedom and consciousness,” (p. 948). For example, by centering Civil Rights movement triumphs and decentering Lost Cause ideology one exposes its fanciful mythology and oppressive legacies. Liberating knowledge generates a learning process focusing social, cultural, and historical representations of people of color to expose how “the system of oppression, that affects us all, works” (p. 948).
King's framing parallels Paulo Freire's (1973) emphasis on the collective and interdependent nature of liberation, the need to contextualize education, and the role dialogue plays in liberatory learning. Combining a Black Studies orientation to content with CCP literacy techniques positions educators as knowledgeable and confident to engage critical concepts and instructional strategies for student inquiry.
Place-Based Experiential Learning
To support our knowledge of the learning process, Nasir and colleagues (2021) note “learning is experienced as embodied and coordinated through social interaction,” and that learning designs should “include integrated kinesthetic learning experiences and focus on the development of argumentation as a foundational practice of critical thinking,” (p. 561). In addition to the experiential notions of learning, Grunewald (2003) writes of the decades-old tension in teacher autonomy. He notes that “in place of actual experience with the phenomenal world, educators are handed, and largely accept, the mandates of a standardized, ‘placeless’ curriculum,” (p. 8). Since humanizing, anti-neoliberal educational research compels the examination of our history, contexts and oppressive political coalitions, a powerful method is to make research and instruction place-based and experiential. Grunewald (2003) continued, “place-based pedagogies are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit” (p. 4). Therefore, a shift towards being place-based teacher education can honor local education stakeholders’ contextual needs and educators’ practices for critical inquiry (Napolitan et al., 2019). In our design for liberatory teacher education, we infused place-based content and critical pedagogy with a complementary experiential orientation to learning (e.g., Popular Education; Freire, 1973; Local South, 2018).
Experiential learning and popular education can expand one's critical consciousness by employing contextual and dialectical pedagogies to support awareness and understanding (Freire, 1973; Harfitt & Chow, 2020). In other words, meaningful learning occurs as educators experience and bi-directionally link content to context and relating concepts and language to a larger ecology of economics, politics, and culture. Additionally, experiential learning pedagogies directly oppose solely mechanistic relationships between content and concepts.
Dynamic Equity-Oriented Teacher Education Partnerships
Undermining aspirations for interdisciplinary or liberatory teacher education looks like historic resistance to “university-centric perspectives” (Zeichner, 2019, 2021 p. 3) in teacher preparation programs and dependance in traditional teacher workshops on “technocratic, top-down, anti-dialogical professional development (APD),” (Kohli et al., 2015). One powerful way to transform technocratic-centered teacher learning spaces is to partner activist teacher educators with ethnic studies scholars and community-led organizations. In this vein, the ASCEND coalition spans traditionally siloed institutions to support teachers to contextualize knowledge of historic oppression, while still supporting teachers to develop the academic skills of their students (Kretchmar & Zeichner, 2016; Napolitan et al., 2019; Zeichner, 2019).
ASCEND's design is preceded by other university partnerships that authentically work with community educators to move beyond simply providing isolated pre-service teacher experiences. The UTeach Urban Teachers (UTUT) program in Austin, Texas is one dynamic partnership in which university educators partner with practicing and pre-service secondary literacy teachers to “prepare teachers who possess a deep understanding of the history of schooling within marginalized communities, an assets-based view of students, and a social justice stance on improving urban education,” (Skerrett et al., 2018, p. 1). This mutually beneficial and multifaceted partnership includes research groups and “professional learning communities for in-service literacy teachers attached to the university's college of education,” (Skerrett et al., 2018, p. 2).
Like UTUT, the Collaboration and Reflection to Enhance Atlanta Teacher Effectiveness (CREATE) program focuses on the parallel development of practicing and pre-service teachers (Cross & Thomas, 2017). CREATE utilizes a three-year residency model to partner a research University, urban school district, and local grassroots organization to support pre- and in-service teachers and has reduced teacher attrition. Residents receive support from mentor teachers and a site director for their clinical practice as well as Critical Friendship and Mindfulness training to support them in a consistent cycle of collaboration, reflection, and self-care. By partnering with community entities, CREATE receives feedback from school age students and the district to impact teacher preparation.
In another example, Seidl (2007) presents a transformative example of a 7-year long partnership between an educator preparation program and local African American church in Columbus, Ohio. The primarily white pre-service teachers reported gaining insight on their own critical consciousness, culturally relevant pedagogy in action, awareness of how race and privilege impact African American students and connecting university coursework to their clinical practice, and an increased likelihood to consider students’ culture when preparing lessons. Mustian and colleagues’ (2017) community-immersed educator prep program successfully focused on developing culturally responsive educators for schools in Chicago. There, selected university-based pre-service teachers work in conjunction with Chicago schools through introductions to communities prior to student-teaching. These primarily white pre-service teachers travel to communities in Chicago and support students and communities by gaining cultural competencies and a deeper understanding of culturally responsive pedagogy and they’ve reported improved teacher retention.
A subtle yet significant variation on these models regarding ASCEND, is the equal integration of an African American Studies department faculty member and the education director of a deeply justice-oriented community organization alongside education department faculty and local middle school faculty. By co-designing and co-facilitating professional learning experiences across these epistemological and ontologically plural spaces, several forms of expertise and knowledge merge, including knowledge of practitioner pedagogies, backgrounds of students, school dynamics, national educational trends, community tensions, community assets, and historic racial relations of our city.
ASCEND Case Study
Participants & Settings
This case study examines ASCEND—a liberatory teacher education coalition grounded in Black Studies, onto-epistemologically plurality, and place-based experiential learning. First, to demonstrate the dynamic partnership within ASCEND, three examples are provided to show the high level of trustworthiness among Georgia State University (GSU) faculty and City Middle School (MS; pseudonym) leadership: (1) the first author, Jacob, has field-based his university educator preparation courses at City MS for several years prior and during ASCEND at the City MS principal's behest, (2) City MS has hired seven GSU graduates as City MS teachers, and (3) Jacob received the 2019 Distinguished Community Partner award from City MS administration. As for ASCEND specifically, initial conceptions arose from discussions among GSU teacher education faculty and City MS staff. Staff members expressed a desire to support English language arts (ELA) and social studies teachers in their pursuit of critical inquiry, which also aligned with City MS's recent International Baccalaureate (IB) designation. Through deeper discussion of what staff meant by ‘critical inquiry’, we decided to expand our coalition beyond a traditional university and school-based PD model to also engage community-based educators and university faculty from areas outside of education.
Once expanded, ASCEND integrated folks from three prominent Atlanta institutions: (1) GSU faculty from the Middle & Secondary Education and African American Studies departments, (2) the education director of Local South (a pseudonym), a justice-oriented community organization; and (3), City MS faculty, including ELA and social studies teachers and an instructional coach. GSU serves a predominantly Black student population, and following Black Radical (Robinson, 2000) and Mutual Aid traditions, Local South has over 40 years of experience working with students and families in Atlanta by supporting and advocating for fair housing access, nutritional outreach, youth empowerment, and education policy reforms, among other initiatives, as well as supporting Bob Moses's Algebra Project (Checkley, 2001; Local South, 2018).
Together, our interdisciplinary coalition designed experiential workshops to deepen City MS educators’ critical consciousness and implement critical pedagogy. Jacob is a former high school teacher in City MS's district and currently a teacher education professor who instructs multiple middle grades preparation courses. Nadia Behizadeh is a former middle school teacher and current Associate Professor with expertise in language and literacy education. Maurice Hobson is professor in GSU's African American Studies department focusing on Atlanta's local history by employing a Black Studies theoretical orientation (Hobson, 2017). Ayinde Summers has over two decades of experience facilitating outdoor education curricula (Table 1). City MS serves a largely African American student population and is located two miles from Local South and GSU, where Johnnie Ford is the longstanding Social Studies and Language Arts Instructional Coach.
ASCEND Coalition Partner Institutions and Participant Demographics.
The ASCEND coalition is ongoing; however, this analysis focuses on impact of a series of professional learning workshops occurring over five months (see Table 3). Sessions 1–3 occurred at City MS in October and November during district professional development days, while sessions 4 & 5 occurred at Local South, and session 6 convened at the world-renowned Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American History and Culture (AARL).
ASCEND Data Measures, Frequency Counts, and Relationship Between Each Measure and the Primary Research Question it Addressed.
Progression of ASCEND Sessions.
ASCEND's dynamic experiences, identities, and institutional representation align with Carter Andrews and colleagues (2019) notion of epistemological and ontological plurality. ASCEND also employs a dynamic partnership between researchers and practitioners that equally values the knowledge of all stakeholders. Beginning with an urgent problem of practice expressed by City MS allowed for responsive deviations in implementation and consideration of how varied contexts impact implementation. Framing ASCEND as the unit of measure, this study analyzed data with a case study methodology (Yin, 2018).
Data Collection and Analysis
Data sources include written teacher reflections and preliminary lesson plans, transcriptions from dialogues that occurred during workshop sessions, lesson plans, and pre- and post-participation surveys, including measures of teacher efficacy, as well as the Teaching for Social Justice-Beliefs Scale (Ludlow et al., 2008; Table 2). Table 2 also shows how our various data sources supported evidence for each research question. Quantitative data were collected and analyzed by an external evaluator and triangulated with qualitative findings. Qualitative data were analyzed using grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and coded using Strauss and Corbin's (1998) methods of open and axial coding. Axial coding looked for relationships across the piles of data to uncover themes such as tensions, strategies, excitements, hesitations, conditions, etc. Simultaneously, a small set of a priori codes derived from the literature including core principles of Critical Composition Pedagogy (Morrell, 2008; see Appendix A), were employed specifically for artifact analysis coding of educator lesson plans and materials.
After coding, data was arranged and rearranged to see how the codes together wrote a story (Glaser, 2011). The data showed educators move from abstract statements of emotional and intellectual benefit to a more focused steps of implementation. Initial drafts of emergent themes were written, and findings were shared with ASCEND members to member check and elicit feedback (Yin, 2018). This process included email correspondences, small group discussions at City MS, and presentation at a national conference that was co-created and co-delivered with ASCEND participants (Hackett et al., 2018). Additionally, Johnnie Ford, the City MS instructional coach, provided critical feedback on emerging themes and updates on teacher implementation of new practices.
Findings
A Liberatory Teacher Education Coalition: Responsive Design and Implementation
Our first research question focuses on the design of ASCEND, a liberatory teacher education coalition. ASCEND teachers were from City MS, which like many schools operating within pervasive neoliberal reforms, had historically responded to low student-achievement scores by amplifying instruction focused on rote memorization and test preparation (Ball & Ellis, 2008; Delpit, 2012). However, City MS faculty and leadership described to GSU faculty how this approach was not working for teachers or students. Test scores remained low in reading and writing, and students were disengaged from their learning and school leaders wanted a change. After several meetings, Jacob and Nadia agreed with leadership's assessment and shared research suggesting that increasing cultural relevance and criticality are more effective responses to low student achievement (Advancement Project, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2016; Luke, 2000; Schoenbach et al., 2012). Both school and university personnel wanted to support literacy growth through more contextualized, engaging, and critical curricula. Nadia suggested that the co-developed professional development focus on writing, since this was an identified focus area and would engage students in critical text production (Morrell, 2008) focused on illuminating and addressing sociopolitical injustices. Discussions occurred within the larger context of a dramatic rise in white supremist-related crime, the Charlottesville tragedy, renewed interest in revising K-12 curricula steeped in “Lost Cause” mythology, removal of Confederate monuments, and growing rates of local school segregation.
Based on the instructional coach and teachers’ requests to support literacy growth for students, especially in writing, Nadia shared a framework in the first session she had developed for integrating critical composition pedagogy (CCP) with evidence-based practices for writing (Behizadeh, 2019). Participants were asked: How can I teach students to write for social change while meeting content standards? After each ASCEND member shared their thinking, Nadia introduced research-based critical literacy practices (Behrman, 2006; Janks, 2012; New London Group, 1996) and facilitated a conversation connecting current sociopolitical issues (e.g., police brutality, climate change, immigration) to the need to integrate critical literacy practices with English language arts and social studies standards. Next, Nadia led ASCEND in a model lesson focused on whether Confederate monuments should be removed in Atlanta. ASCEND members discussed their thinking based on their knowledge and experiences, they collectively read texts presenting different arguments, and then integrated those sources to create an argument and shared with the collaborative. Finally, ASCEND members analyzed that model lesson to see how CCP tenets were integrated with standards to then brainstorm ways to better integrate CCP in their own teaching. This brainstorm was stimulated by Nadia sharing a crosswalk showcasing CCP compatibility with state standards.
While debriefing ASCEND's first session, participants brought up their knowledge of City MS neighborhood and the discussion uncovered the fact that five ASCEND participants were proudly raised there. Though historically this was a regular occurrence, teachers being from the neighborhood they serve is increasingly rare. A sense of local pride permeated the group and several members expressed a motivation to integrate local history and current geopolitical tensions into their curricula. However, others expressed an initial interest but emphasized limited class and planning time as significant barriers to their ability to connect their district-mandated curricula with justice-related topics. Rather than retreating from this obstacle, we collectively decided to scaffold session 2 and responsively focus on opportunities to extend the basic district requirements to higher order student inquiry grounded in criticality and local history. Returning to our first research question about design, our findings highlight how ASCEND was responsive to participants’ immediate needs and desires, and counters what Kohli et al. (2015) refers to as anti-dialogic professional development. The session's debrief also prompted a redesign of subsequent sessions to become even more experiential and contextualized with instances of local historic triumphs and educational inequities to build on educators’ pre-existing critical consciousness.
Therefore, Maurice used session 3 to address several oppressive tropes about Atlanta by introducing the theoretical lens of Black Studies to ASCEND. With the help of the locally-born educators, Maurice engaged participants in a community mapping exercise to reexamine Atlanta through its unique and historically unparalleled Black merchant, educational, and political classes (Hobson, 2017). This spirited exercise provided context as to how a local business district, Sweet Auburn, could blossom and eventually be referred by a 1956 Fortune magazine article as “the richest negro street in the world,” (Giarratano & Sjoquist, 2018, p. 7) and how Auburn Avenue housed Atlanta Life Insurance, a Black-owned institution that helped finance historic Civil Rights movements including the transformative Montgomery Bus Boycott (Hobson, 2017). The asset-oriented discussion renewed a collective pride in historic Black Atlanta leadership and in this experiential activity, the five local Black participants became co-facilitators infusing their prideful personal experiences into the content and their knowledge became the curricula for our first community walk, which is a common experiential pedagogical practice.
Following this mapping activity, Ayinde facilitated the first community walk to support ASCEND members in analyzing the neighborhoods immediately surrounding City MS. This pedagogical practice, along with being primarily facilitated by a community-based educator encapsulates what Carter Andrews and colleagues (2019) refer to as “multimodality” or “creating space for diverse cultural, literacy, and knowledge practices of communities” (p. 23). The walk was enlightening on multiple levels. On one hand, members identified new community assets, and on the other hand, the walk revealed several racially threatening and violent Confederate symbols. Being near the symbols had a visible impact on our bodies as many participants became emotional as we encountered them and discussed their historical purposes. The symbols included two large confederate cannons a mere six blocks from City MS, as well as two streets named to honor the Confederacy. For years City MS educators passed by these symbols, some unaware of their messaging, but there was a new collective learning as we huddled together to make sense of their placement and purpose.
During the emotional debrief, Jacob drew on Iris Young's (1990) Five Faces of Oppression, to discuss how oppression is expressed by a society's signs, symbols, and habits, and how one's awareness of these expressions can be the very the germination of Joyce King's (2017) Liberating Knowledge. After standing next to and feeling the Confederate cannons aimed at City MS's neighborhood—a centuries-old historically Black community—some ASCEND participants revealed a different stance from session one's relatively ambivalent discussion of confederate monuments by now expressing a firm need to remove them. Relatedly, the walk continued and brought us next to a highly touted charter school adjacent to City MS. As we stopped, the group discussion shifted from the subject of confederate symbols to another current oppressive system—racial re-segregation between the schools (Rooks, 2017).
Many participants voiced that the two schools were racially segregated yet not everyone had this knowledge. It was not until we reviewed demographic data (Figure 2) of all surrounding schools that ASCEND members understood the full and dramatic extent of the segregation. This was highly consequential as members became angered and expressed a renewed passion to research more topics of local inequity impacting students. One teacher participant even said they would share the surrounding school demographic data with parents and students.
2018 city district & MJ high school cluster school enrollment & student demographics by race and ethnicity (OCR U.S. DOE, 2019).
With a renewed motivation to infuse critical pedagogy and a shifting orientation toward community, we returned to City MS to re-examine the district's curricular “scope and sequence” to identify opportunities to integrate CCP and experiential place-based learning. Though most educators were excited to integrate these concepts into their curricula, some voiced apprehension, particularly a tension between limited class time and conflicting district priorities for test preparation. The prevailing discussion led to a collective choice to change course and move the location and topics for sessions 4 and 5 to Local South, a community organization.
By shifting locations away from school, ASCEND further centered the orientation to education that Local South embodies, particularly experiential learning and popular education practices. At Local South we participated in their quarterly retreat, titled “Building a Movement” (BAM; Local South, 2018), which supports a range of community organizers and organizations in their critical awareness of “political education, the big picture, and historical root causes [of oppression] while attaining practical skills for organizing” (Local South, 2018). ASCEND shifted in dramatic ways by joining the BAM seminars and relocating away from the political and power-laden environments of City MS and the university. BAM activities focused on ASCEND member's critical awareness of civil and human rights movements by experiencing Paulo Freire-oriented pedagogical practices that complement CCP strategies, including: (1) group norm-setting; (2) Consciousness-raising/Vision/Strategy (CVS)—a dialogic pedagogy similar to Socratic seminars (Local South, 2018); (3) developing multi-layered and dynamic timelines of political, economic, and social movements for students to situate their personal experiences within (Katz-Fishman & Brewer, 2007); (3) exploring perspectives to injustice through movement-based activities; (4) strategies for group-centered leadership facilitation and debrief; and, (5) intercultural relational bonding.
Session 6 was changed to yet another location to center the place-based experiential learning further—the world-renowned Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History (www.afpls.org/aarl). This session supported ASCEND teachers’ discovery and integration of primary sources from the library—a vital ingredient for critical pedagogy—and further contextualized their personal knowledge of local triumphs and injustices. By partnering with AARL, ASCEND members were able participate in another example of experiential place-based learning by discussing and walking the very streets and passing the institutions discussed in our community mapping exercise from session three. These institutions, including the historic Morris Brown College, Atlanta Life Insurance, Atlanta Daily World newspaper, and Sweet Auburn curb market shaped Atlanta's unparalleled Black merchant, educational, and political classes (Hobson, 2017).
ASCEND's Impact on Educators’ Critical Consciousness and Practice
Our second research question focuses on the impact of ASCEND on teachers and is addressed using qualitative and quantitative measures including reviewing teacher work, survey results, and reflection responses about their commitment to, and attempts at, enacting critical pedagogy. Two primary themes emerged in the data: (a) integrating experiential learning heightened educator critical consciousness, and (b) locally rooted knowledge and educators’ experiences motivated instructional transformations toward equity, even in a hyper-standardized curriculum.
Integrating Experiential Learning Heightened Educator Critical Consciousness
By responsively yet strategically shifting ASCEND sessions around the community, members developed a personal connection between people, place, and content. Varying the sites also honored a plurality of epistemological and ontological orientations towards knowledge and experiential learning. Of the 13 ASCEND participants, 11 explicitly noted how learning about Atlanta helped them think more critically about historic and current local inequitable systems. For example, in response to relocating the last session to AARL, Keshunna, shared, “[I] learned there's a lot happening right in this city that's rich in history. There are also real-world issues that still exist within our communities such as biases, prejudices, etc. that our students really want to talk about, but now can.” Another participant reflected, “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed learning about the rich history of Atlanta and how [history] directly affects my students. I’m excited about exposing them to history that's immediately relevant to their lives.” These statements suggest an experiential Black Studies-oriented perspective can positively affect one's professional learning as well as renew motivation to support student discussion and engagement on topics of inequity.
ASCEND's learning spaces also led most teachers to reflect on how they were still learning justice-related content about their community. For example, Jasmine represents this idea while debriefing the City MS community walk: My biggest takeaway is just how deep some social injustices are. There's a lot of layers to some of the ‘normal’ things we see, and they take a little digging to get the full understanding… and many injustices relevant to our students center around race and economics.
Here, Jasmine describes complexities of oppressive systems while honestly and vulnerably sharing her own knowledge gaps pertaining to injustices. By acknowledging the compounding and intersectional nature of inequity across race and economics, Jasmine reveals a heightened sense of her critical consciousness and reconsidered her students in a new frame that recognizes the extent of discriminatory policies and practices they personally experience around City MS.
The other major realization of local injustice that surfaced during our community walk was the discussion of the stark racial disparities across City MS neighborhood schools. This led ASCEND leaders to research and present racial demographic data across the school zone. This data revealed an intense level of local segregation between City MS, which serves almost 100% students of color, and a neighboring charter middle school serving mostly White students and the school district overall serving primarily students of color (see Figure 2). ASCEND members expressed anger and disappointment over how these data confirmed their personal feelings that a segregated school system existed within their neighborhood zone, but members noted being unaware of the actual extent. This situation parallels national charter school trends and segregation patterns (Heilig et al., 2016) and reified ASCEND's awareness of local inequitable structures. Members also said they would share these data with their math colleagues to include in curriculum.
Qualitative findings of elevated consciousness were triangulated by survey results. Ludlow et al.'s (2008) teaching for social justice belief scale supplied a quantitative lens of educator perceptions before and after ASCEND. Though not achieving statistical significance, collective responses of all items shifted towards social justice. These shifts suggest teachers felt more confident and prepared in their own awareness of inequity and to support students to dissect and confront sources of inequity including racism, ableism, and bullying. Two prompts shifted strongly in the direction of teaching for social justice reflecting a deepened critical consciousness of ASCEND educators: Part of teachers’ responsibilities is to challenge school arrangements that maintain societal inequities; and Teachers should teach students to think critically about government, policies, and actions. These survey shifts strengthen the themes emerged from the qualitative sources and suggest that teachers’ critical consciousness had deepened through ASCEND participation. Assumptions in the two survey prompts above indicate this deepened critical consciousness. The first prompt assumes an elevated role that ASCEND teachers more strongly identified as someone who not only sees inequitable school ecosystems but must be someone who's active in deconstructing them alongside students. A shift toward strongly agree for the second prompt indicates ASCEND educators’ collective desire to move their curriculum beyond the district's standardized and decontextualized curriculum.
Locally Rooting Instructional Transformations Toward Equity
When discussing how to contextualize curricula in an era of neoliberal standardization and testing reform, ASCEND educators emphatically criticized the placeless nature of their curriculum. However, while discussing possible implementation of critical or place-based curricula, over half of ASCEND educators explicitly mentioned time constraints due to testing or state standards requirements as barriers at some point during the five-month project. This was a major tension among educators teaching subjects that are accompanied by a state-mandated test. For example, after an initial session, Kathy shared, “Since we’re starting to transition into [test] training and getting kids ready, I know after we’re done with that, I’d like to have more time to just build up to social justice lessons.” Here, Kathy prioritizes the district's emphasis on state testing performance and positioned critically conscious curricula as an add-on that can only be enacted after test-prep. Interestingly, this concern was brought up more in initial sessions, and as workshops progressed and our relationships deepened, ASCEND teachers began to showcase either how they have, or would, enact critical curriculum despite time or space restrictions. Although a few ASCEND members thought they could not successfully navigate required standards and integration of justice-centered, locally relevant content, the dominant view—voiced by 10 of the 13 participants—was that critical pedagogy could no longer wait. This position appeared in written responses and lesson plans. Maya, a social studies teacher, represents these sentiments by presenting critical literacy and equity-oriented instruction as the mechanism to meet content standards, rather than being peripheral or an afterthought: We’re covering the New South era and the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. Normally, I just teach the facts, but now I let my kids live in that space. At times it's been uncomfortable because there are questions that I don't want to answer. Other times, I feel like my kids are more aware than I think they are, and [ASCEND] has been a great experience because it allowed me to see how I teach them, because it opens opportunities for them to be able to change their community… I’m excited!
Maya's poignant remark underscores what Malcom X reminded us, which is that “you can't teach what you don't know” (as quoted in Howard, 2016; p. 4). Maya also affirmed the pivotal yet challenging role she plays as instructional designer and facilitator of student discussion of emotionally charged topics involving racial oppression. This intersection of curriculum designer and facilitator is one that ASCEND embraced, which is represented by Angela, another social studies teacher, who shared her implementation plans while debriefing a session: ASCEND meetings always spark a fire in me to move from knowing and being to doing! I must say that listening to everyone's ideas gave me a clearer picture of integrating social justice into the content… I commit to bringing more issues that are important to my students into the classroom… I will teach students how to use their words to impact their lives and community by incorporating a social justice component to every lesson… I commit to helping students to find their own voice relating to issues in their school, home, and community… empower and equip with the tools and strategies to impact students in a way that promotes social equity and social justice in their immediate environment and ultimately in society.
Angela's commitment is realized, like many other ASCEND educators, when she describes enacting critical place-based pedagogy. While spotlighting a district-mandated social studies unit focused on Leo Frank—a prominent local historic figure who was murdered and is included in Georgia state standards—Angela, focused on the class's proximity to the Frank murder as an entry point for students to then connect with more current instances of racial terror: We also counted more recent events they could actually relate- Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner… I used it [Leo Frank] more like a hook, to reel them in… So, I did a circle map, and they had three different options. Talk about what social justice means to you, what you think of when you hear the words “social justice,” or, “Write about a time when you were discriminated, or you know someone who's treated differently.” And you know, we did a think-pair-share.
Here, Angela starts with state standards, but expands the initial topic and contextualizes for students with two recent cases of racially charged police brutality. But importantly, she also implements CCP-informed pedagogies to facilitate learning, including student participation, opportunities to respond, and critical inquiry. Angela ensured meaningful student engagement with the topic by scaffolding levels of dialogic and nonverbal student participation, while also increasing student motivation, cultural relevance, and critical inquiry. Other ASCEND members committed to integrating local issues students encounter into curricula, which Tara expresses here: By looking more into the neighborhood, we as teachers, got the opportunity to get a feel for some of the outside issues’ students face… One goal I have is to show students what they face, and feel are big issues—and should not be downsized just because they’re kids.
Rather than dismiss student experiences as trivial or irrelevant, Tara describes how students’ voices and experiences are meaningful and should appear in the curriculum. Another educator, Madeline, underscored that sentiment saying, “I want to continue to challenge students in having a voice and make something happen with their writings—really focus on publishing techniques—ultimately provoking them to make a change in the lives of those around them.”
Lesson plans ASCEND teachers developed reflect the impact of their increased critical consciousness and commitment to implementing critical pedagogy. For example, four ASCEND teachers in seventh grade social studies and ELA collaborated to elevate the intersection of women's and labor rights. In ELA, students read local political icon, John Lewis’ graphic novel, March, which focuses on Civil Rights in the United States and connected the novel to women's rights in world history, focused on Sudan. The students were asked to write letters to the Sudanese ambassador with proposals for advancing women's rights.
In eighth grade Georgia history, two teachers asked students to write historical narratives from the perspective of someone during the Civil Rights movement commonly obscured from history textbooks. This required students to analyze and cite primary documents detailing lives and experiences of everyday people in the South, including those who faced discrimination under Jim Crow laws and those who benefitted from the segregated system. Students then investigated current civil rights issues, including voter registration laws and voter disenfranchisement of convicted felons, including recent election data.
In another example, two eighth grade ELA teachers planned a debate between Henry Grady and Tom Watson, two historic Atlanta businessmen in the late 1800s and key figures in Georgia state standards. This debate led into a critical inquiry of both figures’ white supremacist views (details which are omitted in the Lost Cause-mythologized state standards), including a Socratic Seminar exploring implications of schools, hospitals, and other major institutions being named in honor of White Supremist sympathizers or the Confederacy.
These qualitative data were also supported by survey results. Two prompts related to classroom facilitation of equity-related topics reveled group responses that shifted strongly in the direction of teaching for social justice: Items related to racism and inequity should be openly discussed in the classroom; and Good teaching incorporates diverse cultures and experiences into classroom lessons and discussions. These shifts suggest teachers’ critical consciousness had deepened over the course of ASCEND and additionally, 90% of respondents anonymously stated that they strongly agreed with the following item on the separate teachers’ sense of efficacy scale survey: I have developed and implemented lessons using the framework presented in these sessions. Triangulating lesson plans, qualitative themes, and quantitative data demonstrate ASCEND educators’ efforts to interlace required state standards with critically conscious content and CCP pedagogical principles.
Discussion
Neoliberalism emphasizes compliance and standardization, creating an antithetical structure to critically conscious educators in their pursuit of critical, contextualized, and culturally responsive content. As Bruff (2019) notes, the “allure of neoliberalism” is tempting (p. 367), thus we must “acknowledge the beating heart of neoliberalism: the coercive, nondemocratic, and unequal reorganization of societies,” (p. 367). Neoliberal reform efforts harmfully neglect ecological perspectives of education and led to the mainstream popular framing of educational inequity as an achievement gap—a term that represents children of color and/or poverty as inferior based solely on standardized test scores. In response, Ladson-Billings (2006, 2017) has attempted to reframe inequity as educational debt since debt, “comprises historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral components,” and even though research has devoted significant effort to investigate poor students, an “all-out focus on the ‘Achievement Gap’ moves us toward short-term reform-based solutions that are unlikely to address long-term underlying problems,” (p. 4). Therefore, the ASCEND coalition—a network of justice-oriented stakeholders committed to elevating educator critical consciousness and pedagogical approaches for student critical inquiry—sought to realize an alternative to neoliberal, achievement gap-framed professional development.
ASCEND's expansive design and implementation wove three separate conceptual frameworks—an ambitious endeavor, but one that parallels other areas of educational scholarship currently calling for expansive theories (Gomez et al., 2020; Nasir et al., 2021). ASCEND would have suffered by using a singular conceptual framework, which can reduce complex understandings of phenomena and teacher learning-practice (Strom & Viesca, 2021). In response to practitioner requests for criticality and support with writing, ASCEND's content was informed by Black Studies, centered on experiential professional learning experiences, and included CCP instructional practices.
The ASCEND coalition is an example of what a liberatory teacher education collaborative could look like if theoretical threads of epistemological and ontological plurality, critical pedagogy, and place-based experiential learning are woven together to design and guide implementation. ASCEND mobilized those tools to approach coalition members as “politically-aware individuals who have a stake in teaching and transforming society” (p. 9; Kohli et al., 2015), and teachers as “working for families and in communities in respectful and genuinely collaborative ways rather than trying to save students from their communities,” (p. 2; Zeichner, 2019).
This model will invariably look different when replicated because of nuances in context. Because Atlanta was our location, we utilized a Black Studies lens to expose and grapple with historic and current racial inequities. Experiential place-based education anchored us to the local history and geography where our educators’ practices occur while attending to the individual emotional impact of learning about oppressive systems. Incorporating critical composition pedagogy—which falls under the larger umbrella of critical pedagogy and centers critical literacy practices—helped ASCEND members take up and apply their learning to the complex endeavor of curriculum design and instruction. Importantly, attention to interdisciplinarity, criticality, and experiential teacher education does not omit the need to acquire skills, strategies, and pedagogical practices (Ball & Forzani, 2009; Kavanagh & Danielson, 2020; etc.).
Our second research question focused on the impact of ASCEND participation on educators’ beliefs and practice, and we found that ASCEND teachers elevated their critical consciousness, particularly around the history of Atlanta and their community. For example, learning about the local placement of confederate symbols near City MS and the current local segregation impacting City MS from charter school proliferation helped ASCEND members learn about the current systemic oppression of Black residents and their students. To simultaneously counter those destructive systems, a Black Studies framework informed our experiential analyses of Black empowerment, education, enfranchisement, and entrepreneurship to move beyond reductive and deficit-based representations of Atlanta's Black community. The Black Studies orientation supported an increase in ASCEND teachers’ critical consciousness, a deeper awareness of the systemic blight their students face, a critique of district-mandated curriculum sequence, and an identity as a coalition/collective which increased their confidence and autonomy to enact critical, justice-oriented instruction.
In addition to using Atlanta as placed-based curriculum, the experiential learning simultaneously demonstrated a process of examining cultural artifacts through critical composition pedagogy strategies. ASCEND teachers are better positioned to take up both topics and processes from our shared activities and apply these to their own lessons. This uptake was expressed and demonstrated through enactments of critical pedagogy and members embracing being the facilitator of student discussion concerning equity-related topics, which can be daunting, especially in the face of limited time to cover state-mandated curricula.
Lastly, relevance, autonomy and urgency became priorities across ASCEND teachers. Their approach to curriculum, their authority to determine content, their identity as critically engaged teachers for change and their eagerness to speak publicly about this progress was voiced more confidently as the sessions progressed and even led some ASCEND members to co-present ASCEND findings at Georgia State University's Alonzo Crim Center for Excellence in Urban Education's SOURCES conference (Hackett et al., 2018).
Implications for Teacher Education Practice, Research, Theory, and Policy
More empirical research related to deepening educator critical consciousness and generating complex theories of teacher learning-practice for justice is vital for the health of a critically informed citizenry broadly and liberatory teacher education specifically. To support deeper critical consciousness, innovative cross-institutional partnerships, and theoretical threads for equity in education should be designed and studied. This follows King (2017) proposal to expand the application of Black Studies perspectives, similarly to ASCEND, for its “epistemological commitment to human freedom” and attention to historical collaboration between allies with many intersectional identities to enable the practice of freedom, something that has been systematically removed from education standards and curricula (Davis, 2016). King (2017) contends that integrating Black Studies could be the “jump start to educators’ critical consciousness”, an essential feature of resistance to oppressive institutional structures, reductive curricula, and neoliberal education reforms (p. 948; Love, 2019). Since ASCEND findings capture the impact of designing space to support educator critical consciousness development and the emotional impact of deepening critical consciousness, our next steps focus on the coalition's sustainability, increasing trust between the institutions and demonstrating the same inquiry-based process as adult learners for City MS students.
Creating a coalition spanning four departments across three institutions is challenging and execution can only occur through deep lasting relationships and clear communication and reflection on the authenticity and solidarity of the partnerships. More studies are also needed to capture the implementation of that authentic process (Napolitan et al., 2019). We also acknowledge that our emphasis on Black Studies-oriented content is just one way to make an agential cut (Barad, 1998) regarding liberatory teacher education content. Other cuts could be integrating research such as Tiffany King's (2019) scholarship, which lies at the intersection of Black and native studies, thus further broadening sources of knowledge and ways of being employed in teacher education. Regardless of each agential cut, those foundational theories must be accompanied by strong and complex theories of learning for change (Nasir et al., 2021; Strom & Viesca, 2021). Another limitation for this project was that facilitation, although distributed across all ASCEND members through experiential, discussion-focused structures, did not incorporate planning and facilitation by teachers. Therefore, university and community organization members will co-plan future ASCEND sessions with teacher members, thus further re-balancing traditional university-school hierarchies where professional development is something teachers receive rather than create (Kohli et al., 2015).
One methodological implication involves measurement. Surveys were used to assess teachers’ beliefs of teaching for social justice and efficacy for teaching ASCEND content, but the number of ASCEND participants did not permit traditional statistical significance. Larger collaboratives may study effects using quantitative measures if statistical significance is attainable. However, measures used to capture the experience and learning across practitioners should be as dynamic as the experience itself, and diversifying measures can provide a creative ability to understand as much of the sociocultural phenomenon as possible. Open-ended survey responses and group discussions addressing programmatic and process-oriented ASCEND research questions permitted rigorous qualitative analysis and should be used in the future. Community-based ASCEND learning events continue and the coalition plans to implement lesson study (Lewis et al., 2006) protocols to observe and debrief one another's teaching of CCP-informed lessons. These protocols and recorded debrief sessions could provide an additional source of rich data. Though classroom observations were not analyzed in this study, future findings, of ASCEND projects can be strengthened through classroom observations of enacted lesson plans, student discourse, and classroom facilitation. Again, related to rebalancing power dynamics, we are discussing how members can observe across institutions, such as ASCEND teachers observing ASCEND professors teaching teacher preparation courses and giving feedback.
Implications also include the need to measure K-12 student learning. Pedagogically, adolescents need support to examine complicated and controversial issues to understand multiple perspectives, discuss these issues with others, and develop necessary literacy skills to produce argumentative and critical texts (Luke, 2000; Quinn & Bauml, 2018). Future research in liberatory teacher education collaborations should directly examine how students react to the lessons designed by collaborative members in terms of their critical consciousness development, identity development, and academic achievement. Additionally, policymakers could use this coalition as a prime example of why the departments of education should fund innovate and dynamic university-community-school partnerships.
Our hope as we continue this collaborative is that through continued partnerships, we can push back against pressures of neoliberal policy reforms that undermine the rigor, relevance, and criticality of school curricula. Of course, no single factor can be attributed to the significant absence of critical inquiry and dialogue in urban public schools, though rote test-preparation memorization is clearly not an acceptable path forward. Nor is an acceptable path to teach history by whitewashing local events, leaving little room for students to produce writing critical of oppressive policies, procedures, habits, and symbols in their communities. Absent a critically conscious educator, youth may continue to struggle to find space to practice civic democratic participation. As standardization demands more space for test preparation and predetermined curricula, teacher educators must work in solidarity with teachers, bringing in community-based organizations and ethnic studies scholars for additional support and resistance. Space for educators to design, implement and reflect on their critical instruction is essential to resist the expansion of neoliberal education reform.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
A special thank you to sponsors of the ASCEND research, including “Improving Teacher Quality Grant” from the U.S. Department of Education.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Education, (grant number Improving Teacher Quality Grant).
Author Biographies
Appendix A
See Table A1.
Appendix B
See Table B1.