Toward a Transformative Justice Teacher Education Research Convening Hosted by the Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center School of Education University of California, Davis
The purpose of this focused symposium is to convene a group of scholars across disciplines such as Math, Science, Social Studies/History, and English/Literacy to align and act on what it means to teach and learn in the age of mass incarceration and the increased criminalization of Black, Indigenous, Immigrant, Muslim, differently-abled, and queer bodies. Referring to mass incarceration as the most salient civil rights issue in the 21st century, Alexander (2010) historically situates the incarceration of Black people in a tenuous legacy of controlling and managing Black bodies. Toward a Transformative Justice Teacher Education convened an intergenerational community of scholars to engage in a dialogue about how to best prepare teachers to disrupt educational inequities through their pedagogical stances in the classroom. Our thinking included pedagogical stances that engaged mindset, curricular choices, and classroom culture/climate. Using the concept of a “peaceable classroom,” this focused symposium will be driven by the question that drove Mary Rose O’Reilley and her colleagues at the height of the Vietnam War when they grappled with, “How can we teach [English, Social Studies, Math, and Science] in a way that people stop killing?” (O’Reilley, 1993; Winn, 2013, 2016). Our work was guided by the following questions:
- What does it mean to teach in the age of mass/hyper incarceration and increased criminalization of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, differently abled, immigrant, Muslim, working class, & working poor children and youth?
- What would a tranformative justice teacher education look/sound/feel like in Mathematics, Science, SS/History, and English/Language Arts? What work is already being done and how do we leverage our knowledge to engage in educational problem solving?
Transformative Justice in Education (TJE) Center website: https:tje.ucdavis.edu/ for all updates and a tab for the convening.