Teaching Resistance

John Mink

Description

Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasise teaching radical practice from the field. Written in accessible language, this book is for anyone who wants to explore new ways to subvert educational systems and institutions, collectively transform educational spaces, and empower students and teachers alike to fight for genuine change. Topics include community self-defense, Black Lives Matter and critical race theory, intersections between punk/DIY subculture and teaching, ESL, anarchist education, Palestinian resistance, trauma, working-class education, prison teaching, the resurgence of (and resistance to) the Far Right, special education, antifascist pedagogies, and more. Edited by social studies teacher, author, and punk musician John Mink, the book features expanded entries from the monthly column in the politically insurgent punk magazine Max

Sujets

• Education
• Punk

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 17 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781629637723
• Langue: English

Extrait

Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries, and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom
Edited by John Mink
2019 the respective authors
This edition 2019 PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-709-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933019
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Cover illustration by Miriam Klein Stahl / www.miriamkleinstahl.com
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA.
This book is dedicated to my darling companion Megan March-for so much indispensable guidance, and without whom this project would never have happened. to my mother-a dedicated teacher s aid/para and SPED teacher who had a wicked sense of humor shot through with deep, deep love. and to my father-a wily old commie and lifelong anti-fascist who taught social studies for over thirty years in East Oakland, and who warned me never to become a teacher. Sorry, pop, but that s mob life for ya.
All royalties/author profits for this book will be donated to Teachers 4 Social Justice, who I hope continue to stir the pot and make us all confront uncomfortable truths for as long as possible.
Contents
INTRODUCTION
School Is a Riot
by Melissa Merin
From These Classroom Windows We Can See the Confederacy
by dwayne dixon
How Schools Can Address Racism
by Kadijah Means
The Legacy of Trauma
by Lindsay McLeary
Resistance in the Palestinian Classroom
Mike Corr interviews Murad Tamini
Safe(r) Spaces and Future Cops
by Frankie Mastrangelo
The Dissent of Consent: An Educator s Experience Teaching Sexual Violence Prevention
by Sarah Orton
Interview with Miriam Klein Stahl
interviewed by John Mink
Koko Lepo: Kindergarten and the Struggle in Belgrade, Serbia
by Frederick Schulze
What Prison Teaching Can Teach Us
by Lena Tahmassian
Cops Out of Our Schools!
by John Mink
Becoming a Teacher in Bavaria: Making Up and Finding Leeway within Structural Conservatism
by E. Schmuse
Personal Pedagogy
by Jessica Mills
Community College Is Totally Punk Rock
by Michelle Cruz Gonzales
Insurgent Pedagogies: Decolonization Is for All of Us
by Natalie Avalos
Radical Inclusion and Special Education
by Stephen Raser
Neurotypicals and the Rest of Us
by Ash Tray
Interview with Alice Bag
interviewed by John Mink
Our Students Are Radical Because They Live in the Real World
by Mimi Thi Nguyen
Talking to ESL Students about Anti-Black Racism
by Ian McDeath
Interview with Martin Sorrondeguy
interviewed by John Mink
False Equivalencies and the Resurgent Far Right in a Messy, Violent World
by John Mink
Guide for Youth Protestors
by Jessalyn Aaland
Building the Movement to Stop Trump: Lessons from an Anti-Fascist Civil Rights Educator in Berkeley
by Yvette Felarca
The Big Takeover of New Orleans
by Roburt Knife
Letters from the Educational Battle Lines in Oklahoma (AKA Everywhere, USA)
by Taylor McKenzie
Notes on an Anarchist Pedagogy
by Ron Scapp
The People and Teachers Unite against the State and Neoliberalism in Oaxaca
by Scott Campbell
Maximumrocknroll Radio s Teaching Resistance DJ Slot
by John Mink
Who Punk Forgot
by Christiana Cranberry
Problem Posing in the ESL Classroom
by Ruth Crossman
Lesson Plans for Community Self-Defense in a Time of Resurgent Neofascism
by John Mink
Navigating Spaces
by Mike Friedberg
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
Misfits, outsiders, radicals, and marginalized people have always had a conflicted relationship with education. On one hand, they recognize that school is an oppressive institution. It is a potentially dangerous environment that is forced upon them as kids. Then, when they finally finish or escape it, they are pressured into often ruinously expensive higher education. On the other hand, education has also been an escape valve for people who are otherwise stuck in grim or disadvantaged life situations, helping provide them with structure and intellectual skills that have the potential to improve their lives and those of others.
Although the institutions of education are historically problematic and often oppressive, students who have experienced them as outsiders understand the importance of learning from teachers who have developed radical notions of what education is and how it works. Sometimes these students become teachers themselves, helping subvert the educational institutions or finding alternatives outside of them. In recent decades, one of the most subversive, transgressive, and misunderstood global subcultures-punk-has seen many of its consummate outsider adherents become teachers. This makes sense, given that a large percentage of punks embrace radical idealism, strong personal ethics, and intellectualism. These teachers retain their punk identity, or at least acknowledge the significant role of the subculture in their radicalization.
I am an activist, a fairly new teacher, and a punk. I play in bands and participate in the DIY- and DIT-oriented subculture. Coming to teaching as a politically radical punk, I was not interested in being a one-way fount of information and judgment to my students. Rather, I was hopeful about the potential to explore different approaches to classroom practice-universally reciprocal and justice-oriented, respectful, and centering of a wide array of life experiences; equitable and committed to diversity and demarginalization on a deep level, critical thought-oriented and self-reflective, counter-hierarchical, and antiauthoritarian; intersectionally feminist, decolonizing, and liberatory.
Unsurprisingly, I found there was little real support for such goals in the state credentialing process I was required to undergo. Many of these kinds of ideas are reflected in the rhetoric found in modern teacher training programs, representing a belated acknowledgment by collegiate academies of the newfound visibility of some very hard-fought (and often deeply contentious) radical concepts. This superficial rhetoric, however, is contradicted when it comes to how teachers are trained in actual practice, and the structural nature of many educational institutions results in problematic norms of instruction and learning being perpetuated by default.
In his seminal 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style , Dick Hebdige draws from Althusser s theories on unconscious ideology to describe how broader social divisions, processes, and hierarchies are replicated in schools, from the physical structure of campuses separated into traditional arts and sciences divisions (further divided by specific subject) to the act and shape of classroom instruction itself:
The hierarchical relationship between teacher and taught is inscribed in the very lay-out of the lecture theatre where the seating arrangements-benches rising in tiers before a raised lectern-dictate the flow of information and serve to naturalize professorial authority. Thus, a whole range of decisions about what is and what is not possible within education have been made, however unconsciously, before the content of individual courses is even decided.
These decisions help to set the limits not only on what is taught, but on how it is taught. 1
Seemingly intractable structures such as these, physical and otherwise, can carry strong (sub)conscious connotations of support for a status quo that is often harmful to marginalized people and groups, recasting the well-meaning educator into a role that perpetuates injustice. My own student teaching assessments and pedagogy courses were undertaken in two liberal-leaning institutions that have been repeatedly excoriated by the reactionary right-wing outrage crowd for their reputed leftist extremism. In these institutions, I was struck by how much pressure was placed on teachers to maintain a veneer of neutrality and lack of bias. Of course, neither of these positions truly exist in a broader society. We cannot separate ourselves from our learned, unconscious frames of reference, implicit biases, and positionality in the world-things our students see in us even when we don t. Many diverse perspectives can and should be considered in any classroom setting, and an open-minded, accepting teacher who is also transparent about their own worldview helps to set a standard of honesty for the entire class. But the pressure to conform to a model of purported neutrality serves the purpose of perpetuating some of the most harmful aspects of the status quo, continuing to effectively marginalize many student identities and stifle critical dissent.
Fortunately, we live in a world where insurgent pushback against rotten institutions and injustice is growing stronger. There are many genuine radicals among teachers. Under the weight of administrative, parental, and social pressures (including the threat of doxxing by reactionaries), these teachers must often learn to be quite creative in teaching students to ask a more challenging set of questions, in fighting to push back against the oppressive status quo, and in using subversion to reinvent education from within by putting new and transgressive ideas into practice. As an aspirational radical and student teacher coming from a subculture/community that is used to being defined as outsider and consistently needs to create its own spaces, I wanted to connect with and learn from others who knew how to radicalize and subvert teaching pedagogy; those who treated their students as equals. I needed to learn from those who thought more like me.
The Teaching Resistance column, which this book is drawn from, began in January 2015, the month I got my teaching credential. It ran monthly in the infamous politically and culturally insurgent punk magazine Maximumrocknroll (aka MRR, est. 1982). I started the column on the suggestion of