As doctoral students committed to justice and equity in education, we recognize that the knowledges of education practitioners, students, parents, and other community members are invaluable to confronting the most salient and timely issues related to educational equity in the United States. Included in these knowledges is the kind of knowing and expertise produced experientially, grounded in day to day experiences. We came together with the goal of challenging notions of what counts as scholarship in education and to create a structured space that promotes public scholarship that is comprised of diverse voices, not limited to traditionally recognized researchers from universities and other research organizations. To work towards this goal, we created The Assembly: A Journal for Public Scholarship on Education, an online, open-access journal, housed at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education, that advances public scholarship committed to democracy, diversity, equity, and justice in education.

Our mission at The Assembly is to showcase public scholarship authored by researchers, policy makers, educators, students, community members, and the public that addresses timely topics in education, particularly work committed to educational equity and social justice. Because we are a Colorado-based journal, in addition to publishing work by national contributors, we highlight work that engages with critical issues in our state.  Each issue will be organized into two sections: a peer reviewed research section and a themed “Dialogues” section. The peer-reviewed section will feature scholarship on education issues of national importance and local education issues in the state of Colorado that has implications for national audiences as well. The themed Dialogues section will feature critical essays authored by a range of stakeholders bringing together a wide-array of voices on a single issue. Our work is guided by three organizing principles:

1. Education research must open up space for all groups to speak, in their own voices, about their own experiences so that their knowledges become part of the collective social understanding.
2. Education research must be accessible, and comprehensible to those who are most directly impacted by the research so that collective understandings can include discourse that names injustices, validating the social and educational experiences of marginalized groups.
3. Education research must engage in full reciprocal dialogue with those who are most directly impacted by research.

These organizing principles represent our commitment to education scholarship that is representative of those most impacted by education policy and practice. The Assembly should not be seen as a replacement for traditional education research, particularly since we are part of a traditional research-intensive university. There is certainly still a place for the voice of researchers in education (Rose, 2018). Instead, this is a way to add knowledges that have been traditionally excluded from our collective understanding. As an online journal, we encourage work presented in new and innovative formats, that is accessible in availability and communication, and that is responsive to the lived realities of those most impacted by education policies and practices.

What is Public Scholarship?

We are guided by the Center for Community of Civic Engagement (2018), which defines public scholarship as “diverse modes of creating knowledge for and with publics and communities” (para. 2). Public scholarship must have certain characteristics in order to address and transform education: 1) It is timely, responding to and engaging with current debates and realities; 2) it is relevant to the people most impacted by education policy and practice; 3) it is critical, illuminating and interrogating the power dynamics that shape policy and practice; 4) it is place-based, informing the socio-political context from which it emerges and for which it is used; 5) it is accessible, in availability, usefulness, and clarity for those who most directly feel the impact of the scholarship; and 6) it is expansive, broadening the boundaries of what counts as scholarship and redefining expertise in education research. Despite the broad implications for education policy and practice, traditional university-based research, even critical research, is largely one-sided, with traditional scholars producing and disseminating knowledge in scholarly journals, which are produced and read by other traditional scholars (Bartha & Burgett, 2015). Our vision of critical, public scholarship removes the barriers to the production and dissemination of education research to include and collaborate with the public, or the communities who are best positioned to inform education research to address issues of educational justice.

The focus of The Assembly is to engage in critical public scholarship in order to address the ways in which those in positions of power control knowledge production and dissemination (Fricker, 2007; Mason, 2011). One of the ways this is carried out is through silencing the knowledges of marginalized people and preventing them from participating in full and equal dialogue (Dotson, 2011). Many scholars have done important work to elevate perspectives historically silenced in traditional education research (Anyon, 1980; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Kane & Mertz, 2012; Lynn & Dixson, 2013). The Assembly aims to build on this important work and to be a space where the very people experiencing the consequences of education research can, in their own voices, contribute to and be in dialogue with scholarship on education policy and practice.

In addition to those who are traditionally considered researchers, such as university faculty and graduate students, we are reaching out to educators, students, and community members to submit pieces to The Assembly based on timely and relevant education issues. In this issue, for example, we include two pieces from current public school teachers. In future issues, we will continue to intentionally seek out and publish manuscripts from members of the public on pressing issues in education because we know these are the people who have the deepest understandings of the daily realities of education in the United States. Their knowledge is essential for promoting educational equity and justice.

Public Scholarship, Public Pedagogy, and Community Action

The articles in this inaugural issue of The Assembly address public scholarship, public pedagogy, and community action informed by the knowledge of diverse communities. Because much traditional education research is implicated in further marginalizing particular communities, public scholarship is often complicated, requiring university-based scholars to de-center themselves in order to gain the trust of the public. It also requires these scholars to question the very traditions that secure their positions in traditional research institutions, such as tenure guidelines. Further, a public ethos likely must include ethical notions like recognizing others’ rights of refusal, where limits might be placed on the questions publicly-engaged scholars can ask or what can be made public (Tuck & Yang, 2014). For members of the public, including educators, engaging in work that is meant to improve educational conditions for all students and educators is risky because they are experiencing the daily realities of education and may experience negative backlash when resisting the status quo in education. Despite these challenges and realities, we believe it is necessary to create space for public scholarship on education aimed at addressing educational inequity and transforming education in the United States.

For our inaugural issue we present four peer-reviewed articles that highlight dilemmas that arise from being a public scholar, exemplars of ways to engage multiple audiences with traditional research, and expand our notions of who counts as a scholar.

1. Katherine Schultz explores the challenges and dilemmas involved with engaging in public scholarship
2. Rita Kohli, Arturo Nevárez, and Nallely Arteaga as well as Nicole Mirra present two examples of new ways to engage the public with traditional research.
3. Hayley Breden, a practicing high school history teacher, provides important insights into teachers’ unions and her work is the first example of how we are working to expand notions of who counts as a scholar.

For future issues, we encourage submissions from multiple, diverse authors, encouraging relevant public education scholarship and submissions that push public scholarship to further promote educational justice. We also will accept submissions of traditional scholarship that is written for and useful to broad audiences. We will be accepting many styles of writing, and we encourage that authors take advantage of our online platform, providing interactive articles that assist in broad accessibility.

The Assembly: A Journal for Public Scholarship on Education is a space that reimagines the possibilities for education scholarship and expands the boundaries of who are considered experts within that scholarship. Our digital platform offers tools to broaden the reach of important scholarship aimed at addressing educational equity and justice. This journal is open and free, available to anyone interested and invested in timely and relevant educational scholarship.

References

1. Anyon, J. (1980). Social class and the hidden curriculum of work. Journal of Education, 162, 67–92.
2. Bartha, M., & Burgett, B. (2015). Why public scholarship matters for graduate education. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature Language Composition and Culture, 15(1), 31–43. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2799148
3. Cammarota, J., & Fine, M. (Eds.). (2008). Revolutionizing education: Youth participatory action research in motion. New York, NY: Routledge.
4. Dotson, K. (2011). Tracking epistemic violence, tracking practices of silencing. Hypatia, 26(2), 236–257.
5. Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
6. Kane, J. M., & Mertz, J. E. (2012). Debunking myths about gender and mathematics performance. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 59(01), 10. https://doi.org/10.1090/noti790
7. Lynn, M., & Dixson, A. D. (Eds.). (2013). Handbook of critical race theory in education. New York, NY: Routledge.
8. Mason, R. (2011). Two kinds of unknowing. Hypatia, 26(2), 294–307. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01175.x
9. Nierobisz, A., Richey, F., & Walker, A. (2018). What is public scholarship? Retrieved from https://apps.carleton.edu/ccce/scholarship/what_is/
10. Rose, M. (2018). Writing our way into the public sphere. Teachers College Record, 120, 1–18.
11. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811–818.

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Like many of my colleagues, I am frequently asked to contribute in one way or another to schools and communities around educational projects because of the presumed expertise I have as a scholar and former teacher. At times, this has meant joining advisory boards, leading professional development sessions, or talking to groups of parents or teachers. When I have felt that the work was important and that I had something unique to contribute, I have often agreed to participate in the event or project. This has led me to engage in work across the United States, primarily in urban communities, as well as in global contexts. As an educational anthropologist, I nearly always document my work, at times staying up late after long days of work to write extensive field notes. Although these notes are initially for my own records, they often lead to some form of publication, whether it is an essay, op-ed piece, or scholarly article. In this essay, I discuss my work as a school board member in a high poverty city to highlight some of the questions and dilemmas I have about the relationship of work in the public sphere to scholarship. In particular, I wonder aloud about the role of public scholarship in a situation where my primarily role was to join my colleagues on the board, along with the most engaged members of the community, to work toward the transformation of the teaching and learning conditions in a small urban district.

My work in this district and my subsequent writing about our work raised several questions for me about publicly-engaged scholarship and gave me the opportunity to reflect on my role and responsibilities as a university faculty and community member including: What is (and should be) the nature of collaboration in publicly-engaged scholarship? Who are the audiences of the work? What are the challenges and potential hazards of engaging in this work that sits at the intersection of scholarship and public service? Where is the line between scholarship and action, and how does that change over time?

I begin this essay with a brief description of the city and its politics. Next, I turn to a discussion of how we conceptualized the research and collected data. I highlight my positionality as both a board member and researcher and touch briefly on our fleeting accomplishments, as well as our failures. Finally, I reflect on how this experience informs my understanding of public scholarship.

Joining a School Board in an Urban District

In 2007, I was asked by a governor to serve as a member of a three-person Educational Empowerment Board, or school board, that oversaw a school district of 5,000 students located in a small high poverty community outside of large city. I was invited to be a member of this board because of my knowledge and experience as an educator involved in research and work in urban public schools. When I was asked to serve on the school board, I saw it as an important chance to put my beliefs into action and work toward changing conditions for learning for young people and families in this community that was adjacent to where I lived. As someone deeply concerned with the failure of most urban districts to provide equitable educational opportunities to all children, I felt compelled to join the board. It appeared possible to improve the educational conditions for youth in this city through this avenue, and I felt I had an obligation to use my knowledge and understandings to work toward change in a concrete way.

From the beginning, I sought to understand more about the district by talking with and learning from local activists and members of various community groups. I invited community members to talk with me about their central concerns for the district and sought to understand the complicated politics that guided decisions in the city. The politics in this city were particularly complex and somewhat unusual; the city is predominantly African American with most residents registered as Republicans, because of the role Republicans play in controlling hiring and services in the suburban county in which the city is located. This meant that, until recently, the mayor and other elected officials, including the elected school board, have been Republican.

Because of its dire financial circumstances and abysmally low test scores, for the greater part of two decades, the district had been overseen by governor-appointed school boards, whose authority superseded the elected school board. In addition, the political party governing the state has changed every eight years, which has meant that the educational strategies to address the struggling schools has also changed, without significant advances in the quality of the schools or changes in the status of the district. The board that I joined was appointed by a Democratic governor and comprised two African American males in addition to myself, a white female. None of us were residents of the city, although one board member had been a high school teacher, basketball coach, and superintendent in the district and had lived in the community for a short period of time. This meant that we were all considered outsiders. From the beginning, we knew that we were only going to be in our positions for a short time and that our goal was to improve conditions within the district sufficiently to allow governing authority to be returned to the local elected board.

During the time when the district was run by appointed boards, an elected board continued to meet, though with limited powers as mandated by the state. This dual form of governance meant that there was ongoing tension over who represented the community: the appointed board, the elected board, or the activists who attended every meeting. There had been ten superintendents in the district during the prior twelve years; our board hoped to support our superintendent to stay for at least two to three years so that we could work with him to achieve some measure of stability in the district. We also worked from the beginning to collaborate with and build leadership among the elected board members, though that proved to be more difficult than we anticipated. As I describe in this essay, power was woven throughout all of our interactions.

“You Are Plantation Owners”

I begin with description of an interaction that occurred during our first board meeting that highlights issues of power when outsiders enter into a community, as well as some of the challenges of inviting community members to engage in research. We had been told that the community was angry at the previous board members, most recently because of their role in the closure of a district-run public school and its subsequent replacement by a for-profit charter school. Board meetings during this prior time had been contentious, often lasting late into the night, with frequent screaming matches and occasional fights. The board had built a low wall in front the stage between where they sat and the seating area for the community, demarcating a separation between the community and themselves. One of our first acts was to remove the wall. The most engaged community members believed that the former board members – who they considered outsiders – were profiting from their community. When our board was appointed to replace this prior board, there was a failed attempt to find a community member to sit on the new board. Several people were angry that there were no community members on our board and they made it clear that they wanted us to change it. Their anger over our outsider status and their distrust of a state-imposed board trumped the fact that, in general, we shared their priorities and vision for the district.

The meeting began when chair brought down the gavel and called the meeting to order. Some of the community members welcomed us to the district and informed us of their priorities and concerns. Parents spoke about the lack of textbooks, the deplorable conditions in the schools, the prevalence of fear and violence, and the large number of substitutes who were in positions that they believed should go to full-time teachers. We promised to visit the schools to better understand their strengths and challenges and assured them that it was our intention to procure funds to improve the conditions so that the children of this community would have the opportunity to be educated in a fair and equitable manner. 

There were stories of the past era when this community had stronger, more vibrant academic and musical programs. Individuals noted the recent closing of schools and proliferation of charter schools with a sense of urgency. The district would collapse, community members explained, if the charter schools continued to expand. Nodding in agreement, we promised to take these concerns seriously and explained that we were already beginning to look into alternatives and responses.

Toward the end of the meeting, the comment of one community activist and pastor brought silence to the room. This older African American woman stood before the board, shaking with anger, and declared, “You are plantation owners.” She proclaimed that we should not be allowed to dictate the policies of the district, arguing that at least one of us should step down from the board to make room for a resident who could speak for the community. She elaborated, “Outsiders come in and they let us down. …We have to sit on this end and watch you all make decisions about us. …We understand [this community] better than any of you.” In the ensuing months, when we proposed new programs and new configurations of the schools, her refrain was, “You’re making decisions for this community and in five years we are going to have to live with those decisions.” It was hard to disagree with this assessment; although we had a sincere interest in changing the educational opportunities in the district, our commitment was time bound and our knowledge limited by our outsider status (field notes, March 2007; Schultz, in press).

This story captures our initial entry into the community. As appointed board members, we did not have a role in composing the board. When I brought up this concern with the governor’s staff who had led the selection process, they replied that they had hoped to choose someone from the community to be on the board, but could not find a person who had the “necessary qualifications.” Only ten percent of adults in the city had more than a high school education. Because of the dual focus of improving the quality of teaching and the academic curriculum for the children and youth of this city, as well as the need to solve a severe financial crisis in the district, their assessment was that there was no one in the community who had the necessary expertise. When I carried the response back to the pastor who issued the challenge to us, her reply was simply that one of us should step down. We did not think that move would address the problem, because it was clear that the governor would simply appoint another person from outside rather than inside of the community. Still, I thought about that concern each time I was in the district, and constantly wondered if I should step down as she suggested. I was always conscious of the power and privilege inherent in my position and my decision to remain on the board.

From the beginning, our goal was to listen to the community, inform them as much as possible by making processes transparent, and engage them in as many decision-making processes as we could. We attempted to make up for the fact that we were outsiders, and while we may have succeeded with some members of the community, the pastor never completely trusted us. Although our guiding commitment as a board, repeated often, was that our decisions were centered on what was best for the children and youth of this community, that commitment was not enough.

The story highlights the power imbalance between the community and ourselves, as well as the distrust that was critical for us to address in order to work together. Community-engaged scholarship depends on collaboration between university-based researchers and community members who are interested in contributing to all aspects of the research process, including its conception and later its dissemination to a wider public audience. Although collaboration does not necessarily depend on equal contributions, it is certainly essential to understanding how knowledge and experience is differentially valued across individuals and groups engaged in the work. In this instance, our work was not primarily research, rather it was public service. My collection of data was meant to primarily document the process, rather than to inform our actions. However, because we documented so many of the processes and intentionally talked to a wide array of people, soliciting their perspectives and understandings, our actions were necessarily shaped by our documentation.

Our Research Process

A graduate student, Katie McGinn Luet, joined me in this emergent research and together we interviewed more than fifty stakeholders in the district. These stakeholders included journalists, teachers, administrators, former board members, parents, students, and community members. We documented the public meetings as well as the smaller meetings that we each attended, with a focus on documenting how participation was understood and enacted. While most people did not express concerns about the research, we did not engage members of the community in the collection or analysis of data, primarily because of time and their lack of interest in this role. It is critical to note that this was foremost an opportunity to play a role in the community rather than conduct a research project. The unpaid work of serving on the school board often added another twenty hours of work each week on top of my full-time position as a faculty member and director of teacher education at a nearby university. And while I approached the most activist community members to discuss the possibility of their working with us on a collaboratively designed project, they did not see an immediate benefit to doing so and I did not have funds to pay them.

As a result, our collaboration can be characterized as research conducted on the community, potentially for the community, but not with the community. Later, when we analyzed the data and wrote up the research—as book chapters and journal articles, a dissertation (that Katie wrote), and in essays such as this one—the audience was not the community. At the same time, I used the data we collected to inform my statements in public meetings in the city, including a variety of forms of hearings about closing charter schools and opening a proposed charter school as a public school. My decisions as a board member, including our meetings with the governor’s staff to procure more money for district projects, were also directly shaped by the data we collected. These uses, however, had limited public audiences.

As a traditional research project, Katie and I conceptualized the work as an investigation of the historical, social, political, and economic events that preceded the three-year term of our school board; to record a range of stakeholders’ understanding of the events in the district; and to follow the key events that occurred during this period of reform (2007-2010) (Schultz & McGinn, 2013). We used a traditional set of qualitative methods to collect and analyze for this project. This was useful for my mentorship of Katie as a graduate student and also for my promotion as a university faculty member, as I was an associate professor at that time. Given my longstanding commitment to public scholarship, I was also interested in understanding this work as a form of publicly-engaged research. As I have described, it was difficult for me to enact this as collaborative research, when I was embroiled in the politics of the district, given my role and the power that was inherent in that role. It was also challenging to reconceptualize the project as public scholarship in the midst of becoming a board member—which literally happened overnight—and without the opportunity to build relationships with the community, or even with my fellow board members—before I began my work in that role.

While there was general understanding that the research aspect of my engagement in the district would serve the district, and the board and superintendent officially approved the research project in the first month that we began our work together, two people did express disapproval of the work to Katie. For example, another local pastor told us that he found the idea of the project “distasteful,” and that while he liked me, he worried that I was exploiting the district by doing this research (Interview, April 24, 2008). One of my fellow board members also expressed frustration with the amount of research that has been done in the school district over time to both Katie and me. Although he officially approved of this research project, he added the following caveat: “one of the things that I will not vote for again is more studies of this district. This district has been a laboratory for more experiments than I think any district should have been. …We’ve been prodded and poked enough to last a lifetime” (Interview, November 5, 2008). As a result, although I knew that the research was useful in the decision-making, I also understood the fault-lines and the general distrust of research because it is so often used against, rather than for or with, communities. My colleague’s comments echoed those of the pastor when she described our board as plantation owners.

There is no question that my fellow board members and I had the community’s interest in mind when we agreed to join the board for this district. The chair of the board was an attorney with close political ties to the governor. He had worked for several public agencies, including the local port authority and the city housing agency. The secretary/treasurer worked closely with the state secretary of education to implement the secretary’s vision of standards-based curriculum reform. People often commented that he had been in and out of the district for years and that they never knew when he would show up again—or leave. He has recently become the superintendent of the district almost ten years after our term ended. I came to the board as a university professor committed to preparing teachers for urban schools and addressing inequities in high poverty urban school districts. I brought knowledge of teaching and learning, an anthropologist’s perspective on understanding structural inequality, and a commitment to listening and working closely with the community to identify how to work with them to improve their schools. I believed that my commitment to work with, rather than for, the community would overcome the visible distrust we encountered on our first day. Each decision that we made illustrated the power we held because of the ways that we were positioned, and the stance we claimed, in the district. As a group, we worked tirelessly to improve the educational conditions in the district. Our close relationship with the governor meant that we had access to more funds and were able to accomplish things that were out of reach in the past.

Reflections on Public Scholarship

While I used my knowledge as an ethnographer to systematically understand the context in order to ground our decisions in local understandings and knowledge, in the end, most of our decisions were made in the heat of the moment and guided primarily by the superintendent’s immediate goals. We frequently had to make rapid decisions in public meetings, such as whether to support the superintendent to buy computer programs and textbooks to bolster the failing curriculum and how to negotiate an agreement with several unions to restore back pay while addressing the budget shortfalls and the enormous payments on loans that were paralyzing the district. We discussed whether to pursue legal strategies to shut down charter schools that were failing to educate children and siphoning money out of the district, despite support for those schools among some vocal members of the community. For a variety of reasons, we ended up aligning our strategies with the activist group that opposed the growth of charter schools, creating distrust we never addressed between some members of the community and ourselves (Schultz, in press). Each of these decisions had to be made relatively quickly, drawing on the facts at hand, while taking into account a complex and shifting political environment.

My role was primarily as a board member and through our research, I hoped to inform our decisions and also learn from the experience in ways that might inform others. Although, in the moment, the research was entwined with my actions, in the end I have shared most of what I learned with academics in books, journals, and conferences, and in some cases a wider public audience, rather than with the community itself. In retrospect, I wish I had paid more attention to how to conduct research with the community and how to disseminate information in places and formats that may have benefitted them. All the same, I am not sure that in this case, research collaboration would have made a difference in the ultimate outcomes.

I continue to return to the metaphor of a plantation owner to understand what it can teach me as I think about how to conduct and support public scholarship in my current roles as both a researcher and dean of a school of education. While the pastor used this term to indicate our status as outsiders who were appointed rather than elected by the community, there is clearly a deeper significance to this term, especially as it applies to my role as a scholar and the power signified by that position. I wonder how I embodied the metaphorical role of a plantation owner, as we harvested data from the community rather than working more closely with them in its collection and analysis. In what ways did I (or we) wield power over them with the data that we did not invite them to analyze with us? To be sure, they had little or no interest in doing this work; however, what are the ways we could have shaped the research so that it felt important or consequential to them. How did we eclipse their learning by keeping it for ourselves? Finally, I believe we might have done a better job of sharing the data with them in other ways. While it may have informed my decisions over the long run, I did not make it public in a way that it could inform their decisions and perspectives. I continue to wonder about the venues or formats I might have used for this purpose.

Public scholarship is a notion that simultaneously suggests engagement and distance, mirroring the role that the academy has relative to society at large, especially in public universities such as my own. Universities are a critical part of society in their mission to educate the public, prepare students to take on various roles in the larger community, and through applied research provide knowledge for the use by, and potential betterment of, society. At the same time, universities are often seen as apart from society, occupying rarified positions as elitist institutions, with their work largely in the clouds and far away from real world issues and concerns. The pastor, who claimed we were plantation owners, was fundamentally questioning the presumption of the governor and his staff that we had salient knowledge to bring to bear to help solve the challenges in the school district. She was questioning whether the cumulative knowledge and experience the three of us had, was more critical than her lived knowledge and experience gained by residing in and serving the local community. Research was likely immaterial to her goals, and the goals of her neighbors. Their priority was to attain better opportunities for the youth in their city.

As public scholars, we too often assume that we have knowledge, perspective, insights and ability to formulate questions, gather and analyze data and that if we engage the local community in this process, our research will yield critical findings that will ultimately translate into a brighter future. Once we left the district, it became all too apparent to me that the pastor was right. The three of us may have had university degrees and knowledge of finance, teaching and learning, and educational policy, but at the end of the day poverty and entrenched politics were the dominant forces at work in that community. From her own experience, she had no doubt that would be the case.

We came to the city as board members with good intentions, did all the right things in terms of garnering money for the district, addressing a few of the most salient challenges, changing conditions in the schools. We met with a wide range of people. We listened, and tirelessly worked to get things done –– against all odds. I know there were moments when the pastor ultimately came to value those efforts and more, though I cannot say for certain. For me the greatest lesson was about the limits of public scholarship in the face of larger societal forces such as poverty and racism.

I now understand more about how the research I conducted, as well as my stance as a researcher, shaped my participation as a board member. At the same time, I recognize that my stance as a public scholar did not give me the tools to make the kind of lasting and transformative changes I hoped to make when I agreed to join the board. I now realize how public scholarship is useful for informing a larger and broader audience about issues that are salient to their lives. At the same time, I understand more about the limitations of public scholarship—and of myself as a scholar interested in engaging in local issues—in complex and seemingly intransigent situations, such as this one.

Our term on board lasted two and a half years and my colleague, Katie Luet, remained in the district for at least one more year. By most research standards, that is a long period of time for data collection. While we used this time to build strong relationships with many members of the community, it was not enough time to build the requisite trust we needed to truly engage community members in the research or to convince them of its merit. In the end, I am left with questions about how to combine public scholarship with public engagement. At the same time, I know more about how I would approach this kind of opportunity or role, explicitly framing it as public scholarship from the beginning. In addition, I know that in the future I would use my position differently to conduct research with and for the community. The notion of public scholarship, in part, is transforming conventional notions of research. How might it also transform traditional ideas about taking on leadership and activist roles in the community?

References

1. Schultz, K. (in press). Distrust and educational change: Overcoming barriers to just and lasting reform. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
2. Schultz, K., & McGinn, K. (2013). “No one cares about this community more than us”: The Role of Listening, Participation, and Trust in a Small Urban District. Urban Education, 48(6), 767-797.

About the author

Kathy Schultz is Dean and Professor of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder School of Education. Her scholarly work has focused on the research, development, and dissemination of practices that support new and veteran teachers working with marginalized populations in high poverty areas. Her bio is here: /education/kathy-schultz

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Jeremy^[1] was a queer Asian American teacher candidate who enrolled in a social justice-oriented teacher education program, compelled to create transformative spaces and occupy teaching as a political position.  Unfortunately, although the mission and vision of the program seemingly aligned with his goals, he felt his instructors and the curriculum only addressed equity on a surface level, catered to his white colleagues, and left him feeling unprepared to be the teacher he set out to be.  The compounded neglect he felt impacted him to the point that he expressed, “it makes it hard to breathe” and left Jeremy with incredible needs.  He shared,

I need to learn how to sustain myself and my fellow teachers of Color^[2] in a system that rejects our visions, ethics, praxis, our peoples. I want to learn how schools work with other institutions to oppress communities of color, for example, to incarcerate, to deport, to otherwise criminalize…   I need to see the teacher’s power more clearly so that I use it more consciously and conscientiously [because] I want to work with students to negotiate and to resist schooling, even as I am their teacher.

Jeremy’s experiences in teacher education regrettably echo many studies and about the experiences of teachers of Color (Amos, 2016; Griffin, 2018). With paywalls for critical academic scholarship, and little space or time allotted to exploring critical ideology, research and practice, most of what teachers are exposed to comes from prescribed school-based and district-sponsored development opportunities. Those spaces, while often providing useful tools for teacher learning, are rarely targeted towards the specific needs of teachers of Color, particularly those interested in challenging structural oppression. So where does Jeremy, and other critical teachers of Color get access to the theory, language, and tools they need? Where can they develop the critical, intersectional, and racial literacies needed to confront injustice in their schools and transform the educational opportunities of students of Color.  In this article, we present about a teacher professional development setting called the (ITOC), aimed to support justice-oriented teachers of color as agents of change in racialized school environments.  Building on narratives of teachers of color who attended, we demonstrate how it serves as a form of critical public pedagogy—a politicized space of learning and transformation outside the bounds of traditional and formalized education that facilitates social change.  

Teachers of Color and Racialized School Environments

The U.S. educational system has and continues to maintain and exacerbate racial inequity.  Through overt practices of segregation and discrimination of the past to more subtle nuances of racism today, schools unevenly distribute resources (Orfield, Siegel-Hawley, & Kucsera, 2011), promote a Eurocentric curriculum that is unresponsive to the needs of students of Color (Au, Brown, & Calderon, 2016), and have a teaching force grossly under-equipped to serve ever-diversifying classrooms. These injustices over time, have resulted in school pushout (Tuck, 2012) disproportionate representation in remedial and gifted courses (Ford, Grantham & Whiting, 2008) and inequitable graduation rates (Perez Huber et al., 2015) for students of Color.

In the face of these conditions, many teachers of Color choose teaching because they want to improve the academic experiences of students of Color (Irizarry & Donaldson, 2012), support the educational transformation of their own communities (Dingus, 2008), and act as racial justice advocates (Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2003).  Teachers of Color have been found to have higher expectations of the learning of students of Color (Dee, 2005) and a heightened awareness of educational injustice and racism (Irizarry & Donaldson, 2012). And while there are teachers of Color who do not engage in discussions of injustice, research demonstrates that teachers of Color are more likely to frame racist and classist experiences within a broader socio-political context (Kambutu, Rios, & Castañeda, 2009).

Despite the potential that teachers of Color bring to classrooms to address racial inequity and improve the educational opportunities for students of Color, teachers of Color comprise just 18% of the teaching force (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2018).  In addition, teacher education programs tend to neglect their experiences, perspectives and needs (Amos, 2010; Haddix, 2012).  Studies have revealed that not only is most teacher training devoid of structural and racial analyses of inequity (Hayes & Fasching-Varner, 2015), it is also designed primarily for white teacher candidates (Sheets & Chew, 2002).  Teacher candidates of Color are often ignored and silenced within classes, as well as stunted in their professional growth (Amos, 2010). Practicing teachers of Color have also reported feeling isolated, unsupported and overlooked for leadership opportunities at their school sites (Dingus, 2008), with little professional development that addresses their needs (Franquiz, Salazar & DeNicolo, 2011).  Teachers of Color, who are often recruited into schools for racial equity minded reasons, are not mentored, supported, or at times even allowed by school staff to do racial justice work (Phillips & Nava, 2011).   

Critical Public Pedagogy

When teacher education programs and prescribed professional development fail to provide the racial discourse required to support the socio-political needs of teachers of Color, where do they go to strengthen their racial analysis, develop culturally sustaining curriculum, and gain skills to confront racism? Public pedagogy underscores how teaching and learning take place in public spaces and venues beyond formal institutions and schools (Burdick, Sandlin & O’Malley, 2014; Sandlin, Schultz & Burdick, 2010). Building on this conceptualization, critical public pedagogy highlights the political rootedness of public pedagogical practice such that it serves as a key component of resistance movements for social, economic and racial justice (Giroux, 2003; Jaramillo, 2010). As purveyors of whiteness, traditional teacher preparation programs and professional development function to exclude the voices, epistemologies and perspectives of communities of Color (Sleeter, 2001).  In this article, we discuss ITOC as a form of critical public pedagogy, a “pedagogy of unlearning” (Jaramillo, 2010) that is a refusal of and open challenge to the racial status quo in schools.

ITOC as Critical Public Pedagogy

Grounded in the belief that K-12 educators are politically and intellectually engaged actors who participate in shaping society (Giroux, 2003), ITOC acts as a space of critical public pedagogy as it offers teachers of Color access to critical theory, research, and practice often absent in traditional PD, it engages them dialogically, and supports their capacities for justice-oriented change. Teachers of Color who express interest and readiness for racial justice leadership work are brought together for three intensive days of keynotes, workshops, and working group sessions led by scholars, teachers and community-based leaders of Color with particular grounding in critical race theory (CRT) and racial literacy development. Because ITOC is also meant to support their holistic well-being in the face of racial and ideological isolation and trauma, the space is woven with community building, performance and visual art, yoga and meditation, healthy food, and specific sessions for healing.

Critical race theory emerged from critical legal studies to name institutional culpability in U.S. racial disparities (Dixson & Rousseau, 2005).  Focused on unearthing the permanence of racism and white supremacy on multiple levels (i.e., individual, institutional, and cultural), CRT leans on the experiences and insights of non-dominant communities (Yosso, 2005), and reframes individualized, meritocratic, colorblind and postracial explanations for racial inequality by engaging in structural critique (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). There are five key tenets, outlined by Solórzano & Delgado Bernal (2001), that are central to CRT research and praxis in education: (a) the centrality of race and racism, (b) challenge to the dominant perspective, (c) a commitment to social justice, (d) a value of experiential knowledge, and (e) the utilization of interdisciplinary approaches (). For teachers of Color who aim to transform racialized conditions (Kohli, 2018), ITOC uses CRT to reframe dominant racialized messages in education, center the voices and experiences of the marginalized, and strengthen teachers’ racial literacy.

Closely aligned with CRT, racial literacy refers to the skill and practice of being able to understand the institutional embeddedness of racism and then process and respond to these experiences (Sealey-Ruiz, 2013). In relation to teacher pedagogy, a teacher’s adeptness with guiding students in the discussion of race and racism can either ill-prepare students with problematic understandings and responses to racism, or prepare students to effectively respond to racist discourse and experiences with racism (Skerrett, 2011). For teachers themselves, developing and sustaining their racial literacy is important to helping them uncover and pinpoint the structural and systemic nature of racism (Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Skerrett, 2011), and for teachers of Color this has proven essential to their retention in a predominantly White and racializing profession.  Because this is not the labor that teacher education or school and district mandated professional development traditionally takes on, teachers are often left with few tools to name, navigate, and confront the manifestations of the institutional racism they encounter.  ITOC, as a form of critical public pedagogy, breaks down barriers of intellectualism, scholarship, and leadership, making these aspects central to teacher development.  By supporting the racial literacy development of teachers of Color, it provides a utility for theory and research that is directly tied to their professional sustainability and their capacity for institutional change. 

Methods

All three authors are former teachers of Color who now serve as teacher educators and researchers and have worked closely with ITOC for many years. To demonstrate its effectiveness as a form of critical public pedagogy, we share examples of how ITOC uses critical theory and research to strengthen teachers’ capacity to 1) name racism, and 2) transform the racial climate.  The examples come from a larger research project with 441 participants, all of whom applied to participate in ITOC and self-selected into the study between 2011 and 2017. The teachers in the study were diverse across race, gender, age, years in the classroom and teaching level.  They came from communities across the country and taught in schools that primarily served students of Color.  All the participants completed a qualitative questionnaire with four open-ended in-depth questions, and a subgroup participated in pre- and post-conference surveys, as well as self-guided digital narrative interviews that were solicited through printed prompts and related to concepts taught within ITOC. The teachers whose narratives are included in this article all taught high school, lived on the West Coast, participated in ITOC for multiple years, and expressed themes that were salient throughout the larger data set in clear and accessible ways.  The narratives we share were constructed through a compilation and analysis of all forms of their participation in the study, as well as informal communication and member checking.

Strengthening Teachers Capacity to Name Racism

A teacher’s workload is unfortunately often understood only in terms of what they teach, and how effective it is in increasing achievement.  Less common is the belief that teachers do or should have a handle on how racial inequity exists in the broader policies and practices that govern the school.  Thus, racial literacy is rarely seen as a valuable skill set for teacher training and professional development, despite the extreme impact of racial inequity on communities, students, and the teachers of Color that serve them.  Grounded in CRT, ITOC exposes teachers to concepts that allow them to better name, analyze, and challenge racism, as well as understand its impact on them personally and professionally. 

One such concept is racial battle fatigue, which Smith (2009) defines as “the psychological, emotional, physiological, energy, and time-related cost of fighting against racism” (p. 298).  Although there is a growing body of educational scholarship that has conceptualized and/or researched the significance of this concept in education, it is mostly absent from teacher development.  At ITOC, teachers are introduced to racial battle fatigue as one of the key theoretical frames to unpack the way in which they are experiencing oppression. As we do with many dense theoretical concepts: we start with a video clip, in this case of a short comedy skit video where Queen Latifah jokes about “Excedrin for Racial Tension Headaches,” we then introduce teachers to William Smith’s research on racial battle fatigue, and finally we offer time for them to apply the concept to their own contexts, using the theory to reframe their experiences. 

One year at ITOC, a veteran Latinx teacher attended who had endured racism at her school where she and her students were stereotyped, and was treated in dehumanizing ways by peers and administrators.  She had broken down during the year, and had to take time off, for which she felt incredible guilt.  When we presented the concept of racial battle fatigue, she stood up with tears in her eyes and said, “I thought it was just me! I can’t believe this is a real thing and there is research on it.”  She later expressed that exposure to that theory was an important step in healing and empowerment, allowing her to reframe the narrative and understand racism and the institutional climate as a key cause of the emotional stress she was experiencing.

Mark, a middle school science teacher who identifies as Asian American, also came to ITOC feeling exhausted, and emotionally drained from his school year.  He felt that having to continually teach his white colleagues about how race and racism shape the inequities at his school and his larger community was weighing on him.  Learning the concept of racial battle fatigue, he began to make connections between racialized experiences at his school and his emotional and physical state. He shared,

I can recall a time when a student came into my class really upset…she said that a substitute teacher had called her a ‘wetback,’ and I could just feel myself, like physically, my heart and my shoulders and that flash of rage where I felt like I couldn’t think straight…this was before I ever came here [ITOC], so I didn’t know the word ‘racial battle fatigue’ and I didn’t know about secondary trauma, but it just triggered me... The the best I could do was call the principal and tell her what had happened. And that whole period I was off—emotionally I wasn’t there… even right now I can feel some emotions being stirred up… Now [post-ITOC], I know that that comes from a place of trauma and triggering, reminders of substitutes and teachers who had been similarly hostile to me as a child…

Mark had a visceral response to racism.  Learning about racial battle fatigue helped him identify and name the racialized context of his school as a source of the mental, emotional and physiological toll he was experiencing.  A year later, Mark reflected on his experience at ITOC saying that attending and finding language to unpack and articulate his and his students’ experience made him finally feel like he wasn’t “living in a different world than everyone else.”  Understanding racial battle fatigue as a construct helped teachers make sense of what they were experiencing, feel less isolated, and reframe racism as an underlying source to the emotional stress of teaching. Theoretically and critically engaging teachers of Color provides ways of explaining their realities that help them understand, heal from, and persist in the sometimes racially toxic environment of schools.

Strengthening Teachers’ Capacities to Transform the Racial Climate 

Naming racism has a utility that goes beyond understanding, healing and empowerment. Learning critical theoretical concepts in an applied way also equips teachers of Color with the tools to confront and transform racial inequity in their schools and communities.  A Latino high school teacher in the Northwest, Pablo was one of three male teachers of Color in his district.  He came to ITOC with a similar heaviness of responsibility towards justice, expressing that, “Most of my colleagues are ignorant or dismissive of racial inequities… It feels very lonesome and I often feel disempowered.” He was seeking community to sustain his teaching, to feel empowered as a teacher of Color, and to learn how to most effectively work towards racial justice with and for his students.

During ITOC, Pablo spoke about the utility of the CRT concept of “racial microaggressions”—everyday verbal or non-verbal forms of racism that can take a cumulative toll on people of Color (Solórzano, 1998)—which he stated helped him feel more confident and empowered to call-out racist discourse and acts in his school context.  In a similar fashion to racial battle fatigue, racial microaggressions was taught through examples in the media, a short comedy clip where a Korean American woman resists with humor the questions of a white man who wants to understand where she is really from, connections to the academic scholarship on racial microaggressions, and then space to apply it to their own contexts. Pablo shared,

I wanted to share about this [concept of] microaggressions and how nasty they are… I lost a white friend [at my school] because I stood up and I told him that [his comments] were not right, I told him I was disrespected…[At the time], I didn’t call him racist, but the next time it does happen I definitely will say that it was a racist comment. The next time it happens to me I know better now, I know to say that people are being racist. Because of the last two days [at ITOC], I feel much more confident about these things that I can talk about, that I can go back and reference and really say ‘these things are racist’ and they’re not okay to me…

For Pablo, through an exposure to critical race concepts and a strengthened racial literacy, he felt empowered with critical language to name the everyday racist discourse directed at his students and at him. ITOC's bridge of critical theory to praxis filled an important voidd in Pablo's teacher development by supporting his racial literacy. He shared, “ITOC has been the most empowering and impactful institute I have attended in my career. I had not fully understood all that I was thinking and feeling as a person of Color until I arrived and connections were made. The validation made me whole, and increased my confidence.”

Pablo returned to ITOC three times over the course of four years, and over the course of that time, he developed not only in his skill to name racism, but also in his capacity to confront and transform the racial climate. He expressed,

Ever since my first summer at ITOC in 2015 my activism and leadership has grown exponentially. I was able to make sense of a lot of what I was thinking and feeling. Having my experience and humanity validated helped me see that I was capable and strong enough to start mobilizing and collaborating with teachers and parents that were ready to enact change in our schools.

Building on ITOC’s framing that critical educators of Color are the leaders they have been waiting for, within the convening, teachers of Color are asked to design theoretically and research informed action plans for the racial justice work they will accomplish during the school year.  Pablo’s second time at ITOC, he attended with two women of Color from his school with plans to “curate spaces to undo the work of racism, oppression, hate, ignorance, and other ideas and ideals that subjugate our students and our teachers to learn in oppressive ways.”  Through the following school year, they developed a teacher activist group in their region where they read critical scholarship and organized actions. He shared that through his gained racial literacy and empowerment, he is now recognized by others as an educational leader in his community, being asked to share his expertise and experiences in other contexts.  He is now involved in multi-tiered efforts across his region with like-minded teachers to improve the racial climate and educational opportunities for youth and their families. The critical theoretical frames, the community, and the focus on action are all pieces of ITOC that help bridge critical theory and research to practice, supporting teachers in their efforts to name racism, confront it, and then transform schools.

Conclusion

Many opportunities for professional teacher learning are derived from teacher education and school-based or district-sponsored development opportunities. We argue that these spaces, while often successful at supporting teacher learning, rarely target the specific needs of teachers of Color, especially those interested in learning to challenge structural oppression. A lack of critical racial discourse underserves teachers of Color who are navigating a predominantly white profession, particularly those trying to challenge the status quo. Racial literacy, as a skill and practice, must be strengthened (Sealey-Ruiz, 2013) as it can serve as a tool of personal and professional survival for teachers of Color (Kohli, 2018).

In this article, we presented ITOC as a form of critical public pedagogy. Breaking down false barriers between scholars and practitioners that often leave teachers with outdated research and limited formal opportunities for intellectual engagement, ITOC supports justice-oriented teachers of Color in their racial literacy development, and growth as agents of change in racialized school environments. Through exposure to critical theory and research, as demonstrated through the examples of teachers’ engagement with racial battle fatigue and racial microaggressions, they are able to strengthen their understanding and approach to their professional spaces, as well as their capacities for change. 

While ITOC happens outside the bounds of traditional teacher training or professional development, there are lessons that these institutions can learn from this form of critical public pedagogy.  Teachers of Color in ITOC are engaged in critical theory and tools, their trauma is acknowledged and addressed, and they are supported as a community of change agents to name racism and transform the racial climates of their schools and communities.  Teachers are capable of intellectually rigorous, politically active, professional engagement.  Practicing teachers should have access to critical theory, research, and scholars themselves.  To effectively prepare a diverse teaching force to address the incredible challenges and inequities we continue to see in schools, teacher education programs and teacher professional development must begin to engage teachers in honest discourse on race and racism, cultivate their skills to address racialized issues, and support their overall growth as racial justice educators.

References

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About the authors

is an Assistant Professor in Education, Society and Culture program of the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside, and is a founding co-director of the Institute for Teachers of Color Committed to Racial Justice. Her research is focused on racism and racial justice in schooling, with particular interest in the experiences of teachers of Color.

Arturo Nevárez is a doctoral candidate at the University of California Riverside in the Graduate School of Education.  Previously a middle school and high school English teacher, Arturo's research focuses on the racial literacies of Latinx students in secondary Ethnic Studies classrooms. 

Nallely Arteaga is a PhD candidate in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. Her work examines the racialized processes traditional comprehensive high schools participate in to remove Black and Latinx students into alternative schools.

^[1] All names included in the article are pseudonyms, used to ensure confidentiality.

^[2] The term “of Color,” capitalized to emphasize the label as a racialized category, is used to refer to people who identify as Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern. It is not intended to collapse their identities, but point to the shared historical and current experience of racial exclusion in the United States. 

Off

As a junior academic pursuing reappointment and promotion at a U.S. research university, I spend quite a bit of my time writing articles for peer-reviewed journals in my field. While such publications represent only one possible avenue for disseminating research, they command the lion’s share of my attention because they continue to be regarded by institutional gatekeepers as the gold standard of scholarship (and hence play a large role in my ability to achieve job security). From what I have gathered, these particular outlets are valued so highly for three reasons: 1. Peer review is intended to offer a sort of quality control by ensuring that common disciplinary standards of rigor are met; 2. Publication in these journals represents symbolic entrance into a continuing dialogue among experts in a particular field; and 3. Articles offer new knowledge and insights to improve theory, research, and/or practice in that field.

Of course, these reasons raise more questions for me than they answer. To name a few: who exactly are my peers? Who decides the nature and purpose of the ‘rigorous standards’ to be met in research? What kinds of expertise are valued or excluded in scholarly conversations? What constitutes knowledge and what are we using it for?

While I believe that all scholars should be asking these questions to gauge how well we are fulfilling our ultimate responsibility to serve the public good, they feel especially pressing to me as a professor of education – one of the most public-facing disciplines of them all. And unfortunately, I often feel a strong disconnect between my responsibilities to the world of peer-reviewed journals and to the world of K-12 classrooms (for more on the complicated relationship between educational research and practice, see Bransford & Gomez, 2009 and Coburn, Penuel, & Geil, 2013). The peer groups do not overlap enough. Expertise is not being shared. There are not always common goals. And as a result, it could be theoretically possible for education scholars to earn tenure on the merits of research that is not oriented toward or particularly useful to students, parents, and teachers – those to whom I believe we should be most accountable.

Until large-scale changes are undertaken in the peer review process or how tenure is awarded (topics beyond the scope of this piece), I am taking a both/and approach in my ongoing journey to becoming a public scholar. My approach involves making conscious efforts to share my work in multiple public venues such as blogs, talks, and webinars and striving to make my peer-reviewed journal articles more accessible in terms of writing style and dissemination (one example: my series for the Connected Learning Alliance. My experience with an openly networked public annotation initiative called Marginal Syllabus represented an opportunity to merge these approaches and offered innovative answers to my questions about constructing new peer communities and avenues for public dissemination of research.

Through this initiative, in which one of my peer-reviewed journal articles was made available as a public text that could be commented upon, I was given the opportunity to imagine a different paradigm for conducting, consuming, and responding to research - one in which study findings become the start rather than the end of dialogue and in which diverse forms of expertise extend, refute, and re-mix the knowledge production process for the common purpose of making education more equitable and culturally sustaining. I share my experience with the hope of provoking further conversation about what it means to take democratic values seriously in academic research.

Public Annotation and the Marginal Syllabus Initiative

The Marginal Syllabus initiative began in 2016 with the goal of fostering conversations about educational equity through the use of the web annotation platform, Hypothesis. Its explains the multiple interpretations of marginality that inform this work, from the encouragement of counter-narratives to the novel use of an education technology tool for the purpose of virtual note-taking. During the 2017-2018 school year, Marginal Syllabus partnered with the National Writing Project to create a series of reading conversations entitled, “Writing Our Civic Futures.” An introductory post on the invited all interested participants to “think about the landscape of civic engagement and education while imagining ways that we can engage ourselves and our students as writers and makers of our civic futures”.

The conveners of the project, Remi Kalir and Joe Dillon, asked me and my colleague, Antero Garcia, if we would be interested in having one of our recent articles included in the syllabus. (To learn more about the project, check out these posts from and . The , entitled, “Civic Participation Re-Imagined: Youth Interrogation and Innovation in the Multimodal Public Sphere,” was published in the 2017 volume of Review of Research in Education. Prior to this opportunity, this article was behind a paywall, only available to those with personal or institutional subscriptions to the journal. The irony was not lost on Antero and I that we had written an article about challenging the ways the academy measured youth civic engagement…for an academic journal. As a result, we jumped at the opportunity to share our work with a broader audience.

The organizers took care of securing permissions to use the article, while Antero and I just enjoyed the fun stuff - participating in a - to introduce our piece to the world and then joining in the monthlong annotation experience. Signing up for the Hypothesis platform was as simple as choosing a username and password, and the process of annotation was similarly intuitive. Once logged in, our article appeared in the form of a PDF file. Any annotator could then highlight any word, phrase, sentence, or chunk of text and click to add an annotation that would then appear to all readers in the margin. Readers could choose to create new annotations or respond to previous comments in order to create a discussion thread. As a result, reading the piece would cease to be a linear journey down the page and instead become a constant zigzag from the original text to the margins and back again.

This give and take is where I saw potential for annotation to further the cause of public scholarship. In effect, annotation seeks to break down the hierarchical boundaries that often plague academic research - binaries between authors and readers or researchers and practitioners - by fostering a more equitable and democratic conversation in which all contributions are visible and valid. Readers need not pen their own articles and seek outlets for publication in order to respond to a piece; instead, annotation seeks to make dialogue happen in real time among a wide group of stakeholders.

And indeed, all members of the public were invited to become readers and annotators. Because this effort was spearheaded by the National Writing Project, many teachers and teacher educators were represented; however, many of them invited their students to participate as well in order to support more diverse perspectives and a distributed sense of expertise. Here is a to the article with the 85 annotations that these readers added. I want to tease out a few aspects of the process that impacted me in terms of the value of annotation as a promising practice for public scholarship and do some imagining of what a more inclusive vision of democratic knowledge production might look like.

Re-Considering the Premises of Our Work

As we wrote our original article, Antero and I were inspired by instances of young people using social media in order to speak back to dominant narratives about their identities and shaping public dialogue about the issues that mattered to them. We realized that traditional models of youth civic engagement were not equipped to integrate the activities of the Black Lives Matter and DREAMer movements into their analyses; as a result, we made the argument that the multimodal public sphere demanded attention because of the new opportunities it offered young people for civic action.

When the annotation process began, I was surprised to see how much conversation was generated by the abstract at the very beginning of the piece when we offered this statement about the potential of digital media to democratize the public sphere. The annotators, some of whom I knew personally and others I had never met before, quickly problematized our premise by raising concerns about privacy, trolling, and the corporate control of many platforms. The annotations allowed me to see thinking made visible as readers wrestled with the potential and drawbacks of digital media as a source of transformative civic discourse and even introduced new texts to further our collective considerations (more on linking to new resources in a moment).

This conversation was eye-opening for me because it served as a valuable reminder that the claim that formed the basis for our entire piece and was almost taken for granted in our theorizing was in reality up for debate at a very fundamental level. The norms of academic writing often encourage authors to assume a mantle of confidence and put forth ideas in such a manner as to make them appear as settled fact. But how refreshing and intellectually engaging to recall that even the fundamental premises that structure our writing are works in progress! How exciting for me to be shaken from the complacency of some of my assumptions and be encouraged to reconsider and/or justify my stances!

This conversation felt like the democratic process in action as the voices of my peers complicated and ultimately strengthened my thinking. As John Dewey (1916) reminds us, “Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication” (p. 5, emphasis original). Annotation is a practice that makes this communication transparent and gives each individual a chance to foster rigorous analysis by adding her own perspective to the conversation. In effect, annotation provided more satisfying answers to the questions I raised at the start of this piece about peers, expertise, and purpose than the traditional peer-review process ever had. Annotation embodied public scholarship by welcoming everyone as respected members of an educational conversation - no credentials required. It encouraged the sharing of various forms of expertise that normally would not be considered “rigorous” enough for the research establishment, thereby turning these rules on their head and demanding that more voices be heard. And it reminded us that if our ultimate aim as researchers is to encourage civic engagement, we must welcome such engagement in all possible forms.

Welcoming New Voices through Resource-Linking

In one obvious sense, the practice of annotation invites multiple voices to contribute to a scholarly conversation in terms of the actual individuals who add notes in the margins. Yet during my engagement in the practice I was also struck by the ways that the participating voices multiplied as individuals supplied links to a wide variety of additional texts that furthered the dialogue. As I scrolled through the annotations, I was fascinated to see how the original article sparked recollections in the minds of our readers to such diverse context, from political cartoons and artwork to infographics, TED talks, and other academic articles.

I was familiar with some of these texts while others were completely new to me. Some had been obvious influences on my thinking while others made connections that created new neural pathways in my brain. They embodied the idea that every text that we compose is inevitably influenced by a multiplicity of other texts (both consciously and unconsciously) and that every idea represents a conversation with supporting and contradictory perspectives. I appreciated the annotation process for offering links to these multifaceted perspectives right there on the page instead of keeping them hidden in the minds of each reader, thereby creating a map through which we could trace the lineage of our most deeply held convictions as well as the ideas with which we disagreed.       

I also appreciated the fact that the texts being referenced were not confined to other peer-reviewed scholarship but represented a full scope of expression. Especially in a field like education, which is so applied, annotation offers a refreshing reminder that knowledge can just as easily be borne from a student-produced video or teacher blog post as a researcher’s experimental design study. As a qualitative researcher who is often trying to understand the life of a school and put classroom practice into conversation with discourses swirling across the educational landscape, I feel a responsibility to stay abreast of everything from the latest research articles to the latest viral videos students are watching. Annotation offers a forum in which both can be shared.

Clarifying Arguments through Dialogue

One of the most meaningful aspects of the annotation process for me was witnessing how others took up the claims that formed the core of our article, both because I appreciated seeing how others interpreted our work and because those interpretations helped me to understand how I might clarify my writing when I realized I was not coming across in the way I intended. In the world of literary criticism, reader response theory argues that meaning is created in the interaction between author, text, and reader and that the conclusions that readers draw, whether intended by the author or not, are irrevocably added to the life of the original text. Yet so often those reader responses do not receive the same level of recognition as the original text because of the artificial hierarchy between writer and reader and inequities in who receives platforms to speak. Annotation can help flatten this hierarchy and break down the binary between writer and reader, giving both roles to play in the production of knowledge.

Part of the argument that Antero and I were making in our article was semantic. We suggested that encouraging young people to ‘participate’ or ‘engage’ in civic life implies that civic institutions as they exist are healthy, trustworthy, and responsive to their concerns - an implication that we found fatally flawed considering the multiple ways in which these institutions marginalized the concerns of youth generally and youth of color in particular. We instead called for an embrace of youth civic ‘interrogation’ and ‘innovation’ in order to honor the ways in which youth were developing pathways to civic action on their own terms. While these semantics might seem like an exercise in empty theorizing, we argued that the language we use to describe phenomena - particularly in academic spaces - is a form of action and can have tangible influence on the kinds of initiatives that get funded.

Our purpose was also to spark dialogue within the field of civic education, and as a result it was fascinating to see how the participation/innovation distinction was taken up by readers/contributors. One annotator sparked a lively conversation by asking, “I’m all for imagining new kinds of civic participation or "innovation," but at some point there needs to be a connection to the established means of engagement and action, right?” This question sparked a cascade of responses as folks wrestled with whether we were constructing an artificial either/or binary or a both/and invitation as we pushed for recognition of non-traditional forms of civic action. For instance, do social media campaigns need to result in voting in order to be considered effective or are they important regardless of whether they interact with traditional structures of engagement?

In one sense this was the exact sort of conversation that Antero and I wanted to elicit, which felt rewarding, but in another it made me wish that we had more explicitly and forcefully made clear our aim to trouble binaries rather than reinforce them and our commitment to challenging the idea that action was meaningful only to the extent that it harkened back to formal systems. As a result, annotation offered me a learning opportunity that will resonate as I am working on my next pieces, reminding me to think more consciously about audience and exactly what I want to communicate and how.

Yet there were other moments when annotation exposed fundamental differences of opinion that did not inspire me to change my approach but instead confirmed my deeply held views and reminded me of why it is was so important for me to advocate for them in my scholarship. Antero and I claimed toward the end of our article that the development of critical consciousness and a deep understanding of structural oppression were key elements of informed and transformative civic action. We critiqued programs that encouraged young people to get involved in addressing community challenges without first delving deeply into the systemic issues that cause them because of their tendency to reinforce the status quo, rely upon institutional gatekeepers as agents of change, and mask the perpetuation of inequity.

One annotator disagreed with this claim, commenting, “If we set the bar too high, requiring full purity of understanding, few educators will get involved.” This individual suggested that teachers may not be prepared to introduce critical analysis and that it could be cultivated later after students are introduced to action civics projects. As I considered this annotation, I realized how much I disagreed with this perspective, both because it created a binary between action and reflection and because it suggested that critical understandings were not essential to understanding and engaging in public life. This time around, the annotation process helped me to understand the bedrock principles that I am not willing to compromise and alerted me to a view that I feel compelled to continue challenging in my work to come. I remain committed to the belief that normative forms of civic learning will continue to marginalize the perspectives of young people from minoritized communities until educators heed the civic disruptions and innovations of youth and forge a new path based on honoring their civic counter-narratives.

Public Annotation and Democratic Praxis

Despite the perilous state of dialogue in our country embodied by highly charged partisan rhetoric and media-driven sound bites that characterize most political discussions, I have hope that annotation has a role to play in re-imagining public scholarship as a project of equitable co-construction of knowledge - a project that is profoundly democratic. As Cornel West (1998) reminds us, “dialogue is the lifeblood of democracy” (p. 10).

I also envision annotation as having a role to play in the enactment of critical pedagogy. Paulo Freire (1970) argues that when teachers and students engage in critical dialogue together, the traditional power structures of authority that divide them fall away, and “teacher-students” and “student-teachers” are created who are co-intent on unveiling oppression and re-creating knowledge (p. 80).  He argues that only through praxis can the traditional, ‘banking’ model of education, in which students are seen as passive depositories of isolated chunks of knowledge, be replaced by a problem-posing model of education that focuses on collective inquiry for shared empowerment.  He reminds us that, “Apart from inquiry, apart from praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other” (p. 72).

I can imagine no greater role for teaching and scholarship than to foster mutual humanization for the purpose of promoting equity and justice. For me, annotation represents one practice that can support us as we continue on that worthy journey.

References

1. Bransford, D. & Gomez, L. (Eds.) (2009). The role of research in educational improvement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. 
2. Coburn, C., Penuel, W., & Geil, K. (2013). Research-Practice Partnerships: A Strategy for Leveraging Research for Educational Improvement in School Districts. New York: William T. Grant Foundation. Accessed from: .
3. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education; an introduction to the philosophy of education.New York: The Macmillan Company.
4. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.
5. Mirra, N. & Garcia, A. (2017). Civic participation re-imagined: Youth interrogation and innovation in the multimodal public sphere. Review of Research in Education, (41), 136-158.
6. West, C. (1998). The moral obligations of living in a democratic society. In D. Batstone & E. Mendieta (Eds.), The Good Citizen (pp. 5-12). New York: Routledge.

About the author

Nicole Mirra () is an assistant professor of urban teacher education in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. Her teaching and research highlights how young people use their literacy skills to advocate for their communities and challenge injustice. She can be reached at nicole.mirra@gse.rutgers.edu.  

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Across the country, teacher unions face decisions about democracy and their role which are both internal and external.  Internal issues are those that primarily impact association members and must be addressed and resolved among members.  Elections for office within teacher unions and the campaigns leading up to these elections are mainly internal affairs.  External issues include those that are between teacher unions and one or more organizations or groups in society, such as parents, another labor union, or a school district’s bargaining team.  A current challenge for teacher unions (sometimes referred to as associations) throughout the country is learning how to navigate and balance both internal and external conflicts, discussions, and issues.  The union for educators in Denver, Colorado (Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association or DCTA) has been deliberating about and working through these internal as well as external points of contention for the past several years.  A main challenge for union members as well as union leadership of DCTA is to determine which issues to prioritize.  Should the union focus solely on its public image while ignoring conflicts between members because this current era is one that includes rising anti-teacher sentiment and the steady privatization of public schools?  Or, should the union focus more on resolving differences of opinion among its members and leaders at the risk of losing its public image?  Examining the issues facing educators in Denver and challenges regarding democracy within DCTA from 2015-2018 can help union members in other locals and members of the public throughout the country better understand the role of unions in our society and what being a productive, effective educator union means.

The 2017-2018 school year saw in multiple states which energized participants and drew nationwide attention to the issues of teacher pay and the importance of collective bargaining. Tens of thousands of teachers in West Virginia, Colorado, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky participated in statewide actions (some were work stoppages and strikes; others were one-day walkouts) to draw attention to the decreasing wage competitiveness and declining working conditions for educators in these states. Following these actions, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in June 2018 that public employee unions could not compel workers to join their unions or pay partial dues, a harsh blow to teacher unions and public employee associations.  While several states (including Colorado) are already “right to work” states in which public employees are not obligated to pay any dues towards union membership, the decision in resulted in what is feared to be a in states in which public employees had previously been required to either be a union member or pay a reduced fee for the benefits they received from the union’s work regardless of whether they were a member.  The momentum and attention drawn to teacher unions by the statewide actions of the school year and the Janus decision of the summer serve to raise several issues and questions related to what the roles of teacher unions are for current union members and for a democratic society.  Against this backdrop of democratic deliberation within and among various educator unions, members within DCTA are working to make their union more democratic and focused on their goal of providing every student with an excellent education.

The Purposes, Goals, and Priorities of Teacher Unions

Both national educator unions, the (NEA) and the (AFT), have made renewed calls for their members to work for social justice in the past several years.  To what extent are various locals and state associations within these unions truly working towards a more socially just society, and what can union members do to ensure their local association is working towards this priority?  In order to work diligently towards these goals, local associations including DCTA need to work democratically and efficiently to make these values and goals a reality.

At the past several annual meetings of both the NEA and the AFT, delegates to these assemblies have often voted in favor of resolutions (statements of belief) that support more socially just, culturally responsive school environments for America’s students.  For example, at the 2018 Representative Assembly, the NEA voted in favor of that stated in part, “basic student rights include the right to safe and stable school environments; free inquiry and expression; freedom of the press; due process; gender equity; freedom of association; freedom of peaceful assembly and petition; … and equal educational opportunity.”  However, at this same Representative Assembly, the NEA also voted to support a that promotes collaboration between the NEA and police unions to help police officers become more culturally competent.  The rationale for this new business item was that in order to “change today’s culture of police being seen as the enemy, NEA should lend support and assistance in promoting partnerships between education associations and law enforcement, help encourage training for community officers, and help build educator, police, and community relationships.”  However, this new business item that the NEA is now obligated to fund is in conflict with the desires of many social justice focused groups such as the nationwide group .  This organization, like many other education-related groups across the country, believes that rather than supporting police officers’ continued presence in and around schools, more counselors and other resources should be provided to students to meet their social and emotional needs.

Political Bias in Teacher Unions

Should union leaders have politics that are more left-leaning, even radical?  Or is there merit in aiming for a centrist position on some issues?

Educators across the country generally understand their roles as public employees and the limitations that places on where and when they may share their political views.  However, the levels of political involvement of teachers once their workday is over vary widely in activity levels as well as across the political spectrum.  While some media outlets often paint teachers as die-hard liberals, found that nearly 29 percent of the over 900 educators surveyed reported voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election.  While the majority of educators identify themselves as either Democrats or unaffiliated/independent, there remains a range of diversity of political affiliation that can often lead to disagreement and disunity within teacher unions, particularly at the local and state levels where the makeup of educators’ political affiliations can vary widely from the national data.  Both major political parties have elected officials who have supported policies that have harmed public school systems.  One well-known example is Democratic Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emmanuel’s support for .  This mass closure impacted Chicago’s black students the most by forcing students whose schools had been closed to travel farther to attend school, and most of the schools that remained open to those students were of no higher quality than the closed schools.  Eve Ewing’s 2018 book gives excellent analysis of the impact that decisions by political leaders of all stripes can have on students.  

Both major political parties have been involved and have led decision making that has harmed historically underserved student populations, but the Democratic party has overall been much more supportive of the rights of all students, particularly students from marginalized backgrounds.  For example, the Democratic Obama administration’s Department of Education issued new guidelines in 2016 for which the Republican Trump administration promptly “rolled back” soon into Trump’s time as president.  Most educators are registered Democrats, but as explained previously, a significant portion identify as independent or Republican.  This raises a question of whether teacher unions can and should work harder to support policies that are increasingly left-leaning.  While teachers are largely white and female, the public school student population in the United States as well as in , Colorado is made up of at least , and .  Why, then, do many educators belong to a political party that has frequently supported policies that are detrimental to public school students?  And, what implications does this have for teacher unions’ policy priorities?  According to both the and the , one of the main purposes of educator unions is to support policies that will better serve all public school students, so even though many union members may vote Republican, it helps unions to serve students well when they support more social justice-focused policies such as increasing teacher pay, expanding equal access to quality education for all students, and protecting students from historically underserved backgrounds. 

How Unions Can Works Towards Their Social Justice Goals

For those who want their union to be more anti-racist and social justice focused, is it productive to work towards more seats in the governing body and other efforts to transform the organization from within?  Or might it be more productive to work for change from outside of the official leadership structure?

Since teacher unions have a variety of political affiliations within their memberships – and widely varying beliefs among even those who identify as part of the same party - some local and state associations have a more challenging time than others living up to the social justice ideals that the national organizations NEA and AFT set out for themselves.  Over the past several decades, unions in some major cities have been pushed by their members to act more intentionally and quickly to promote social justice goals at the local level. 

In Chicago, the Chicago Teachers Union () saw the rise and now dominance of a caucus within the union called Caucus of Rank and File Educators () which pushed CTU to be more proactive and engaged in Chicago education policy in addition to fighting for teacher pay and benefits. The current CTU president, Jesse Sharkey, had been an education activist in his school community , and was instrumental in helping CORE members to win seats in the governing body of CTU beginning with the union’s 2010 election.  The changes CTU has seen over the past decade have included a revitalization of the union’s influence in the city of Chicago, and were successful in large part to organizing efforts of CORE members within CTU as well as organizing efforts among teachers, parents, and community leaders as well.  The book and the documentary film both tell the story of changes to CTU and the union’s ability to have a real impact on education policy in Chicago over the past decade.  CORE members were able, over a period of several years of tough organizing work, to work within their union’s existing organizational structure to win more seats in the governing body and then to make changes to the union’s structure to increase democracy within the union. 

In Denver, the teachers’ union (DCTA) is facing turbulent times as well.  The organization’s leadership structure is traditional, with a president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, and a 16-member board of directors.  Denver Public Schools is often known as a “reform capital” of the United States, with a massive increase in the number of charter schools, innovation schools, and its location in a right-to-work state.  Over the past decade, the number of charter schools has steadily increased while the teacher turnover rate in Denver has reached 25%.  One recently published that 31 percent of Denver Public Schools teachers were in their first three years on the job, compared with just 7 percent of teachers in the more affluent Boulder Valley School District.  In response to these external issues facing Denver and to internal undemocratic practices by some DCTA leaders and members, several DCTA members came together in a member’s home in fall of 2016 to form the Caucus of Today’s Teachers. (I was one of these founding members, and my current role is to do most of the communications, writing and research to inform our members of how education policy decisions impact our profession and our students).

One major catalyst for the formation of the Caucus of Today’s Teachers is that through all these challenges, DCTA has had the same union president for nearly a decade due to a lack of term limits for the union president written into the union (all other offices within DCTA are term-limited).  The current union president is now nearing the end of his fifth consecutive two-year term (next election is in April 2019).  In spring 2017, the ran a slate of candidates for President, Vice President, and several seats on the union’s board of directors. This was an attempt to turn over control of the union to more progressive, anti-racist, social justice focused educators who saw president Henry Roman’s lack of action on key issues as a sign that the union was becoming stagnant and not truly serving the best interests of students or educators in Denver.  The of the spring 2017 election was mixed.  After a highly contentious campaign season, the election for DCTA President resulted in a difference of fewer than 50 votes triggered an automatic vote between the incumbent and his Caucus-supported challenger, Tommie Shimrock.  The Caucus of Today’s Teachers’ candidate for Vice President, Christina Medina, beat her incumbent challenger by nearly 150 votes.  While the incumbent president Henry Roman won in the end, his small margin of victory was a sign that nearly half of DCTA’s over 3,000 members were either highly dissatisfied with Mr. Roman’s leadership or simply thought that it was time for change in what had been eight years of the same president.  The following spring, the Caucus of Today’s Teachers successfully elected three more of its educators onto the DCTA Board of Directors, and now holds the office of Vice President, as well as nearly half of board seats.  Caucus members who sit on the DCTA Board of Directors have a major goal and responsibility to promote more democratic decision-making processes and to encourage deliberation (rather than complacency) about important issues in Denver schools.  However, the effects of these changes to the governing body have not yet resulted in lasting change within DCTA or in DCTA’s actions in Denver Public Schools. 

While DCTA membership has grown slightly in the past year (up to 52% from 50% from 2017 to 2018), Colorado’s status as a right-to-work state and the relative stagnation of DCTA’s reputation in the community over the past decade has caused many Denver educators to either refrain from joining the union completely, or to join the union but work for social justice through channels that bypass or exclude the union.  While CORE was successful over several years of effort in changing the leadership of their union, but thus far, the Caucus of Today’s Teachers has not seen the same success level yet.  Perhaps this is due to various challenges in organizing support to grow the Caucus of Today’s Teachers, but low membership (just over 50%) when compared to ( were members of CTU prior to the Janus ruling) possibly plays a role on stifling momentum as well.  When membership is common across a school district, working within the union to make change is the first choice of educators. 

Navigating Disagreements and Conflict within Teacher Unions

Across the country, the teaching profession and educator unions face regular public scrutiny and criticism.  When dilemmas or disagreements arise within a union, to what extent is it beneficial to union members and the students they serve for the organization’s leadership to turn a blind eye to - or worse, to completely deny - disagreements in the name of protecting the union’s public image?

As Keith Catone states in his recent book The Pedagogy of Teacher Activism, “historically, the most recognized way for teachers to act collectively has been to organize through their unions” (Catone, 2017, p. 10).  However, teachers in many places throughout the country, including in Denver, sometimes feel that deep disagreements with their fellow union members over whether and how to make change within and outside of the union is nearly as substantial a challenge as contract bargaining with the school district.  In this era of towards teachers and their unions, union members of all opinions must decide how much effort to devote to working for change they believe is necessary within their union and change in education policy in their communities outside the union.  For teachers unions in today’s climate, particularly unions with low membership like DCTA, it’s a risk to let disagreements and conflicts within the union become public knowledge.  However, it’s also a risk to the long-term health of the union to continually ignore or brush off the concerns and disagreements that arise among members. 

Teacher unions such as DCTA should work to make changes to their structure and priorities despite risking public opinion.  In the long run, a union that functions in a more democratic way and makes room for more authentic member involvement can better work towards the social justice ideals laid out by the NEA and AFT.  In DCTA, the facts that the president is not term limited and that committee chairs are appointed by the president are far from inclusive and democratic.  According to philosopher Amy Gutmann, policies that stifle disagreement within a supposedly democratic organization or create an uneven playing field for members within the organization are policies that should be changed (Gutmann, 2004).  If DCTA and other teacher unions want to be examples of what inclusive, democratic, openly deliberative organizations can be and can accomplish, it’s up to members as well as organization leaders to work together to grow membership, revisit and revise undemocratic policies and bylaws, and ensure the practices they support are good for all students, educators, families, and community members. 

References

1. Bradbury, A. et al. (2014). How to Jump Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers. Detroit, MI: Labor Notes.
2. Catone, K. (2017). The Pedagogy of Teacher Activism. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
3. Gutmann, A. and Thompson, D. (2004). Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

About the author 

Hayley Breden is a high school social studies teacher in Denver, Colorado.  She is a founding member of the in Denver, earned her B.A. in History at , earned her M.A. in Educational Foundations, Policy, and Practice from CU-Boulder, and is a member of the Advisory Board.  

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