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Oh, fix me
Oh, fix me
Oh, fix me
Fix me, Jesus, fix me.
We're still blaming teachers. At conferences and in publications, we're still blaming teachers. In the news and at school board meetings, we're still blaming teachers. We're still talking about what teachers aren't doing and what they don't know. Teachers are faulty and broken. And everyone has something to say about how to fix them.
Yes, it's the teachers who are broken, faulty, and require fixin'. But I submit to you that teachers, like the students they serve, are victims. They get smashed by school districts with wrecking balls of bureaucracy, limited resources, and inadequate pay. They get smashed by impractical professional development that does little to support the realities of day-to-day school life. But sadly, they are also wrecked by us: teacher educators. But we are victims, too. We suffer the indignities of a political tenure track system that rarely values collaborative work in schools and school communities. We suffer the injustice of state and NCATE standards that devalue true social justice and academic freedoms that embrace a true and authentic meaning of curriculum.
But rarely do we get at the source. It is rare that we talk about how teachers are developed. How are teacher education programs structured? In what ways are these programs evaluated? And, in what ways do teacher educators engage in and model critically reflective self-assessment and evaluation toward the continual improvement of a praxis that supports educational equity?
As a woman of color scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of social foundations and curriculum theory in the context of urban teacher education, I am an advocate and purveyor of scholarship and praxis that raises the intellectual value of the work of teachers and teacher educators who wholeheartedly and unselfishly support those who are most likely to be underserved in the educational arena, k-20.
I advocate for and subscribe to the praxis of engaged pedagogy as defined by cultural critic and scholar bell hooks (1994). I advocate for and subscribe to the theoretical and conceptual notion of critical race feminism as defined by legal scholar and social activist Adrien K. Wing (1997). What I propose is a classroom praxis of engaged pedagogy from a critical...