Janet Johnson Rhode Island College LRA Dallas 2013

1. “How Much of Myself Do I Want to Put Out There?”: Identities and Literacy Practices in Social Justice Teaching Janet Johnson Rhode Island College LRA Dallas 2013

2. “Teaching for social justice requires one to be both self-critical and self-forgiving.” Bill Ayers Association of Teacher Educators Conference February 2013

3. (Unacknowledged) Labor of Teaching • Intellectual labor (Giroux, 1988) • Emotional labor (Boler, 1999, Lasky 2005)

4. Actions of Social Justice Educators (Ayers, 2013) • Standing up • Discovering friends and allies • Acting for equity/social justice outside of education • Going along • Self-protection

5. Theoretical Framework • New Literacy Studies • Teaching for Social Justice • Pedagogical literacies • Taxonomy of social justice literacies • Teacher Resilience

6. Taxonomy of Social Justice Literacies(Hines and Johnson, 2007) • Systems Literacies • Individual sees how complex dynamics create and perpetuate social, economic, and political inequities, and knows how to disrupt dominant narratives. • Strategic Literacies • Coalition-building • Oppositional • Testimonial • Resilience Literacies

7. Professional Vulnerability • Multi-faceted/ multidimensional (Lasky, 2005) • Openness and trust are necessary for all relationships • Can also lead to a sense of powerlessness and anxiety • Teachers may feel as if they are being “forced” to act in ways that are inconsistent with their beliefs

8. Existing Literature on Teacher Resilience • Psychological • Personal attributes (tenacity, sense of moral purpose) • Environmental factors (support systems) • Strategies (help-seeking, depersonalization) • Focus is not on social justice teaching, but teaching in difficult conditions

9. Resilience as a Literacy Practice • Teaching for social justice can lead to unwanted attention, including risk to livelihood. • Withdrawal or isolation may occur until scrutiny and/or threat of sanctions has been withdrawn. • Channeling, avoidance, self-silencing are deliberate acts in opposition to authority. • Actions are based on systems literacies.

10. Methodology • Critical qualitative case study • Pragmatic horizon analysis (Carspecken, 1996) • Research question: • What does resilience look like as a literacy practice for teachers who feel threatened because of their commitments to social justice teaching?

11. Case Study: Daniel • White, male, late 20’s, gay • Working class background, tight-knit family • Grew up in an urban setting • Came out to his family early in his college career

12. Themes • Professional Vulnerability • Personal Vulnerability • Context Matters • Theory Matters • Integrity and Identity

13. Context Matters • Moving from Urban to Suburban • “…Maybe I went into Suburban High more confident about how I was teaching in terms of teaching a social justice position than I should have…when I was at Urban High perhaps it wasn’t an issue because I wasn’t revealing anything that they didn’t know.” • “I also felt that they needed to…come to realize some of those things because not all of them lived it.” • “I cranked up the social justice dial just a little bit. “

14. Teaching The Inferno • Essential Questions: personal journeyand the variables that make up identity: gender, race, class, and…sexuality. • Madonna video “What It Feels Like for a Girl” • “Am I Blue?” short story • GLSEN Heterosexual Questionnaire

15. Professional Vulnerability • Discussion with principal • Daniel: “We talked about race, why not this?...I have students who identify this way…” • Parent conference: no-show

16. “I just backed off critical social justice everything.” • “I don’t know if they understood my purpose…I just switched gears completely. I went…totally literal…you know, multiple choice…I just washed [critical theory] out completely.” • “Oh crap, this is a job. I’m not in college anymore. You know, I can’t just do this stuff…”

17. Personal Vulnerability • Social justice teacher • Change in demeanor; social justice part of his identity • Gay male teacher • “Even though I don’t talk outwardly…you can certainly read signs, you can certainly wonder, ‘Where is his wedding ring?’ Or, ‘Other teachers have pictures,’ or ‘Other teachers talk about things.’”

18. Following Years • Year Two • “I toned down [the theory] and took out anything related to LGBT issues…I just feel like we are just being very superficial. And so I wasn’t into it as much.” • Year Three • “I learned from the first year at Suburban, how can I negotiate being in the system but still work against it. The third year…I was a valued part of the school... I didn’t feel compelled or pressured to teach [any particular] way.”

19. Daniel’s Systems Literacies • “Looking back now, a smaller dose of any of what I did probably would have been better.” • “I was writing my thesis on masculinity and queer theory…and so I probably wasn’t as scared because…I was a researcher and expert in that field.” • “I consciously made it a goal to be more transparent in terms of [framing it as] ‘We’re doing this because of this,’ or ‘The set up for this comes from…’”

20. Continuum of Resilience Literacies Withdrawal “cop-out”; “shut down completely”; “tell me what to do and I’ll do it” Pragmatism (Reading Context) “still doing what I thought was good for me, but then what she wanted to see too.” And “staying low” Focus on Students (Reading Students) “where are they willing to go, how are they going to respond to it, um in small, you know, in baby steps, bite-sized pieces of it”

21. Implications • Resilience literacies allow teachers to maintain their sense of integrity as social justice educators, even when they feel professionally and personally vulnerable. • There are policy implications for not just students, but teachers from marginalized populations. Teachers who feel vulnerable don’t take risks or feel valued.