Divided by policy, united by resilience: Using transformative pedagogy to impact prospective teachers in all contexts

Abstract

As American teacher educators and teachers are being roiled by restrictive legislation around critical race theory and divisive concepts in some states, our investigation explored the impact of critical communities of practice (CoP) on redesigning and teaching introduction to education courses with a transformative lens. This manuscript details the collaboration of four equity-minded teacher educators, each representing unique institutional and political contexts. While two authors taught in states which promote culturally sustaining pedagogies, the other two authors taught in states that had passed laws restricting the professional autonomy of educators and honest discussions of race and racism. Participation in this critical CoP as a support group enabled us to better understand and navigate our dichotomous policy contexts and renewed our commitment to teaching prospective teachers to be politically conscious and empowered to teach in anti-racist ways. Our CoP was instrumental in helping us recognize that transformative pedagogies and collaboration are effective tools that can provide much needed support to teacher educators across policy contexts, while we simultaneously strive to prepare teacher candidates who will teach in culturally sustaining ways.