“American Hunger”: Challenging Epistemic Injustice Through Collaborative Teacher Inquiry

Abstract

Teacher education for high-poverty schools is often understood as preparing teachers to master a set of best practices in order to hit the ground running and address the needs of students who are behind because of the achievement gap. Our own work has suggested that a necessary dimension of teacher learning across the lifespan involves interrogating and resisting the ideologies that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, conflate poverty with intellectual inferiority. We believe pre-service and in-service teachers ought to become better attuned to the rich resources already present in all communities, an undertaking that requires building relationships with students and families rather than learning strategies to "fix" them. This chapter is based on a 4-year partnership around literacy and engagement with teachers and students in a U.S. public school serving predominantly African American boys. We draw on the work of feminist theorists, in particular the related concepts of epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance, to analyze the impact of systemic inequalities on the school community as well as the teachers' challenges to deficit views of students. Through their work as part of a teacher inquiry community, the educators in our research site identified the effects of a hyper-remedial curriculum geared towards testing and worked to design alternative curricular spaces that nurtured students' capacities for critical and literary investigation.