Chapter 3: Becoming a More Disruptive Teacher by Engaging in Side-by-Side Learning with Children Rather than Avoiding Discomfort

Schools need teachers who are disruptive. Although teachers are often seen as counters to and not sources of disruption, our claim is that schools need not be left undisturbed. Rather, the social practices that characterize schooling spaces must be subject to reflection, renewal, and, when necessary, rejection coupled with re-imagination. Schools need teachers with epistemic commitments and pedagogical practices that attend to the marginalization of communities and their members. Schooling can make the various and intersecting identities of the schooled matter in ways that they become more vulnerable to subordination than others (Crenshaw, 1989; Dutro & Cartun, 2016; hooks, 1994; Ladson-Billings, 2000). Status hierarchies organized by the intersections of race, language, social class, gender, sexual identity, epistemic injustice and other hegemonic relations must be disrupted if teachers are to help organize more equitable futures for children (Cohen & Lotan, 1997; DiGiacomo & Gutiérrez, 2015).