Chapter 4: Motherscholar¹ Teacher Activists: Enacting Democratic Processes Between Neoliberal Institutions

In-the-field education practitioners can serve as gate-openers for spaces where the academy intersects with K–12 schools. Cann and DeMeulenaere (2020) refer to “Lord Gatekeeper” as one who “upholds the traditions of academia as performed by the imagined older, white, male scholar, in ivory/ivy covered towers, closing the gate to those who don’t fit the description or are found guilty of ‘thinking while Black’” (p. 10). As practitioner-scholars, we often find ourselves acting as a pry-bar that forces open that in-between space where K–12 practice interacts with the university’s research and scholarship. In our setting we, two motherscholar-practitioner-activists, work in the gap between our large state university (where we earned/are earning doctoral degrees), and a local school district run by White liberal business leaders from our medium-sized city. At times this feels like being “between a rock and a hard place” with an R-1 university desperate for grant funding on one side, and a financially at-risk² school district on the other. This is the school district where one of us worked for 20 years, and where all of our children attend/ ed school. We bring multiple identities and positionalities to our praxis: one of us identifies as Black biracial; one of us is “socially positioned as White (for now)” (aka SPAWN).³ We are undertaking different research trajectories, we are both teachers, at different grade levels; one of us was a school counselor and the other may be a principal or other building or district leader.