Chapter 12: Can Education Fight Back?: Immersive Experiences and Private Spaces to Confront and Transform Othering¹

We are both associate professors of secondary education at a large public state university. Like many faculty members teaching and working for social justice, the rise in White terrorism, extremism, and violence during the years of the Trump administration were both devastating tragedies and a call to increase our efforts. Particularly as professors of secondary education, we want desperately to believe that people can be educated out of hate, bigotry, and -isms (such as ableism, anti-Semitism, classism, racism, or sexism). We hope that education can confront the evils of our campuses, our communities, and our world. Nelson Mandela famously claimed that, “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” But given the increase of hate crimes on our campuses and in our country, we struggle at times to believe that education is a hope, let alone an effective weapon, for overcoming oppression and supremacy. We concur with preservice teacher Amber, quoted at the start of this chapter, who expressed the failure of her teacher education courses to prepare her to be anything more than an “observer” on a “battlefield.” And given that by 2024 the United States will be “minority White” (Frey, 2018), we wonder with Amber whether our preservice teachers are woefully underprepared for the social-political complexities of the world.