Cultivating Spaces of Possibility: Student Teaching Triads as Agentic Homeplace

Abstract

Today’s elementary teacher candidates (TCs) are entering a world of public education decimated by decades of neoliberal education reforms (Kumashiro, 2010; Lipman, 2012) exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic (Giroux, 2021) and the current white-supremacist, heteropatriarchal backlash (Pendharkar, 2022). For justice-oriented TCs, finding agency in these political contexts while teaching within the ambiguous space of “someone else’s” classroom presents a particular challenge (Britzman, 2003; Zeichner, 2009). Their stories sit alongside those of justice-oriented cooperating teachers (CTs) and university supervisors, both of whom mentor TCs while navigating constraints and deepening their own teaching practices. However, most teacher education programs and research fall short as regards to preparing new teachers to enter classrooms with a grounding in justice-oriented pedagogies (Cochran-Smith, 2010; Milner, 2013; Sleeter, 2013). This is especially problematic as most teachers entering the field are white middle-class cisgender women deeply socialized in the neoliberal context of education. Therefore, TCs are typically left asking, “But how do I actually teach social justice?” Through this dissertation study, I address this critical issue by investigating two main research questions: In what ways are white teacher candidates, cooperating teachers, and university supervisors navigating constraints and negotiating relationships with each other in order to center justice-oriented pedagogies in their elementary classrooms? In what ways do the stories of these experiences foster social transformation as well as complicity with neoliberalism? To answer these questions, I use narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) to explore the stories of five white teachers making up two student teaching triads (each consisting of a TC, a CT, and their shared university supervisor) as they taught in a public elementary school during the 2022–2023 academic year. Their stories of upheaval, uncertainty, solidarity, and resistance center the triads’ approaches to building relationships of care with each other, their colleagues, and their students. I interpret their stories using a theoretical lens of critical and intersectional feminism, specifically focusing on bell hooks’ (1990/2015) conceptualization of homeplace. I theorize that the triads’ relationships of collective care form an agentic homeplace; this homeplace fosters triad members’ agency to resist neoliberal constraints and center justice-oriented pedagogies within their school. Thus, I offer a critical perspective of the agentic role triad relationships play in cultivating possibilities for justice-oriented white teachers to work in solidarity with marginalized communities to collectively challenge neoliberalism and transform public schools.