Reading This Bridge Called My Back for pedagogies of coalition, remediation, and a razor’s edge

Abstract

In this article, I examine the engagement of pre-service teachers with US feminist of color theory. Centering coalition relations, re-mediation, and dialogic narrative, I argue that the field of women of color thought is pedagogical in thinking through the intersectional and multidimensional problems of teaching and schooling, particularly when working with under-resourced schools and displaced and dispossessed students and their families. A framework based on the intellectual labor of US women of color, where the pedagogies of coalition, re-mediation, and dialogic narratives create powerful epistemological interventions that support pre-service teachers as they think about the complex problems of schools in this era of the defunding and the dismantlement of public education. It is a US women of color pedagogy that engages teachers in developing alternative accounts of their relationship to the world, how these new accounts are unavoidably theoretical and provide a starting point for new thinking about pedagogy, power, and praxis.