Visibilizing our Pain and Wounds as Resistance and Activist Pedagogyto Heal and Hope: Reflections of 2 Racialized Professors

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reflects experiences of two racialized professors from a Critical Race Theory (CRT) paradigm teaching in Canadian teacher preparation and educational leadership programs across multiple universities. The analysis of their lived experiences as counter-stories through storytelling focuses on how their identities, bodies, course content, and activist pedagogies are read and received teaching predominantly white students and working with non-racialized colleagues. The authors situate the microaggressions they experienced from administrators, colleagues, students, and larger community members, while teaching about anti-black racism, white supremacy, and other equity topics in education that challenge normalized metanarratives which at times make others uncomfortable. The authors seek to disrupt and challenge these normalized policies and practices within teacher education programs and within publication processes that privilege whiteness, and disadvantage Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), and other minoritized identities. The sharing of counter-stories embedded with pain serve two purposes: to heal from traumatic experiences via sharing in solidarity with other brave voices, and simultaneously to disrupt and promote an activist pedagogy that calls-out inequities as a form of resistance, even within spaces and departments whose identity is shaped by their support for equity and social justice. The objective is to challenge the incongruencies and paradoxes between theory and practice within the enactment of equity in teacher education programs rooted in tokenism, color-blind/neutral policies, and performance politics. A series of recommendations are outlined to work toward centering non-dominant bodies, histories, voices, and cultural capital to prepare teacher candidates who can constructively engage in equity work by understanding interconnections between power and privilege, instead of remaining stagnant in deficit thinking rooted in fear and weaponization of bodies unknown to their cultural identities and lived experiences.