Eric Bybee

‘Affective polarization’ refers to the amount of negativity that people feel for those who belong to a political party other than their own. This self-study reports on our particular use of a narrative cycle model and documents its validity as a tool for doing the emotional work of exploring contradictions in one’s practice without the pressure of engaging in public emotional discourses. We focused on the contradiction between our intention to teach anti-oppressive teacher education and inadvertently silencing students who exhibited affective polarization. Our narrative inquiry analysis documented patterns of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that we assert could help improve the practice of anti-oppressive teacher educators from a variety of political leanings and pedagogical orientations responding to affective polarization. They are 1) recognizing the ineffectiveness of persuasion, 2) recognizing a commonality of emotions, and 3) recognizing an ethical commitment to all students. Practically, our narrative cycle model is a tool to inquire into the emotional work of exploring contradictions in one’s practice. Our findings offer a more nuanced understanding of the emotional work involved in responding to affective polarization while enacting anti-oppressive education ideals. Our model also advances a theoretical understanding of how to interrupt the immediacy of time, place, and sociality in the classroom to allow teacher educators to confront their own discomforting emotions. We assert that our narrative cycle tools can help teacher educators turn and face their own emotional and intellectual reactions to affective polarization in the classroom and do so in a manner that upholds the ideals of anti-oppressive teacher education.

Although mentored undergraduate research has been shown to deepen student engagement across various disciplines, this type of extended learning opportunity is not a prominent feature of research and practice in teacher education. Our article addresses this gap by analyzing the experiences and growth of a group of five preservice teachers engaged in a mentored undergraduate research experience in several sections of an introductory critical multicultural education course. Specifically, we examined how pre-service teachers’ personal, academic, and professional engagement with critical multicultural education is impacted when they are positioned as researchers and receive additional training outside the traditional class format. Our findings indicate that their involvement as student co-researchers fostered a new awareness, sensitivity, and emotional investment in issues of social justice beyond what they gained in their introductory multicultural education course. Pre-service teachers described navigating personal relationships with new awareness and sensitivity and adjusting future plans in accordance with their deeper understanding and commitment to educational equity. We argue that mentored research opportunities are an innovative way to address professor/student power differentials in teacher education research and offer a unique model of critical multicultural teacher education that promotes deep engagement with issues beyond the classroom setting.

Although direct engagement with neighborhood espacios deepens student understanding, less is known about the benefits of this approach to bilingual teacher preparation programs. Our article addresses this gap by highlighting community walks, or caminatas, as a pedagogical approach with futurxs maestrxs bilingües (FMBs). Specifically, we propose an espacio emergente in the preparation of FMBs, and we examine how two Latinx professors used caminatas through a historically Latinx community in a rapidly gentrifying area to support the development of students’ critical consciousness. Our findings indicate that the caminatas allowed students to historicize the local neighborhood, interrogate power and their own deficit conceptions of minoritized communities, critically listen to the sounds and voices of the community, and experience discomfort in nuanced ways. We argue that caminatas deepen FMBs’ understanding of community assets and are an innovative way to support the fourth goal of preparing FMBs: developing critical consciousness.

This reflexive inquiry explores a teacher educator’s efforts to design opportunities for students to use their knowledge of social media and the internet to contribute content to their online critical multicultural education course. Findings identify steps critical multicultural education pedagogues can take to design such opportunities: 1) identify contradictions in their practice; 2) take pedagogical risks; and 3) work with chronic tensions.<b> Designing formal opportunities for students to identify and use content from social media and the internet as learning resources and curricular content for critical multicultural education shifted the power relations in the course. </b>These results demonstrate the potential of critical pedagogy online to create new practices of shared knowledge construction, expertise, and authority and address the call for research into the potential of online environments to foster critical pedagogy.

This article explores notions of belonging and citizenship for “American Mexican” students—Mexican‐heritage youth born in the United States who return to Mexico with their families. Our findings reveal belonging as a sociocultural practice that participants negotiated spatially and relationally, chiefly by making their US‐born status more and less visible within particular spaces at school. The experiences of American‐Mexican youth reveal the crucial roles of migration and belonging in shaping civic identities and future potentials in a transnational world.

Our paper contends that growing awareness of the historicity of English lies at the heart of the process by which English language teachers develop “critical” identities. We compare novice teachers in three different contexts of English teaching: urban Guatemala, rural Nicaragua, and a Tibetan refugee community in India. Collectively, these ethnographic case studies illustrate the complexity of English teacher identity formation in contemporary global society, as our participants developed new understandings of their positions in history, their relationships with English learners, and the local meanings around English as symbolic capital.