Tag Archives: pedagogy of insurgency

EDCP Seminar | Jan 2023 | A Pedagogy of Insurgency in Troubling Times | Dr. Wayne Au

Mark your calendar for UBC Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy Seminar with Dr. Wayne Au (University of Washington, Bothell).

Dr. Au will be speaking on “A Pedagogy of Insurgency in Troubling Times” on January 27, 2023, 12:30PM – 2:00PM via Zoom.

For Zoom details, please email edcp.educ@ubc.ca

Dr. Au’s seminar talk is titled “A Pedagogy of Insurgency in Troubling Times: The Imperative of Teaching and Organizing for Educational and Social Justice”. Teachers are on the frontline of ongoing social, economic, and community health crises. Using the organizing for racial justice done by teachers in Seattle, WA, in this talk Dr. Wayne Au will discuss how teacher actions represent a kind of pedagogy of insurgency that is required when social contradictions reach a particular level. While not all-powerful, it is important to recognize that this kind of pedagogy can have significant local impact as well as offer symbolic inspiration for teacher organizing at the national and international levels.

Dr. Au is a former public high school social studies teacher and is now Dean and Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. He is a long-time editor for the social justice teaching magazine, Rethinking Schools, and his work focuses on both academic and public scholarship about high-stakes testing, neoliberal education policy, teaching for social justice, critical pedagogy, and anti-racist education.

Author or editor of over 100 publications, his recent co-edited books include Insurgent Social Studies: Scholar-Educators Disrupting Erasure and Marginality (2022), Rethinking Ethnic Studies (2019) and Teaching for Black Lives (2018). His most recent authored books include the second edition of Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality (2022) and A Marxist Education (2018).

Dr. Au was honored with the UWB Distinguished Teaching Award in 2015, presented the William H. Watkins award for scholar activism from the Society of Professors of Education in 2017, and recognized with the Distinguished K-12 Educational Leader Award from the Evergreen State College MiT program in 2019.

 

Insurgent Social Studies

 

Insurgent Social Studies: Scholar-Educators Disrupting Erasure and Marginality has just been published by Myers Education Press.

The collection brings together contributions from a “new(er)” generation of social studies scholar-educators who take as one of their starting points a social studies curriculum that is “designed to erase or otherwise marginalize voices, bodies, and experiences not accepted by or created for the benefit of white supremacist society.”

The project was inspired by Wayne Au’s conception of pedagogy of insurgency. Au describes this kind of pedagogy as requiring:

  • Bravery and risk, as rebellious educators take the step of fighting back against social and educational injustice in public and visible ways.
  • Allies, accomplices, and solidarity, as educators and community members come together across different identities in order to build a more broad-based and effective movement for educational justice. This, in turn, also helps to mitigate risk.
  • Understanding organizing, protest, and demonstrations as a valuable and worthwhile form of pedagogy and curriculum in itself.
  • Using critical analyses of power as a central approach for teaching and learning about social and educational injustice.
  • Developing a curriculum of insurgency for educators, students, and the community to engage in critical analyses of power in schools and society.
  • Embracing schools as sites of both oppression and liberation, and in the process also reimagining the role that schools can play in broader social change.
  • Connecting to broader social movements, as educators, students, and community see and understand that their own struggles for justice and liberation are part of broader, historic traditions in the fight for change.

The editors, Natasha Hakimali Merchant, Sarah B. Shear and Wayne Au, argue that “taken as a whole, a pedagogy of insurgency seeks to understand and at least partially explain the ways that teachers have the power – through pedagogy, curriculum, and community activism – to actively resist injustice while also working towards a more radically just world.

This is a path-breaking work in social studies education and anyone who is engaged and the political/pedagogical struggles for social justice in schools and the larger society will benefit from reading this collection.

I want to thank the editor for inviting me to write a brief Afterword.

Table of Contents

Introduction – We Won’t Wait Any Longer: An Introduction and Invitation to Insurgency for Social Studies
Natasha Hakimali Merchant, Sarah B. Shear, and Wayne Au

1. Insurgence Must Be Red: Connecting Indigenous Studies and Social Studies Education for Anticolonial Praxis
The Turtle Island Social Studies Collective

2. Solidarity Is a Verb: What the Black Lives Matter Movement Can Teach Social Studies About the Intersectional Fight Against Anti-Black Racism
Tiffany Mitchell Patterson

3. The Audacity of Equality: Disrupting the Distortion of Asian America in Social Studies
Noreen Naseem Rodríguez and Esther June Kim

4. “Existence Is Resistance”: Palestine and Palestinians in Social Studies Education
Hanadi Shatara

5. Insurgente: A Familia in Conversation About Latinxs Voices in the Field of Social Studies
La Familia Aponte-Safe Tirado Díaz Beltrán Ender Busey Christ

6. Unsatisfied: The Conceptual Terrain of De-Essentializing Islam in Social Studies
Natasha Hakimali Merchant

7. Queer Worlding as Historical Inquiry for Insurgent Freedom-Dreaming
Tadashi Dozono

8. Democracy Is Interdisciplinary: The Case for Radical Civic Innovation Across Content Areas
Antero Garcia, Nicole Mirra, and Mark Gomez

9. Cultural Bombs and Dangerous Classes: Social Studies Education as State Apparatus in the War on Terror
Jennice McCafferty-Wright

10. Whiteness and White Responsibility in Social Studies
Andrea M. Hawkman

Afterword – Insurgent Social Studies and Dangerous Citizenship
E. Wayne Ross