Enacting a Critical Pedagogy, Influencing Teachers’ Sociopolitical Development

Historically marginalized students continue to experience opportunity gaps in our schools and inequities in their communities. To change these contexts, we want students to develop the skills, mindsets, and ability to act against oppression. In order for that to occur, educators must have support and opportunities to learn and practice acting as agents of change against oppression in the educational system. This challenge is particularly salient given that a majority of teachers are White and middle class, and thus have different backgrounds from the youth they seek to support. This exploratory study examined whether and how educators who participated in a project called critical civic inquiry (CCI) experienced sociopolitical development. Data including video observations, written assignments, online discussion boards, and individual interviews. The paper focuses on the experiences of five White educators in urban middle schools who participated in a yearlong CCI course, which was designed to support them in implementing critical pedagogy, student voice, sociopolitical development, and participatory action research in their classrooms. In this paper, we discuss how enacting a critical pedagogy as a participant in CCI may have impacted the sociopolitical development of teachers.