Extraordinary Pedagogies: An Endarkened Feminist Approach to Revolutionizing Teacher Consciousness

This book presents a curriculum model for preparing white preservice teachers to be successful in urban contexts. It is based on more than 15 years of ethnographic teacher research generated within an intensive immersion course designed by the author, called the Philadelphia Urban Seminar. Specifically, the model shows how to complicate white preservice teachers’ awareness of identity and foster teachers’ understanding of their own identity and positionality. Readers will learn how to develop teachers’ capacities to respond to diverse students’ situatedness; to navigate stressful relational and institutional dynamics in which race and gender injuries are involved; to evolve as leaders who take a stand for social and emotional justice; and to cultivate respect for new literacies and logics. This resource shows how to generate this complex consciousness meaningfully and quickly by integrating pedagogical shock, an ontological framework for personhood, extraordinary literacies, and direct inquiry into a white supremacist patriarchal ideology that pervades teaching and learning in the United States.

Book Features:

• Research and practice that empower teachers committed to transformative existential education (i.e., antiracist, antisexist, and antiphobic praxis for all people).
• A cutting-edge curriculum framework with clear and transferable principles, practices, lesson plans, assignments, and readings.
• Support structures for teacher educators focused on personal and professional expansion, including chapter summaries, strategic lists, analytic memos, insightful transcripts, poetic interludes, and more.
• An experiential curriculum that teacher educators can adapt to their context as either a two-week immersion or a full-semester existential education course.
• Exemplar transcripts featuring teacher educators, advanced graduate students, and pre-service teachers with action-oriented tools and materials to aid the reader in implementation.
• A companion website with video and audio recordings featuring the author leading class sessions and workshops, context images that provide necessary visuals, and documents for use in implementation.

Jeanine M. Staples-Dixon is a professor of literacy and language, African American studies, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at The Pennsylvania State University.