Although I did not fully appreciate the importance at the time in my own development as a person and teacher, my work as an Outward Bound instructor with incarcerated teens on month-long canoe expeditions and my subsequent experiences teaching tracked and alternative school students guide my current teaching and research in profound ways. Despite their profane language, their socially unacceptable ways of dealing with anger and dissatisfaction, their lack of high school credits and other traditionally conceived indications that they were going to be successful, my young friends, my students, were bright and inquisitive people who regularly made insightful observations about the world and their places within it. Others saw them as less intelligent and less interested in learning than their more academically successful peers, but in all of those settings, I found them to be intelligent, energetic and caring people who, despite repeated failings and painful school experiences, returned again and again to attempt to earn high school degrees. My students told many stories about how their teachers did not care about them, or looked for ways to get rid of them because they refused to play the games that schools and teachers demanded. They each had a different story for why schooling did not work for them – a complex assemblage of emotional issues, misdiagnosed learning problems, and refusals to submit to the indignities that they saw teachers and schools imposing upon them. At the time, I also did not appreciate how their experiences were importantly situated within race, class and gender dynamics.

Regardless, my diverse teaching experiences inspired me to research how schooling may lead marginalized students to consider themselves not smart enough, to become people who are not interested in academics, or even to end up in prison. My former students also motivate me to seek ways to reform schooling while also inspiring new educators to honor, teach and inspire their students, especially those for whom schooling has not traditionally worked well. While schooling alone cannot alter the oppressive racial, economic, and social conditions that infused my students’ educational experiences, I fundamentally believe in the importance and potential of education, and I want to contribute to lasting educational change that offers all students powerful and positive opportunities for transformative learning.

As a result, I believe that one of my primary responsibilities as a teacher is to help us to identify and ask probing questions, especially ones that help us examine how teaching and learning are complexly intertwined with beliefs, practices and structures that may support the social reproduction of inequality. Examining such practices and beliefs requires us to ask important questions like: Why do we school in the ways we do?  Who benefits? Who is harmed? How do the social, political and economic contexts surrounding schools influence what happens in them? How should schools respond to those dynamics and our students’ complex lives? How might we build upon our students’ and their communities’ strengths? What values should our ideal of the educated person reflect? What are our moral responsibilities as educators?

Asking and answering such questions is both intellectually and personally challenging, especially because they focus on issues of social justice. But I agree with Parker Palmer who argues that, “good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.” As a result, I believe that if we are interested in creating inspirational educational spaces in which we ask and seek answers to difficult questions, we should focus on who we are as people rather than exclusively on the techniques we should use in our classrooms. Palmer also famously quips, “technique is what teachers use until the real teacher arrives.” These notions infuse all aspects of my teaching, from course design, the choice of texts, to the crafting of assignments and the ongoing nature of class interactions. I seek to help us understand how the dynamics of who we are (i.e., our many beliefs and prior life experiences) influence both our beliefs about the nature of teaching and learning and the resulting decisions about what happens in the educational spaces we create. As such, I seek course materials and activities that inspire personal reflection and engage us both intellectually and emotionally It is, of course, a path that I am also walking as I teach.

Rather than being merely an exercise in self-understanding, we need to build upon our initial reflections by exploring how schooling provides often radically different experiences for others; such differences are deeply felt and may help students hold erroneous beliefs about themselves and their worlds. Thus, I seek to create learning opportunities (both within and outside the classroom) that help us analyze our personal responses to course material and our classroom discussions and activities while comparing our responses to the diverse voices of others whose experiences may be radically different from ours. Because reading such work is often emotionally and intellectually challenging, I use a variety of simulations and experiential activities to spark new ways to understand the theoretical ground traveled in our course readings as well as to stimulate classroom conversation and independent written analysis.

Furthermore, grounded in my scholarly work in both feminism and Deweyan pragmatism, I believe that knowing itself is a by-product of communal engagement. As a result, I attend to the creation of communities of inquiry in any teaching context. I embrace Maxine Greene’s argument that, “education can only take place when we become friends of each other’s minds.” Doing so begins by helping individuals feel acknowledged for who they are and for the experiences and ideas they bring to the group. This kind of engagement requires the exploration and creation of mutual trust and care that serves as a foundation for our critically discussing educational views and practices. It can be difficult to achieve this sense of community, thus doing so requires on-going attention to the process of education as it unfolds.  It also requires honesty, openness, and diligent attention in the day-to-day work of the classroom. In keeping with Paulo Freire’s calls for collaboration amongst all learners and teachers in an educational community, I seek and create opportunities for all of us, students and teacher alike, to provide each other with feedback about our progress together.

As a result of holding these beliefs about teaching, learning and knowing, I strive to foster supportive yet challenging learning spaces, ones marked by critical thought and generosity of spirit for others’ diverse perspectives. I encourage us all to examine our many reasons for holding beliefs, and to help us  inquire into which reasons are most sound and which ones warrant reconsideration. Doing so involves exploring tricky intellectual terrain that requires openness, risk taking, and humility as we seek to help each other think clearly about the most vexing of problems facing us as educational professionals. It also requires that we seek out alternative perspectives by encouraging each other to ask how others might disagree with our ideas and the reasons we offer for the positions we hold – especially mine.  Ultimately, I hope to model the standpoint that we are all traveling an educational path during which we can and must learn with and from one another.

Collaborative critical inquiry runs like a thread throughout my teaching life. It links my current work with future and practicing teachers with my diverse students in traditional classrooms and in wilderness settings. While I don’t know where most of my past alternative school students are today, their optimism lives in my belief in our collective power to inspire educational change. As I keep re-discovering with my students, students of all ages want and need to engage deeply and directly with the world around them. They want to ask questions. They want to explore answers, especially ones that are difficult and challenge them to think in new ways. We teachers need to create contexts to support and inspire such student exploration, and perhaps most of all, to join them.

1. 1. Parker J. Palmer, The Courage to Teach : Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, 10th anniversary ed. (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey-Bass, 2007).
   

2. 2. Ibid., 6.
   

3. 3. Gary R. Howard, We Can't Teach What We Don't Know : White Teachers, Multiracial Schools, 2nd ed., Multicultural Education Series (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006).
   

4. 4. Vivian Gussin Paley, White Teacher (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
   

5. 5. Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children (New York, NY: The New Press, 1995).
   

6. 6. Allan G. Johnson, Privilege, Power, and Difference, 2nd ed. (Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, 2006).
   

7. 7. Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed (New York: Urizen Books, 1979).
   

8. 8. Maxine Greene, "Introduction," in Stories Lives Tell : Narrative and Dialogue in Education, ed. Carol Witherell and Nel Noddings (New York: Teachers College Press, 1991).
   

9. 9. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York, NY: Continuum, 1988).