When Shutting the Door Won’t Do: Teaching With the Specter of Community Backlash and the Implications for Teacher Education

Abstract

Recently, numerous news stories have detailed the ways teachers across the country have been disciplined for addressing issues of oppression and justice in their schools. This paper engages poststructural discourse analysis to consider data from a year-long study of recent graduates of a justice-oriented teacher education program during their first year teaching, examining the ways that stories of community backlash functioned to discipline early career teachers to behave in particular ways. I theorize that these stories serve to discourage teachers from pursuing justice-oriented work in the classroom and that such discourses must be addressed in teacher education programs to prepare preservice teachers for the political realities of entering classrooms in the United States in the current cultural moment.