The Movement Expands

Chapter 8 examines the expansion of the movement to new issues and newly forceful constituents. It charts the rise of the police-free schools movement and discusses the influence of the Movement for Black Lives. It documents the assertion of voice and leadership by Black girls; girls of color; and gender nonconforming students in the movement, highlighting the intersectional ways that they experience the school-to-prison pipeline. Finally, it examines the role of teachers as allies to the movement and highlights efforts to implement restorative justice as an alternative to zero tolerance. It emphasizes the need to connect restorative justice to school-site organizing that connects teachers with students and parents in ways that transform relationships and create liberatory education.

Location, Location, Location: Liberatory Pedagogy in a University Classroom

In this article, we explore the practice, promise, and contradictions of introducing liberatory practice into a higher education classroom. Freire introduced liberatory education in response to the hierarchical transfer of knowledge, “banking” concept of education that has dominated educational institutions. The banking approach to education demands that students memorize and repeat top-down “official” knowledge in order to achieve success. Liberatory pedagogy holds great hope, but developing a space for liberatory dialogue within the university classroom remains messy and rife with contradictions. Professors interested in liberatory pedagogy must make explicit the contradictions and challenge the multiple ways schools shape students, politically and culturally. We reflect on three different points in the semester as moments of explicit focus on the contradictions of creating liberatory spaces and dialogue within higher education. Location matters in every moment: our social locations shape our experiences, and the location of the classroom within higher education and the shifting locations in the liberatory process include managing the contradictions and possibilities of human liberation. We offer educators wishing to develop liberatory practices some ways of reflecting on and shaping a liberatory space within higher education classrooms through the lens of a professor and student engaged in the process of liberatory dialogue.

Promoting Curriculum of Orgullo: Latinx’s Children’s Books and Testimonio

As educators that are committed to democratic liberatory education for all, we are called to create spaces and places where we can cultivate and curate experiences that can provide avenues for students to develop self-awareness and agency. These dialogical spaces and places will problematize and question students’ knowledge and understanding leading them to articulate perspectives inhibited by hidden curriculum that hinders them from developing and actualizing a sense of self and purpose. This essay provides an example of decolonizing curriculum through children’s literature to support students in exploring, analyzing, and creating testimonies as a way to problematize their understandings and experiences with marginalized communities. Testimonio, embodied in the aesthetics of children’s literature, provides a pivotal pedagogical tool that allows students to critically reflect on systematic oppression, social inequalities, and hegemonic practices. Framed within a curriculum of orgullo (Calderon-Berumen & O’Donald, 2017), the testimonies embedded in children’s literature scaffolds the process of reading, producing, and analyzing students’ personal narratives.