Unsettling Education

Brian Charest, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at the University of Redlands. He has presented locally and nationally and published articles on teaching, equity, civic engagement, community organizing, social justice, ethics, and radical pragmatism.Kate Sjostrom, PhD, is a lecturer and assistant director of English education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research and teaching focus on writing teacher identity development in the context of education reforms, as well as on the potential for teacher-writing to build teachers’ advocacy.

“In this political moment and in these palpably perilous times for youth and the adults charged with their care and safe passage—parents, teachers, youth workers—UnsettlingEducation offers both hope and guidance. The dazzling educators gathered together by Brian Charest and Kate Sjostrom are animated by an urgent spirit of resistance to the status quo that they recognize as representing a kind of state of emergency for the oppressed, the exploited, and the disadvantaged. The challenge facing teachers in these troubling times is to resist injustices, unsettle the settled, destabilize the stable, trouble the undisturbed, explore the unknown, and dive into (rather than run away from) the contradictions. The message these teachers bring to their students is generative: you are a full human being; you have a right to be here; you need no one’s permission to interrogate the universe. This book shows us what that can look like in real time.”—William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (retired) and Author of To Teach, Fugitive Days, and Demand the Impossible!: A Radical Manifesto

• Acknowledgments – Brian Charest/Kate Sjostrom: Introduction – Section I: The Promise of Unsettling Moments – Introduction – Avi Lessing/Glynis Kinnan: Against Measurement: Making a Case for School Play – Angela Whitacre de Resendiz/Will Hudson: Calculating Justice? Using Mathematical Mindsets for Teaching From a Social Justice Perspective – Noah Asher Golden: Challenging Misrecognitions Through Reflexive Teacher Education: Knowing and Growing in an Age of Commodification – Section II: Pedagogies of Resistance – Introduction – Sarah J. Donovan: Beyond Mandates and Measurement: Imagining a Gradeless Classroom – Matthew Homrich-Knieling/Alex Corbitt: Pedagogies of Resistance: Reflecting on the Successes and Challenges of Humanizing Classrooms in a Time of Standardization and Accountability – Mikela Bjork: Compulsory Heterosexuality: Unsettling and Undoing the Hidden Curriculum of Heteronormativity in Schools – Section III: Unsettling Education Through Institutional Critiques – Introduction – James McCoyne: Managing Teachers: Efficiency and Human Relations in Education – Kevin Christopher Carey: Motivation, Mental Health, and the Eclipse of Social Imagination – Samantha Young/Deborah Bieler: A Look Into Leaving: Learning From One Equity-Oriented Teacher’s Resignation – Russell Mayo: "all schooled up": One Teacher’s Path Toward Deschooling – Epilogue – Jay Gillen: Everyone Knows Whose Side I’m On: Teachers, Students, and the Struggle for Freedom – Contributors.