In this year’s seminar, we will continue our close focus on teaching practice that advances equity and justice. We seek to articulate and extend how we as teacher educators work with our candidates to ensure that they are equipped not only to enact equitable practice but also to disrupt patterns of inequity in our classrooms. We are asking our presenters to bring their perspectives to bear on this theme by selecting one high-leverage practice of teaching from the TeachingWorks list. Each speaker will investigate and illuminate the enactment of that particular practice of teaching, and expose the nuanced ways in which issues of equity and inclusion are fundamental to just practice. Further, our speakers will sketch the ways in which these practices are powerful levers for disrupting persistent patterns of inequality that exclude children and disenfranchise students in schools.

We are inspired by Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s argument that “We must shake our fists and raise our voices against inequalities and injustice. Resistance and rage show we care. And then we must transfer that outrage to action” (AERA 2017). With concrete examples and stories, our presenters will help us understand and discuss the detailed ways in which teaching and teacher education can be disruptive. We will ask our speakers to illustrate how they work with beginning teachers to ensure that these new educators are prepared with ways of relating and of acting in their practice to ensure that each of the young people in their classes thrives and grows as human beings. Starting with a concrete description of the practice and what it looks like in real action, each speaker would examine core issues or imperatives inherent in the deliberate work of enacting the practice toward justice with students and different kinds of content. The presentations will include concrete examples of our speakers’ teacher education practice – including lesson plans, video, details of assignments and units of their work to illustrate how we can teach novices to enact teaching that is disruptive, humanizing, and equitable.