Call for Interviewees:
Rebel Pedagogy: Remedy & Repair in Adult Learning
“If school can be a place of harm, it can also be a place of healing. Until school stops harming children, shouldn’t all adult education be thought of as remedial education? A place of collective tending, suturing, bandaging, and repair in the wake of a damaging system?”
Kate Klein, excerpt from the book-in-progress
I am currently writing a book about how adult learning spaces can (and often do) help to remedy the lasting impacts of emotional & spiritual wounds incurred in early school experiences.
I want to interview adult educators who are committed to ‘teaching otherwise’. This means striving to make their classrooms spaces of justice, dignity, and liberation, that is, unlike how school usually is.
I’d like to talk to you about:
- Your experiments in ‘teaching otherwise’… what do you do and how is it going?;
- What supports you in your process;
- How (if at all) your own school wounds inform your experience in the classroom as a teacher; and
- How you make sense of the tension between “liberatory educator” and “worker”.
You don’t have to be a college or university professor to have something to say on this topic. Maybe you’re…
- A literacy facilitator
- A choir leader
- An anti-oppression trainer
- A language tutor
- A professional development facilitator
- A community organizer who uses popular education tools
- A teaching assistant who runs tutorials
- A free schooler, or a parent trying to unlearn schoolish ideas (i.e. re-teach yourself)
- Some other beautiful thing I haven’t even thought of!
If you teach adults in an environment where sometimes the ghosts of their school wounds show up, I’d like to talk to you.
Some things to know:
- These interviews are for a book I’m writing. I don’t have a book deal, and have never written a book before so I can’t promise I will succeed at publishing this! At this stage I also have no money to give anybody.
- So, right now, i’m looking to talk with people who would take pleasure in having this conversation for its own sake, even without compensation & with no guaranteed outcome.
- If you’re like, “Yeah, I would love to do this interview but only when you have money to pay me / have a publisher!”, that’s understandable. Let me know and I’ll put you on a list of people to reach out to if/when that happens.
- When you reach out to me, we can talk more about things like privacy, credit, scheduling, etc.
- I’m a slow-moving guy with a full-time job. I’m in no hurry. If you reach out to me, we might not chat straight away, or don’t have to if you’re not available yet. Just say hey, and we’ll figure the rest out together.
- If you don’t know me, I should make explicit: this is a political project and your radical politics are welcome with me. I identify strongly as an anarchist and abolitionist educator. BIPOC, disabled, and queer/trans teachers to the front!!
Here are the questions I’ll ask:
- Do you notice the legacy of your students’ early school experiences showing up in your work together? If so, how so?
- Do you think early school wounds can be remedied in an adult learning environment? What have you seen in your classroom (or other learning environment) that tells you your answer?
- What do you experiment with in your learning environment in an attempt to create reparative learning experiences?
- Where do you draw support from in your attempts to ‘teach otherwise’? How did you / are you learning to do this?
- How can we commit to creating liberatory experiences for students while often being so disregarded by the institutions that are paying us? How do you hold both truths?
- Do you find that your own past experiences of school show up for you in your life as an educator? How are the ghosts of your own school history alive for you in your work?
Interested, curious, or want to know more? Email me at info@rebelpedagogy.ca and let’s talk!
Rebel Pedagogy 