Discussion Question: Ryan, Celestina, Carol, Erin, Kakas, Sam

In her piece, Bartolome points to the dangers of a myopic focus on "one size fits all" methodology that not only reinscribes deficit assumptions about minoritized students, but also obscures the inequitable structural and political contexts in which schooling occurs (For me, this spoke directly to my issues with Kunfuju's essentialized and moralizing arguments). She writes beautifully about a humanizing pedagogy, that instead, challenges the banking model of education and questions any sort of silver methodological bullet aimed at "fixing" students. This type of pedagogy requires a deep understanding of how schooling functions violently in our society to reproduce unequal power relations, as well as of student's realities, histories and prospectives. Yet for example, even with an obviously rigorous understanding of the justice issues around student's narrative strategies, Sarah Michaels admits that she herself struggled to implement appropriate questions and responses with students (p.440) (Not that any amount of academic/research based knowledge can ever make one immune to a misstep, but I do think this speaks to the difficulty of bridging theory into practice). At the end of her piece, I was left with the same "Ok, what do I do ??" feeling, that I'm sure we've all felt as a theory class came to a close. 

I 110% agree that our analysis of power dynamics and social contexts, or "political clarity", needs to be SHARP, so that we are able to make decisions centered on respect for our students and remain critical of potentially problematic methods or curricula that may be introduced at our school, but I wondered about the implications for teacher education programs like the one we are all in now.  Coming out of an education department at my  undergrad institution that taught me a lot about CRT and close to nothing about how to make a badass graphic organizer/strategies for struggling readers, I am always curious about the balance between theory and practice, pedagogy and content. (I do think that in general if your pedagogy game/ analysis is tight, you're probably going to make sure you know how to make the badass graphic organizer your students need though?) I would like to talk more about how folks feel a humanizing pedagogy can be effectively taught/integrated into teacher education programs and what that means for the structure and balance between methods and theory classes at these institutions.