Toward Anti-Oppressive Teaching: Designing and Using Simulated Encounters

Toward Anti-Oppressive Teaching introduces an innovative approach for using live-actor simulations to prepare preservice teachers for diverse classroom settings. Based on the SHIFT Project at Vanderbilt University, the book highlights the promise of these encounters to empower preservice teachers to become more culturally responsive.

Despite widespread recognition of the need to educate novice teachers in the theory and practice of culturally responsive pedagogy, few teaching candidates have the opportunity to try out, reflect upon, and internalize these lessons prior to taking their first job. As a result, new teachers are often unprepared to respond effectively to real-life dilemmas of difference and inequity in K-12 schools.

The book shows how carefully crafted encounters—when incorporated as part of a well-designed cycle of instructional tasks—can build on traditional approaches to educating future teachers about culture, power, and systems of oppression. The book is ambitious in scope, laying out the rationale and theory behind the use of this new approach and shows how teacher educators are using, adapting, and designing simulations to fit the context of a teaching program. The authors include sample simulation materials and offer advice for addressing common logistical and programmatic challenges for adopting this new practice including how to hire, train, and care for actors.

Filled with engaging examples and testimony from students who have participated in the program, Toward Anti-Oppressive Teaching provides guiding principles and practical suggestions, and offers a point of entry for those interested in a new approach to addressing a long-standing challenge in teacher education.

Elizabeth A. Self is an assistant professor of the practice in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. With an interest in the social foundations of education, she teaches courses in the elementary and secondary licensure programs that focus on philosophies of education, critical pedagogy, and the practice of teaching as situational and contextual. Her current research focuses on designing and using live-actor simulations to prepare teachers for anti-oppressive education. Her work on simulated encounters has been featured in Education Week, Chalkbeat, and on the TeachLab podcast series. Self earned her MEd in the Learning, Diversity, and Urban Studies program and her PhD in the Learning, Teaching, and Diversity program at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College.

Barbara Stengel is a professor emerita of education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. A teacher educator since 1980, she is the author of Just Education: The Right to Education in Context and Conversation (Loyola University Press, 1991) and coauthor (with Alan Tom) Moral Matters: Five Ways to Develop the Moral Life of Schools (Teachers College Press, 2006). She has published her work related to teacher knowing, the moral dimensions of teaching and teacher education, and affect in educational interaction in various journals and handbooks, including Teaching Education, Educational Theory, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and The Handbook of Research on Teaching (5th ed., American Educational Research Association, 2016). Stengel is past president of the Philosophy of Education Society, has served on the executive board of the John Dewey Society, and is currently an associate editor of Educational Theory.