Teaching as Protest: Emancipating Classrooms Through Racial Consciousness

Teaching as Protest explores how K-12 teachers can expand the boundaries of their profession with anti-oppressive, community-building pedagogies. Now more than ever, students are looking to their schools to make meaning of our nation’s complicated and compounded traumas, namely those at the intersection of race, class, gender, and power. This book provides historical and philosophical perspectives into liberatory instructional work, while offering planning, preparation, and practice tools whose modalities recognize identity and mindsets, emphasizing schools that predominantly serve Black students. By moving beyond conventional tools and tasks such as standards, lesson-planning, and grade-team meetings and into more emancipatory, student-centered approaches, teachers can answer the call to a more just and radical demonstration of protest intended to disrupt and dismantle oppression, racism, and bias.

Dr. Robert S. Harvey is Superintendent of East Harlem Scholars Academies, a community-based network of PK-12 schools, and Chief Academic Officer of East Harlem Tutorial Program, where he manages Out-of-School Time, Postsecondary, and Teaching Residency programs. A Visiting Professor in the Practice of Public Leadership at Memphis Theological Seminary, Dr. Harvey is an education leader, community connector, author, and public voice in education, child advocacy, and social change with extensive experience in academic and non-profit leadership.

Susan Gonzowitz is the founding Managing Director of the East Harlem Teaching Residency, a 28-month, school-based teacher development program of East Harlem Tutorial Program. An Adjunct Lecturer in Literacy and Racial Equity at Hunter College School of Education (CUNY), Ms. Gonzowitz is a teacher developer, consultant, and author committed to pedagogy, antiracism, and literacy.