Browsing by Author "Sosa, Teresa"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Classroom Discussions as Distortions: Examining Discriminatory Teacher Practices
    (Sage, 2017-03) Sosa, Teresa; Bhathena, Catherine D.; School of Education
    Ms. Mendez, English Department chair in a large urban high school, has noticed a persistent pattern in the practices of her colleagues. These practices tend to be racially insensitive and emphasize a noncritical view that does not attend to students’ experiences and positions students from a deficit perspective. Realizing that such practices serve as social reproductions of racist and classist orientations that reproduce the existing social order, Ms. Mendez decided school leadership should be informed. However, she worries that the school’s leadership will not work to enact change and instead will take her concerns lightly.
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    Disrupting rules of emotion in an urban English classroom
    (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020-08-20) Sosa, Teresa; Hall, Allison H.; Brian, Collins
    Purpose: Our study focuses on regulation of emotions in critical literacy, its resulting racial oppression, and students’ response to emotional control. We examine a student discussion of a poem, looking specifically at the affective responses of students’ interactions as these open possibilities for identifying ways that students confront, resist, and subvert emotional control. Our research question asks how students resisted limited forms of emotion and enabled opportunities for varied affective forms of engagement. Approach: In our analysis, we explored both emotions and discourse (broadly defined as language, actions, embodied acts, etc.) as they construct the flow of activity in this discussion. We also looked at past familiar practices which make the present one recognizable and meaningful. Findings: Findings indicate black students resisted emotion rules by discussing racism, a highly taboo subject in schools. Students also rallied against an interpretation that felt as distraction, an attempt to negate or shut down the naming and sensing of racism in the poem and in the classroom. Despite the constant regulation of emotions before, during and after the discussion, black youth firmly indicated their right to judge the interpretation that the poem had nothing to do with racism as inadequate and steeped in whiteness. Originality and value: In schools, critical literacy often fails to attend to how emotions are managed and reflect racial control and dominance. In order for critical literacy as an anti-oppressive pedagogy to confront the oppressive status quo of schools, it must no longer remain silent or leave unquestioned rules of emotional dispositions that target marginalized students.
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    How Students Use Their Cultural and Linguistic Knowledge to Transform Literacy Goals
    (Project Muse, 2019) Sosa, Teresa; Bhathena, Catherine D.; School of Education
    Black and Latinx youth frequently are asked to complete school tasks and activities without much focus on the knowledge and experiences they draw from to make sense of what they are being asked to do. Using culturally sustaining pedagogy as a framework, this work provides a clear example of the interactions, engagement, and learning that unfolded in a 9th grade English Language Arts classroom as broader goals of one lesson emerged through students sharing their lived experiences and concomitant understandings of the social world. This work provides a clear case for how to support the fullness of youths' identities as dynamic beings and provides evidence for how this does not detract from the goals of school activities, In fact, it enriches them and makes them meaningful.
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    Introduction to Special Issue—Engaged Leadership for Urban Education: Explorations of Equity and Difference in Urban Communities
    (Sage, 2017-03) Willey, Craig; Sosa, Teresa; Scheurich, James Joseph; School of Education
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    New teachers face complex cultural challenges – the stories of 3 Latina teachers in their toughest moments
    (The Conversation US, Inc., 2021-05-14) Sosa, Teresa; School of Education
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    Testimonios of (In)Justice and Communal Spaces: Four Latinas in Their First Year Teaching
    (IUPUI Office of Community Engagement, 2022-06-22) Sosa, Teresa; School of Education
    In August 2020, four Latinas began their first year teaching and entered a school system that continues to emphasize policies, measures, and curriculum that supports racism and social injustice. Their first-hand experiences included a pandemic that largely challenged modes of delivery in schools and the lack of access for students of marginalized communities that made existing disparities even more obvious. But they also entered teaching at a time when there was renewed interest in openly pushing issues of race, oppression, and violence to the forefront. This article details how these four Latina teachers connected their testimonios to the current sociopolitical realities and to their commitment to social change through monthly zoom chats. Their chats became spaces of Convivencia, a way to engage, reflect, and support each other that is centered within a Latina womanist epistemology. Cultural Intuition was used to analyze their experiences and to point out key aspects of their testimonios that reflect their ways of knowing and agency. This piece concludes by making a case for how these types of communal spaces are necessary across various institutions and spaces for Latinas.
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    Testimonios of teaching from four latina first-year teachers
    (Taylor & Francis, 2022-12-06) Sosa, Teresa; School of Education
    In 2020, first year teachers entered a school system that continued to emphasize policies, measures, and curriculum that support racism and social injustice. But first year teachers also entered at a time when there was renewed interest in openly pushing issues of race, oppression and violence into the forefront. I write about the lived experiences of four Latina teachers that were co-constructed as testimonios through dialogue and conversation. This work centers their voices as their tellings are fundamental to our understanding of the challenges in schools. For these teachers, blaring inconsistencies between their social justice endeavors and what they experienced were made clear and their classrooms became sites of contestation towards realizing teaching as it should be. Their work is situated in schools as focal places that reflect inequitable macro spaces and, at the same time, serve as places to resist subjugation and generate openings of alternate possibilities.