UC Berkeley

This dissertation tells the story of how an experiment in university-based teacher learning blossomed into a rigorous and deeply meaningful learning experience for teachers and a teacher-centered partnership between a university-based institute and a group of justice-oriented K-12 teachers. This ethnographic study followed a group of California Bay Area-based, K-12 justice-oriented teachers as they 1) learned about the racialized histories of housing in the Bay Area as well as restitution work through a university-based summer institute, and 2) as teachers implemented this content in their respective communities—both in and outside of school. As a way to highlight universities' roles in supporting justice-oriented teachers, particularly around the foundational racial justice issue of housing, this dissertation narrates the experiences of these teachers and the university-based staff involved in the university-teacher partnership. Through examining these phenomena, I make the case for supporting justice-oriented teachers' learning, and for learning from teachers in order to inform this support.

Using critical theoretical frameworks that focus on social/racial justice and transformation, this study illuminates significant topics, theoretical framings, and programmatic components that afforded powerful professional learning for teachers around issues of racial and social justice. More specifically, it provides insight into the potency of engaging teachers in what Freire (1970) calls “generative themes,” pertinent to participants’ personal and sociopolitical contexts. This dissertation brings forward the importance of addressing the generative theme of housing within teacher learning spaces, particularly as relevant to teachers’ personal lives, and as an understudied topic within such spaces. Notably, the framing of racial capitalism was resonant for teachers, pointing to the need for a racial capitalism framing in teacher learning spaces and engaging teachers in the explicit study of this theory.

The study 1) revealed teachers as expert pedagogues who benefit from rigorous content over a blueprint for teaching this content, 2) demonstrated the dynamism of teachers' creativity, and 3) showed the activist nature of justice-oriented teachers. Teachers' implementations provided insight into how they work, which furthers the field's understanding of their professional learning needs. As a study that examined the role that universities can play in meeting teachers' learning needs, this dissertation found a partnership approach to be key to such an endeavor, where core components of this work include respecting teachers’ expertise, taking an iterative approach, providing rigorous content and focusing on the experience of teachers rather than their curricular outputs, and involving former teachers as key participants. The study highlights the role that research/policy/interdisciplinary university-based institutes can play in supporting justice-oriented teachers, and the potential of these entities to positively impact and enrich teachers’ work as “transformative intellectuals” (Giroux, 1988). This study contributes to empirical research on teacher learning by offering a glimpse into one model for supporting and sustaining teachers, and, more specifically, highlights the role that universities can play in the work of supporting teachers who teach for racial and social justice.