Undergrad Education student and instructor present at DPR15 Conference in UK

Instructor Katia Hildebrandt and undergraduate student, Raquel Bellefleur had their paper accepted to the Discourse, Power, Resistance 15 (#DPR15) Conference at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. They presented their paper on February, April 17. (Abstract below)

Becoming (a) Subject: Tracing Narratives of Performance and Privilege in the Development of Anti-oppressive Educators

Katia Hildebrandt and Raquel Bellefleur, University of Regina, Canada

The potential of online spaces to either disrupt or reinscribe oppressive discourses is especially relevant as we move increasingly to digital networks in teacher education. Specifically, it becomes imperative that we understand how these spaces can be used to complement and augment, rather than undermine, efforts to help preservice teachers take up anti-oppressive practices. As such, this paper stems from the doctoral research of one of the authors (in which the other author acted as a participant), which explores the complex intersection of anti-oppressive (or social justice) education with open, online networks. In the proposed presentation, we investigate the ways in which teacher candidates might begin to construct themselves as anti-oppressive educators in both on and offline spaces. Through an unpacking of a series of “complicated conversations” (Pinar, 2011) about digital identity and social justice work, we deconstruct the ways in which the discursive production of teacher candidates (including discourses of whiteness, of teacher neutrality, or of the “good teacher” as expert) affects their engagement in and perception of the work of anti-oppressive education. Moreover, we examine our own journeys in doing anti-oppressive work in an attempt to trace the ways in which privilege and resistance have shaped our processes of becoming, and we explore the transformational possibilities offered by performativity, in both digital and face to face spaces.