Acts of Resistance: Subversive Teaching in the English Language Arts Classroom

In 1969, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner published Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Subversive teaching today, however, looks very different than it did in 1969. Teachers today must deliver their instruction in an era of formidable challenges related to curriculum, educational policy, and cultural and political ideology. Students learn in an environment that includes active shooter drills and increasingly violent public policy that assaults immigrants, people of Color, women, and the LGBTQIA+ community. A robust public education is needed now more than ever, though the resources to provide it dwindle daily.

Acts of Resistance: Subversive Teaching in the English Language Arts (ELA) Classroom showcases examples of subversive pedagogy to instruct and inspire teachers and to contextualize subversive ELA pedagogy in the contemporary educational moment. Chapter authors–in-service teachers and teacher educators alike–draw from case studies, narrative inquiry, and other qualitative methodologies to explain how they have variously taken up subversive pedagogy in the ELA classroom. Because teachers and other stakeholders resist oppressive structures—including disciplinary confinements—when they teach from subversive viewpoints, each chapter describes a disciplinary “act of resistance” that illuminates possibilities for countering uncritical, “traditional” handling of ELA experiences.