Youth Resistance for Educational Justice: Pedagogical Dreaming from the Classroom to the Streets

Youth Resistance for Educational Justice shows how resistance, especially among minoritized groups, is an increasingly crucial dynamic of social and educational transformation. It illustrates the ways in which young people are conceptualizing and asserting more socially just educational futures through participation in social movements. In doing so, this volume affirms the need to understand hope and dreaming as concomitant to concepts of youth resistance and educational change. Rather than focusing on top-down solutions to educational and social inequality, this book centers on grassroots and community-centered examples of resistance and social change within diverse educational settings. Featuring a wide range of U.S. and international case studies, this book showcases the ways in which racially minoritized young people develop into social and historical actors by engaging in collective activism and organizing, as well as daily forms of individual and interpersonal resistance, within schools and other community-based contexts. These case studies bring together empirically driven narratives that highlight a range of racialized communities and gender diverse communities, in a variety of contexts (urban, suburban, and rural), to show the ways that youth create imaginative resources that interrupt dominance and envision alternative futures in these sites. With chapters focused on theory and praxis, this collection interrogates the structural barriers to educational justice, as well as the cross-cutting factors and practices that resonate across disparate contexts and communities. With a focus on real life actions inside schools, community learning environments, and the media, this book provides insightful conceptual tools and examples that are important for critical educational policies and practices. It will therefore be beneficial to postgraduate students and scholars in Critical Education, Educational Policy and Politics, Social Justice Education, and Multicultural Education.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Section 1: Freedom Dreaming and Theorizing Through the Cracks 1. Finding “Faaji” in a Cyborg Makerspace, or Learning to Carve a ‘Loophole of Retreat’ 2. La Facultad en el Valle: Rural Latinx Youth Resisting Deficit Depictions of their College-Goingness and Envisioning Alternative Futures 3. “Never Had a Chance to Imagine a Future Where I could Be Free”; Theorizing Back and the Right to the Word and the World 4. Alternative Dreams: School Pushout and Latinx Student Resistance in Continuation High School 5. Healing is a Human Right: Lessons from Levanto Section 2: From Radical Imaginations into Organized Action 6. #NoTeenShame: Storytelling and radical dreaming across and beyond generations of Pregnant & Parenting Youth 7. The Circle Keepers: Birthing A School Based Restorative Justice Youth Leadership Cohort as Abolitionist Praxis 8. Quest to be Heard: How Oakland Students Demanded Equity Innovations During a Period of Rapid Change 9. Jailbreak! Students, Parents and Teachers Practicing Fugitivity and Freedom Dreaming 10. Blueprints for Liberation: Harnessing Black & Latinx Youth Resistance & Dreaming through Critical Design Section 3: Creative Pedagogical Experiments 11. Centering Black Children’s Worldmaking Visions: Considering what it means to co-facilitate liberatory space to freedom dream with Black children 12. The Intersection of Pedagogical Dreaming & Technology: Towards a Critical Race Techno-Pedagogical Imagination 13. Educators as Questgivers: Adult Tensions and Youth Dreaming in Youth Participatory Action Research 14. Reclaiming Student-Teacher Affinity Spaces as Creative Sites of Racial Justice 15. “It was all a dream...”: Inspiring the next generation of Black male educator activists