Teaching as a Wild Rumpus: Ungovernance in Teacher Education

This conceptual article argues that teaching and teacher education in the U.S., even social-justice-centered work, is dominantly bound up in the logics of governance and maintaining dominant social orders. An emerging body of scholarship on anticolonial teacher education offers a different vision. Building on this collection of work, I think with everyday modes of teacher resistance to governing structures. In doing so, I argue for teaching and teacher education as an unruly everyday practice of freedom riotously opposed to management, discipline, and order. Drawing on Halberstam’s notion of wildness, the article imagines possibilities of public school teachers studying and struggling toward teaching grounded in collective care and against governance. Ultimately, the article illuminates the revolutionary, world-making possibility of everyday teacher work.