Holding space for student teachers: engaged pedagogy in the face of discrimination

In this article, a group of teacher educators from Aotearoa New Zealand consider what it might mean to support student teachers who have disclosed experiences of racial, gendered, and/or queerphobic discrimination during professional practice placements. Through our personal stories, grounded in bell hooks’ engaged pedagogy and education as the practice of freedom, we theorize our own experiences of educational discrimination via a phenomenology of practice. These crafted stories highlight experiences of negotiating minority identities within educational spaces, foregrounding the question of whether education is a practice of freedom or a practice of negotiation against discriminatory environments. Our meaning-making drives us to ask why, despite professional discourses and policies around inclusive school environments, discrimination remains a lived reality for student teachers. We ask: how can we as teacher educators better enact an engaged pedagogy that offers freedom from discrimination in the practicum spaces within which student teachers learn to teach?