Equity Pedagogy: Beliefs Shape Teachers’ Interactions With Students

Abstract

challenge White privileging (see Chin, 2015); I encourage readers to seek out this model and to embark on such paths of self-reflection as well. As an instructor of preservice art educators, I engage my students in critical self-reflection on their biases, and strongly encourage our student teachers to embrace values/ beliefs and corresponding behaviors that evidence beliefs in equity, justice, and empowerment. When I demonstrate teacher– student interactions (to be detailed shortly) as practices for my undergraduate students, I explain why we do them in terms of promoting equity, and how these actions reflect our beliefs in equity. I find that students, future art educators, are more likely to adopt these behaviors as habits when they understand why they are doing them, as they want to promote equity. My hope is that readers, both preservice and in-service art educators, will be motivated in the same way. In what follows are examples of how our equity values are exhibited by what we do—how we interact with our students. Our actions show our beliefs. First, we look at some of the key beliefs underlying our actions, as related to equity.