Schools and Teacher Activism: Implications from the Arizona #RedforEd Movement

Drawing from some of my ongoing scholarship connected to the Arizona #RedforEd movement and informal play, I examine the potential of these two areas to design schools in ways that are centered in agentic, decolonial struggles and “moves.” From an analysis of the role of politics in schools to explorations into how leadership may play out in creative ways, this work imagines how this may look in the in-between moments and from subaltern spaces versus traditional notions of bureaucracy and school design. By subaltern, in this case, I am guided primarily by the work of (Anzaldúa G. Borderlands/La frontera: the new mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987) and Mignolo (Theory Cult Soc 26:159–181, 2009; Postcolonial Stud 14(3): 273–283, 2011) in terms of negotiating borders, liminality, and in-between spaces via how minoritized students and educators navigate these layers to imagine and create spaces more attuned to challenging systemic forces that may be alienating and subtractive. Further, this work offers examples of how space is embedded in a heterogenous set of moments whereby action, imagination, and reflexive stories and space-making sometimes comes to the fore. Elements of autoethnography are used to leverage personal experiences with links to the political field of broader struggles and for the purpose theorization.