Radical Pedagogy Institute PST Scholarship Fund
Who We Are
The Radical Pedagogy Institute is a collective of educators based in the greater New Jersey area (this includes NYC) who believe in the transformational power of radical pedagogy and local political organizing. The Institute was created to provide a space for such educators to forge local connections and support one another in our work towards a truly liberatory education system for all students.
Our Vision
We dream of an educational system that uses tenants of critical pedagogies–queer, anti-racist, DisCrit, culturally relevant, and other liberatory pedagogies–to re/humanize educational experiences for all students. Such educational practices are what we refer to as “radical pedagogy.”
We intentionally use the term “re/humanize” with the backslash for two reasons. First, we honor that many Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students come to schools having already engaged in truly humanizing educational experiences at home with their family or other members of their community. Our goal for those students is to rehumanize their PK-12 education through the use of radical pedagogy. We also recognize that for some students, e.g., some queer students, such identity-based cultural experiences/communities may not be available, in turn limiting their access to truly humanizing educational experiences. For those students our goal is to humanize educational spaces and experiences through the use of radical pedagogy.
Our Mission
The Institute is a space for educators in the greater New Jersey area to foster meaningful connections, obtain the political knowledge for teaching needed to organize for change within their communities, and learn how to enact anti-racist, queer, and other critical pedagogies across ALL content areas (yes, even math) and grade levels. The Institute strives to provide a space in which teachers themselves are viewed as expert change agents and valuable sources of community knowledge. To that end, members are encouraged to propose professional development ideas to share the radical pedagogy and political organizing they are doing in their own classrooms and communities.
Our Pre-Service Teacher Scholarship Fund
The Radical Pedagogy Institute is committed to providing access to our community for pre-service teachers throughout the greater New Jersey area (including NYC). To provide that access to as many pre-service teachers as possible, our partner organization, Teach About Women, has helped us to create a Pre-Service Teacher Scholarship Fund. We hope to provide at least 10 PST Scholarships per year, but that number will be contingent upon the generous donations of our community members and other outside individuals. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation today to support our pre-service teachers.
What Exactly Does Your Donation Support?
For every $200 we receive, we are able to provide one Membership + Summer Collaborative scholarship to a pre-service teacher. Each scholarship provides the pre-service teacher with free access to all resources in our searchable database, free attendance to all of our professional development offerings (both our monthly Cross-Cutting Offerings and our Spotlight Offerings), free access for one year to all past professional development recordings in our PD Video Library, free access to the book club we offer every semester, and free access to all other community meet-ups and learning opportunities we provide throughout the year. The Membership + Summer Collaborative scholarship for pre-service teachers also allows us to offer these pre-service teacher free participation in our annual Summer Collaborative, which is a series 6-8 workshops featuring leaders in the field of education who are currently enacting radical pedagogy in their teaching, and/or research. The Summer Collaborative is usually focused on some theme of social justice and radical pedagogy, relevant to contemporary discussions in education. The theme of the 2021 Summer Collaborative is "Resisting A Return to 'Normal': Creating Re/humanized Classrooms."
In addition to each pre-service teachers with free access to all of the above Radical Pedagogy Institute membership benefits, every $200 donated allows us to pay each of the facilitators of our monthly PDs for their labor. At Radical Pedagogy Institute we value the work of enacting radical pedagogy and the political organizing that our facilitators are doing in their classrooms and community. We believe valuing our facilitator's work requires compensating them for their work/contributions to our community. Every pre-service teacher scholarship we offer, funded by your donations, allows us to show our gratitude (in the form of compensation) to the facilitators of our professional development offerings, as well as other community offerings such as the "Camp" of Mathematical Queeries, our summer mathematics enrichment offered to LGBTQ+ students entering grades 9-12.
Isn't this the Sort of Training Pre-Service Teachers Should Receive In their Teacher Education Coursework?
While all pre-service teachers are required to take a single diversity course in their teacher professional development, one course is not enough to prepare them to engage in meaningful radical pedagogy. Access to the Radical Pedagogy Institute community allows pre-service teachers to receive more targeted (and ongoing) training in radical pedagogies that will help them better serve every BIPOC, queer, disabled, undocumented, and multilingual student in their current and future classroom.
