Radical Teachers

radicalteacher

(rad-i-k'-l-te-char) n.

FIRST USED IN 1975, as two words, when a magazine of that name appeared, edited by a group of dissident college teachers of English. By 1982, small groups of academics throughout the United States and England thought of themselves as radicalteachers and began a process of self-examination on this issue. By the year 1999, it was written in its present form as one word and was synonymous with (the archaic) "teacher."

1. one who provides a student- rather than a teacher-centered classroom; nonauthoritarian.
2. one who shares rather than transmits information.
3. one who aids in student growth and empowerment by drawing out what is already there and latent.
4. one who respects students.
5. Radicalteachers have a relatively coherent set of commitments and assumptions from which they teach, and they are aware of it; this awareness distinguishes them from rocks, mollusks, and nonradical teachers.
6. Radicalteachers possess the capacity to listen well and the self-control not to always fill silence with the sound of their own voices.
7. Radicalteachers believe that theory and practice are not separable.
8. Radicalteachers are concerned with process as much as product.
9. Good intentions are not enough to create a radicalteacher.
10. Radicalteachers do not divide neatly into four component parts: scholarship, teaching, service, and institutional need.
11. Radicalteachers understand the power of language and do not refer to their part-time faculty colleagues as part time persons (or people).
12. The teaching of radicalteachers is holistic: it assumes that minds do not exist separate from bodies and that the bodies or material conditions, in which the potential and will to learn reside, are female as well as male and in a range of colors; that thought grows out of lived experience and that people come from a variety of ethnic, cultural, and economic backgrounds; that people have made different life choices and teach and learn out of a corresponding number of perspectives.
13. Radicalteachers work with themselves, their classes, and their colleagues to discover, name, and change sexism, racism, classism, and heterosexism.
14. Radicalteachers demand a lot from their students; e.g. "we can refuse to accept passive, obedient learning and insist upon critical thinking" (Adrienne Rich, "Taking Women Students Seriously," Radical Teacher #11, 1979.)
15. There are varieties of radicalteachers; e.g. feminist radicalteachers are not in every respect identical with socialist radicalteachers.
16. Radicalteachers do not assume they know it all.

-- Pamela Annas, editor,
New Words: A Postrevolutionary Dictionary, 2008

(Politics of Education: Essays From Radical Teacher. ed. Susan Gushee O'Malley, et al. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990: 339-340.)