Flux Pedagogy for Equitable and Humanizing Education

Flux pedagogy refers to the integration of relational and critical pedagogy frameworks into a transformative and responsive teaching approach. It is constructivist, student-centered, relational, adaptive, and reflexive; it's a humanizing pedagogy that can help educators to examine the goals and processes of schooling in this moment of extreme uncertainty with a goal of fomenting mutual, collective, durable individual and societal growth, learning, and transformation. Flux pedagogy integrates critical relational frameworks into a complex adaptive pedagogical approach that identifies and addresses lived problems as a form of radical learning towards informed action, particularly through the use of participatory approaches and critical pedagogy practices such as racial literacy storytelling, communal re-storying, counter-storytelling, and critical dialogic engagement peer inquiry groups. The primary dimensions of flux pedagogy are: (1) Inquiry Stance Pedagogy; (2) Trauma-Informed/Healing-Centered Pedagogy Radical Compassion/Self-care/Self-Love; (3) Emergent Design, Student-Centered, Active Pedagogy; (4) Critical Pedagogy and Storytelling; (5) Racial Literacy Pedagogy; and (6) Brave Space Pedagogy. In this article, Sharon M. Ravitch discusses each dimension and offers their integration--flux pedagogy--as a generative heuristic for equitable, responsive, ethical pedagogies. She offers strategies for enacting flux pedagogy with students and colleagues in ways that support the co-construction of courses as brave space communities of practice in a moment where people need more of these affirming and generative professional spaces (Arao & Clemens, 2013; Lave & Wenger, 1991). [This article is an edited and updated reprint of "Flux Leadership: Leading for Justice and Peace in & beyond COVID-19" (EJ1275876).]