Improvisational Teaching as Being With: Cultivating a Relational Presence Toward Justice-Oriented Literacies

The authors (two classroom teacher researchers and two university researchers) explore the potential of improvisational teaching for justice-oriented literacy instruction with adolescent youths. In the aftermath of racial unrest and student activism at the University of Missouri and when faced with the emerging confusions among students in response to global humanitarian crises, the two teachers encountered tensions and emerging justice-oriented literacies through a relational presence in the classroom. Guided by the scholarship on improvisational planning and teaching, the authors explore how teachers’ being with the major resources in the room produce generative literacy sites of critical discussion, reading, writing, and making as acts of creative resistance and solidarity. Throughout the article, the authors juxtapose the two teaches’ feelings and voices to amplify their differences and their affectual responses to encountered tensions to evoke new conditions of possibilities for justice-oriented literacy education.