ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the author's journey of teaching from an antibias perspective has been rich with discovery, risks, lessons, and mistakes. It focuses on the hard lessons learned during first year of teaching. The chapter addresses tackling budget cuts and their effect on schools, and the conservative backlash that followed. It explores teaching young children about local and national tragedies. For each of these experiences, the chapter elucidates on the political challenges of teaching for social justice. The process of addressing budget cuts with students taught an incredible amount. Critical literacy is more a mindset than a particular set of teaching strategies, and Dales work exemplifies this idea. Teachers who have critical consciousness tend to be more alert to issues, problems, incongruities, discontinuities, tensions, dilemmas, and controversies in their community and beyond. The enthusiasm of students and teacher to respond to some injustice may not be shared by skeptical parents, colleagues, administration or, worse yet, Fox News.
