ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author considers how these women teachers' narratives, stretching back more than fifty years through the history of American education, can contribute to the understanding of the immediate present and the unfolding future of social change in this country. She discusses why she persists in particular versions of Marxist, feminist and anti-racist theory and practice. The author argues that "elements taken from different existing problematics may, in a new order, and constituting a new field, yield us greater explanatory power and political purchase". The limitations of deterministic economic analyses of education and reproductive cultural studies of schooling are evident. Theoretically and strategically, the definition of the political has been, and continues to be, a continuous subject of struggle within the progressive tradition. These teachers and their students develop the principles and practices of their particular pedagogies, not according to abstract definitions of external theories, nor according to the narrow strictures of local regulations, but in political partnership.
