Listen to Teachers is committed to the daily practice of anti-racism. We are guided by scholars who explain that neutrality with regard to race matters is not possible: Kendi (2019), for example, famously wrote, “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist’” (p. 9), connecting back to Freire’s (1985) notion that "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral” (p. 122). We are also guided by the definition of anti-racism as “An active and consistent process of change to eliminate individual, institutional and systemic racism. This process involves examining and challenging societal structures and individual biases/beliefs that uphold racism and its power imbalances” (CARED Glossary, 2020).

In Listen to Teachers, we continually challenge ourselves to utilize a desire-based framework, a research approach constructed by Indigenous researcher Eve Tuck (2009). Desire-based frameworks provide an alternative to damage-centered research, which “frames entire communities as depleted” (p. 409), which center “narratives that insist that we are ruined, that we are broken, that we are damaged” (p. 424). In LTT, we honor Tuck’s work and the Native and urban people whose interests it respects, and we recognize the ways that it is relevant to public school educators, another group that has “troubled relations with research and researchers” that have practiced “historical exploitation and mistreatment of people and material” (p. 411), and where schools, like Native lands and urban areas, become “spaces saturated in the fantasies of outsiders” (p. 412).

Engaging in a desire-based approach in Listen to Teachers means that we “craft our research to capture desire instead of damage,” and that we “are concerned with understanding complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (Tuck, 2009, p. 416). Our practices acknowledge and honor the coexistence of educators’ experiences of frustration, pain, and exclusion as well as their voices, joy, and innovation. We are committed to the continual process of ensuring that LTT is mutually beneficial to the educators and the research team and “[emphasizes] the real, positive outcomes for communities in both the short and long term” (p. 424).

Listen to Teachers also draws inspiration from Adrienne Rich’s poem “What does a poet need to know?” from What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993). We have particularly taken up the lines “We must use what we have to invent what we desire” and “We cannot work in isolation, or in fear of other voices” as we provide space for like-minded educators to come together and work to advocate for change. And we created an innovative way to protect educators from the “fear of other voices” as they engage in this important desire-based work.

Listen to Teachers recognizes that inequities in society exist and that schooling often functions to maintain or exacerbate inequality. We believe public education policies and practices must, instead, intentionally work to create greater equity, justice, access, and inclusion for those who have been historically and persistently marginalized, based, for example, on their race/ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, or ability.

When we engage in a creative act, when we create something new, we are putting new possibilities into the world; creativity is therefore inherently a change-making process. Listen to Teachers provides a space for educators to engage in creative thinking, to imagine new educational worlds. Documenting current school realities is a way for educators to train their gaze on their tangible, physical surroundings, consider the object of their photographs as representative of some educational reality or experience, and use the photograph and the experience of capturing it and considering its importance to imagine what could be.

Central to the Listen to Teachers project is Photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997), a participatory research methodology that centers the perspectives of marginalized people. LTT educators are trained in Photovoice, which includes crafting a research question, mindfully taking photographs that document and clarify their question, composing brief narratives about their photographs, collectively analyzing their photographs and narratives as data, then sharing their work with the public to create change. 

Listen to Teachers focuses exclusively on public schools. We intentionally choose to work in public schools as a way of living out our commitments to equity and antiracism, to the common good of public education, and to the development of all children who represent all forms of diversity. We believe that the ideal of public schooling is beautiful and that the diversity of our youth is beautiful, and that both are worth fighting for. We choose not to focus on other kinds of schools, such as charter, private, and parochial schools, because they have different affordances and challenges than public schools; operate under different laws; and draw people, funding, and other resources away from public schools.

The Listen to Teachers project’s work is nested within the traditions of multiple bodies of scholarship, including community-engaged research, educational research, humanistic social sciences, participatory research, public humanities, public scholarship, and research on women. 

Listen to Teachers advocates for teaching and learning to be centered in any conversations or policies about public education, and we advocate for those who know the most about teaching and learning – that is, educators – to be included and listened to in these discussions. Taking to heart oppressed groups’ rallying cry, popularized by disability rights advocate Charlton’s (1998) “nothing about us without us,” Listen to Teachers is committed to ensuring that education and educators take their rightful place of prominence when school policies, practices, and budgets are being determined. LTT urges those in the conversation to ask: What do teachers think about this issue, and are we listening to them? How does this issue affect actual teaching and learning, and how can we ensure that teaching and learning remain our top priority with respect to this issue?

Listen to Teachers includes only women educators. Being a women-only project provides a safer space for participating educators – who are more likely to be women – to engage in the research process, particularly within the context of traditionally patriarchal public school buildings and systems. Moreover, as one Cohort 1 teacher quipped, “The men in education are already listened to!”