Scholar. Expert. Authority. Evaluator. Instructor. Disconnected. Abstract. Arrogant. Knowledgeable. Intimidating. Unapproachable. All words that can be associated with stereotypes of university professors. All words that I have used to describe several of the professors I experienced while navigating my doctoral studies.

When I think of my experience as a Black, cisgender female doctoral student at a prestigious, private, predominantly White university, I think about who I learned from vs. who I learned with. These two groups of people were not synonymous. The majority of individuals I learned from were those who considered themselves the authority in their field. They curated my learning experiences in ways that prioritized what they thought was important for me to learn, while not considering the things I valued and what I wanted from my learning experiences. With them, I felt misunderstood, tolerated, and invisible. In contrast, I learned with my Chicago Public Schools cooperating teacher. I learned with teachers in Evanston Public Schools, as we reflected together on what motivated them to refer Black children for special education services. With them, I felt seen, valued, and at home. Though I successfully completed my doctoral degree program, I was disillusioned enough from my experiences that I did not seek out a university faculty position after graduation. I didn’t have the words to describe what I was feeling. All I knew was something about the way I was taught to teach and to conduct quantitative research ‘on my subjects’ felt wrong and extractionary, but I didn’t know why.

In 2005, after five years in the nonprofit and for-profit education world, I walked into UWM as an assistant professor with the determination to successfully navigate the perish or publish gauntlet. As I adjusted to life as a university professor, Hurricane Katrina wreaked its devastation on Black New Orleanians. I had a sister who was working in Louisiana on disaster recovery and we had many conversations about how public education was being hijacked in the aftermath of the hurricane. I wanted to help but didn’t know how. Challenging the paternalistic and white supremacist underpinnings of my desire to help or ‘save’ young Black children in New Orleans was the genesis of a relational commitment to a group of New Orleans-rooted public education and racial justice advocates as we lifted up a multiyear community-based participatory action research project. Through critical conversations over the course of several years, we collectively revealed and healed from the myriad ways we, as Black educators and community-based scholars, were marginalized, utilized and weaponized against the Black folks’ interests by the academic research enterprise. We reclaimed our intellect, our agency and our community capital and put these in service of the Black New Orleans community’s needs, goals, and aspirations. Rather than engaging in this research to further my tenure and promotion goals, my role was to be humble and to use my privilege and power in service of the community I was in relationship with. We captured the story of this journey in the book, Black Participatory Research: Power, Identity and the Struggle for Justice in Education, published in 2016.

Advancing Critical Pedagogy and Praxis across Educational Settings tells many stories of journeys like mine. It tells many stories of educators, scholars, collaborators, and partners engaged in collective and critical learning and meaning-making about their efforts to create equitable learning experiences for both themselves and for racialized and minoritized students and communities. Like myself, many of the authors were raised and prepared in white supremacist, patriarchal, and ableist educational institutional academic contexts. They resisted the inevitability of their positionality as cogs in the systems by using critical mutualism to recognize how they were perpetuating these systems. It was through engaging in this critical reflexivity that they realized their research was wrong headed from the beginning. Despite being socialized to not question their authority as expert researchers, the editors and chapter authors arrived at a place where critical reflection on their positionality, beliefs, assumptions, biases, and experiences was a necessity, not a luxury.

As the editors shared in A Conscious Exploration of Mattering in Collaborations across Educational Settings, being responsible for the disbursement of millions of dollars of grant funds, led to the realization that they were exerting power and control based on what they prioritized, how they engaged their community collaborators, and the way they distributed this money. Without engaging in critical mutualism, they would sit comfortably in the belief that their money, resources, and ‘help’ would absolve them of complicity in promoting solutions grounded in paternalistic and racist practices. The editors envisioned this book as a resource to provide exemplars of how to center learning with not from or upon. This book tells the stories of collaborative university/school research partnerships grounded in authentic relationships, driven by a collective purpose leading to the disruption of inequitable systems, and elevating local knowledge and expertise. Several chapter authors engaged in both unlearning and relearning. They engaged in critical post-hoc reflections, giving permission to readers who are not there yet to begin their own journeys, starting from where they are, as well as providing different pathways for doing so. This book claps back against the belief that white-centered, paternalistic research practices employing positivist objectivity is the golden standard. This book acknowledges the harm of research done onto communities and the imperative to do better and to do different.

When I began establishing relationships to co-create a community-based participatory action research project addressing the theft of public education in post-Katrina New Orleans, I had to contend with a significant lack of trust caused by Black community members’ experience of drive by research. These communities experienced many researchers dropping in, driving by and parachuting through their neighborhoods and schools, collecting data, and exploiting their findings in service of their scholarly aspirations. Similarly, in their chapter, “You’re Not Just Here To Tell Me What To Do?”: A Study in Standing Under, Baumann described their efforts to come behind researchers who operated in disingenuous, extractive ways in a school district by removing support structures after they completed their intervention and collected their data. Drive-by researchers removed effective services and resources leaving behind carnage, confusion, and pain. Acknowledging this pain and the need to spend time to prove their trustworthiness was a necessary first step to engaging in collaborative research. I was invited into the New Orleans education space by a trusted person, my sister. Baumann was invited in as well, which went a long way towards establishing trust. Framing collaborative research based on community grounded aspirations and priorities rather than external deficit perspectives of what the school district was doing wrong and needed to fix allowed the researchers to focus on opportunities rather than problems.

Baumann and several other chapter authors understood the importance of acknowledging positionality and power of researchers entering into community engaged research with school communities and each other, no matter their intentions and personal views of self. Engaging in critical mutualism led to the prioritization of learning through building and sustaining relationships. Personal interactions required ongoing reflection, navigating tensions and conflicts, and adjusting the partnership if needed to ensure mutual needs and benefits were being met. This kind of scholarly engagement required shifting perspectives from being an outside, objective expert to being a learner and student. It also required engaging in explicit and critical reflection of individual positionality and the ways that our identities exerted undue influence if unattended to.

Advancing Critical Pedagogy and Praxis across Educational Settings challenges the foundational principles embedded in our academic and educational institutions. It serves as a resource and as a necessary tool for the preparation of future scholars. The lessons learned that are shared in this book can influence these future scholars’ socialization into scholarship and guide their critical reflection on the beliefs and assumptions which need to be either cultivated or challenged. It provides examples of how to disrupt hierarchical roles by creating a ‘maroon intellectual community’ grounded in critical resistance to white supremacist values of rationality and objectivity over emotion and relationships as described in the chapter, “I’m Glad It’s Us”: Reflections on a Teacher Professional Development Experience Designed by Women of Color. The transformation of our educational institutions requires collective engagement in the development of critical radical mutualistic relationships across disciplines, roles, hierarchies, as well as the co-creation of knowledge to drive this transformation in ways that do not recreate inequitable systems. This book provides a roadmap for the types of university/school partnerships that engage in the critical discourse and creative ideation necessary to push back against research practices that reinforce individualism, personal gain, and maintenance of the status quo.