White, Suburban Teacher Candidates Read #blacklivesmatter

White, Suburban Teacher Candidates Read #blacklivesmatter As #blacklivesmatter civil disobedience spread across the country in 2015—in the streets, through traditional media, and across informal social media—teacher educator candidates attending a university in suburban New York struggled to articulate appropriate ways educators should respond. Early in the discussion the fallback response seemed to be erasure of the voices of protest. Some teacher candidates repeated social media tropes that served to obscure the protest objectives by claiming that, of course, All Lives Matter. Other media headlines were shared that suggested #blacklivesmatter represented violent destruction rather than productive civil disobedience. As the professor for the course, it became apparent that much more time was needed to explore this movement with students and examine where the messages we were consuming, and often sharing via social media, where coming from. The syllabus was reorganized and more time was allotted for discussion. Three points of entry into the discussion proved effective in opening conversation that was so effectively cut off by social media memes. 1) It was important to begin with exploration of family context. Many teachers and potential teachers in our region are in aspirational, middle class families that very often include civil servants, often serving in fire departments and police departments. It became important for the teacher candidates to explore what these connections might mean regarding their responses to current events involving police. 2) Historical context is very important for examining this movement. Many social media memes the teacher candidates were familiar with attempted to create a dichotomy between #blacklivesmatter and earlier “peaceful” Civil Rights movements. 3) The act of tracing some of the tropes and memes circulating about #blacklivesmatter helped the teacher candidates to examine their own beliefs about the movement and discuss how their understandings had been influenced by the consumption of this type of discourse