At the California Math Council-South (CMC-South) conference in November 2024, I attended an interesting workshop run by Dr. Erica Heinzman (UC San Diego) and Anne Schwartz (Escondido Union High School District) on “Creative Insubordination: Ways to Empower New Math Teachers.” They discussed work by Dr. Rochelle Gutiérrez and Alex Shevrin Venet that described strategies that new teachers could use to challenge policies that are inappropriate or unethical.
As we worked through the articles, I realized that Gutiérrez’s and Venet’s strategies can be grouped into three stages of creative insubordination:
1. Finding support: Before attempting anything, finding like-minded individuals makes change sustainable. This includes:
- Seeking allies who are better at certain practices than we are
- Boosting the voices of others
2. Gathering information: Instead of simply rushing in or demanding immediate action, taking the time to gather information strengthens the argument for change. This includes:
- Observing and documenting to observe patterns
- Experimenting to start change
- Facilitating (helping others communicate and collaborate)
3. Resisting injustice: Resistance is the last step, after laying the foundation with community-building and data-gathering. This includes:
- Pressing for more information (“What did you mean by that?”) and questioning
- Creative non-compliance (not following along with harmful practices but doing so under the radar).
- Turning a rational issue into a moral one (“we should do the right thing,” “we’re being told to do that, but is that best for our students?”)
- Disrupting (doing something different knowing that it will ruffle feathers)
- Modeling (publicly doing change so others see it)
- Countering with evidence to show our counterexamples are not unique
- Using required tools in ways that weren’t intended but work to our advantage
- “Flying under the radar”: asking for forgiveness afterwards instead of permission beforehand
Sources
- Gutiérrez, R., “Strategies for creative insubordination in math,” Teaching for equity and excellence and equity in mathematics (7), 2016, 52-60.
- Venet, A. S. (2024). Becoming an everyday changemaker: healing and justice at school.