Amplifying the Soundtrack of Our Teacher Selves

We are a group of teacher educators who began to work together through a social justice-oriented doctoral program in teacher education in the United States. Currently, we are at different stages of our careers—one doctoral student, two early-career teacher educators, and one seasoned professor––but have continued to support one another. Our mutual love of music, combined with our openness to methodological inventiveness as a way to critically reflect upon our lived experiences of teaching, led us to this collaborative self-study. We were inspired by the New York Times’s amplifier playlist—a curated list of songs released weekly by Lindsay Zoldaz, a pop music critic, which centers on a theme that connects listeners and expands their repertoires. Adapting Sánchez and Haniford’s (2020) arts-based methodology that they called “papertending” (p. 385) to our “musical mapping,” involved building playlists to map the soundtrack of our becoming as teachers. A significant theme across playlists focused on justice-oriented teaching, whether in PK–12 schools or at the university. We identified the following sub-themes: songs that provided social commentary, songs that encouraged resistance to injustice and activism, songs that reflected how teaching is embodied and at times requires an outlet to release emotions, and the importance of supportive feminist queer communities for students and teachers, and how those communities and care help to support justice-oriented teaching.