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Teacher characters are often overlooked in young adult literature (YA), because the reader's gaze is centered on the protagonist. Focusing our attention on the adolescent character makes sense because these books are written for and about young people, but what are we missing? In this column, we, a teacher educator and a preservice teacher, foreground teacher characters in YA literature to examine the ways in which abolitionist teaching appears within a genre that normally provides a limited landscape of how teachers build and sustain community (Shoffner 7). We provide an additional perspective to what Melanie Shoffner describes as the "familiar representations of teachers in popular culture" by considering how YA profiles instances of abolitionist teaching.
In our shared readings, we- John, a White, male, cisgender preservice teacher from Minnesota, and Stephanie, a Black female cisgender teacher educator-began with a focus on how YA literature could be taught, but as we read, we found that the novels themselves critiqued teaching practices. Our research began as an independent study and included reading theories such as youth lens, which situate adolescence as a cultural construction that interacts with race and class (Petrone et al. 508).
We focus heavily on the relationships between teachers and students; however, we read with the assumption that students were the center of these relationships, thereby negating the ways in which teachers build relationships. These novels, which include selections such as The Poet X and New Kid, had their fill of teachers with authoritarian, harsh, racist, and sexist behaviors. In each novel, the beginnings of hope for the students came from the attentive and thoughtful teachers: the advocates and mentors for the struggling, promising student protagonists.
The good teacher characters come with a certain risk attached. They could easily be read as the "teacher savior," taking away the students' agency and reinforcing the student-at-risk label (Shoffner 7). Too often, the visual images of socalled savior teachers are reserved for White women who inadvertently land in a failing school of Black and Brown children and somehow, before the end of the film, transform students' lives, communities, and relationships to school. Films such as Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers further this stereotype by solidifying whiteness-as-care, while Black and Brown students appear as deficient and empty before...
