Whitney Gaines

Background

About Whitney Gaines

As a queer educator with passing privilege, I am dedicated to antiracist abolitionist teaching. I aim to help my students develop as critical thinkers who are committed to social justice and community-building. Education is liberatory. An excellent education will help students and learners dismantle systems of inequity and injustice in the world. Richard Schaull, in the foreword to Pedagogy of The Oppressed, writes “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (Schaull and Freire, 34). As an educator, I am not interested in nor do I wish to integrate students into the logic of our present system. I look for ways to help learners deal critically and creatively with our reality to shape a better world. During my teaching career, I've helped students write and perform their own Moth Project stories to be sent to the White House under President Obama's Arts Initiative. I've mentored students throughout the creative writing process at Lighthouse Writer's Workshop. I've incorporated leveled critical-theory analysis to high school students and unit planned incorporating the following theories: Marxist, Feminist, Gender, Critical Disability Studies, LGBTQ Theory, and Critical Race Theory. I have taught SEL and activism to high school youth and lived those values in defense of student safety.