Cornell Notes from Underground: Whiteness, Neoliberalism, and AVID for Higher Education

This critical narrative study analyzes the discursive means by which the educational nonprofit AVID acculturates teacher educators and teacher preparation programs to its ideological network. Through scenes reconstructed from Cornell notes taken at an AVID Summer Institute, the author examines his double identity as an AVID for Higher Education (AHE) trainee, simultaneously alienated as a social justice educator but complicit in co-constructing AVID’s target white neoliberal identity. This article aims to encourage resistant risk-taking among critically leaning educators who may find themselves either avoiding white neoliberal educational reform activities taking place in their programs or complying with them against their better judgment. By co-conspiring to carry out critical interventions during white neoliberal reform activities, or by conducting critical “underground” research as this article exemplifies, white neoliberal educational reform may be decentered and more space opened for anti-oppressive pedagogies in teacher education. This study combines autobiographical and arts-informed methods from narrative inquiry to examine the double identity that emerged for the author during AHE training. Beginning with critical Cornell notes taken and kept “underground” during training, the author turns to Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novella Notes From Underground as a guide to analysis, showing that critical resistance to the culture of positivism white neoliberalism promotes is both long-standing and not won by working alone. The article recommends that, in the struggle to center racial and social justice in teacher education, critical educators should co-conspire and actively seek out white neoliberal reform activities, prepared to intervene with knowledge not only from critical theories but from the histories of race that drive the discourses reform organizations use to acculturate teacher educators to their ideological networks.