Deborah Ball delivered the presidential address at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association. Her talk, “Just Dreams and Imperatives: The Power of Teaching in the Struggle for Public Education,” focused on the enormous potential teaching has for contributing to the development of a just society and supporting the flourishing of historically marginalized groups—and the ways teaching instead often has reproduced inequality and reified injustice through the discretionary spaces that are inherent to teaching.
Ball argued that working to make teaching a force that can regularly disrupt the injustices that persist in, and through, teaching practice requires facing and managing tensions between constraint and discretion, as well as between professional boundaries and autonomy.
We would like to highlight the following clip from this talk, which is about the biases against Black girls in elementary school situations: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CtOerqE09VHKyGBk-Evh_e2-4o9svm3B/view
You can see more of this talk and others from Ball at:
https://deborahloewenbergball.com/news-archive/2018/4/19/deborah-loewenberg-ball-delivers-presidential-address-at-aera-annual-meeting