Injury and Opportunity: Reflecting on Experiencing Microaggressions and Their Potential for Teaching and Learning

• In Event: Puerto Rican Women Teacher Educators Telling Their Stories, Sharing Their Lives

Abstract

Do you need a passport to go to Puerto Rico?
I am so glad to have an ESL person as a professor.
How do we include Mexican-American history when we have limited time?

Objectives
The phrases above illustrate the kinds of discussions that have often emerged during conversations with my teacher education students. They make it evident that our identities as Puerto Rican women and faculty members often place us in contested spaces where we become the targets of microaggressions and discriminatory practices and our commitment to our work as critical teacher educators is questioned. Using auto-ethnographic and counterstorytelling methods, I analyze and discuss my experiences as a teacher educator to argue that, as Puerto Rican women, we may be uniquely positioned to engage future teachers in discussions about the injustices that impact our communities.

Theoretical framework
Ideas about socially accepted worldviews, values, and social practices are often communicated through narratives that privilege white middle-class ways of being. Critical race theory invites us to participate in processes of counterstorytelling where mainstream narratives about minoritized communities are critically examined as a way to disrupt socio-political inequalities (Delgado Bernal, 2002; Montecinos, 1995; Parker & Lynn, 2002; Solórzano & Yosso, 2001, 2002). In this presentation I will argue that counterstorytelling may serve as an important tool for analyzing the experiences of teacher educators from minoritized communities and for engaging teacher interns in the critical examination of their own views and experiences regarding education and with minoritized communities.

Modes of inquiry and data sources
After collecting notes about instances where my students verbalized ideas that aligned with masternarratives, I selected examples that illustrated a range of themes that frequently emerged during classroom discussions and individual conversations. I used counterstorytelling methods as a way of disrupting the deficit-oriented narratives evident in the incidents. I will discuss examples of such conversations and the lessons I learned from them.

I will present my analysis as a critical autoethnography through which I will discuss not only my role as a teacher educator, but also engage in a more substantive conversation about the institutional and socio-political contexts in which I- and many others- operate (Burdell & Swadener, 1999). Using autoethnography will allow me to place my personal and professional experiences as a woman of color, a researcher, and an educator within the complexities of the social, political, and cultural contexts of our society (Reed-Danahay 1997, 2009).

Substantiated Conclusions and Scientific or Scholarly Significance
As Puerto Rican women and educators, our experiences often allow us a window into rich and complex perspectives about how oppression is created and perpetuated. Yet, this positioning may also make us the targets of the same deficit perspectives that are used to interpret the lives of the communities that we belong to. Thus, it is important to reflect on and engage in conversations about how experiences of microagression may become an instance of symbolic violence with tremendous socio-psychological impact on our lives, as well as opportunities for engaging students in meaningful learning.

Author

• Enid Marie Rosario-Ramos, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor