Solidarity With the People: Organizing to Disrupt Teacher Alienation

• In Event: Seize the Time: Foregrounding Liberation in Social Justice Education

Abstract

This paper will examine a multi-ethnic teacher-activist group from South Central Los Angeles that worked to better understand colonialism while also working towards solutions that are socially transforming. This paper will outline the context, tension, and importance of developing relationships as a form of resistance against a schooling system that works to alienate people from one another.

The research question that drove this paper is as follows: How does using a anticolonial perspective to engage teachers in the process of understanding the material conditions of their personal and professional lives disrupt their feelings of alienation in schools?

This paper drew from an internal colonial framework (Blauner, 1969; Chavez, 2011) to make sense of the culture of isolation and alienation persistent in many schools as a historical development (see Little, 1999; Rosenholtz, 1991; Sarason, 1971) that mirrors the larger socio-political landscape of society promoting a culture of separation rather than solidarity with communities. For this paper, alienation is understood as the process taken to maintain power through normalizing a particular set of cultural beliefs and practices while simultaneously working to marginalize groups that fall outside of established norms (Fanon 1963). To counter notions of alienation, we drew from hooks’ (2000) notion of solidarity as a lens to understand the ways educators come together and build relationships with other teacher-activists.

With the understanding that research has been used as a tool in colonial expansion, qualitative methods were employed in an attempt to paint the findings from an insider perspective (Tuhiwai Smith, 1999) as we also took active roles in the organization. To capture the nuanced perspective of teachers’ dialogue and thinking, we drew from interviews (Seidman, 2012), purposeful sampling (LeCompte & Preissle, 1993) and field notes collected over the 2012-2013 school year. Participants consisted of ten teachers that worked in elementary, high school, or university settings in South Los Angeles, taught a broad range of disciplines, and taught for up to thirteen years.

In order to make sense of the usefulness of a community based organization for teachers we put forth a framework of Solidarity as a lens to discuss the ways participants worked to be in authentic kinship with one another. This notion of solidarity across the data stood out because of the ways participants discussed the importance of developing a network of colleagues who held similar beliefs, cared for one another, and were committed to each other. The data is discussed as three sub-themes: shared beliefs, community, and commitment.

This notion of solidarity is an important concept because it articulates a framework that challenges systems of coloniality that works to alienate people from one another. Developing solidarity with fellow teachers is a call for a deeper understanding of the ways colonial values and beliefs impact our daily lives, and of the ways we can heal and renew our commitment to serve our students and communities.

Authors

• Antonio Nieves Martinez, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

• Carolina Valdez, California State University - Monterey Bay

• Stephanie Cariaga, Locke High School