Teachers of Color as (Un)natural Bridges: Navigating Warring Worlds While Remaining Whole

• In Event: 41.029 - Teachers of Color as Wounded Healers: Disrupting Dehumanization in the Teaching Profession

Abstract

The research is increasingly clear that schools operate as social mirrors, reflecting the same systemic inequities and social toxicities as the larger society in which they are situated. More recently, schools have been acknowledged as sites of whiteness (Kohli, in review) that posit white people, language, culture, and manners of being as the standard. For teachers of color who refuse to subscribe to hegemonic white and middle class standards of moving through the world, this presents a cultural incongruence that demands that teachers of color learn to move through the world with a forked tongue (Anzaldua, 1987), a splitting of language and identity in different spaces. This paper examines the way teachers of color who lie in the legacies of colonialism are often entering the profession carrying the impacts of intergenerational trauma (Whitbeck, Adams, Hoyt, & Chen, 2004) and ancestral hurt (Duran, 2006). Once in the profession, these teachers are constantly asked to make a difficult decision: negate aspects of their identity and consciousness in order to “act white” and fit in, or retain and cultivate a critical consciousness that leaves them constantly under attack in these sites of whiteness. Essentially, we ask teachers of color who are the survivors of trauma and hurt to enter spaces that are in large part purveyors of their trauma and suffering and then demand their silence.

This action research will utilize Anzaldua’s concept of nepantleras (Anzaldua, 2000) to analyze a two-year qualitative data set collected during my time as a lead teacher on the instructional lead team, charged with facilitating the cultural competence staff-wide training for over thirty high school teachers in Deep East Oakland. Anzaldua theorizes that the Nahuatl term nepantla, which means “in-between,” refers both to a period of transition and growth as well as the navigation of multiple and conflicting worlds. Cultural workers who navigate these warring worlds are referred as (un)natural bridges who are opening themselves to potential wounds—they are also positioning themselves to create innovative perspectives between these worlds which could potentially transform the social conditions (Anzaldua, 2002). Through this analytical lens, this paper explores the role of teachers of color ‘breaking the mirror’ and beginning to transform these schools - as sites of suffering - into sites of solidarity and healing, where teachers of color are neither commodified (Kohli, in review) or cast to the margins.

This paper serves as an exemplar of what it means for teachers to act as nepantleras in order to build solidarity and transform both the site and the narrative. This study serves to illustrate and illuminate the way critically conscious teachers of color at this school site took on the role of nepantleras, navigating their position as people of color in a site of whiteness. Taking on this approach allowed these teachers to create a spaces for themselves as wounded-healers who had the opportunity to actually heal while simultaneously transforming the existing dominant perspectives narrated against them.

Author

• Sharim Hannegan-Martinez