Resisting the Hostility of "Safe" Spaces: Anticolonial Healing in Teacher Education

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

Abstract

This paper examines critical qualitative data collected over a five-year period from a recently established teacher credential program in California focused on urban education and social justice issues. This paper will illuminate how teacher education programs, generally, alienate critically conscious teacher of color candidates as well as ways in which these programs can more effectively serve their needs. Many of these candidates come into teacher education programs with “spiritual injury, soul sickness, soul wounding, and ancestral hurt” (Duran, 2006, p. 15) as a result of being members of “internal colonies” (Gutierrez, 2004, p. 281) commonly referred to as communities of color. Central to building solidarity with critically conscious teachers of color in the context of teacher education requires the willingness of these programs to engage in open and honest, critical conversations that address the questions with which these candidates are most concerned with. Instead, teacher education programs too often silence the most pressing issues facing urban communities, or internal colonies (Montecinos, 2004; Sheets & Chew, 2002). This silencing is often presented as a set of norms created to maintain a “safe” space for “everyone” so that no one person’s opinions are more valued than others (Leonardo & Porter, 2010). “Safe” in this sense too often becomes a safety jacket for more privileged teacher candidates unwilling to confront the painful parts of their identities. This silencing further intensifies the oppressive conditions and challenges facing critically conscious teachers of color as they seek transformative strategies to more effectively navigate the socially toxic conditions of the teaching profession. Leonardo & Porter (2010) argue that this notion of safety is actually psychologically violent to the socio-emotional development of communities of color. Similarly, this paper illustrates the ways in which this silencing is hostile to the humanity of critically conscious teachers of color.

Not responding to social toxins facing dispossessed people in urban communities leads to poor health (Wilson et al., 2008). Not doing so in teacher credential programs inadequately prepares candidates with the critical sensibilities needed to deal with the dehumanizing conditions of the teaching profession. Beyond cultivating “safe” spaces for dialogue, teacher education programs must foster institutional cultures that critically nurture the ability for its candidates to confront the painful parts of their identities while committing to practices aimed at transforming the struggles facing oppressed people (Duncan-Andrade, 2011). This paper will answer the following question: How is teaching pre-service teachers to critically understand oppression and liberation from an anti-colonial perspective healing for the identities and teaching practices of critically conscious teacher of color candidates? Using anti-colonial theory, public health, and Leonardo and Porter’s (2010) pedagogy of fear as an analytical lens, this paper will share data-driven assertions to illustrate how the programmatic inclusion of pre-service teacher of color’s lived experience, personal frustrations, and social dissatisfactions fostered a humanizing space, which unified their cohort, cultivated conditions that heightened their healing as historically marginalized people, and increased their commitment to teaching in the interests of the communities that they identify with serving.

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco