Exploring Teacher-Teacher Racial Mismatch: How Faculty Racial Contexts Shape Coworker Support

• In Event: 69.057 - Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: 69.057-9 - Race, Resistance, and Relationality: Teachers and Students Navigating Inequitable Educational Terrains

Abstract

Drawing upon in-depth, ethnographic interviews with 98 public high school teachers from both urban and suburban school contexts, this study examines cases of positive teacher interactions across racial lines. While previous research on teachers’ job satisfaction finds that white teachers who work with a majority of black colleagues perceive lower levels of coworker support than whites who work among majority-white faculty, research to date has not explored the social interaction processes in the workplace where positive intergroup relations do arise. This study makes that next step in the literature, as it uses process tracing methods to diagram how positive cross-racial teacher interactions occur. Findings suggest that the formation and consequences of coworker support processes are unique to each faculty context.

Author

• Jennifer Lauren Nelson, Emory University