H.E.L.L.A. Educators of Color: Collective Testimonio on Healing, Empowerment, Love, Liberation, and Action

• In Event: 53.081 - Roundtable Session 21
  In Roundtable Session: 53.081-5 - Radical Storytelling and Creative Resistance: Exploring Testimonio as Theory and Praxis

Abstract

Teachers of color have the highest attrition rates in the profession (Ingersoll & May, 2011; Sealey-Ruiz & Lewis, 2011) leading to a national imperative to diversify the profession (Boser, 2014; Sleeter, Neal & Kumishiro, 2014). Particularly, teachers of color committed to social justice often have experienced oppression and racism in schooling, which calls for their need to heal (Kohli, 2008). A Critical Professional Development (Kohli, Picower, Martinez, & Ortiz, 2015) and Healing Justice (Ginwright, 2016) centered framework offers an explicitly political reconceptualization of professional development by understanding “oppression as a form of social and collective trauma” and rebuilding a “healthy collective identity and sense of belonging that promotes meaning and purpose for teachers and students” (Ginwright, p. 8). This paper draws on an IRB approved study that describes how a California critical study group situated within a grassroots social justice teacher organization explicitly centers the voices, needs, and Community Cultural Wealth (Yosso, 2005) of teachers of color through a more holistic, anti-hierarchal, social justice and radical healing based model of teacher support.

The author utilized collective testimonio (Sánchez, 2009) as a process for homemade theory making or what Anzaldúa and Keating (2000) called conocimientos as a radical tool for critical teacher professional development. Their collective testimonio brings together the stories and experiences of three from a total of twelve educators of color who teach in a variety of settings such as K-12 schools to juvenile halls, and in a variety of roles such as classroom teachers to English Learner specialists. In addition to the professional diversity, the group was also diverse in terms of race, sexuality, age, language and life experiences. The overarching goal in this collective was to build on the leadership strengths, critical analyses, intersectional experiences/testimonios, and pedagogical creativity of social justice classroom and community based educators of color.

From a profession dominated by more than 80% White teachers (Goldring, Gray, & Bitterman, 2013), these teachers of color share stories of resiliency and the community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) they possess and have utilized to thrive within an oppressive education system. Applying Critical Race Theory’s tenet of counternarrative, their individual and collective testimonio speak back to the dominant discourses about people of color as being deficient and lacking dominant cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986) and instead, highlights how internalized and institutionalized forms of racism serve as obstacles as well as motivation to fight against oppression. The role of collective testimonio served as critical teacher praxis centered in political education, critical reflection, healing, empowerment, love and transformative resistance. These teachers intentionally sought to disrupt mainstream purposes of professional development by creating a space centered and led by teachers committed to repurposing education for both students and teachers as a tool for liberation.

Author

• Farima Pour-Khorshid, University of California - Santa Cruz