EduColor, Educational Justice, and Moving at the Speed of Trust

• In Event: Teacher-Led Networked Educational Organizing in the United States: Invited Session

Abstract

The public education experience for many people of color has been deficit-based and damage-centered (Solorzano, & Yosso, 2001; Tuck, 2009). EduColor, formally established in 2015, is an inclusive cooperative of informed, inspired and motivated educators, parents, students, writers and activists which seeks to address this problem by elevating the voices of public school advocates of color on educational equity and justice. In this paper I use an autoethnographic approach to describe how the lens of intersectionality influences our work and the development of the EduColor movement in online and face-to-face spaces. EduColor promotes and embraces the centrality of substantive intersectional diversity through bridging the links between movements for social justice in this country and the classrooms that we serve.
We take intersectionality to mean understanding and bearing witness to the multiple paths of exclusion that are operating within the sphere of public education, and the larger society (Crenshaw, 1991; McCall, 2005). This theoretical lens links us to support and learn from other social movements that have also used online spaces to build power and voice, such as the Black Lives Matter Movement and the accompanying #SayHerName movement which sought to bring a greater understanding of intersectional justice issues to the public sphere. Likewise, technology plays a large role in EduColor, as many of us began to build relationships through social media websites and saw those ties strengthened through education conferences and other meetups. To connect, dialogue centers around the use of the hashtag, #EduColor, to converse on Twitter and share resources with each other. We also maintain a website, EduColor.org, where archived moderated monthly Twitter chats are archived. Our Twitter chats are one-hour long live, moderated discussions on a particular topic that occur via Twitter and utilize a common hashtag (see Gao & Li, 2017 for more information on Twitter chats). Members frequently meet up at education-related conferences, and we are currently planning a dedicated EduColor meet-up for later in the year.
In this paper, I draw from our public EduColor Twitter chats to describe the ways in which the lens of intersectionality shapes our linkages to other networked social movements and our choices of topics, discourse, and practices. I will describe the way social media allows us to build relationships that allow us to create active advocacy communities and space for inquiry and reflection on our work, and how our approach serves dual, inter-related purposes: to support our thinking about fair and informed educational policy and to transform ourselves to be beacons of hope and love in the classroom, in our schools, and in our communities. This paper has implications for practitioners that seek to develop strategies to organize and connect around issues of social justice. It also has implications for researchers that are interested in learning more about networked organizing in education, particularly organizing related to matters of social justice.

Author

• Christopher Rogers