Growing in Ground We Stand In: Educator-Organizer Research as Critical Race Praxis in Education

• In Event: Expanding the Possibilities for Critical Race Praxis in Education Across Multiple Contexts

Abstract

Recent scholarship linking education and the health sciences has advocated for teachers to commit to the healthy social development of urban youth by creating curriculum that responds to the social stressors of young people’s everyday, urban lives (Duncan-Andrade, 2009; Ginwright, 2010). At the same time, critically conscious teachers of color often recognize that they are implicated in the very social suffering that their students of color experience in their communities and schools (Gorski, 2009). Thus, many critically conscious teachers of color come into these spaces 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. As a field we have yet to acknowledge and address the healing needs of both students and teachers that would allow them to fully thrive. The driving research question and sub-question for this paper is, how can research in the health sciences—spanning the fields of public health, epidemiology, social work, and psychology— inform policies and practices for thinking about pedagogy, teacher development, and socially transformative education in communities of color? How can this robust framework provide a richer basis for understanding previously underexplored insights about how education and educational policy can not only be critical and culturally relevant but how it might also help better account for the additional social and emotional health demands students and educators in urban settings must negotiate?
 
In this paper, the author will utilize Charmaz's (2006, 2009) constructivist version of grounded theory to analyze field notes and other artifacts, video of community and classroom meetings, and teacher, student, and community member interviews. Further, the author conceptualizes educator-organizer research to answer the research questions and analyze findings from inter-connected sites of study. Educator-organizer research is a combination of community-engaged research (Center, 2011), activist research (Hale, 2006), & social activism research (Atkinson, 2017) on one hand, and critically conscious education (Freire, 1973) and education as social activism (Sleeter, 1996) on the other. In the realm of social transformation, organization and mobilization is the highest form of critical consciousness and activism.

This project focuses its analysis on the critically and holistic transformation of spaces serving students and teachers of color in three counter-cultural educational spaces: a local high school; a university; and a statewide, political, and grassroots teacher organization. All three sites are interconnected through the author’s work as a teacher-researcher, credential program coordinator, and co-founder of the teacher organization. While guided by a CRP–Ed lens, the author developed and tested a pedagogical paradigm for teaching youth in urban communities to grow from maladaptive coping to critical hoping, and to also thrive through their unresolved traumas. Further, the author employed the research findings to coordinate a credential program and a teacher organization dedicated to identifying, recruiting, supporting, and sustaining teachers of color. Each space employed critical theory, critical pedagogy, and health science research to foster the pedagogical development, health and well-being, and political education of their participants.

Author

• Patrick Camangian, University of San Francisco