Critical Professional Development as a Tool for Teacher-of-Color Healing, Retention, and Resistance

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel aims to bring more visibility to the trauma and racialized barriers that teachers of Color experience working in schools that operate as sites of whiteness. It also will illuminate how Critical Professional Development (CPD)- a participatory, collective, theoretically rich professional development space that fosters teachers’ critical consciousness and activism- supports their healing, growth, and retention. With four papers from different contexts, the panel will share research focused on the struggles teachers of Color face in a predominantly white profession, how CPD can support retention through racial literacy development, how CPD has operated as a site of collectivized learning to challenge oppression, and how CPD can be used as a tool to organize teacher of Color retention.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 5: Macro-analysis of the social contexts of teaching and learning

Chair

• Cynthia B. Dillard, University of Georgia

Papers

• Healing From Critical Teacher Pushout: Embracing the Body as Protection and Knowledge Amid Institutional Violence - Stephanie Cariaga, University of California, Los Angeles

• Lessons for Teacher Education: The Role of Critical Professional Development in Teacher of Color Retention - Rita Kohli, University of California - Riverside

• A Humanizing Critical Affinity Group Model for/by Social Justice Educators of Color - Farima Pour-Khorshid, University of California - Santa Cruz

• What CPD Means to Me: The Impact of Critical Professional Development on Black Teachers - Micia Mosely, Independent Researcher

Discussant

• Cynthia B. Dillard, University of Georgia