Disruptive by Design: Challenges and Successes of a Women of Color Critical Autoethnographic Coalition

• In Event: Your Liberation Bound Up With Mine: Defining the Public Good Together in Critical Research-Practice Partnerships

Abstract

This paper highlights the challenges and successes experienced by two university professors and a group of eight Women of Color (WoC) pre-service and early career teachers as they co-designed and implemented a critical, auto-ethnographic coalition meant to provide a space of sanctuary, affirmation, and professional development for WoC teachers in a primarily White institution (PWI). This work emerges as, across the United States, a dearth of teachers of color persists as the population of students of color rises (Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2018). As Brown (2014) suggests, teacher education programs are largely responsible for the low numbers of teachers of color, as too frequently, white, middle class perspectives and values are perpetuated by their mostly white and middle class faculty. If we take issues of issues of equity and diversity seriously, it is not enough to revise recruitment efforts; teacher education programs must make institutional changes to value the knowledges of communities of color, to retain teachers of color, and to prepare all teachers to teach the diversifying k-12 population across the nation (Brown, 2014; Haddix, 2017; Irizarry, 2011).

As a methodological approach aiming to take up this call while also looking to “democratize forms of inquiry” (Gutierrez & Jurow, 2016), the larger critical auto-ethnographic study (Camangian, 2010) under which this paper is subsumed engaged participatory methods as well as practitioner inquiry methods (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) to invite WoC pre-service and first year teachers to excavate and share their experiences, perspectives, and understandings of teaching and learning with each other, with peers and stakeholders in their institution, and across professional educational settings. More broadly, the aim is to accumulate long-term WoC perspectives and engagement that can later be leveraged to transform the environments in which WoC are teaching and learning, rather than adopt interventions that are solely designed and passed down by researchers (Fowler-Amato & Warrington, 2017).

More immediately, this paper captures challenges and successes faced as participants navigated pre-service and early career teaching and when they sought to leverage their experience-based knowledge to address structural inequities. Most prominently, the challenge of building sustaining and trusting relationships with colleagues prevented participants from pursuing crucial knowledge needed to navigate teaching obstacles. Conversely, through writing and sharing stories with each other about their teaching practices and cultural understandings as connected to their intersectional identities, the WoC teachers found affirmation and support in the collective, mobilizing their understandings to enact change at their institution and within the schools they were working. This case study of a WoC collaborative is informed by critical autoethnographic data including journal entries and photographs; fieldnotes and transcripts from weekly group meetings; and interview and focus group transcripts.

This work highlights the crucial role that places of sanctuary and healing serve for WoC teachers in PWI’s. What’s more, it points to an urgent need for leveraging the perspectives of WoC to be at the center of critiquing systems of injustice and enacting change in teacher education programs, in schools, and across professional settings (Haddix, 2017).

Authors

• Danielle R. Filipiak, University of Connecticut - Storrs

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs