Self-Storying as a Route Toward Connection in a Women of Color Critical Autoethnographic Collective

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Collective Reimaginings: Women of Color Storying and Transforming Teacher Education

Abstract

This presentation will trace a set of data from a larger project focusing on the work of two professors and a group of women of color (WoC) preservice and early career teachers in a predominantly white teacher education program engaging in a critical auto-ethnographic collaborative. This paper highlights the challenges and successes encountered by two university professors and a group of eight, WOC teacher candidates and early career teachers as they co-developed a critical ethnographic coalition meant to provide a space of sanctuary, affirmation, and professional development in a primarily White institution.

This project is informed by critical autoethnographic data (Camangian, 2010) including journal entries and photographs; fieldnotes and transcripts from weekly group meetings; and interview and focus group transcripts. The work takes on humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2014) and ethical (Campano, Ghiso, & Welch, 2015) methodologies, creating conditions so that participants are engaged in all stages of research, emphasizing the trust, transparency, and centrality of their knowledge and theories in this work.

The learnings highlighted in this paper will illuminate the ways that self-storying through autoethnography not only served as self-preservation within primarily white contexts, but also as a means toward justice-oriented collective building. As Gloría Anzaldúa (1983) has highlighted, writing ones truths not only serves to heal, affirm, and rebel for the wellbeing of self, but also serves to build intimacy between WOC that can mobilized toward social justice oriented coalition. A close look at participants’ writing and transcripts of conversations will highlight the ways that writing and recording stories and subsequently sharing them served as connective, as they saw each other’s experiences reflected back at one another; affirmative, as they came to understand that the choices they were making as students and new teachers, drawing on their own experiences and cultural intuition, were being similarly made by others; and educative, as they learned from one another about teaching practices and cultural understandings they were not privy to as a product of their own intersectional identities. What’s more, participants reported that these collective benefits of the autoethnographic collective helped them to take on leadership roles in the school and to collectively advocate for their rights as students of color.

This work has important implications for teacher education. It highlights that WOC experiences and knowledge must be central to change-oriented research and action around issues that most affect them (Mohanty, 2000; Moya, 2000), and, in this case, in teacher education programs (Haddix, 2017). Currently, preservice teachers, the teaching workforce, and higher education faculty remains predominantly white, creating conditions for white middle class values to be centered in teacher education and, in turn, the knowledges, literacies, languages, and intellectual lineages of communities of color remain largely neglected (Brown, 2014; Haddix, 2017). Further, this work has implications about the necessity for marginalized teacher ed students to create and maintain spaces of healing and learning in the face of constant encounters with white supremacist values in both K-12 and higher education contexts (Pour-Khorshid, 2019).

Authors

• Grace D. Player, University of Connecticut - Storrs

• Danielle R. Filipiak, University of Connecticut - Storrs