Trump Who? Timeless Professional Development Issues of Race, Racism, and Antiracism in a Segregated Swing State

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 13
  In Roundtable Session: Designing Supports for Educators in a Trump Era

Abstract

Purpose: This paper discusses findings from a study of equity-oriented professional development in a suburban-rural suburb of Pennsylvania, a state that was one epicenter of political conflict in the last election. Here, Black students are the majority of the student body, but educators are still almost exclusively white. The study sought to spark equity dialogues in inservice PD on race, racism and cultural relevance, arguing that it might provide a “way in” that other tools locally hadn’t.
Theoretical perspective: Preservice professional development (PD) that addresses issues of equity and antiracism asks educators to foster inquiry into improving practice (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) so it supports all groups of young people, particularly students of color, to succeed (Hollins & Guzman, 2005). Most accounts of such PD report that teachers, particularly white teachers, fiercely resist the “race” aspect of the endeavor, often calling such work extra, unnecessary, and imposed (Gay, 2005; Wiseman & Fox, 2010; Pollock et al, 2016). Guided by such scholarship, researchers expected heated conflict and resistance to race-related PD in this quintessential “swing state.”

Methods: We spent much of the 2018-19 school year studying educators’ experiences of a PD dialogue series in the suburban-rural Pennsylvania community. Twenty-one educators and three principals participated over six, day-long sessions. Research questions included the following:
How are educators in these demographic/political contexts currently experiencing purposeful equity-and-inclusion-oriented dialogue in their work?
What dialogue supports do they want and need in order to talk with colleagues and students (and when relevant, students’ families) in the current moment?
We documented PD dialogues in fieldnotes (Emerson et al, 1995), and PD facilitators used post-dialogue journals and interviews to comment on each dialogue experience immediately after it occurred (Mishler, 1991). We worked to identify trends in participants’ responses (Boyatsis, 1998), using grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) and discourse analysis techniques piloted in earlier studies (Pollock et al, 2010, 2015).

Findings: We unexpectedly encountered no mention of Trump or the current era. Instead, we encountered timeless issues of race and racism in educators’ responses, such as: a) feeling powerless in the face of deep inequities of segregation, and its resource disparities; b) the inadequacies of a white teaching force serving predominantly Black students; and c) teachers unclear about how to enact requested projects of “equity” and “cultural responsiveness.” The experience suggested that for some educators in the nation, “Trump era” teaching is actually not fundamentally different from pre-Trump teaching--particularly in the “always there” aspects of race and racism.

Scholarly Significance: Studies of teacher development on issues of equity, race and racism often rarely analyze the specific political moment or “era” of national life. We propose that researchers can investigate today’s educator needs in a time-specific manner-- and then demonstrate when some needs are in fact timeless. The final paper in our session describes our responsive intervention: designing educator supports for collective action in an era with exacerbated, not new, racism and inequity.

Author

• Andrew Matschiner, University of California - San Diego