Showing Up With Family: Navigating Culturally Relevant Sustaining Professional Development During the Pandemics

• In Event: We're Breathing! Black Female CritTeacher Educators in Historical Pandemic Moments

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
The paper examines how I, an African-American critical teacher educator, make sense of the challenges and possibilities of changing professional development practices during Covid-19 and BLM. Specifically, I was intrigued by how school staff members and I were “showing up with family” and how it impacted our practices.

Research questions include:
1. What was the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and school closures on the move to online professional development?
2. How were the professional and personal experiences of the teacher educator and the K-12 staff members amplified during the Covid 19 and BLM?

Perspectives/Theoretically
I utilized Black Feminisms and culturally relevant-sustaining pedagogies to theorize my roles as a teacher educator and auntie. Tenets included concrete experience as a criterion of meaning, ethics of caring and personal accountability and intersectionality (Collins, 2002, 2016; Crenshaw, 1991; and Haynes, Joseph, Patton, Stewart, Allen, 2020). Additionally, culturally relevant-sustaining pedagogies provided a way to theorize evolving practices in the PD sessions (Author, 2019; Paris, 2017; Gay, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 1994).

Modes of Inquiry/Data Sources and Data analysis
There were 8 all day sessions, two face to face and six zoom, involving 2 teacher educators and 23 staff members from six schools in one district in New Jersey in Spring 2020. I employed Crenshaw’s analytics framework - structural, political, and representational intersectionality - for discussing power relations shaping my experiences as a Black, female critical teacher educator engaging staff members from detailed planning notes, journal entries, and professional development materials.

Preliminary Findings
I highlight how school staff members and I “showed up” during the PD sessions before and during the pandemics. I share how family was personally and professionally influencing our practices in at least 3 ways.
1. Empowering Physical Presence – Over my 20 year plus experience in higher education, I can count on one hand the number of times that participants have asked to include their children in the PD sessions. Not once did I have a family member attend a PD. Yet, zoom PD sessions were filled with children of the school staff members as well as my own 6 year- old niece who just wanted to be with a “girl” in the room.
2. Calling out Mentally Adverse Presence –The mental stress Black women bear during the anti-black racism pandemic shows up in the adverse effect on Black women’s lives. Specifically, one staff member discussed how after the George Floyd murder how the stressed intensified as the wife of a Black man and mother to 4 Black boys while Black male educators worried about being perceived as criminals.
3. Challenging Hopeful Presence – Notions of power shaped my 15-year-old niece’s hopeful presence in the midst of several overlapping injustices. She provided personal examples of racism and powerpoint slides of her protesting climate change and racism.

Significance
Living in the midst of two pandemics school closures and multiple overlapping injustices, it is imperative to understand how teaching and learning is impacted for both teacher educators and inservice staff members.

Author

• Michelle G. Knight-Manuel, Teachers College, Columbia University