"We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For": Teachers of Color Reclaiming and Reimagining Schools

• In Event: The Epistemologies of Teachers of Color: Disrupting White-Centered Racial and Linguistic Hierarchies in Schooling

Abstract

Throughout the shameful racial history of U.S. public schools, there have always existed teachers of Color who have resisted its assimilationist goals. In addition to education within the homes, informal, and grassroots settings of communities of Color, teachers of Color have worked within formal or government-sponsored K-12 settings to disrupt linguistic and cultural hierarchies and pass along community-based knowledge. Subversive behind doors, these educators pushed against low expectations, engaged relationally within dehumanizing conditions, and affirmed the worth and agency of students of Color in an unjust world (Gere, 2005; SiddleWalker, 1996).

With attention on the glaring racial disparities of academic success within public schools and a lack of diversity in the teaching force, a growing pressure focused on “minority teacher” shortages began to emerge in the 1980s and 1990s. Scholars and activists began pointing to xenophobia within hiring practices (Rong and Preissle, 1997) and called for recruitment strategies to grow the presence of teachers of Color (Merino and Quintanar, 1988; Su, 1996).

Since then, research has demonstrated how teachers of Color academically and social-emotionally engage students of Color (Amos, 2018; Author, 2019; Villegas and Irvine, 2010): they are more likely to have cultural match, serve as cultural brokers with the community, and see students of Color as capable learners (Brown 2009). Additionally, teachers of Color have been shown to hold insight to the racialized experiences of students of Color and stand as their support and advocates (Gomez & Rodriguez, 2011). This paper extends that research to show how critical teachers of Color— those with a structural analysis of oppression—move beyond academic engagement in current educational structure towards reclaiming and reimagining schools for communities of Color.

The paper utilizes critical race theory (CRT) as a means to show the racializing forces teachers of Color endure, as well as their agency to disrupt it. Originally a legal theory, CRT became part of the landscape of critical educational scholarship in the late 1990s to draw attention to racism as the root of these conditions of racial inequality (Ladson Billings, 1998; Solorzano, 1997). Over the last two decades, the impact of CRT in education has grown tremendously (Ledesma & Calderon), drawing attention to racial microaggressions (Solorzano, Allen, & Carrol, 2001) and hostile racial climates, or environments steeped with individual and institutional racism (Jayakumar, Howard, Allen, and Han, 2009).

Guided by narrative inquiry, the paper includes five counterstories— diverse in terms of race, age, class, gender, and geography— to reveal how teachers of Color have worked to center the histories, languages, cultures, epistemologies, and ontologies of communities of Color in schools that have traditionally served to marginalize students of Color. This paper displays the strength and agency of teachers of Color committed to justice as they resist messages that they do not belong and reimagine schooling as a place where they and their students can thrive.

Author

• Rita Kohli, University of California - Riverside