When Sharing Stories Transforms Relationships and Leads to Powerful Collaborations for Disrupting Racism at School

• In Event: Dispatches From the Field: Five Models of Collaborations for Teacher Agency and Social Justice

Abstract

This project documented an effort to disrupt racism in an increasingly diverse school within a white town due to a program by which predominantly non-white students from throughout the county attended the school as part of a “Choice” program. We, a group of five white teachers, along with students of color and their families, formed an alliance against the growing racism in the era of Trump. Our work is now more urgent as local outcries emerge against Critical Race Theory and the Black Lives Matter movement which we are seen to support.

Adichie’s (2009) concept of The Danger of the Single Story, demonstrated the human tendency to classify others by stereotypical characteristics, which helped us understand the white community resistance we faced while forcing us to critique our own tendency to label that resistance with a single story of white supremacy. White teacher identity studies (WTIS), which Jupp (2020) described as a “co-constitutive subfield tied to critical white studies” (p. 722), supported us in facing resistant white colleagues. It pushed us to see that they, like us, were “each attempting to come to grips with their own complexity and complicity in a white-supremacist system” (Jupp & Lensmire, 2016, p. 986).

Participatory activist research (PA𝒕R) methodology (lisahunter et al., 2013) promoted an “emancipatory approach” (Herr & Anderson, 2015, p. 18) and included aspects of critical theory (CT). It encouraged a combination of interracial collaborative action and critical reflection that developed our agency as aspiring allies and activists. The PA𝒕R concept of research as an ongoing, evolving model with an unpredictable outcome was in keeping with our recurring search for multiple stories rather than a single story of the racist resistance of our white school community. Sources of data included recorded planning meeting transcripts, participant race history interviews, monthly participant narrative process logs, critical incident files, and a lead researcher journal.

Princeton Public Schools Superintendent Steven Cochrane asserted that “You cannot read your way out of racism. You cannot workshop your way out of racism. You have to relationship your way out of racism” (Long-Higgins, 2019, 6:42). Through sharing our stories followed by critical dialogue and reflection, we created relationships that transformed us into powerful collaborators. Through the agency we gained, our students independently secured unlikely permission to develop a curriculum for an ethnic studies course. We teachers secured a year-long program of teacher professional development around race and gained an added focus on social justice literature for the English department.

We established important relationships with universities, schools, and organizations. These links lent legitimacy to our efforts in the eyes of the administration, and made it harder for us to be shut down by the community. Our university connections were often the only true support that our students received for their work and for their racial identity. More networks between in-service teachers involved in social justice work and teacher educators as well as researchers are needed in order to provide support and to bridge the gap between research and practice.

Author

• Janice Marie Marsili, Montclair State University