Teachers of Color Enacting Authentic Care to Sustain Students' Humanities During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: In Pursuit of Justice: Teachers of Color as Change Agents

Abstract

This qualitative analysis centers the voices of six teachers of Color in the California Bay Area who expressed and maintained authentic care (Valenzuela, 1999) for the holistic well-being of their students of Color amidst mass disruptions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings reveal that authentic care empowered the teachers to adopt humanizing instructional and pedagogical practices that prioritized the holistic well-being of their students during the period of online learning. Enacting authentic care further caused the teachers to reject and challenge dominant, neoliberal discourses of “learning loss” widely espoused during the pandemic. Their narratives reveal ways in which schools may become more humanizing and authentically caring spaces for students of Color during times of crisis and beyond.

Author

• Corinna D. Ott, University of California - Riverside
  Presenting Author