"When We're in the Room": Black Teachers' Freedom Dreams for Their Retention and Thriving

• In Event: Examining and Improving Conditions for Black Educators

Abstract

Objectives: This paper shares the stories of Black Bay Area teachers during the 2021-2022 school year, the year of the return to in person teaching. Drawing primarily on analysis of interviews with 21 teachers from the same school district, we examine what Black teachers need to stay in the profession.

Theoretical Framework: In the afterlife of slavery (Hartman, 1997) and school segregation (ross, 2021), scholars have turned to Critical Race Theory (CRT) to understand the pervasive and endemic legacy of race in the United States (Bell, 1995; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2016). BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016) extends this framework to allow for the “specificity of the Black” (Wynter, 1989). This study uses CRT and BlackCrit to build on teacher retention scholarship by exploring the counterstories (Delgado, 1989) of Black teachers, which disrupt the dominant narrative around current national teacher shortage concerns. These frameworks allow us to see how antiblackness is structurally implicated in the concerns they raise.

Methods: This paper focuses primarily on data from semi-structured interviews conducted virtually with 21 teachers in the Bay Area. We asked the questions: in the third year of the pandemic, what are the most pressing issues facing Black teachers? What do they need for their retention? What are their freedom dreams for the state of education?

Data Sources: Data sources consist of transcripts from video-recorded semi-structured interviews (N= 21). The teachers taught in a variety of schools and levels with a range of 1-29 years of experience. In addition, we analyzed artifacts that teachers shared with us after the interviews, which include a book of poetry and two nonprofit entrepreneurship projects the teachers created in response to their encounters with antiblackness. We collaborative coded (Smagorinsky, 2008) the interviews using a mix of a priori and emergent codes, reconciling differences when required.

Results: This study explores Black teachers’ experiences with antiblackness during the dual pandemics of antiblackness and COVID-19. Analysis of the data suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated issues of equitable access for their students and their job salary sustainability. However, teachers named that their continued experiences with antiblackness and their disproportionate workloads compared to their non-Black colleagues that they were experiencing before the pandemic was their most pressing concern regarding teacher retention.

Scholarly significance of the study: The hemorrhaging of Black teachers post the 1954 Brown v. Education decision takes place within the greater context of teacher retention nationwide, especially in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continued antiblack attacks on curriculum and instruction. The storytelling that transpired in the interviews are an index of the greater social context, a cultural and political climate where Black bodies are continuously silenced, and the labor of these racial justice oriented teachers often goes unnoticed by mainstream, white norms (Burciaga & Kohli, 2018). The storytelling in this paper is a counternarrative (Solórzano and Yosso, 2002) to the structural silencing and stereotyping of Black teachers in education, demonstrating Black teacher resilience within the current social and political context.

Author

• Jessica Lee Stovall, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author