Teachers of Color as Seed Agents in Everyday Classroom Life: Amplifying Extraordinary Practices Toward Racially Just Educational Spaces

• In Event: Illuminating Sociality and Learning in Diverse Educational Environments by Interrogating Movement, Touch, and Affect

Abstract

Objective
While teachers of Color are recognized as change agents who transform racially inequitable schooling, an ontological emphasis on “change” and “transformation” primarily focuses on how their practices work towards dismantling white supremacy and interlocking systems of oppression within institutions. Denaturalizing neoliberal logics of “teacher effectiveness”, I argue for paradigmatic shift of teacher quality by amplifying teachers’ abilities to center the livelihood and embodied practices of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) as seeds for racially just educational spaces while nourishing alternative ways of living within and beyond sanctioned schooling.

Theoretical Framework
I offer a paradigmatic lens of teachers of Color as seed agents as an expansive view of racially just social futures that are already embodied within the seemingly mundane practices of BIPOC. An ontological commitment to center the brilliance of BIPOC inherent in mundane life disrupts the white gaze that dominates the design, practices, and interactions of teaching and learning within formal schooling spaces, prioritizing how BIPOC are already creating and sustaining their humanities through ingenuity (Baker-Bell, 2020; Guitierrez et.al., 2017; Mustaffa, 2021). Aligned with Bang & Vossoughi’s (2016) joint attention between macro and micro scales of activity to realize educational justice, I conceptualize teachers as seed agents by examining how notions of change, transformation, and ingenuity towards liberatory education are expressed multidimensionally through micro-interactional processes in daily life.

Methods & Data Sources
Utilizing 110 hours of video/audio recordings, field notes, and audio recorded reflections as data sources, I examine the day-to-day language and embodied practices of a Black woman educator in an urban high school. Designed as teacher solidarity co-design where teachers are positioned as research partners and theorizers of their own practices (Philip, et.al., 2022), I illuminate how our mutual embodied attunement towards race and racialization within micro-interactions enhanced our paradigmatic lens of extra-ordinary practices that cultivate racially just learning spaces.

Results
Drawing upon her deep knowledge of students’ racialized experiences in schools and broader society, the teacher’s attunement to racial embodiment and students’ humane needs in day-to-day life enabled her to transform the classroom into a sense of home. Specifically, she enacted affective and multi-sensorial practices (e.g., meditation, cultural practices related to foods, thematic use of colors from pan-African flag) to cultivate a life-affirming space for Black and Latinx students. Yet, instructional coaches who observed her classroom emphasized behavioristic and content-driven lens to describe her practices, overlooking the political and ethical dimensions of a Black and Latinx-affirming learning environment while offering counterproductive feedback that minimized students of Color ways of knowing and being.

Scholarly Significance
Through my conceptualization and analysis of teachers of Color as seed agents, I challenge policy-driven indicators of “high quality teaching and learning” that insufficiently capture while marginalizing racially just practices that are already inherent in everyday classroom life among teachers and students of Color. Significance of this study includes implications for revitalizing teacher critical race praxis and redefining institutional meanings of teacher quality that value and sustain the learning and practices of teachers of Color.

Author

• Josephine Pham, University of California - Santa Cruz
  Presenting Author