Teachers’ Racial Equity Learning Within New Teacher Mentoring Conversations: Negotiating Ideologies, Discourses, and Tools

• In Event: You Are Not Alone: Mentoring Practices and Priorities

Abstract

Supporting teachers for racial equity, diversity, and justice remains a critical focus for teacher development efforts, yet understanding of teachers’ learning as it unfolds in process, co-mediated by surrounding organizations and sociopolitical environments is still emergent. Drawing on sociopolitical theories of learning, this case study examines illustrative moments where teachers engage with transformative discourses within an equity-oriented new teacher mentoring program. I found that despite reoccurring engagement with transformative equity discourses, tensions between transformative discourses and organizational tools foreclosed opportunities for more socially just enactments of equity. This study demonstrates the dynamic role of ideologies in teacher learning, not simply in the larger landscape or individuals’ beliefs, but also as embedded within presumably neutral organizational resources.

Author

• Joy Esboldt, University of Delaware