Research as Healing: Reflections of a Teacher Educator of Color on Critical Race Praxis

• In Event: Me-Search: Pursuing Race, Culture, and Gender in the Heart and Healing Work of Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Objectives
Teachers of Color have attested to experiencing racial microaggressions, being forced to serve as racial experts (Endo, 2015; Author, XXXX), and being stereotyped into particular professional roles (Amos, 2010; Woodson & Pabon, 2016) in their work in K-12 schools. Unfortunately, many of the supports teachers of Color leverage for well-being and retention are self-led, and are additional to the already demanding structures of the teaching force (Author XXXX; Author XXXX). Yet, teacher education, which is one institutionalized avenue to prepare teachers of Color with tools they need to navigate a predominately white profession, is fraught with similar (or worse) issues of whiteness and racial harm as K-12 schools (Author XXXX; Sleeter, 2017). This paper is a reflection on how the Institute for Teachers of Color Committed to Racial Justice (ITOC) was built to serve the racial justice needs of teachers of Color, but created through cycles of inquiry, reflection, and action, also worked to support my healing and racial justice goals as a South Asian teacher educator and critical researcher of teacher education.

Theoretical Framing
Freire (1996) explained that, for liberatory transformation inquiry must be intertwined with praxis, what he defines as reflection and action, rooted in critical consciousness. In an educational system so fraught with endemic and institutionalized racism, critical race theory (CRT) has been an important framework used to identify and disrupt how systemic racism shapes institutional structures (Matsuda et al., 1993). Theorized as critical race praxis in educational research, Jayakumar & Adamian (2014) outline four tenets of this work: (a) Relational advocacy towards mutual engagement; (b) redefining dominant and hegemonic systems; (c) research as a dialectic space that rejects white ways of being and knowing, and recenters the epistemologies of communities of Color; and (d) critical engagement with policy (and practice).

Methods and Data Sources
In this article, I use the four tenets of Jayakumar and Adamian’s (2015) model of critical race praxis to frame ITOC and demonstrate the power of engaging in educational research that is designed as praxis. To describe its impacts on teachers of Color, I draw from previously published research on ITOC, and use excerpts and analysis to walk through the four tenets (Author, XXXX). After the framing of each tenet, I engage in auto-ethnographic reflection to describe how participating in this research approach had impact on me.

Results and Scholarly Significance
ITOC designed as critical race praxis had positive impacts on teachers’ growth, retention, and well-being. Using the panels’ frame of me-search, I also unpack how ITOC helped me to mitigate the racially harmful and overwhelming whiteness of teacher education, rewrite my place in the profession, and eventually create systematic shifts to my program and the field. This reflection can inform how research as critical race praxis can advance racial justice within policies and practice, while also being personally healing for scholars of Color with commitments and values that differ from Eurocentric dominant paradigms of research.

Author

• Rita Kohli, University of California - Riverside