Imbalanced Promises and Surveillance Fails: A Dialogue Between Teachers and Their Struggle for Care

• In Event: Teacher Trauma and the Struggle for Self-Care and Well-Being

Abstract

Teacher preparation and professional development stress culturally-relevant and trauma-informed practices in the classroom while the realities of teaching require or pressure early career teachers to acquiesce towards oppressive and dehumanizing practices (Ginwright, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Using BlackCrit (Dumas and ross 2016), politics of desirability and respectability (Harrison, 2021; Strings 2019; Higginbotham, 1993), Black women’s rage (Cooper, 2018) as theoretical framings, we examine the illusion between these ideologies. Using letter writing as a catalyst for connection, two Black women educators discuss what it means to teach Black children in a climate of hostility. We ask: How do we learn to teach in an environment where Black children are despised? This study challenges educators to consider the impact of complicity.

Authors

• Stephanie P. Jones, Grinnell College

• Madison Wardlaw, School District of Philadelphia