Now, Who Will the White Girls Learn From!? Toward Affinity Spaces for Teachers of Color

• In Event: Writing Against Racism: BIPOC Faculty and Graduate Students in Teacher Education Imagining New Pathways for Collective Justice

Abstract

Introduction
This autoethnographic study draws on the seemingly irreconcilable differences in the critical, historical, and sociocultural intersections of consciousness between one Black doctoral-student-teacher-educator-motherscholar (the author) and her white pre-service teachers. Responding to the racialized consciousness of both teacher and student, Audre Lorde (2012, p. 116) challenges them to choose “each other and the edge of each other’s battles,” recognizing that “the war is the same, if we lose, someday, women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet, if we win there is no telling.” Grounded in Black feminist thought (BFT), critical race (CRT), and standpoint theories (ST), this paper explores what lies at “the edge of each other’s battles.” As such, the main concern of this paper involves disentangling and reassembling what at first sight might appear as the incommensurable differences between seemingly different bodies and ways of knowing in a teacher education classroom. Building on knowledge in the field of the teacher education research that already exists, but moving toward a new approach for troubling and unsettling the entanglements of embodied race and racism in the academy, this paper spotlights a path toward illuminating hope and shared humanity in education spaces.

Findings
Data for this study consists of field notes and journaling notes taken after class. The findings of this autoethnographic study reveal moments towards a collective winning through the author’s use of engaged and embodied pedagogies (hooks, 2014). This work considers and addresses some specific barriers, but it also engages with several hopeful reimagining(s) of what it might mean to acknowledge our emotions, embodiments, and the convergence of our humanity for both the researcher and the students in this class

Significance
As this study was conducted at large university in the Midwest, one that produces a large number of future classroom teachers for urban schools, the findings have much to offer those interested new understandings of instructor/ student interactions in teacher education. While previous research has highlighted some of the experiences of doctoral students (instructors) of color, much remains unexamined concerning the complex intersections of identities, emotions, and ontologies in these spaces. This study, an autoethnography, responds to the urgent need to address the paucity of research in these areas by providing new insights into the use of embodied pedagogies in the classroom as a way of creating a pathway toward a more humane experience for both students and instructors of color.

Author

• Bisola A. Wald, University of Minnesota