“Teach-ivists”: Community Schools as a Setting for “Transformation in Our Society”

• In Event: Community Schools: A Strategy for Supporting and Sustaining (BIPOC) Teachers

Abstract

Although racially diversifying the teacher workforce is a national priority (e.g., US DoE, 2022), few scholars ask BIPOC-identifying educators what enables them to enter and stay in the profession (Will, 2022). In this inquiry, we interviewed 25 BIPOC community school teachers and asked these research questions: What attracts BIPOC to the teaching profession; the schools they served; and why did they stay? We found that enabling teachers to exercise their “political-pedagogical strategy” (Freire, 1998, p. 76) bolsters teacher retention.

For this study, we adopted Nieto’s (2006) lens that “teaching is inherently political work” and that “what teachers say and do every day can have a tremendous impact on the lives of their students” (Nieto, p.1). This framework helped us interpret individual perspectives in creating a composite narrative.

We used data from a research practice-partnership study of two community schools (Authors, unpublished) and collected through individual Zoom interviews in 2022. This is a phenomenological, secondary qualitative analysis of data that remained unexamined in the primary study (Heaton, 2008), built around a participant who used the term “teach-ivists” to describe the faculty at their community school. The research team frequently discussed our positionalities to center and understand this sentiment in our study. For example, two team members never taught in community schools and the others were employed at our research sites. These explicit conversations bracketed our assumptions (Chan et al., 2013) to refocus us on teacher-activism.

Our data included interview transcripts from 25 BIPOC community school teachers. Participants taught various subjects and grade levels from kindergarten to twelfth grade physics and were ethno-racially and gender-diverse. Interviews were 60-90 minutes, semi-structured, and conducted by a university researcher. Transcripts were coded in Dedoose according to our three research questions.

We organize our findings into three themes titled after participant quotes:
1. “What we do in our classroom is only one facet of transformation in our society.” BIPOC teachers were involved in activist movements, and their identities as abolitionists, environmentalists, undocumented immigrants, socialists, etc., primed them to become teachers as a political act.
2. “Incorporate . . . social justice, inclusion, and empowerment [into] the standards.” Curricular autonomy enabled BIPOC teachers to infuse instruction with relevant and consequential topics, and to elicit collective action in service of their communities.
3. “Shared vision at our school about teaching the whole child and social justice.” Collaborating with like-minded educators enabled job and career longevity among our participants. At community schools, BIPOC teachers were “surrounded by people who also do this.”

Findings from BIPOC community teachers bear lessons for educational policymakers, school and district administrators, teacher preparation programs, other BIPOC teachers, and for society writ large, about “what it means to be an educator in a more sustainable context, versus working in isolation” (School 1 participant). Adopting such practices would protect and strengthen the profession and help to actualize the dream of education as the Great Equalizer, especially in the current political climate when teacher voice and movements toward social progress in schools are under attack (Sawchuk, 2021).

Authors

• Tomoko M. Nakajima, University of California - Los Angeles

• Marisa Saunders, University of California - Los Angeles

• Rosa Jimenez, RFK Community Schools

• Darlene Tieu, Los Angeles Unified School District