Marginalized Toward (In)Effectiveness: Educating While Having (In)Justice on the Heart and Mind

• In Event: Educating While Racially Marginalized: The Teaching Profession as a Site for Care and Activism

Abstract

Objectives
Teacher diversity shortages continue to be documented (Carver-Thomas et al., 2022). Further, the conditions in which marginalized educators exist can constrain their efficacy and vitality (Bristol & Goings, 2019). Importantly, recent studies elucidate how marginalized educators uniquely support historically marginalized students (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2002; Jackson et al, 2014; Pham, 2019). Yet, the literature on the sense-making experiences of these pedagogically effective educators in the process of their work remains scant. This case study seeks to understand how historically marginalized educators navigate teacher-student subject relations towards social justice praxis. By examining these racialized experiences inside often unjust spaces, I explore the syncretic practices involved in leveraging funds of knowledge and identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014) to advance justice commitments inside spaces that are often unjust. Ultimately, the experiences of marginalized educators offer insightful possibilities for a more equitable education system.

Theoretical Framework
This study is guided by multiple frameworks that offer a cogent analysis of the role that race, gender, and social structures play at both individual and societal layers. Leveraging Omi & Winant’s (1994) discussion of race being examined through social-structural and cultural representations necessitates an examination of both forces as co-constitutive. Further, to attend to both the complicated relationship between broader social structures that surround individuals in the education field as well as how those individuals are signified within a long history of evolving racialized identities, I also employ Fine & Weis’ Critical Bifocality (2012). By bringing both frameworks together, I illuminate how individual experiences are mediated and constituted through multiple layers of systems and structures that confer consequential tension on both teachers and students.

Methods and Data
This is a case study of a Black social justice social studies teacher. The study leveraged field observations of teacher interactions, 2 interviews with teacher of focus, and 1 interview with the teacher's direct supervisor. Further, various artifacts reviewed include: screenshots of online lessons/zoom class, pictures of PowerPoint slides, message logs from Zoom, and emails between students and teacher.

Results
Analysis indicates that a complicated array of practices, values, and tensions constitute how the educator-participant traverses her contested professional terrain. Results show a racially marginalized educator navigating the liminal space between her justice-orientation and state-sanctioned job as a public-school educator. Additionally, the case study illuminated ways in which whiteness and racialization travels across relationships, systems, and structures constraining progress towards justice–conferring internal and external tension on the role of the educator. Further, discursive and relational practices–ultimately processed through a space of racial marginalization–mediate the educator away from the higher ideals of a more just education for all.

Scientific Significance
Ultimately, this research contributes to examining how education is “stuck in the halls of liberalism” (Delgado & Stefancic, 2000)–ultimately leaving the racially marginalized and historically resilient educator to refract the tensions inherent in ‘serving two masters’ (Bell, 1976). Qualitative research on the experiences of racially marginalized educators complements the emerging research on how to develop and envision pedagogies and practices that free those teachers to enact just possibilities.

Author

• Aukeem A. Ballard, University of California - Berkeley