The Role and Design of Racial Affinity Groups in Supporting, Retaining, and Repositioning Teachers of Color

• In Event: AERA Graduate Student Research-in-Progress Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Understanding the Experiences of Teachers of Color (Table 9)

Abstract

Being a teacher of Color is a racialized experience. Teachers of Color experience isolation, burnout, and racial battle fatigue. Racial affinity groups for teachers of Color can support and retain teachers of Color. Affinity groups provide collective critical race spaces to humanize, heal, support one another, and work towards racial justice. They are powerful opportunities for teachers of Color to be repositioned into a space of knowledge, community, racial justice, and healing-centered activism. This study aims to understand the role and design of racial affinity groups in supporting and repositioning teachers of Color. The design includes who the affinity groups serve, the ideological underpinnings, and what actions the group takes to support teachers of Color.

Author

• Emily Dech, University of California - Riverside