Reclaiming Place in Teaching: Future Teacher of Color Spaces as Communities of Resistance

• In Event: Refuge, Resistance, and Reimagination: Racial Affinity Spaces for Educators of Color Across the Pipeline

Abstract

1. Objectives
This study explores Future Teachers of Color (FToC) collectives, which are racial-affinity, critical professional development (CPD) (Kohli, 2018) spaces designed for students of Color in higher education who plan to be teachers. Amidst the whiteness of teacher education, we argue that future teachers of Color need collective and deliberate spaces that center their belonging and ways of knowing in the profession.


2. Theoretical framework
bell hooks’ (2015) concept of communities of resistance— a homeplace amidst domination and oppression, and a homeplace for liberatory struggle and dreaming— described the need and utility of communities of resistance as a homeplace for Black people globally. Yet this framework is also a useful tool for teachers of Color who are navigating an educational system that is operating through whiteness, and has served as a key tool in their retention and thriving in the profession (Kohli, 2021). Being in a community of resistance, thus, enhances teachers’ ability to claim their place in a white dominated educational system and build the futures they want for their communities.

3. Methods and Data sources
We analyze participant observation and interview data to explore the structure, purpose, and impacts of two FToC organizations at universities with racially diverse TEPs, one in California and the other in Washington state. Designed as qualitative research, we engaged in participant observation, where two of the authors created, facilitated, and researched two distinct FToC spaces, and collected data from August 2023 through January 2024 regarding the planning and the meetings themselves. The context was understood and analyzed through observation notes, reflective individual and focus group interviews, qualitative questionnaires, artifacts from meetings, emails with participants, and memoing.
4. Results
The FToCs in this study exemplify how teacher candidates and college students interested in pursuing teaching careers were sustained through the creation of a homeplace. The FToCs served as sacred places for folks of Color to build community, enact joy, and resist whiteness and oppression as part of their CPD as emerging educators. In a profession dominated by whiteness, FToCs provide a space for preservice teachers of Color to build supporting networks rooted in social justice before stepping into classrooms and schools as full time teachers, where they may encounter the stress and hostility of performative racial politics and burnout (Kohli, 2021). Thus, FToCs function as early forms of critical professional development.


5. Scholarly significance
As K-12 schools are challenged with racialized problems such as disproportionality, tracking, suspension, racial bias, etc (Hernández et al., 2022), there have been attempts of recruiting teachers of Color (Najarro, 2023). Yet, there must be more intention to sustain teachers of Color in the profession, beginning with preservice teacher education. FToC is one space TEPs can learn from to create equitable and racially just teacher education that is needed to combat whiteness and enact change to better the experience for future teachers of Colors and their future students

Authors

• Hui-Ling S. Malone, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Andrea Carreno Cortez, University of Washington

• Rita Kohli, University of California - Riverside