Claiming Space to (Re)generate: The Impact of Critical Race Professional Development on Teacher Educators of Color

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

Abstract

1. Objectives
In this collaborative research study, we explore how a racial-affinity critical race professional development (CRPD) space for teacher educators of Color committed to racial justice serves as a “homeplace” of support, healing, and regeneration amidst systemic racism and protections to white comfort in teacher education. Weaving together three counterstories from participants in the CRPD, the authors examine how this space supports teacher educators in recentering communities of Color epistemologies to sustain themselves and reclaim teacher education.

2. Theoretical framework
We use Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Race Professional Development (CRPD) to explore a space that both supports teacher educators of Color through the harm they face and provides room to reclaim and reimagine teacher education. CRT is a framework that originated from critical legal studies to explicitly name institutionalized racism as the root of U.S. racial disparities, including in the education system (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and teacher education (Solórzano, 1995). In this paper, we are guided by CRT to explore the structural racism teacher educators of Color face in teacher education. We also explore the experience of their participation in the Institute for Teachers of Color (ITOC), a CRPD, as an intervention on the racial harm they endure. This space was designed to engage educators of Color with CRT and offer them tools and frameworks to name, navigate, challenge, and replenish from systemic racism in teacher education.


3. Methods and Data sources
Research design, data collection, and analysis were conducted by a collective of teacher educators of Color, who are also researchers that study issues of race, culture, language, and justice. Guided by CRT counter-storytelling methodology (Yosso, 2013), we present three auto-ethnographic reflections of three of the study’s authors. The research was guided by the following research questions: (1) What is the racism that teacher educators of Color face, and how does it impact them? (2) How does attending a racial-affinity CRPD support their personal and professional well-being?


4. Results
Through analysis of the three counter stories. It emerged that: (1) teacher education is imbued with structural racism and protects white comfort through specific forms of racial harm to TEOC, and (2) ITOC as a CRPD intervenes on the impacts of these racialized logics and systems through pathways of acompañamiento (support and solidarity), dynamic healing, and (re)generation. It serves as a “homeplace” where they find acompañamiento (supportive comradeship) to counter the silencing and racial harm they experience and co-create spaces that are affirming, healing, and (re)generative.


5. Scholarly significance
This research offers lessons for supporting educators of Color and concrete practices that can bring us closer to racial justice in teacher education and restoration from harm: (1) decenter whiteness in teacher education; (2) listen, believe, and act when teacher educators of Color share the racism they experience; (3) compensate teacher educators of Color for their expertise and labor; and (4) make teacher education a homeplace for people of Color.

Authors

• Sharon Leathers, Ramapo College

• Diane Nevarez, California State University - Stanislaus

• Nallely Arteaga, California State University - Dominguez Hills

• Rita Kohli, University of California - Riverside