Healing Partners: A Story of University Faculty, Teacher Mentors-Mentees, and a School District

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 4:20 pm Four Seasons Ballroom 4
  In Roundtable Session: Re-membering Pedagogy: Mourning, Grieving and Healing as Part of Renewal (Table 1)

Abstract

Purpose
This proposal shares a multi-year partnership between university faculty working with BIPOC mentors and mentees and district staff in a large urban district in the Midwest. As a collective of teacher educators, we reflect on our racial, gendered, and classed identities and how that translates to our interdisciplinary conversations with teacher mentors as we center racial literacy in the digital age to rethink curricula and pedagogy (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021). We share experiences that blend and bind us together in ways that lead to collective well-being and healing, as university faculty members working alongside each other with teacher mentors and mentees. We highlight a commitment to care that gives space for the complexity of identities and nuanced ways of being, asking: What happens when we place healing at the center of our partnerships and the practices in which we engage?

Theoretical Framework
This study draws on scholars whose work focuses on revolutionary healing, liberatory practices, and collective well-being (Boggs, 2012; Lorde, 2007; hooks, 1994; Ahmed, 2014, Paige & Woodland, 2023; Hemphill, 2024). We agree with Boggs, who calls on us to engage in critical connections, and hooks (1994), who states, “The moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others” (pp. 289- 299).

Method
This interpretive qualitative study (Erickson, 1986) is based on our interactions, observations, and reflections of a multi-year partnership between teacher mentors and mentees, district employees, and university faculty.

Data Sources
Data from program resources, interviews, emails, and Zoom calls were coded using thinking with theory (Jackson & Mazzei, 2022) to make meaning of university faculty members, teacher mentors and mentees, and district staff coming together to change structures, processes, and practices that, in turn, changed them.

Findings
Preliminary results from this study reveal layers of healing that took shape among university faculty, with district staff and university faculty, and among mentors and mentees. Emerging results show 1) critical online spaces are primed for collective healing when educators come together with a focus on remapping relationships, 2) processes and procedures at district offices can be geared towards humanizing partners, and 3) moving away from product-mentality helps us to stay present in the moment.

Significance
Implications highlight how intentional reflexive community and partnership allow educators to center humanizing each other and enact critical feminist pedagogies for collective well-being where empathy and connection become the tenets on which we move toward future dreaming to heal.

Authors

• Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr, University of Minnesota

• Jana Lo Bello Miller, University of Minnesota

• Stephanie Rollag Yoon, Minnesota State University - Mankato