“It’s Going to Take a Radical Change to the System”: Uplifting Educator Experiences of Navigating Racial Stress and Trauma in Two LA Schools

• In Event: Research in Progress Roundtable Session 3
  In Invited Roundtable: School Context, Teaching and Learning, and Moral Education: Insights from Research on Language, Race, Gender, and Sexuality (Table 18)

Abstract

Youth and adults of colour are significantly impacted by race-based stress through exposure to racism (Anderson & Stevenson, 2019). Schools continue to be contexts of ongoing racialized violence, including the manifestation of racial stress and trauma (RST). For educators and students of colour, there are significant psychological, physical, and spiritual costs to living, working, and studying within spaces that have historical and present indicators of RST across different levels of the school ecology. Through reflexive thematic analysis of focus group data, the current study aims to explore the manifestation of RST in schools, uplifting the experiential knowledge and counternarratives of educators navigating and addressing it in two Los Angeles (LA) schools.

Author

• Sophie D'Souza, Stanford University