“Born under the rising sign of social justice”: Becoming an Anticolonial Scholar-Educator

• In Event: Rooted in Relations: Tracing Connections Across Women of Color Methodologies to Reimagine Educational Justice

Abstract

Teacher professional development (PD) is often imagined as a solution to intervene into the ways in which teacher education –and the broader system of K-12 schooling— centers whiteness and negatively impacts educational opportunities and experiences of students of color (Leonard & Woodland, 2022; Parkhouse et al., 2023; Picower, 2011 & 2015; Riordan et al., 2019; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Love, 2019). However, scholars have shown that even equity focused PD does not interrupt and may, in fact, reproduce the same patterns within the profession (Fernandez, 2019). This critical, anti-colonial, descriptive case study explored how a year-long professional development program impacted teachers’ classroom practices. It documented the nuanced and intentional pedagogical, curricular, and mentorship approaches that were key hallmarks of a critical, racial-justice program led by teacher credential faculty facilitators in its 8th year of partnership with a local California district.

As a classroom educator for over 15 years and while a graduate student, I was consistently asked to reflect deeply on my own story into social justice. While it was hard to pinpoint a particular moment, I wholeheartedly believe I was “born under the rising sign of social justice” (Tuck & Yang, 2018, p. 1). As Tuck & Yang (2018) encapsulate, “the pull toward working for justice can feel transhistorical, like you heard it whispered by ancestors or felt it transmitted back to you from a future-in-waiting. It may feel immensely strong and encompassing, like gravity, both planetary and personal, all at once” (p. 1). Raised by parents whose lives were impacted and torn apart by war, and social and political strife, there was never a time when we did not have conversations in our household around systemic injustices. And even during times of silence, when these injustices were not spoken of aloud, my body felt with every fiber of its being the impact of experiencing one’s humanity being questioned and trampled on.

In this presentation, I share about my own formation in becoming a critical classroom educator and how this is deeply connected to my commitments as a scholar. My experiences – a daughter of war refugees whose parents were doctors in their native home of Afghanistan, raised in the Bay Area alongside many communities in Title 1 schools, witnessing the subtle and explicit discrimination expressed against my mother, and then hearing the same deficit thinking from preservice white teachers – make me hyper aware of how people of color in general are treated, of how students of color are treated in the K-12 system, and how difficult, and oftentimes dangerous, it is to implement, and teach others how to implement, socially just and anti-racist teaching practices.

I likewise reflect on the impact of not seeing my own cultural ways of knowing reflected in the critical research methodologies. Despite this absence of a straightforward methodological path, I share how my experiences as a daughter, teacher, mother and scholar informed my process of finding a methodological approach through the lens of anticolonial stance and through an ethics of answerability (Patel, 2016).

Author

• Freshta Gran Guzman, Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District