Designing for Cross-Geographic Solidarities: Teachers of Color Convening to Imagine Possible Futures

• In Event: Teachers of Color Learning, Resisting, and Designing for Equitable Futures

Abstract

This paper discusses themes evidenced from a convening of teachers of color from three different teacher preparation programs located in distinct geographic areas. This social design experiment (Gutiérrez & Jurrow, 2016) was co-designed with teacher partners who began collaborating with us when they were pre-service teachers (PSTs) in their respective programs. Over three years, we worked to leverage their experiences and perspectives to explore how to better prepare them for their future work in linguistically diverse classrooms. We are mindful of common pitfalls that occur in work with members of racialized communities; therefore, we work with teachers to center their experiences without essentializing commonalities or flattening differences. We take a proleptic approach, where co-learning serves as “... mediated representation[s] and nascent experience[s] of the future in the present” (Cole, 1996, p. 184).

At the conclusion of a 3-year study across three sites focusing on the preparation and development of teachers of color, the co-investigators brought 15 of the participants together for a convening on one of the university campuses. The gathering was intentionally designed for building cross-site solidarity, where teachers were able to share their collective frustrations and create a space of mutual affirmation. The design of our respective learning ecologies (at each of the three sites) with an eye towards cultivating solidarity among our respective teachers across the three sites allowed for this coherence and sharing of teaching struggles. Research participants across sites shared some of their challenges as first or second-year teachers, some of which came from their distinct contexts but other challenges were shared across sites, despite different geographic locations. We argue that this convening constituted and resulted in a collective space of solidarity for fellow teachers of color facing similar challenges. We ask: What do racialized PSTs learn over time from participating in learning ecologies designed to explicitly center their experiential knowledge?

We found that in creating this purposefully designed space, convivencia, or being together (Castro, 2025) was central to each respective learning ecology of our three programs. Convivencia included providing time and space to create community, using the Zoom platform to connect across sites and discuss the focus on teachers of color across geographic spaces, and meeting with the other research teams over the academic year. The care we provided for the teacher participants also included respecting their safety concerns regarding COVID-19 at our convening. The collective co-constructed space provided a place where participants expressed anger and frustration, but also endearment, sympathy, and mutual affirmation. Providing food was important for convivencia to “break bread” and deepen our collective commitments. Participants trusted that they could be present in that space and co-created norms to be enacted. One of the common concerns coming up for the new teachers of color was experiencing surveillance rather than support from administrators.

While recognizing that not all teachers of color are racially, culturally, linguistically, and even politically aligned, nor should they be placed with the burden of teaching others, teacher education programs can engage in culturally sustaining practices that validate their cultural historical pasts, and design for their future civic participation.

Authors

• Danny C. Martinez, University of California - Davis

• P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Ramon Antonio Martinez, Stanford University