Emotional Job Demands and Barriers of Early Career Alternatively Certified Black Teachers

• In Event: Equity-Focused Scholarship as Emancipatory and Liberatory Advocacy for Women of Color in Academia

Abstract

Purpose
This study explored emotional job demands and barriers of early-career alternatively certified Black teachers (ECACBTs) with five or fewer years of experience. Research questions include:

1. How do early-career alternatively certified Black teachers (ECACBTs) experience emotional demands in professional roles?
2. What barriers do ECACBTs experience while navigating their emotional job demands?

Theoretical Frame & Reflexive Statement
My identity as a Black woman, former alternatively certified teacher and thoughts about leaving the classroom as a result of workplace-related emotional job demands and barriers during my first few years in the classroom motivate this scholarship. My personal and professional commitments to ECACBTs’ emotional job demands and barriers inform my insights and allow for an insider’s perspective to the way that the problems are framed and solutions that are recommended.

In addition, the theory of emotional demand by Tuxford and Bradley (2014) was utilized to explore demands on teachers that “require[s] sustained physical or mental effort” (Demerouti et al., 2001, p. 501, and Näring et al., 2012), in addition to the unique “emotional labor and management of emotions” that Black teachers demonstrate when within white institutional spaces (Evans and Moore, 2015, p. 444).

Method & data sources
In this review of literature, turnover, retention and associated demands among Black teachers was explored. Studies on the emotional job demands and barriers experienced by Black, early-career, and alternatively certified teachers were found using online search engines. The criteria for inclusion were peer reviewed from 2000 to 2021 that had search terms: Black teacher turnover, retention, emotion, and alternative certification. This yielded a sample of 1,746 citations that were sorted and reduced to 20 that were analyzed and synthesized for this review. Data analytic tables to examine which factors influenced Black teacher turnover.

Results
Factors linked to turnover among Black teachers included: Title I-eligible or “hard to staff” schools, high-stakes testing, inadequate support, student teaching experience, or poor working conditions (salary, resources, job security, accountability, classroom autonomy, collegial support, student behavior, parental support, teaching time, and school community) (Young and Easton-Brooks, 2020; Evans and Leonard, 2013; Carver-Thomas and Darling-Hammond, 2017; Campoli and Conrad-Popova, 2017; Farinde-Wu and Griffen, 2019).

Stark and Koslouski (2021) found that participants experienced positive emotions from their students’ tenacity and determination but they experienced negative emotions due to “emotionally tense interactions” connected to perceptions of not adequately addressing their students’ academic challenges (p. 66). Participants communicated that initiatives to support their workplace emotional demands did not sufficiently address their emotional needs.

Significance
These findings have policy and practice implications for recruitment and retention of ECACBTs and sheds light on the workplace emotional demands and barriers that ECACBTs experience. By improving policy and practice to diversify the teaching profession, students from diverse backgrounds will also benefit from having teachers who share their backgrounds.

Author

• Olubunmi Fashusi, Hunter College, CUNY