(Un)packing For My Return Home: An investigation of motivation for mobility from an African American woman U.S. Teacher

• In Event: Resilient voices: gender, race, and place across the African diaspora

Proposal

African American teachers are in great demand. Yet, policy interventions that emphasize recruitment, retention, and diversification appear to be ineffective as African American teachers remain significantly underrepresented in United State’s (U.S.) schools. Evidence of a significant exodus of African American schoolteachers from U.S. classrooms can be traced to historical race laws and policies connected to Brown vs. Board of Education. This exodus continues today in dynamics such as low teacher pay and hostile work environments within the profession. African American teachers are being pushed out of U.S. schools and some are instead opting for teaching positions abroad. I am a teacher that chose the latter.

I use a qualitative design encompassing autoethnography, anthropoetry, and journaling to investigate my research. Autoethnography refers to writing about the personal and its relationship to culture (Ellis, 2004). It requires that I make myself the object of my research while writing in the first person, to focus on a general case that has extended over time (Ellis, 2004). For this, I utilized an extensive library of personal journal entries dating back as far as the age of 12 years. Focusing on my personal and professional experiences in U.S. society, I disclose hidden details of my private life and investigate the emotional experience of doing so. I created new journal entries detailing my experience of reviewing this personal history. I was able to detach myself from the words and create a safe space to relive my encounters. There is a vulnerability that is required to do this work. I relied on anthropoetry for this. Rosaldo (2013) developed anthropoetry to render the complexities of dwelling in a particular space to interpret the feelings of the researcher and those involved. The details of my poem Home allowed me to expand the complexity of the world that I was conditioned within and the world that I became a guest within.

After working two years in a midwestern school district, I left the U.S. education system and spent four-and-a-half years teaching abroad. Centering Dillard’s (2002) Walking ourselves back home: The education of teachers with/in the world, this study is an investigation to understand my personal motivations to leave the U.S. education system and pursue teaching opportunities in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. While teachers play an essential role in the U.S. education system, TIME’s recent article reminded the nation that U.S. teachers are suffering. One confessed, “I work three jobs and donate blood plasma to pay the bills, this is what it’s like to be a teacher in America” (Reilly, 2018). One may wonder what it’s like to be a teacher in America and furthermore, why are teachers remaining in a system of which they are suffering?

African American teachers experience a particular type of suffering. Kohli (2018) suggests when isolated and surrounded by homogeneous teacher colleagues, teachers of color and specifically African American teachers, are systematically pushed out of the profession due to negative racialized experiences. Evidence of this push-out is found in the 10% decrease of African American teachers in U.S. schools between 1987 and 2012. As the teacher workforce became more diverse and teachers of color accounted for 20% of the teacher workforce, the percentage of African American teachers decreased from 7.5% to 6.5% (Ingersoll & Merrill, 2017). African American teachers are entering the U.S. education system, however, for various reasons, they are exiting in disproportionate numbers.

Dillard (2002) suggests a need for educators to reflect on their lives as it reveals the embodiment of who we believe ourselves to be. I investigate my personal motivations for departing the U.S. education system through two questions. First, why did I choose to leave the U.S. education system and more broadly, U.S. society, in order to pursue teaching opportunities abroad? Second, how did race, gender, class, and nationality impact my motivation to migrate? Intersectionality allows me to engage in “how differences such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and age intersect”in my life (Beck, 1992). I reflect on my embodied identities, being African American (race and nationality), a woman (gender), from a working-class family (class), and being an educator (teacher). Intersectionality is used as a model to understand, analyze, and engage with my identity and otherness, as it is constantly evolving through engagements and relationships within society (Bhopal & Preston, 2012).

Double-dutch is used as a metaphor to “double-dutch” through my personal and professional experiences. Double-dutch requires two turners. Two people stand in front of each other, holding two ropes, while simultaneously turning the ropes with their wrists. Swinging the ropes in an inward circular motion, while moving the hips from side to side, allows the ropes to swing but to never touch. Double-dutch describes my four themes of race and gender, race and class, race and teaching, and race and nationality. Note that race is always the first rope, and modifies the significance of the second. I possess a historical type of social conditioning, which has been validated by U.S. society with emphasis on a traumatic past embedded in racism and dual identity (Fanon, 1967; Dunbar, 1968; Du Bois, 1994). Still, I felt no sense of belonging to a society that I assumed I should belong to. Poignantly stated, I was “the black American fighting a schizophrenic crusade, to get into the society and to radically alter it, both at the same time” (Dunbar, 1968, p. 14). It was my realization of my intersectionality that rendered me unable to fully belong within American society, that enabled my decision to migrate.

This challenge to “walk back into the inner and outer communities that I call home” (Dillard, 2002) developed into a narrative reconstruction of diary entries. I recognized my fear of reliving these experiences but also the exhilaration of the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of my motivations to leave the U.S. I faced loneliness and vulnerability and a resistance to expose my family, friends, and others involved. My findings incorporate this internal dialog, which I anticipate sharing at this conference.

References

Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.

Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well. USA: Basic Books.

Bhopal, K., & Preston, J. (2012). Intersectionality and ''race'' in education. New York: Routledge.

Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory an introduction (3rd ed)
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Dillard, C. B. (2002). Walking ourselves back home: The education of teachers with/in the world. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(5), 383–392. https://doi.org/10.1177/002248702237393.

Du, Bois. W. E. B. (1994). The souls of Black folk. New York: Dover Publications.

Dunbar, E. (1968). The black expatriates: A study of American Negroes in exile. London: Gollancz.

Ellis, C. (2003). The call of ethnographic stories. The ethnographic 1,24-57.

Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin, White masks. Grove Press: New York, NY.

Ingersoll, R., and Merrill, L. (2017). A quarter century of changes in elementary and secondary teaching force: From 1987 to 2012. Statistical analysis report (NCES 2017-092). U.S. Department of Education. Washington DC: National Center for Education Statistics. Retrieved from http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch.

Pryor, E. (2016). Colored travelers: Mobility and the fight for citizenship before the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Reilly, K. (2018, September). This is what it’s like to be a teacher in America. TIME. Retrieved from http://time.com/longform/teaching-in-america/.

Rosaldo, R. (2014). The day of Shelly’s death. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Author

• Tiffany Lachelle Smith, University of Minnesota