Widening Our Aperture: The Impact of Race and Racism on Black Women Teachers' Practice

• In Event: A Nuanced Portrait of the Demographic Divide: Resisting Monolithic Representations of Teachers of Color

Abstract

In this paper we widen our aperture, illuminating the experiences that three Black women teachers bring to their teaching practice. Our study is nested within a larger ethnography that is focused on the school-family relationships in a racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse school in a mid-sized midwestern city. Here, we focus on the experiences, assets, and struggles of three Black women teachers, and the ways that their experiences enable and/or constrain their propensities and abilities to take up race explicitly in their teaching practice. We ask: How do experiences of racism impact how Black women teachers address issues of race and (in)equity across various school-related contexts (eg., school-level practices, classroom pedagogy, parent interactions)?

Our project rests upon the assumption of critical race (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) and racial stratification theorists (Bonilla-Silva, 2010; Omi & Winant, 2014) that race is a central component (Burton, et al., 2010) of the social organization of schools (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 2006; Lewis & Diamond, 2015). Of particular importance is the theorization that the instantiation of race in institutional policies, practices, and interactions produces and rationalizes racial categories and inequalities (Lewis, 2003).

Ethnography enables examination of “how the social world is constructed by people, how they are continually striving to make sense of the world, and assigning meanings and interpretations” to bodies, events, and practices (Woods, 2011, p.2). The site for our study, an ethnography, constitutes a critical case (Flyvbjerg, 2006) as the demographics of the school and the heterogeneity of feeder neighborhoods represent a microcosm of the diversity that currently marks the U.S. In addition to serving African-American, Latinx-American, Asian-American, Arab-American, White, and multi-ethnic families, 35% of the students are low-income, and 17% are English-language-learners.

Leveraging grounded theory (Glaser & Straus, 2009) and iterative comparative analysis (Corbin & Straus, 2008), we analyze the data to determine how personal and professional experiences of individual and systemic racism affect three Black women teachers, and impact the ways in which they teach students and partner with families. We investigate the similarities and differences across these women’s experiences; and when and how they take up race in their teaching.

We find that these three women share common identities and contexts (generation, race, gender, school context) yet, each draw from their experiences with racism in different ways – either by explicitly naming, pushing back, and disrupting racist school-based practice or by insisting that race should not guide their focus and in fact that it is critical not to attend to race. This perspective, for example, was embodied by Michelle, a woman whose experience of harassment at the hands of police officers informed her insistence on a colorblind approach.

Systemic racism thrives and affects how teachers address racism in classrooms. This raises an important question: How can we widen our aperture (Hammond, 2015) to recognize teachers’ racialized experiences and engage their unique insights and contributions to teaching? Our study adds critical nuance to understandings of what teachers of color bring to the field of education, given their own personal experiences with racism.

Authors

• Simona Goldin, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Debi Khasnabis, University of Michigan

• Jennifer Sawada Vega, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Ebony Perouse-Harvey, Southern Connecticut State University