Race (Un)Awareness: Immigrant Early Childhood Teachers and Self-Identity

• In Event: Transnational Teachers' Experiences and Identities

Abstract

Eight percent of full-time teachers in the U.S. (i.e. 256,000 teachers) are immigrant and transnational teachers (Kena et al., 2014; McFarland et al., 2017; Startz, 2017).To understand how these teachers negotiate their own identities so that they can in turn support the identity development of young children in their care, it is essential for teachers to be very cognizant of their backgrounds and implicit/explicit biases.
This qualitative, interview study features the stories of two South-Asian teachers who have been teaching in U.S. early childhood classrooms for over 15 years. The data include how they are still developing their racial identity, being a teacher of color in the U.S., and how they are negotiating the spaces of race-awareness, and race evasiveness.

Author

• Ayesha Rabadi-Raol, Sonoma State University
  Presenting Author