School as a Battlefield: Unpacking Minoritized Teachers' Intersecting Identities

• In Event: Teacher Identity and the Contemporary Development of Teachers in Educational Systems Globally

Abstract

Marginalization and inequities plague our educational systems. Teachers whose social identities are minoritized tend to face the brunt of these pressures, which threaten their professional development (Delpit, 2012; Schutz et al., 2020). Thus, it is imperative that we move beyond just acknowledging the inequities to begin taking active steps toward addressing both the overt and tacit structures that promote them. Our paper focuses on intersecting identities among minoritized teachers’ professional, racial, gender, and sexual identities—an area scant in the educational research literature.

Teacher identity research has often focused on ‘role’ identity in the profession—placing greater attention on what teachers know and what they do over who they are as individuals. As such, existing research focuses primarily on pre-service teachers’ teacher education experiences and practicing teachers’ work in K-12 classrooms. Teachers’ social identities tend sometimes to be overlooked, despite acknowledgement of the need to investigate the personal construction of social identities within the profession (AuthorA., 2004; Day & Gu, 2010). What has been missing is a close examination of teachers’ social identity markers, especially those linked to power structures, the intersections among them, and how those markers interact with and influence teachers’ professional identity construction and enactment (Cho et al., 2013; Crenshaw, 1991).

When school norms and society’s master narrative about teachers are not aligned with their sense of self, school becomes a battlefield where minoritized teachers consistently experience microaggressions, implicit or explicit exclusion, and invalidation of their experiences by stakeholders (Endo, 2015; Endo et al., 2010; Sue, 2010). This tension is exacerbated for teachers who identify with multiple marginalized groups (e.g., an Hispanic transgender teacher). Thus, our study pursued the following questions: (1) In what ways do minoritized teachers’ social identities intersect? (2) In what ways do minoritized teachers’ intersecting identities influence construction and enactment of teacher identity?

Four teachers in the United States who lie at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities participated in 85-115 minute, semi-structured interviews. They identified as (i) Latino gay, (ii) Latinx lesbian, (iii) Bisexual Hispanic, and (iv) Asian-Hawaiian transgender male. Our data analysis found that participants’ teacher, racial, gender, and sexual identities were not seamlessly integrated. Being Latino/a/x or Asian/Hawaiian was often encultured in their home and communities, which was often diametrically opposed to being gay or transgender. Thus, they experienced internalized homophobia or “feeling guilty” about not conforming to normative gender or sexual identities. This internal struggle was exacerbated when school culture and policies (overtly and covertly) oppressed their identities by limiting curriculum choices, overburdening them as the “diversity leader” in the system, excluding them from collegial networks, and disempowering their transactions in identifiable ways. Concurrently, however, their struggle made them more reflective about prejudices, implicit biases, and various assumptions they made about their students, thereby influencing how they communicated with students, chose classroom activities, and interacted with parents. In our paper, we discuss the complex implications of these composite, yet fragmented identities on teachers’ sense of belonging in schools, classroom practices, and interactions with stakeholders.

Authors

• Ji Y. Hong, University of Oklahoma

• Dionne Cross Francis, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Casey Violette Haskins, University of Oklahoma

• Kelly Chong, University of Oklahoma

• Jessica Dickinson

• Weverton Ataide Pinheiro, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Kathryn Habib, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill