“We Don’t Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident:” Negotiating Professional Boundaries In Ethnic Studies Classrooms

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 10. Learning and Teaching in Contentious Times

Abstract

This study examines how Ethnic Studies (ES) teachers negotiate professional boundaries during periods of intensified political contestation and shifting organizational logics. Drawing on five years of qualitative interview and field observation data (2022–2026) from Oeste Unified, a large urban California district with extensive institutional investment in ES, we analyze how teachers recalibrate authority, instructional practice, and professional identity under conditions of civic volatility. We find that while teachers initially interpreted district messaging as authorizing expansive civic engagement aligned with ES’s transformative aims, escalating political tensions reshaped district framing toward administrative neutrality and compliance. In response, teachers increasingly localized authority within their classrooms while continuing to position themselves as institutional actors, selectively absorbing professional risk to preserve the discipline’s intellectual and moral commitments. Over time, this dual positioning heightened ES teachers’ sense of moral responsibility within their professional roles, but simultaneously eroded institutional trust and intensifying role fatigue and organizational estrangement. Our findings suggest that even in high-fidelity reform contexts, political pressure can quietly relocate professional boundaries, shifting responsibility for implementation integrity onto front-line educators.

Authors

• Amy Gong Liu, University of California, Irvine

• Emily K. Penner, University of California-Irvine