🎥 Teacher Truth Perspectives: Our Resident Research Experts in Conversation
During our recent Teacher Truth Perspectives Launch Party, we had the opportunity to witness multiple powerful testimonies and exchanges. One insightful dialogue was between Dr. Tameka McGlawn, strategic research advisor to BlackFemaleProject, and Dr. Britte Haugan Cheng, Teacher Truth survey lead. Read their exchange to gain insights about what surprises, concerns, and hopes Dr. Cheng found in the data.
Review data findings and other view other Teacher Truth artifacts at www.teachertruth.org.
Dr. McGlawn: Could you share with the beloved community here: as you were going through the experience, what surprised you? What concerned you? And what did you have hope for?
Dr. Cheng: Well, I think the findings are not a surprise. We know these findings, and yet, as we put them together, the power of them continued to surprise me. Every day we would sit down and talk about, analyze, write about, communicate to the team what we were learning; it was always a journey of trying to figure out how to relate emotionally to them, and what our role was, what our responsibility was to those findings. So that's just what my experience has been.
The strategies that we read and heard about from participants have been the things that the Teacher Truth team does so beautifully. I have hope that there are organizations and networks that can make those strategies more a part of the day-to-day of our educators, of our Black educators, of our educators of color. I do have hope for that, and I see the commitment of folks when I talk about these findings. Every single person I talk to is down. They want to know how to help; they want to know how to get involved; they want to know, “Who funded that? Let's go talk to those people again and see how we can support the work coming out of Teacher Truth.”
I think the question of our responsibility to our survey participants and to our teachers here is a deep question and I'm very excited to hear thoughts about how we can support them and what we can do.
Dr. McGlawn: Wonderful. I appreciate your characterization of what it took to do the analysis, while standing in a very unique role. I mean, traditionally, when we think of how researchers function and the way that they're typically trained, rarely do they characterize those who are contributing the data in the way that you just did, let alone the analytics and the process that it takes to take numerical and narrative experiences in such a calculated and intentional way, while also holding the humanity of each of the teachers, each of the contributing educators that participated in the survey.
And so, before we transition, I also want to ask for your insights. What are some of the ways that we can think about a research agenda that builds on what we've learned so far in the power and the beauty of these stories, as well as these findings that for me ache at the heart of the matter? Having been Black as long as I've known myself and in this work, the findings were not surprising to me, and often those strategies that you presented that were really a constellation of how individuals find within themselves the emotional-mental-spiritual-physical fortitude to be in these spaces that aren't necessarily welcoming, loving, embracing, and joyful leads me to deeper questions about how do we use this research and the findings to propel a research agenda that deepens some of those strategies in meaningful ways for the individual as well as the systems in which they serve?
Dr. Cheng: Amen and that's exactly it. We have to take these strategies, we have to formalize them, and we have to make them part of professional practice. I'd love to talk with the California Teachers Association. I'd love to talk with the California Science Teachers Association, the California Math Teachers Association, and figure out how our professional networks can start to understand the importance of this work, and make it more clear that it has to be part of the institution's responsibility as well to embody these strategies in the day-to-day. It has to be part of the work that gets done, and it's going to have to be forever. This is not a strategy that gets put into place, we do for a couple years because it's our DEI work this year, and now we're going to move on to something else. This has to be a constant sensemaking process that our educators can engage in together to make sense of what's going on in their classrooms and in their personal workplace as well.
Dr. McGlawn: Beautiful. Thank you for that, and for the confirmation of the self-to-system transformation and that the work has to live on all sides, 360. So rich. So meaningful.