DR. MCGLAWN:
We encourage you to continue to reach out to Teacher Truth, to Black Teacher Project, to BlackFemaleProject, and use the communities that have formed that are in service to liberation and love and joy and trust and places and spaces to come and just be celebrated, be seen, and when necessary, to lay your burdens down.
DR. MICIA MOSELY:
We would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge the context that we're in, in terms of being in multiple global pandemics. Most of us were prepared to teach and to lead when the world was very different than it is now. So our notion of what we're helping to heal people from has also shifted. Yes, we're helping people heal from oppression that has been around since the founding of this country, but also from the recent collective trauma. So for folks who are choosing to show up now and engage as educators, I see an opportunity. And I'm excited for this next phase of the research for Teacher Truth to say, "Right now—not 10 years ago—right now, this is what's happening." I believe in Teacher Truth as a real opportunity for us to shine a light on possibility and not lose the hope that we can change, as opposed to, "Let's just make these Black teachers feel better." That's not what we're up to. We're up to helping sustain Black teachers to lead transformation, which is very different than just having a long career.
DR. CHENG:
What I'm hearing from the past two years of this research is that people already know what it is they need. We just have to listen and make sure that they can be more formalized and that they're more available. And that it's part of school districts and state administrations’ job to sustain the workforce. Affinity groups are part of it, but it's a starting place for other solutions, other supports, other kinds of wisdom to get shared that can then be brought out.
DR. CHAMBERS
What we heard in those focus groups was, “Wow, outside of Black Teacher Project, I don't have another space like this. I don't have a space where I can come and actually just share what I've gone through and then realize that my colleagues are also experiencing this.”
DR. MCGLAWN:
I often encourage people to think about the fact that people in positions of power, authority, privilege, and decision-making may not all be effective as leaders. So when we say leadership, I always wanna make sure we're being mindful of individuals who may be in those positions, but they are not leading towards liberation. They're not even interested in it. When we deconstruct some of the lessons we're learning from Black educators, they are grappling with questions like, where am I positionally located inside of this ecosystem? What's my sphere of influence and what can I control and what decisions can I make that can influence what happens in my classroom? How do we look at liberatory influences at multiple levels within the system? Because the system isn't designed to be liberated. When we think about acknowledging affinity groups, when we think about places like Black Teacher Project, when we think about beloved communities that adrienne maree brown and others are creating, how can we be responsive? And what is the role of Teacher Truth inside of that responsiveness, knowing that this is the water that many Black educators in California and nationwide are swimming in?
DR. CHAMBERS:
I just think about humanizing teaching in a way that gives teachers access and opportunity to share the solutions to these challenges that they've named. We've heard from them through the survey; we've heard from them through the teacher interviews and the focus groups, and they know what the solutions are. So it's about providing that platform and space for them to communicate their solutions, and then for us to do it justice as we lift it up to leaders so that implementation can happen and be sustained over time.
DR. CHENG:
I think I speak for Dr. McGlawn and myself when I say we wanna take on that whole system. That's what we love to do. We wanna get in there, we wanna find those levers. The system doesn't know. The system doesn't have the wisdom. The people in the system have the wisdom, as Aasha said. Bringing that up to our conversations with leadership, with the data that we've collected, with the strong, rich, deep, amazing stories that are collected by Teacher Truth is a start to bring up what we're learning and put it back into the system with folks who are doing the work with the bright spots, with the champions who are doing the work at the leadership level. The data taught us that putting resources into the system isn't the thing. Putting resources into sustaining people and practices is what is a next step that hasn't really been part of the conversation yet. You can put all the resources out there, but even people with resources are being pushed away from actually doing the work by all of those people that were exerting pressure in the system.
DR. AASHA JOSHI:
”Reading through the focus groups was incredibly powerful. They were really in-depth, layered stories of everyday racism that Black teachers endure. And then they were powerful narratives of community. When teachers were asked, "How did you sustain yourself?," more often than not, the answer was: other people. Other Black people. Other Black teachers. Other Black staff. Knowing the power of community and the power of those bonds and the power of professional community is incredible. Teachers are forming their own communities within their spaces. When we think about ourselves within systems, one person alone cannot change it. One person in community can at least sustain themselves, but what does it mean to actually then change and thrive is a hard question. And I don't think there are any easy answers. We have to acknowledge the complexity, and then move forward from there, rather than thinking about the education system as, “Oh, we can fix this, we can fix that,” instead recognizing that it is an entire system of people—not cogs, but people. At every single piece of this is people, and that comes with complexity.”
DR. CHENG:
We did a follow-up survey of those who responded in 2021. We sent them another survey, and there's lots more to report on the survey, but in light of the supports that Dr. Chambers was just talking about, there are actually reports of quite a bit of access to supports, the largest being professional affinity groups, which 58% of respondents said they had access to. There was also about half who said that they had access to ongoing systems of mental health supports and access to culturally competent mental health therapists that they also took advantage of. There were other resources that were available, but a lot of folks are not necessarily able to take advantage of them. And we need to dig in a little bit more to figure out why they weren't able to do that. But what I'd really like to show you is that we also asked participants what kind of interactions help sustain them in their capacity to do their job. And what you really see is that social friends and acquaintances is 65%, and educators is 61%. These are social interactions that folks are having that are keeping them sustained. Friends and acquaintances outside the classroom, but also in the workplace.
DR. E’RIKA CHAMBERS: The first week of August 2022, we held five focus groups where we worked with Black Teacher Project fellows. We captured their stories of racism, but then we really wanted to highlight the things that they were doing to thrive, the things that they needed to thrive in the profession. We asked them about what they recommended for informal and formal resources. Many of them shared the informal resources that they had access to, which many times were affinity groups. So finding other teachers that look like them at the school site, and then also organizations like Black Teacher Project, which provide the resources, the training, the tools that Black teachers need to be successful and thrive at what they do. Right now there's a shortage of teachers, but they continue to show up for our students and for themselves and do their very best.”
Read MoreDR. BRITTE CHENG:
90% of the 206 educators who responded to the survey talked about having experiences that they associated with racist beliefs on the part of their colleagues. 84% said that they felt isolated in the workplace because of their race. 83% said that they had had experiences of their colleagues demonstrating fear of them based on their race. And I should just remind everyone that what we asked folks was what experiences they'd had in the past two years. So this is not in their lifetime. This is not over their long careers. This was in the past two years. 82% said that they had experienced racism in the form of being alienated and ignored in the workplace, or having someone make a comment about who they are based on their perceived intellectual capacity as in relation to their race. And then 63% of the respondents reported an experience of racism that was connected to sexual stereotypes and inappropriate sexual behaviors that they perceived as being connected to their race. 52% of the folks who said that they had experienced this kind of racism were female, and 74% were male. And 70% of male respondents said that they had experienced some sort of sexually inappropriate behavior or some sort of comment related to a sexual stereotype.
We were trying to capture the stories and the sense of what had gone on during COVID, at that point, and how intersectional and how prevalent it is. And it's something everyone I think knows, but to really see it in the numbers never ceases to take my breath away. We compared these numbers to the experiences of racism and oppression that others had reported in other labor sectors. In our survey, the experiences were double what we'd seen in other research of folks in other sectors. We're acknowledging the experience that the participants are having, and the breadth of experiences, the range and the frequency and the everyday nature of these experiences that are really creating deep exhaustion for Black educators.
Read MoreDR. TAMEKA MCGLAWN:
“We've been thinking about Teacher Truth and how to be supportive of teachers and educators who are navigating tremendous dynamics of oppression, pain, trauma, loss, grief. Centering human-centered design thinking and liberatory design practices in our work with Teacher Truth was a way to really try and examine how Black educators were experiencing race and racism in the workplace, both inside of the schoolhouse and the district, or in the context of education at large. And most importantly, it created a way to engage in learning about their experiences that would simultaneously honor their experiences. We really centered on elevating voices as we were also exploring how educators—how the teachers, counselors, paraprofessionals, or those who serve in different ways—are navigating. How do they protect themselves while also trying to center self-care and then even move into healing? So much of what we experience as Black educators—those of us who have been in service to other people's children—there's so many dimensions of the cost and the impact of what it means to be in this space. We have been humbled by the lessons we've been learning on so many different levels because of the deep pain that many are experiencing.”