Research on the attrition of teachers of color suggests that, under certain organizational conditions, they leave teaching at higher rates than other teachers. Additionally, research has identified microaggressions experienced by Black teachers. Building on the literature, we explored how racism and microaggressions may help us understand Black mathematics teachers’ attrition. We designed and administered the Black Teachers of Mathematics Perceptions Survey and found that teachers’ experiences of microaggressions accounted for most of the variance in our modeling of teachers’ thoughts of leaving the profession. These data reveal that anti-Black, racist microaggressions should be addressed as organizational conditions to be mitigated. From a critical quantitative perspective, the data reveal sociocultural and sociopolitical influences that often go unnoticed in large-scale policy work.

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This paper investigates what choices teachers made and what rationales they offered related to the inclusion and exclusion of primary source photographs for a hypothetical unit about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in order to better understand teachers’ curricular decision-making as it relates to representing the histories of oppressed people. Elementary and secondary social studies/history teachers from three different in-service and pre-service cohorts ( n=62) selected and discarded images from a bank of 25 famous and lesser-known photographs. Their decisions and explanations were coded for emergent themes. Findings reveal that these teachers tended to be guided by criteria both technical (how they might teach using a particular photograph) and philosophical (why they might teach about a particular photograph), with narrow definitions of what they deemed relevant and appropriate for their students. Their choices constructed a sanitized narrative of the Civil Rights Movement that largely avoided a discussion of racism.

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The focus of this study is about what lies at the intersection of critical race theory (CRT) and arts-based educational research (ABER). Our goal is to address the emotional terrain about race in schooling, based on the stories of people of color that we transformed into poetry, drama, and performance. In doing so, we examined the usefulness of ABER in the construction of CRT counter-narratives as is called for by critical race theorists.