Cultivating sacred spaces: a racial affinity group approach to support critical educators of color

The Retention of Educators of Color Amidst Institutionalized Racism

“…Racial activism stress reflects the level of stress that EOCs feel raising diversity issues in their school. This variable relationship parallels research (Burciaga & Kohli, 2018; Pour-Khorshid, 2018) which states that EOC are committed to the profession and to their students, even when their efforts in promoting social justice and equity in their schools are overlooked. These data are especially important given that EOC often work in schools with greater numbers of students of color (US DOE, 2016).…”

Teacher Leadership for Love, Solidarity, and Justice: The Invisibilized and Contested Practices of Teacher Leaders of Color

“…Recruiting teacher leaders of Color for justice-oriented purposes while preserving white colonial normativity demobilizes and sabotages ongoing efforts to engage radical social change, spiritually murdering (as cited by Love, 2019) and robbing teacher leaders of Color, particularly women of Color, of their dignity and humanity as radical change agents. In fact, participation in official and formal teacher leadership roles can heighten the risk of racialized trauma; Lucia's cognitively and socioemotionally dissonant leadership experiences further illuminate why teacher leaders of Color are pushed out of institutionalized roles, work at the margins, and need critical racial affinity spaces to heal (Lac & Diamond, 2019;Pour-Khorshid, 2018). In other words, efforts to recruit and retain a diverse teacher leader population are insufficient and incomplete endeavors for educational justice: doing so without transformation of racist, capitalist, cis-heteropatriarchal ideologies, policies, structures of domination and control can result in serious racialized psychological, spiritual, and traumatic consequences for teacher leaders of Color, while simultaneously reproducing injustice.…”

“…Inclusive of (in)formal and (un)official titles through which they are (un)recognized as leaders, teacher leaders of Color still persist, challenge, and build power for educational justice in counterspaces and in the margins of racialized schooling spaces. Teacher leaders of color agentively co-construct the teacher preparation they deserve (Lee & Pham, in press), organize for their own learning (Navarro, 2018), and develop their own self and collective healing (Pour-Khorshid, 2018;Pour-Khorshid et.al., in press). Considering that the potential for and learning of counterhegemonic leadership primarily occurs in the margins, the practices and ways of being that teacher leaders of Color develop become marginalized and unrecognized within institutions that preserve white, colonial, cis-heteropatriarchal normativity.…”

Three Buckets and Eight Strategies: Recruiting, Supporting, and Retaining a Racially Diverse Special Education Teacher Workforce

“…Offering tuition support as an effective strategy to recruit SETCOC for special education programs can offset the costs of teacher preparation, a problem that teachers of color often cite as a barrier for enrolling and completing teacher education programs (Carver-Thomas, 2018;Scott, 2019). Consider, for instance, that the median wealth of Black families ($24,000) is nearly eight times less than that of White families ($188,200;Moss et al, 2020). Some Black families have little to no money to bail themselves out of emergencies, much less can they afford to increase their debt load.…”