From a Spark, a Mighty Flame: How Germinal Networks Support Teachers of Color to Promote Change in Activist Organizations and Beyond

Abstract

Background: Recent research has demonstrated that social justice teacher activist networks provide vital support to teachers of Color, reducing feelings of isolation and providing high-quality professional learning opportunities. Yet, there is a need for broader scaled research that looks across multiple activist organizations to add to our understandings of these findings. Focus of Study: Our study examines the network participation characteristics of 26 activist teachers of Color across 14 activist organizations in the United States. Our research questions were: (1) How do activist teachers of Color foster social capital in networks to influence policies and actions in their organizations and beyond? (2) What relationship exists between the participation structures of networks and the involvement of teachers of Color in the activist organizations? Research Design: Our research design used a critical social network research approach informed by Black feminist thought (BFT) and research on teacher activism. Our data included interviews from the 26 teachers and documents from their activist organizations. Our analysis involved a macro-to-micro qualitative network analysis of data, which afforded a broad view of network characteristics and deep descriptions of the stories of a subset of teachers. Conclusions: We found that the teachers of Color who were involved in affinity-based groups and subgroups were often the germinators of policy and action shifts, usually related to racial and intersectional justice in their organization. We call this network phenomenon a germinal network. We explore other features of germinal networks, such as a tendency toward reflexivity and mentorship-seeking and support. This study has implications for future critical research on social networks and the design of radically inclusive and humanizing social infrastructures in education-related organizations.