Sowing Seeds of Justice

Abstract

Forming the basis for a provocative dialogue and written to illuminate teaching stories often pushed to the margins, this chapter provides a counter-narrative to the discourse surrounding leaky teacher-of-color pipelines and the national teacher crisis. Employing a critical race analytical lens, critical auto-ethnographic approach, and narrated through prose, five female educators committed to social justice share how they rely on unique and intersecting identities to sustain themselves in contested school spaces, while simultaneously exploring the cultural wealth they and their students bring into those spaces. Their collective stories reveal important lessons essential to our understanding of how to develop teachers for social justice. They also provide insight for those who teach in schools and classrooms meant to educate our most vulnerable and under-served students, and may answer the question, Why doesn't anyone want to teach anymore?