Starting a dialogue in difficult times: Intersectionality and education work

Abstract

Teachers, we cannot go back to the way things were," wrote education theorist Dr. Bettina L. Love for Education Week, a large trade news outlet (2020). In her April 2020 opinion piece, she emphasized educators' potential to change their work, learning from COVID-19 1 induced changes to transition toward a dreamed of education reality.As we finalized this essay in May 2022, we had two years to reflect on the impact of her urgent call to not accept the injustices of a broken education system but to dream courageously to start anew with educational "spaces of justice, high expectations, creativity, and processing the collective trauma of COVID-19" (Love, 2020). While we recognize that the cacophonous COVID-19 symphony may never be complete, it has, nonetheless, somewhat receded. We offer up this essay as an introduction to both the raw, real processing of trauma experienced by education workers and as a primer for how we create work spaces for healing and preventing that trauma from continuing to reverberate in bodies and societies.The health pandemic's impact can be recognized in new losses: death tolls; and cases of long COVID. But it can also be perceived by the continued economic hardships COVID made more visible (e.g., unemployment, job insecurity and lack of benefits, evictions, food insecurity, care work imbalances, transportation gaps, and inaccessible healthcare), and by the profoundly clear, interwoven, and compounding systemic inequities it exposed. Examples are represented by micro-aggressions, bullying, discrimination, harassment, and unequal pay and workloads, which are palimpsestic (Alexander, 2006) of contradictory systems of citizenship women labor to navigate in capitalist, racist, heteronormative, patriarchal societies. On arrival, the global health pandemic merged with a looming climate catastrophe and intensifying global white supremacy and authoritarianism. For many with privilege, especially the white privilege of ignorance, these intersecting oppressive forces are individually experienced, reproduced in everyday interactions, and institutionally fortified.In this special issue, scholars document and conceptualize the intersectional nature of the rupture(s) caused by the global health pandemic to education work, for educators and related workers, and across diverse work from the standpoint of those who labor within them. Their scholarship documents the patterned experiences of systemic inequities of a mostly women workforce, who, more often than not, are invisible and silenced and whose work is an

Intersectionality in Educational Psychology and Curriculum Studies: A Critical Review

“…Educational work such as practicing caring and teaching is inherently gendered, but gender alone is not sufficient to paint the full picture of inequities faced by other women educators of color, of LGBTQ+ and/or trans-identity, differently abled, speaking a non-dominant language as their first language, etc. (Robert et al, 2023). Intersectionality and the education system collide and collude within the context of the global pandemic COVID-19, immigration and migration, systemic racism, and ongoing political turmoil, further shaping intersectional dynamics of oppression, as COVID-19 has caused intersectional ruptures to education work by exacerbating the pre-existing inequitable working conditions and reconstituting who teaches whom, what, how, and for what purposes (Robert et al, 2023).…”

“…(Robert et al, 2023). Intersectionality and the education system collide and collude within the context of the global pandemic COVID-19, immigration and migration, systemic racism, and ongoing political turmoil, further shaping intersectional dynamics of oppression, as COVID-19 has caused intersectional ruptures to education work by exacerbating the pre-existing inequitable working conditions and reconstituting who teaches whom, what, how, and for what purposes (Robert et al, 2023).…”