CHAPTER 5
HUMANIZING RACIAL JUSTICE IN TEACHER EDUCATION
Do you want sweet poison or do you want bitter medicine? Bitter medicine sucks going down. But sweet poison is just going to kill you in the end. So which one would you rather have?
—KAY FUJIYOSHI, TEACHER EDUCATOR
While the last chapter ended with strategies for disrupting Whiteness by counseling certain people out of the field, this chapter focuses on recruiting mission-driven people into it. From students and faculty to mentors, field supervisors, and community-based organizations, nothing is more vital to advancing racial justice in teacher education than ensuring the right people are around the table. This chapter explores how the Racial Justice Programs (RJPs) work to develop like-minded program teams with shared vision and how they recruit students with the most capacity to teach toward anti-racism.
Gathering all the right people is like assembling essential ingredients, but it isn’t enough—you still have to make the recipe. Racial justice in teacher education is humanizing work that requires critical relationships and individuals willing to hold the emotions that arise out of the work of deep reflection. Author and education scholar Bettina Love proclaims that “we want to do more than survive.” While the introduction and previous four chapters of this book focused on surviving Whiteness, the kinds of relationships developed in the RJPs begin to move teacher education past surviving and invite the possibility of becoming spaces for thriving.
DEVELOP A PROGRAM TEAM WITH A SHARED MISSION
RJPs are particular about who needs to be at the table when advancing racial justice in teacher education. They tend to take a team approach and seek to have a say in all the people who interact with their preservice teachers. While that includes faculty and administrators, such as those interviewed for this book, it also includes advisors, field supervisors, adjuncts, classroom mentor teachers, and school leaders. The RJPs work to ensure a shared political analysis amongst the team. Bill Kennedy explained, “There was a recognition early on that [the cohort] could not be taught by a singular person, I think in part to combat the idea that this should be on the back of one person. Also because the person who was doing it originally recognized quickly that he was not prepared to do it by himself as a White person.” The RJPs thought deeply about who should be around the table, in terms of racial identity but also disposition and skills, and therefore dedicated time and resources to hiring, professional development, leadership, and ongoing reflection. This team building was a key component because it ensured that candidates received the kind of 360 support needed to prepare them to advance racial justice in their future classrooms.
POSITION LEADERSHIP TO HIRE QUALIFIED PROGRAM TEAM MEMBERS COMMITTED TO RACIAL JUSTICE
Finding the specific and sophisticated skill set for such a wide range of roles is a challenge. It is made easier when leadership at the top understand the racial justice goals of the programs and seek qualified people. As the leadership recognizes who needs to be at the table, systems and hiring can shift to ensure that other critical team members, like mentor teachers, are brought into the program as well. For example, when it was time to hire a new director for the Newark Montclair Urban Teacher Residency Program that housed the RJP programs at my institution, myself and other like-minded colleagues volunteered to be on the hiring committee. This way we could try to ensure that the new director would be (a) a person of Color, (b) a person with demonstrated experience in Newark, and (c) someone with a social justice mindset. Because we also have supportive racial justice leadership from our dean and the director of the Center of Pedagogy, we were able to hire someone who fit the criteria, Kimberly R. Santos. She in turn set off a chain of hires, as well as transitions out, that literally and figuratively changed the face of our field mentors and induction coaches to become almost exclusively women of Color, and predominately Black women.
Each RJP emphasizes how important it is for them to have control over hiring people with the specific identities, experiences, skills, and perspectives for preparing anti-racist teachers. Recruiting BIPOC is a consistent goal. Christina Villarreal has come to recognize the inherent power in hiring as a tool for advancing racial justice in the programs she has led. “As a director, I have agency around hiring. So who did I hire? If you look at my team of field advisors, it’s nearly all women of Color, with a couple of White women, all of whom demonstrated an explicit commitment to racial justice during the interview process.” Villarreal clarified that this is a shift from the identity of past advisors. “It goes back to the same criteria around admissions: What am I looking for in an application?” While hiring people of Color was a priority, the applicant’s experience and perspective on justice mattered, which moved the hiring beyond tokenism. “I changed the requirements of the advisor position to say ‘has to have explicit experience with and commitment to asset-driven and justice-oriented curriculum and pedagogy.’ I think that actually weeded out a lot of people who would have applied for the same position in past years.”
For one of the interviewees, gaining hiring privileges was a battle they chose to fight when first taking on leadership in the program. They said, “I want to have fucking hiring privileges. I want to increase the number of critically conscious teachers of Color who are teaching our teachers. I want more queer teachers, and I want to increase the number of teachers who could help all of our teachers grow.” This RJP had attempted to address this dilemma by hiring alumni of Color, but they recognized that while the alumni had the right racial identity, teaching experience, and political analysis, they didn’t yet have the experience to navigate White resistance from students. “They didn’t have the experience to take the emotional labor off of those experiencing the brunt of these biases. So despite being ‘of Color,’ they were still placating even to the comfort level of those who were invested in the existing social system.”
This reveals how specific the skill set is to advance racial justice in teacher education. RJPs have to consider identity, teaching experience, racial/political consciousness, content area expertise, and the ability to navigate and disrupt Whiteness. For the last criterion, the interviewee described a goal of teacher educators who can “help support multiply marginalized students in those spaces to feel heard, recognized, and seen as experts on their own reality, while at the same time not altogether silencing White students.” They had to jump through a lot of hoops and engage in several political navigations in order to gain the right to make those desired hires. They finished: “Just to be clear, I have the final say on hiring. Which was my way of saying, fuck the way you did it, I’m handling shit now.”
Annamarie Francois explained that the qualities Center X looks for when staffing their teacher education program are aligned with their racial justice mission and how that mirrors what they also look for in students. “We’re essentially looking for the same thing, but at a higher level. So what we oftentimes say in the Center is that one of our guiding principles is that we need to mirror the diverse, critical thought–carrying, social justice–oriented communities that we seek to create in schools. So that means the Center has to reflect that.” The teacher education courses at Center X are taught by UCLA faculty who have advanced degrees and are considered experts in their field, but that is not enough for them to be automatically selected to teach in the RJP. Francois elucidates: “They play this border-crossing role; they understand the intersection of research and practice, but they also understand what it means to work in low-performing urban schools, because they attended and/or taught in urban public schools, so there’s not a private school teacher mindset on the team. . . . We get to decide who teaches, so we cherry-pick educators whose beliefs and values align with ours and whose research can help inform the way we carry out teacher education.” RJPs understand the importance that every team player has in reframing the ideology of preservice teachers and therefore dedicate the time and resources to ensuring that hires at every level have both the requisite skills as well as a shared dedication to and experience in working toward racial justice.
In addition to hiring, assistance from leadership involves navigating external entities such as funding and accreditation. Tanya Maloney explained the support from our leadership: “Because they trust that we are doing work that is purposeful and that is good for our students, they support us by continuing to apply for grants to support our work.”
On top of finding funding, racial justice leadership involves sheltering RJPs from external pressures that could easily derail them. One such pressure is accreditation. Institutions of higher education are bound to both national and state accreditation requirements to demonstrate both legal compliance and adherence to the curricular and program standards required of educator preparation programs. All too often, these standards privilege more technical dimensions of teaching over racial justice components. In her leadership role over Center X, Francois has made a political commitment to defending her program against the ways in which traditional accreditation demands are out of touch with a racial justice framework. In describing her program review experiences, she reflected, “If you don’t understand the language of critical race theory, if you’re not committed to educational justice in the way we think about justice, it’d be hard for you as a reviewer to see how all of those technical aspects of teaching are embedded in our justice-oriented program. The technical takes second seat to why we do things the way we do—cultural relevancy, cultural sustainability. It was really, really hard to explain that.” Fortunately, she believes that thanks to increased dialogue between the accreditation body and teacher educators, the evaluations are starting to become more aligned toward the asset-based approach of RJPs.
DEVELOP A RACIAL JUSTICE COMMITMENT ACROSS ROLES
Oftentimes, RJPs struggle to find classroom teachers to serve as mentors who are not only successful teachers with strong content, pedagogical, and relationship skills, but who also advance a racial justice mindset. Efforts to find mentors who are people of Color doesn’t necessarily mean that they have advanced racial justice knowledge. Additionally, typically there is not alignment between the racial justice goals of the programs and the daily demands of the realities of classrooms. Therefore, preservice teachers find themselves growing in terms of their racial analysis from coursework but may find themselves in conflict with their classroom mentors, or they are blocked from implementing the kind of racial justice curriculum assigned within the RJP.
The systems in place for recruiting mentors in many traditional teacher education programs look more for typical criterion for highly qualified classrooms, so RJPs need to do additional work in finding and vetting mentors to ensure an ideological and pedagogical fit. At Center X, since field advisors were selected to lead cohorts because of their commitment to racial justice, they are entrusted to find these multidimensional classroom mentors. Francois explained, “Our faculty advisors are responsible for finding the placement, vetting the placement, talking with the principals about the beliefs and values of the program, making sure it’s a good fit—and not just around the technical dimensions of teaching, but around the social and political dimensions as well.”
Despite these efforts, finding people with all the right criteria is a challenge, so one strategy is to provide professional development (PD) around racial justice for people who fit the bill in terms of other qualifications and identity markers. Traditional professional development for educators is often imposed by administration and delivered by outside curricular vendors or consultants based on discrete skills. While mentor teachers may be required to attend PD to learn certain curricular programs, they often do not receive support in how to mentor—and even more rare are opportunities to develop consciousness around racial justice.
In contrast to traditional PD, critical professional development (CPD) is a type of development that “frames teachers as politicallyaware individuals who have a stake in teaching and transforming society. In both pedagogy and content, CPD develops teachers’ critical consciousness by focusing their efforts towards liberatory teaching.”1 It is with this model of CPD that the Newark Teacher Project supports mentor teachers in developing their political understandings of racial justice. Maloney explained:
Our mentor teachers spend the most time with our students, so it’s important that their professional development is really focused on preparing anti-racist teachers as well. We do that by inviting our mentors to engage with our students in the very same curriculum that we have our students engage in. So for example, this summer, as a part of the initial mentor institute . . . they were learning about the Four I’s framework and thinking about how to connect that to understanding education.
Because of the challenge of filling roles with people who fit in terms of identity, skills, and shared commitment to racial justice, oftentimes RJPs take on the additional work of providing critical professional development to all team members.
COLLECTIVELY ENGAGE IN THE INTERNAL WORK OF RACIAL JUSTICE
Given the challenges of hiring for, developing, and engaging in racial justice work, there is a need for continual growth and learning. Farima Pour-Khorshid recognized that as teacher educators, “none of us have arrived to a point where we don’t need to engage in this deep, reflective, and emotional work.” She wondered, “What does the preparation for teacher education look like and how are we creating space for teacher educators to do their own work too?” RJPs must carve out the time, space, and resources for team members to do the tough work of continuing to advance our own personal and professional racial justice knowledge, engage in critical self-reflection, and interrogate and heal our deep-seated racial ideology.
Pour-Khorshid calls on RJPs to create “more intentional space of doing this kind of internal work as well. Not just sharing how we’re doing it in our courses, but literally personally doing it.” While she recognizes that not everyone wants to do that work, she believes that “it would be a powerful way to model a more holistic approach to advancing racial justice.” Pour-Khorshid challenges us to do this internal work “in a way that is nonhierarchical, in a way that is grounded in cultural humility, in a way that’s really about humanizing ourselves as professors and humanizing our students and really seeing it as a reciprocal process, as opposed to teaching theory to our students in transactional ways.”
UCLA has taken on some of this collective internal work. Tyrone Howard described how the faculty has engaged in conversations about race and diversity over the past few years. He reflected that “those have been fruitful, in my opinion, because those are spaces where we as a faculty come together to talk about our own stuff, if you will. Because it’s one thing to say, ‘You need to be more racially just and inclusive,’ but there’s something different to sit in a room as part of a two- or three-day retreat.” By personally unpacking their own “stuff,” the RJPs are engaging in the very same work they ask of their students, therefore gaining more insight and empathy into the emotional aspect of this endeavor.
This internal work is not without its challenges, given that Whiteness lives not just with students, but within faculty as well. Francois recounts, “I don’t want to make it sound as though racial justice is easy and we have all the answers. It’s not, and we don’t. It’s really hard because we bring our own identities, our own histories, into the work, but I think that we have a willingness to go there with one another. And we have enough patience, just enough patience, that when it gets hard, we still sit at the table.” This willingness to go there ensures that Whiteness is interrupted not only with students but also with faculty.
Francois remembers, “There are times when we have some White faculty members who get very emotional when we’re tackling issues of racial justice and when we use words like ‘White fragility,’ like ‘White supremacy.’ When we are speaking our truth and speaking from who we are, it doesn’t sound academic, right—it sounds like Annamarie, curly-haired Brown girl that grew up in South LA. That’s the way I’m engaging in those conversations. With all my lived experiences as a Brown girl from South LA.” Francois’s willingness to be vulnerable supports others around the table to reframe their own racial ideology:
But we still have White teacher [educators] that cry, and at the same time we have teacher [educators] of Color who were raised in middle-class, upper-middle-class families who also have challenges with some of these conversations. The point is, we all have challenges with these conversations because we are likely to come into it with our own stuff. But you got to be willing and to hold the expectation that in this teacher education program, we’re going there, and if you’re not willing to go there, then this is not the right fit for you. We have had teacher educators who have left.
As typically happens, it is the emotional generosity of people of Color such as Francois who take up the labor to have challenging conversations that pushes the work forward. Their unwavering commitment to racial justice in the classroom and the conference room sustains and refines the work of the RJPs.
RECRUIT AND ADMIT CRITICAL PRESERVICE TEACHERS
Just as the RJPs are intentional about building program teams with shared missions, they are equally intentional about admitting critically conscious students into their programs. Previously, I wrote about admissions being a place to be explicit with students about the racial justice mission of the program. I write more about admissions here to demonstrate the way these programs selectively screen to ensure they have students who can become strong teachers for students of Color. Because students typically complete their teacher education programs in one to two years, RJPs must attend to the justice-minded dispositions potential candidates exhibit at admissions. We have a finite amount of time to transform preservice teachers’ ideology. If we are to take up the mission of advancing racial justice, we have to be honest about how far we can actually move those who come in with explicitly racist understandings coupled with resistance to alternative views. If we can admit that it would take more than a year to prepare some students to become the kind of teacher students of Color deserve, then we need to apply that political clarity within the admissions process and provide some level of control over who will become teachers.2
In moving toward racial justice in teacher education, all of the RJPs are resolute in their commitment to recruiting students of Color. In fact, a program I initially interviewed for this chapter was an urban teacher education program at SUNY Cortland called Cortland’s Urban Recruitment of Educators (CURE) that is exclusively for teachers of Color.3 Similarly, Francois stated, “We specifically recruit teachers of Color. That’s our target audience. Most of our students have reported that they come to UCLA because they know someone who’s gone through the program, and they know they’re going to be seen and they know that we’re going to surface—not just surface, but we’re going to grapple with—White supremacy, racial injustice, identity, and positionality.”
While the RJPs prioritize candidates of Color, they also accept White students. However, for all their applicants, the programs put into place screening processes because they want to specifically recruit critically conscious students who are looking for an anti-racist experience. Camangian recounted, “We’ve historically been the program that brought in the students of Color that brought critical consciousness, the White allies, and those on the fence who we felt had potential as agents of social transformation.” Pour-Khorshid, who teaches in the same program, added, “We’re selective. One: prioritizing students of Color from marginalized backgrounds. Two: students who are committed to wanting to do that work [racial justice]. They may not even be hella critically conscious, but if they have a desire and a commitment to do that work, then that matters.” To help tease out which students want to do the work of anti-racism, there are certain questions their program asks. Pour-Khorshid provides insights on these: “I think it’s more around why they even want to come into the profession. Questions like that are really important and will set other students apart and helps us to figure out who would be the right fit for that kind of experience.”
There is a saying that traditional teacher education programs, as the university cash cows, are pressured into accepting anyone with a bank account and a pulse to keep enrollment high and money coming in. In contrast, Francois explains what they are looking for in candidates during the admissions process: “So when we recruit . . . we evaluate them on their experience in urban settings, their experience in schools, their commitment to social justice, and then their ability to analyze and respond to, in writing and verbally, a piece of academic text around some kind of an issue that requires courageous and critical conversation.”
Fujiyoshi demonstrates how their similar admissions process serves to screen people in as well as out. She recounted an interview where they asked candidates how they felt about having conversations about race. One of the candidates answered, “I’m really looking forward to having dirty conversations about race.” She pressed back: “Dirty is a really interesting adjective to use. Why did you do that? Why was that your word choice?” His inability to articulate why he characterized race as “dirty” or to engage further about the topic gave them enough hesitation not to accept him into the program. She said, “Those are the things that are on our radar from admissions where we’re just like, I don’t know if we can work with you. There’s a certain level of what we can and cannot work with, and I think our admissions process does a good job of giving us at least a starting point.”
The admissions screening makes it clear that for some candidates, there isn’t enough time to get them where they need to be within the confines of the programs. To be introduced to diversity and racism, see it through an asset rather than “dirty” lens, reframe all Four I’s, and learn to teach is too much of a lift within the short time they are in teacher education. By applying this kind of clarity during the admissions process, these programs are able to focus their energy on candidates who are further along in their development of becoming racially just educators.4 As Francois explains, “While we have them, we want to make sure that we shift their mindsets as far as we can toward being critical social justice educators in the limited time that we have. At least they go into schools with some beginning tools. We may not have gotten them [all the way there], but at very least, they will do no harm.”
BUILD RELATIONSHIPS THAT HOLD EMOTIONS
Once the program team and student cohorts are in place, the real magic of the RJPs begins. With so many people committed to the same vision of racial justice, RJPs are able to create the context for powerful and humanizing relationships where people are truly seen, trust is developed, and the vulnerable work of deepening racial consciousness can blossom. Relationships, trust, and care are hallmarks of the RJPs and set the groundwork for the racial justice work. As Patrick Camangian asserts, “Students don’t care how much their teachers know until they know how much their teachers care.” Similarly, Francois stresses, “Teaching is 90 percent about relationships. And relationships are dependent upon my being able to see you, to understand you, and to value you, and then help you get to where you want to go.”
In alignment, Villarreal avowed that: “Teaching is only 20 percent content, but 80 percent relationships.” Teaching, she explained, “starts with being able to meet your students where they are,” which is why she works to develop relationships with her preservice candidates. “I can’t train you until I know you and you can’t work with kids until you know yourself.” Her teaching philosophy is grounded in her ethnic studies background that posits, “No history, no self; know history, know self.” As a result, she creates multiple opportunities to build personal relationships with each student and to develop community across students. Through these relationships, students are able to dig deeply into their own personal and cultural histories to prepare for similar work with children. She builds these relationships by creating a rich array of social activities in which the community gets to know each other as whole people, rather than just in their professional roles as students and professor. These activities include inviting her cohorts to dream up and wear group Halloween costumes, hosting baking parties at her home, traveling on wine tasting tours, and going out for karaoke parties. These activities create opportunities for the students to deeply connect and for her to get to know their personalities, hopes, and fears. By investing in these relationships, Villarreal builds trust with her candidates and, as will be demonstrated, trust sets the context for the vulnerability to push toward racial justice.
These caring, critical, and humanizing relationships fostered between faculty and their candidates are not feel-good popularity contests or attempts to be liked. Rather, they build the trust necessary for the challenging emotional component of advancing racial justice. Education leadership scholar Rosa Rivera-McCutchen uses the framework of radical care to describe such practices that focus on challenging broader inequality while cultivating authentic relationships.5 The radical care in the student-teacher relationships within the RJPs is authentic, but it is also intentional because it is within these relationships that the deeply vulnerable work of dismantling Whiteness happens.
Bill Kennedy unpacks the balance: “There’s a caring aspect, an empathizing aspect, that happens. But there’s also then a chance to push.” He describes this radical care as “messy.” “We have boxes of tissues just piled up in our office because we expect that. And I think you have to have the kind of disposition to want that.” Kennedy explains that the faculty indeed want and set the stage for these relationships because they are purposeful in creating the space for growth. “I’m not treating this like a psychologist or anything, but for my own work around this [examining race], I feel that’s an aha moment when I know something’s happening—that’s when there’s some learning going on.” These humanizing relationships, characterized by trust, facilitate the capacity for both faculty and students to do the tough, emotional work that is part of interrupting a lifetime of socialization into Whiteness.
TEASE APART AUTHENTIC EMOTIONS FROM STRATEGIES OF WHITENESS
Supporting candidates to do the kinds of racial reframing evident in chapter 3 is challenging and emotional. Particularly for White students, resistance and Tools of Whiteness are also part of this process of examining race, so it is important for faculty to be able to recognize the difference between authentic emotional growth and White resistance strategies. By building humanizing relationships with students, faculty are able to know students well enough to be able to tease out which is emerging.
In 2019, activist and lecturer Rachel Cargle was featured in the Washington Post with an article titled “I Refuse to Listen to White Women Cry.”6 In it, she described her responses to her audiences of mainly White women: “When women have come up to me crying, I say, ‘Let me know when you feel a little better, then maybe we can talk . . . If you have feelings about it, take it to your therapist, because this is not the space.’” As hinted at in the Cargle article, the term White tears has become popular in anti-racist circles in the last several years and refers to the way White people, particularly women, take up space and derail interracial dialogue by exhibiting emotional distress when topics of Whiteness are raised. White tears are a strategic tool of Whiteness to pull the empathy in the room toward their user, positioning White women as the ones who need comfort and attention in challenging race conversations rather than the people of Color who are the actual targets of racism.
To move students forward in reframing race, RJPs complicate the notion of White tears and recognize when crying is derailing versus when it is authentic. As Villarreal explained, “I think there’s different variations of tears. There’s obviously the tears of shame. There’s tears of guilt. But I also see tears of growth, and those are powerful because they’re accompanied by statements like ‘I never thought about it that way before.’ That, to me, is the opposite of a red flag; it’s a green flag.” Pour-Khorshid also teased apart the way some of her White students respond to race content, explaining, “Being connected to feelings is different from taking up space. How you do the work to unpack those feelings matters, your willingness to engage in that deep critical self-reflection and labor to learn and heal makes all the difference.” These professors’ ability to tease apart the different types of tears and emotions their students exhibit goes back to the deep, personal, radical care they put into each of their students, because only that allows them to properly assess where their students’ emotional responses are coming from.
Fujiyoshi explains the complicated emotions that White students experience during conversations about race. “Those are difficult for a lot of White folks. There’s a lot of guilt or shame or really feeling scared to mess up. And I think those are good emotions because they show you that you care enough, that you are worried about this, that you’re thinking about it, it’s on your radar. But it’s tiring. Everybody cries.” Creating the relationships that allow for this flow of emotions is part of the work of dismantling Whiteness, and it takes years of experience, empathy, and emotional labor to be able to decipher the source of the exhibited emotion.
In contrast to the productive emotions described above, Fujiyoshi is able to identify when White students are instead using emotions as a strategy of resistance. “That’s another thing that I wrestle with—just feeling like the White folks need some more validation, they are looking for me to say ‘great job.’ But when the push comes and they’re being challenged in some way, then it becomes, ‘It’s you, Dr. Kay, who’s making me feel like this!’ and then it becomes this externalization thing.” Fujiyoshi’s skill and experience allow her to distinguish when the emotions come from internal reflection versus external resistance. Because of the trust she builds, she can continue to push them forward, despite their resistance. She profoundly responds to her students by asking them, “Do you want sweet poison or do you want bitter medicine? Bitter medicine sucks going down. But sweet poison is just going to kill you in the end. So which one would you rather have?” Through this choice, Fujiyoshi makes it clear that while these relationships are loving, they are also places where unapologetically tough work is going to happen.
The trust built within these relationships prepares students to understand that when they are called in about something they have said, it is meant as a way for them to grow and learn, rather than as an affront to their character. This work of unlearning racism is not a walk in the park. Pour-Khorshid warns her students, “Don’t be offended if I gently and lovingly let you know what you just said was foul, and we’re going to unpack that together. It’s always a learning opportunity.” Students understand that what they do or say will be held up to them like a mirror—but because of the gentle and loving relationship, the bitter medicine is more likely to be seen as an opportunity for growth and less likely to be read as a personal attack.
RECOGNIZE THE EMOTIONAL TOLL
While the RJP team members recognize the vital necessity of this humanizing work, holding these emotions takes a toll on them, particularly on faculty of Color, who are navigating the unexamined racism of their White students and supporting the internalized racial trauma of their students of Color. For faculty of Color, navigating the balance of protecting themselves from the racism of their White students while also simultaneously using the program to push students’ anti-racist development places them in their own space of vulnerability.
In the UTEP program, Fujiyoshi meets with every student individually in meetings called one-on-ones to check in and help them work through their growth. Fujiyoshi describes the toll of these meetings: “The one-on-ones are exhausting. There are a lot of tears, it’s a lot of time. For me, it’s a lot of headspace and a lot of worrying.” Traditional teacher education methods classes on math or reading instruction are less likely to take on this emotional side. One interviewee described a methods instructor in their department who was “an older White guy, nice as all get out, but I know he didn’t (a) understand, (b) want to understand, or (c) feel the need to understand why issues of racial justice under the umbrella of social justice were important. So we have some folks who would fall under that category of ‘I just want to teach my science methods course,’ which he saw as sort of race neutral.”
In contrast, the willingness to engage the emotional component of dismantling racism sets RJP instructors apart from others who simply teach required methods or content courses. RJP faculty move beyond a transmission model to a desire to transform teachers’ deeply held beliefs. They engage in critical self-reflection about Whiteness, how to navigate and push in affirming ways, and how to engage in their own self-care. Fujiyoshi describes the challenge of creating warm relationships with students, particularly White students who are resisting or have a lot of need for validation: “We’re trying to talk about building relationships [in our classes] and the importance of having warmth in the classroom, and then I’m caught in this conundrum where I am not doing that with you. But wait, I still have to model this so let me take a step back.” Fujiyoshi makes the commitment to the work by stepping back, reflecting, and pushing herself to continue to build the trusting relationships for students to grow.
Shortly after our interview, Pour-Khorshid sent me an article titled “I Was Wrong to Tell You to De-Center Your Feelings, White People,” written by April Dawn Harter, LCSW, a Black anti-racist therapist.7 Pour-Khorshid explained what appealed to her about the article: “I keep thinking about how it takes a certain type/level of emotional labor that may not be for everyone to do, but as I specifically think about this as a racial justice/healing justice facilitator in particular, I think we do need more effective ways of doing this work and having these conversations and supporting understanding, healing, growth, change.” While it is grueling, Villarreal explains her take on when students have breakthroughs: “I don’t think I could still be doing this every day if I didn’t see people in those moments.”
WHAT ARE THE SPACES IN WHICH TEACHER EDUCATION CAN ADVANCE RACIAL JUSTICE?
The previous sections described how RJPs structure themselves programmatically. This section looks at the pedagogical spaces for engaging racial justice as candidates begin their journey through the programs. I will not go into detail about the specific assignments and syllabi of the RJPs here; rather, I will summarize the goals of coursework and then describe the different programmatic structures of learning in which racial justice is integrated.
To briefly summarize the goal of coursework in an RJP: The courses are designed to teach topics typically included in teacher education such as methods and content, but this is done while allowing students to reframe their understanding of race across racial justice frameworks such as the Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage. Pour-Khorshid describes this in the UESJ program: “This is a program committed to social justice, which means you are going to have to unpack your racial identity. Not just your racial identity; you’re going to have to be unpacking the various forms of privilege and power that you hold.” Both Pour-Khorshid and Villarreal are also trained facilitators with Flourish Agenda, a national nonprofit that provides Radical Healing Workshops, which they have brought into their respective programs. Pour-Khorshid explains:
We use Shawn Ginwright’s framework of healing-centered engagement that argues that to aim toward social justice, we need to heal from oppression at various levels. So we’re looking at the individual kind of harm we’ve experienced under the oppression that we live in, in society. But then we’re also trying to heal interpersonal relationships, the ways we engage with our students, the ways we engage with our families, the ways we engage with our communities. Ultimately we’re also trying to heal institutions because we understand that institutions are shaped by oppression and perpetuate harm.8
Pour-Khorshid illuminates how all of the Four I’s are interconnected and are addressed as part of her RJP. The following section examines all of the spaces, in addition to coursework, where the RJPs rely on the humanizing relationships they have developed to further their racial justice goals.
ORGANIZE STUDENTS INTO COHORTS
Once programs select students with the most potential to become critically conscious, anti-racist teachers, RJPs organize students in ways that develop the kinds of humanizing communities that build the trust for racial justice work. Every one of the RJPs in this chapter used a cohort model. Cohorts are small groups of students placed together for the scope and sequence of their coursework and field-work. While not exclusive to RJPs, traditional programs often have large numbers of candidates, and it becomes more efficient for students to register for classes that fit their individual schedules, rather than try to coordinate them into particular groupings that meet together. The benefit of cohorts, however, is that they allow students to have a community of peers in which to build relationships, share experiences, reflect on new knowledge and feelings, and engage in challenging conversations. For advancing racial justice, the cohorts become a space where the work is furthered through peer discussion, and it can be particularly powerful when the cohorts are made up of racially diverse candidates with different life experiences.
While each RJP is structured differently in terms of how much time and when in the program sequence students are in their cohorts, each uses the cohort as a home place for key experiences and learning. Fujiyoshi reflects on some of the benefits of the cohort as a space to address racial justice: “It’s a great bonding experience for the cohort. It creates moments to really grow together, to be vulnerable, to listen, to empathize, to express compassion, but also to call things out. To be shocked, to be pissed.”
By building relationships in cohorts, opportunities for cross-racial dialogues support greater awareness and understanding across difference. Annamarie Francois said, “What’s important for us is that they learn together side by side and that they have courageous conversations with one another, because by separating them, the conversation is going to stay safe, particularly for our White students, and we don’t want that.” As she implied, the mixed-race nature of these dialogues pushes the students, particularly the White students, to understand their future role in classrooms with students of Color. “We’re really trying to push the envelope and transform the way we talk to one another about teaching, the way we understand the students that we’re serving, and the way that our identities impact that.”
Because the RJPs prioritize admitting candidates of Color, the White students are often the minority within their cohorts. This creates opportunities for learning from people of Color that many White students have never had. As Howard explains, “In our courses, unlike most other programs in the country, White students are in the minority. And I think that dynamic lends itself to a host of different things that happened in terms of the interactions.” Maloney expanded on what some of those different things are for the White students: “They are learning to teach in an environment that is intended for teachers of Color, so they are learning perspectives and hearing perspectives that they have not likely heard—certainly not fronted in other aspects of their teacher education.” She believes that because of this, “those particular teachers are going to be mindful of race in ways that I don’t think they would have been.”
These mixed-race cohorts allow students to learn from their different experiences when topics of race are made explicit. For example, Maloney described a racial autobiography that our candidates wrote and shared with each other. “We were able to talk about how we all were experiencing race differently based upon our racial background. And so students started to realize, particularly the White students, ‘Oh, everybody didn’t have the same experiences as me!’ But also I wanted them to think about how your experiences have given you a false sense of what is normal.” In examples such as this, the mixed-race cohorts allow all students to learn from each other’s positionality. While the mixed-race cohorts provide these opportunities, they often happen because of the emotional labor of people of Color. Because of this, many RJPs have also created racial affinity spaces so that both groups have room to be themselves and do the appropriate work and healing for their communities.
CREATE RACIAL AFFINITY SPACES
Also referred to as identity caucusing, racial affinity groups provide a space for White people and people of Color to separately explore the impact of the Four I’s, particularly internalized racial inferiority and superiority. This allows people in both groups to be bravely honest, to stumble and say the wrong thing, and to move forward while minimizing cross-racial harm.
The program at USF is just starting to implement racial affinity spaces within their student teaching course; the groups meet a few times a semester. Pour-Khorshid explained how the spaces further candidates’ theoretical understandings of race: “What does it mean when we talk about Whiteness? There’s this assumption that just because a reading is assigned that the students ‘get it’ and that they’ve grappled with it and are now ready to act accordingly, which is not the case. I think there’s a lot of intentional reflection that needs to happen.” In order to create the space for this intentional reflection, the student teaching course is implementing the affinity groups so “that process is not at the expense of the students of Color. . . . So we are offering different kinds of entry points to the theory [of Whiteness] and then having them come back into the racial affinity spaces and have structured protocols around unpacking what they heard, what they resonated with, what were things that were challenging, and why.”
For students of Color, racial affinity groups provide a reprieve from White people and the harm they can often inflict when bumbling through learning about racism in cross-racial groups. It also provides a space for students of Color to unpack how they are impacted by the Four I’s of Oppression, particularly how they have internalized racism and how they may be unconsciously upholding Whiteness. In our emerging work with racial affinity groups in NTP, we offer three groups based on how students identify: one for White students, one for Black students, and one for non-Black students of Color. In the White group, I lead the students to break the silence about race and discuss various ways we uphold Whiteness. Maloney facilitates the group for Black students, and conversations have focused on both Black joy as well as internalized oppression. In our group for non-Black students of Color, we have invited a colleague, Blanca Vega at MSU, as well as Pour-Khorshid and Villarreal, to facilitate, and their discussions have centered on how anti-Blackness lives in their communities.
PROVIDE ONE-ON-ONE MEETINGS
The racial affinity spaces provide a place for students to collectively work out issues stemming from their racial identity development. Most of the RJPs also do this work with individual candidates privately. Because of the commitment to creating humanizing experiences, the RJPs recognize how personal much of this work is. In order to attend to the individual process that students work through in their development as anti-racist educators, many of the RJPs build opportunities to have one-on-one meetings with students. Fujiyoshi further demonstrates how these relationships create the space for the necessary work of dismantling Whiteness. “I try to meet with everybody at least once during that quarter to talk about their process of seeing themselves. It sometimes brings up stuff that people just haven’t addressed before. I’m not asking anybody to dig into the vault, but I think in some ways people want to.”
Fujiyoshi recognizes that she is asking students to be vulnerable, but that the meetings are purposeful. “Those one-on-one meetings are really where our students end up talking through their own wrestling, their own investigation. And sometimes there are really tough ways that they just need a little support. It really gets us at a place where we can think about what it means to be human—and I think being human right now is pretty tough. I think that’s why it’s very emotional. It can be very heavy at times.”
One-on-ones can provide an additional space to disrupt Whiteness or support students who are hitting bumps in the road of their racial development. When White faculty lead these meetings with White students, one-on-ones can also be a strategy for alleviating some of the emotional toll endured by students and faculty of Color. Kennedy recalled a White student who kept enacting his Whiteness in ways that were inappropriate and harmful toward his peers of Color in his cohort. The student had received the message that as a White man, he needed to position himself as a learner. But he overcorrected this message and ended up frustrating his cohort members who felt he was relying on them as people of Color to teach him about racism. Kennedy remembered his confusion and agitation in trying to do Whiteness “right.” Kennedy used the opportunity for a one-on-one to support this student’s development. “He didn’t get it at all. . . . He had like this huge breakdown, where he was yelling and storming around the office. It just took time, it took conversation, and just the trust that I built with him for him to understand that he was also still doing something that was problematic—expecting other people to teach him.”
As another White man, Kennedy recognized the importance of this space for the student to work these emotions out so as not to put it on his cohort members of Color. “It’s exhausting work, and he needs to go out and do that work on his own. Part of that work is what he was doing in that moment with me. That’s where he should be taking that energy and time.” Kennedy created space to remove the burden of working through Whiteness from the students of Color. He continued: “So, then he went back to the cohort with this new learning in a way that was still a little self-congratulatory, but with a real perspective of how he doesn’t have to just constantly be like, ‘Teach me that.’ There are things that he can learn, that he can contribute, and he can make mistakes in ways that are not actually harmful.”
Finally, one-on-ones can also support students who are advancing in their racial consciousness and are ready to take on more than the rest of the cohort may be ready for. Pour-Khorshid described a White student who was frustrated in class by her more resistant White peers. “She checked in with me afterward, and after that very long conversation, I feel like she’s just been constantly checking in with me. She’ll ask me for different resources, or she’ll ask me what I think about certain things. I think it’s been really on her mind since she has been exposed, so now she’s able to see it and feel safe enough to talk to me about it.” By building on the trusting relationships fostered in the RJPs, one-on-ones provide a space of differentiated support based on where individual students are within their journeys toward racial justice.
ENGAGE WITH THE COMMUNITY
While all teacher education programs have requirements for students to spend time in the field or schools and communities, traditional efforts often could be described as poverty tourism. Candidates become spectators in urban communities, viewing the pain of poverty and institutional racism, with no analysis of the forces that have looted such communities. This results in reinforcing deficit thinking about urban areas, rather than understanding the assets, resistance, resilience, and heart of such communities. Many students try to avoid teaching in urban schools, and in fact, several interviewees shared stories of undergraduates’ parents who called trying to plead for their child’s safety in an attempt to get them out of an urban placement. When such students are “forced” into these placements without a systemic analysis, they often see the challenges urban communities face as the residents’ own fault. For example, they complain about the condition of the neighborhood without understanding its lack of municipal services. In traditional programs, the university supervisors may share these deficit views and are therefore not positioned to interrupt or transform such conceptualizations.
In contrast, RJPs are intentional about engaging with local communities in ways that are reciprocal and that explicitly address the Four I’s. The UTEP program in Chicago has a robust approach to community engagement in which their candidates spend a great deal of time working in specific grassroots organizations run by and for people of Color. Their goal is for candidates to build relationships with the community organizers and also to understand the history of Chicago. Fujiyoshi asked, “How do we understand the makeup of Chicago when we’re looking at the conditions of schooling? We have to take into consideration the political economy and racial segregation. So we’re working with organizations that have that community knowledge.” It is through these relationships that candidates gain knowledge and reframe institutional and interpersonal racism. Fujiyoshi continues:
I think some students don’t actually ever have connections or relationships with people of Color outside of working in a school . . . where there’s a power dynamic between them and kids of Color. Serving as an intern with a community organization that’s led by people of Color that are from the communities that are also really about self-determination . . . just the tenacity of these organizations, but also their heart, is what really is important for our students to engage with. To be able to see communities in a different way, that these aren’t places that need you to come and fix. There are already people working within these communities that have had a history of working in the community, that have had a history of organizing and community activism that was happening long before you.
Fujiyoshi recognizes that by engaging in these communities, White candidates can reframe some of their missionary tendencies. “Before you come in thinking, ‘I need to come and save this place, these children need me,’ take a step back for a second and see who already is here, what’s already being done, and really think about yourself in terms of your allyship. The philosophy that we hear from our organizations is solidarity, not charity.”
Similarly, Center X structures community engagement into their coursework as an opportunity to develop an assets-based approach that positions people from local communities as experts rather than people in need of help. Francois explains that right from the beginning of coursework, candidates are “walking in a community with elders to talk about the history of the community, they are doing home visits, they’re taking photographs and mapping the assets.” These activities support students to realize they are not the experts. “They’re not making determinations about the neighborhood themselves, they’re asking folks. They’re asking the gas station attendant, the person at the laundromat, ‘Tell me about your neighborhood, tell me about this school. What are your hopes and your dreams for the school?’”
This experience helps candidates recognize the importance of entering a space with humility and with an understanding that they are not the experts. Francois insists that “to identify the wealth and the needs of a community—that has to come from the people who live there.” Because this community engagement happens early in the program, she encourages candidates to “use that information throughout your methods courses and throughout your other courses to inform the formal content that you are learning and to recognize that the problems lie not in the community.” This community engagement element of the RJPs allows students to build relationships and access knowledge that helps them reframe their understandings of all Four I’s.
CONTINUE SUPPORT AFTER GRADUATION
While the RJPs work hard to advance racial justice from admissions to graduation, they recognize that a year or two of teacher education is not enough time to reframe a lifetime of racial socialization while simultaneously preparing someone for the technical aspects of teaching. As such, many of the programs broaden their relationship with their students’ post-graduation into a period referred to as induction, when new teachers are entering the field. Through induction support, which sometimes involves critical professional development sessions or in-classroom mentorship, RJPs are able to extend their racial justice reach. The time spent fostering humanizing relationships and trust early in the program often flourishes as these long-term relationships develop. For example, while there is only one year of the official RJP at University of Chicago, they provide multiple years of induction support, so alumni remain very much part of the daily conversation. Fujiyoshi explains:
I say five years, because at a staff meeting, for instance, we’re still talking about people from three years ago, four years ago, five years ago. So they’re still on our radar, but they’re not officially in our program. We want to hear about our students from our coaches. We want to hear about who’s doing awesome, who is struggling during what and why, and could we have seen that.
By creating coherence between what happened in initial coursework and induction support, the racial justice perspectives taught previously are more likely to find their way into classroom practice. Kennedy explained that at UTEP, candidates are prepared to know that induction coaches are going to be engaging them in critical conversations using a racial justice lens. He says:
This is the lens we’re applying to all the situations that you’re having. We’re going to talk about it and we’re going to connect it back to what you read in that first year, because if those ideas just sit in a folder somewhere and they’re not part of your daily practice, then you’re just going to fall out of routine, especially because you’re going to be socialized into these school environments where that’s just not the case.
As Kennedy alludes, once they are in schools, teachers will be held accountable to innumerable standards, but it is unlikely that racial justice will be one of them.
Francois also works to address this challenge through induction: “We continue to provide them with field support because we know that once they get into these schools, they may not have the leadership that believes in justice the way we do. They’ve been trained to think of race a particular way, and they’re willing to engage in a hard conversation.” Francois recognizes that there may be a disconnect between this training and what happens when they become teachers in a school that doesn’t share this justice stance. “But then you have a school, and a leader at the school, where it is not okay to stand in that [justice stance], so we continue to work with them through their first year of teaching. We’re in schools. We’re in their classrooms every other week keeping them focused.”
While some of the work is with the new teachers, helping them stay connected to their justice-minded aspirations, other times the work is about preparing the school leadership to understand the teachers’ racial justice lens and practices. Francois explains: “I’m working with the principal to help them understand why this young [teacher] is taking so much time developing community in their classroom. Why is this young [teacher] bringing real-life problems into the classroom? Why do we have the students outside addressing the issues in their community and then looking at it through the lens of content?” The RJPs recognize that it is unfair to throw new anti-racist teachers into the field without extending this lifeline. “I feel like that’s part of our responsibility as teacher educators, that we don’t just prepare them. You gotta support them in arguably the most difficult year, the year outside of teacher preparation.”
Many of the faculty in these RJPs, including myself, are affiliated with local and national social justice education organizations that actively work on issues of racial justice. Across the country, there is a loose network called Teacher Activist Groups made up of local organizations such as Teachers 4 Social Justice in San Francisco; People’s Education Movement in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago; Teachers for Social Justice in Chicago; New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) in New York City; TAG Philly and TAG Boston; along with national groups such as the Education for Liberation Network. Many of these organizations have racial affinity groups, host annual conferences, and organize around issues such as the school-to-prison pipeline and high-stakes testing, among others.
Because RJP faculty have relationships with such groups, either as members or supporters, they create opportunities within their programs for students to become involved in these networks, allowing them to realize that they are part of something bigger. As a former student of mine once expressed after attending a NYCoRE conference, “Before, if I didn’t like something, I’d go, ‘Well, that sucks,’ and I didn’t realize that other people think it sucks too and we can all get together and do something.” Either by bringing teacher activists in as guest speakers or by having students attend the organizations’ conferences and events, students in RJPs learn that there are other educators outside of their cohort committed to racial justice. As students graduate and become classroom teachers, these organizations become places for them to find co-conspirators and avenues for racial justice activism.
CONCLUSION
Throughout this book, I have emphasized the relationship among the various levels of the Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage. In the opening, I explained that one of the reasons that #CurriculumSoWhite proliferates is because an individual teacher’s problematic understandings of race are amplified through their institutional power. In the following chapters, I argued that a strategy for dismantling #CurriculumSoWhite is actually through the inverse relationship of institutional and individual racism. These two closing chapters about the RJPs demonstrate that through transforming the institution of teacher education, there is opportunity to disrupt individual preservice teachers’ racial ideology prior to their entering the classroom. These teachers will still wield institutional power, but they will do so with reframed understandings of race and with the desire to work toward anti-racism rather than to uphold structures of White supremacy.
In the introduction, I claimed that #CurriculumSoWhite is especially nefarious because rather than operating at just the teacher’s individual level, it maintains Whiteness on all four levels: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized. By restructuring teacher education to transform teachers’ understandings toward anti-racism, teachers now have the potential to instead disrupt Whiteness at all four levels.
When teacher education programs are structured to interrupt teachers’ mainstream understanding of race, programs are positioned to go beyond just changing the lesson plans aspiring teachers might teach. The RJPs demonstrate that in addition to disrupting curricular Tools of Whiteness, transformations can happen at multiple levels. First, racial justice programs become places with a unified ideology, creating a tight-knit community with a shared mission—along with institutional power—committed to racial justice in schools. Such programs are able to transform the racial consciousness of preservice teachers, both White and people of Color, alongside committed mentors, supervisors, and faculty associated with these programs.
The individual aspiring teachers who attend RJPs have had the opportunity to reframe their racial ideologies to focus on anti-racism. Next, they enter K–12 schools with the commitment and skills to apply their racial justice frame, thus potentially transforming those institutions. Importantly, children in these schools benefit from these anti-racist educators because they will not be subjected to the trauma of #CurriculumSoWhite and will instead be taught in humanizing and culturally sustaining ways.9 Finally, when teachers are able to recognize their Tools of Whiteness and the damage it causes, they can join the families in chapter 1 in pushing back against racist pedagogy, potentially transforming the production of curriculum.
Unfortunately, RJPs are the exception to how teacher education functions, not the rule. Many programs exist with little or superficial attention to racial justice, focusing instead on approaches such as multiculturalism or cultural competence that develop specific pedagogical strategies without transforming underlying foundations of racist ideology. Therefore, many aspiring teachers are not provided the opportunity to transform their socialized understandings of race prior to entering K–12 schools, priming them to inflict egregious acts of curricular violence through their own #CurriculumSoWhite.
But by scaling up and sustaining the practices in RJPs, the broader field of teacher preparation has the potential to become a serious threat to the maintenance of racism in schools. It requires similar efforts in recruiting and developing not just teachers but also teacher educators with the commitment and capacity to work toward anti-racism. But ultimately, by transforming teacher education into spaces dedicated to racial justice, we can have an institutional response that preemptively interrupts the norm of reading, writing, and racism in schools. These RJPs provide a path toward the radical possibilities of what humanizing education can look like in teacher education and in schools.