Anti-Racist Teacher Well-Being and/as Curricular Praxis
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Date
2024-12-19
Authors
Cartee, MaryJohn
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This dissertation explores the well-being of public K-12 teachers in the United States who explicitly identify as anti-racist and/or anti-colonial teachers. Well-being has traditionally been conceptualized as attached to single human individuals in most Western academic scholarship. However, drawing on insights from the posthumanisms, community psychology, Critical Race Theory, and Indigenous studies, this dissertation argues that these teachers’ well-being is not only influenced by the larger institutional, political, and environmental contexts in which they live and teach; it is co-constituted with them on the level of ontology. In order to explore these teachers’ well-being, this study draws on immersive cartography (Rousell, 2021), a posthuman methodology that centers affect (Gregg & Siegworth, 2010), process, and emergence. While methods were also borrowed from traditional, qualitative, humanistic methodologies (i.e. interviews and focus groups), process, relationality, and emergence were centered. Four interviews and one focus group were selected for the dissertation based on affective resonances. Together, these interviews and an instance from a focus group map a terrain of anti-racist, anti-colonial teacher well-ill-being which co-constitutes with multiple temporalities from teachers’ pasts, collective histories, and multiple environments. Many teachers had deep personal connections of many types to various forms of oppression, and these histories informed their willingness to question societal common sense—including their own. Furthermore, the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) teachers in the study found themselves resisting or circumventing the white, feminized position of “footsoldier of colonialism” (Leonardo & Boas, 2021) in the teaching profession by doing work outside the classroom, or by leaving the traditional classroom for other work in the broader field of education. Implications of this work include a need to address the dividual—as opposed to individual—character of ongoing anti-racist, anti-colonial teacher education, particularly its hidden curriculum. The dividual substrate of the hidden curriculum of ongoing teacher education is aggregate, continuous, and pre-personal, and includes racist affects, gendered embodiment, and collective histories. Changing this dividual substrate is perhaps more challenging than changing individuals; nonetheless, anti-racist, anti-colonial teachers discussed being sustained in community with students and with other teachers similarly oriented.
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Keywords
anti-colonial, anti-racist, immersive cartography, teacher education, teacher retention, teacher well-being