Fighting to Educate Our Own: Teachers of Color, Relational Accountability, and the Struggle for Racial Justice

Research demonstrates that many teachers of Color enter schools committed to challenging injustice, yet often face barriers to accomplishing this goal. This article presents emergent themes from a qualitative study with 218 self-identified, racial justice-oriented teachers of Color. Using Wilson...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEquity & excellence in education Vol. 49; no. 1; pp. 72 - 84
Main Authors Kohli, Rita, Pizarro, Marcos
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amherst Routledge 02.01.2016
Equity & Excellence
Subjects
Accountability
Barriers
Community
Culture
Epistemology
Grounded Theory
Interviews
Justice
Minority Group Students
Minority Group Teachers
Power Structure
Professional Isolation
Public Schools
Qualitative Research
Questionnaires
Race
School Culture
Social Justice
Teacher Attitudes
Teachers
Urban Teaching
World Views
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Summary:Research demonstrates that many teachers of Color enter schools committed to challenging injustice, yet often face barriers to accomplishing this goal. This article presents emergent themes from a qualitative study with 218 self-identified, racial justice-oriented teachers of Color. Using Wilson's ( 2008 ) indigenous cultural framework of relationality and relational accountability to analyze our data, we introduce the concept of community-oriented teachers of Color to describe the accountability these teachers have towards students of Color and their communities. We found that despite their connections, insights, and successes with students, hierarchies of ontology (ways of being) and epistemology (ways of knowing) within schools that promote individualism served to isolate and marginalize community-oriented teachers of Color and, thus, limited their ability to advance racial justice.
ISSN:1066-5684
1547-3457
DOI:10.1080/10665684.2015.1121457