by Bree Picower
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 hav
e 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 agita
tion 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.”