by Bree Picower
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.
