Cultivating Joy: An Introspective on Developing ESL Practitioners of Color
By Kristen Vargas and Tasha Austin
Kristen Vargas has a Bachelors in Linguistics and Masters in Language Education and writes for the Rutgers Humanist. Tasha Austin is a lecturer in Language Education at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education and the Teacher Education Special Interest Group Representative for NJTESOL-NJBE.
Introduction and Framework
After a semester of student teaching, I found myself reflecting on my experiences in the classroom as a student of color and questioning how those helped shape my beliefs about language, or linguistic ideologies, and how I chose to execute instruction -my teaching praxis. It drove me to compare the process of navigating the academic and professional institutions of becoming an educator to drowning, and doing so within the context of COVID-19 felt like:
Figure 1. Untitled comic of hand waving from under water (Source: Gudim, 2017)
As a means of naming my reality (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) I share my counterstory with the hope that my voice might break through the dominant narrative in teacher education which does not center the experiences of pre-service teachers (PST) of color due to their severe underrepresentation in U.S. K-12 public schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018). Despite the long standing cultural mismatch of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) teachers within US classrooms, upon my completion of a teacher preparation program, I decided not to enter K-12 teaching. I strategically use the term BIPOC to represent how across the spectrum, specific communities are racialized and feel the impact of structural racism. In an effort to better understand what facilitated this personal choice, I looked through the lens of critical consciousness (Freire, 1996) in search of the joy I experienced in my training. Freire explains critical consciousness as the ability to deconstruct the power structure of the dominant group in order to envision something better and construct something new. To facilitate this critical reflection, I decided to engage in an introspective grounded by the following three questions:
What is my first memory of being in a classroom?
Have I ever felt the need/urge to perform resistance in a classroom?
When has learning been a process of joy for me?
Literature & Analysis
I reflected on my graduate coursework, focusing on my experiences in student teaching and capstone presentation. I kept returning to something my advisor asked us to do throughout our final semester: find the joy. As I was completing my Master of Education two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I admittedly felt intense resistance to this mission.
My concern for students and educators from minoritized and low-income communities increased tenfold when the first wave of the pandemic hit. The communities hit hardest by COVID-19 were also the communities that most depend on schools as protective factors (Center for Disease Control, 2020); thus, according to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, school closures exacerbated already significant economic and racial disparities (NAACP, 2020). I was no exception to this racialized impact and needed to use a critical lens to reflect on my personal experiences as affected by structural racism, and how I myself was experiencing school as a PST.
What is my first memory of being in a classroom?
I focused on my own educational history and formative experiences. My first memory of being in a classroom was of being one of 24 first graders with a white teacher who yelled at us all day. The internalization of linguistic ideologies which posit that minoritized languages — and therefore, minoritized people— are inferior to White Mainstream English and its speakers, can lead to students losing “confidence in the learning process, their own abilities, their educators, and school in general” (Charity Hudley & Mallinson, 2014, p. 33, as cited by Baker-Bell, 2020, p. 27). Whether someone’s first memories are positive or negative shapes how they walk into spaces of learning and how they have learned to be within those spaces. What students of color learn about how they are perceived through the lens of whiteness is often internalized (Baker-Bell, 2020). Although I’ve had many other contributing experiences to my identity as a learner, the first one is deeply rooted in my experience of race, power, and control.
Deconstructing my first memory of being in a classroom as a student revealed a correlation I made between whiteness and power in contrast to non-whiteness and suppression.
Have I ever felt the need/urge to perform resistance in a classroom?
The second question focuses on agency and advocacy. In my reflection I discovered that my resistance to centering the joy of teaching was not due to the absence of that joy rather, it was a response to the “hokey” hope that “ignores the laundry list of inequities that impact the lives of urban youth” (Duncan-Andrade, 2009, p. 182). The joy I was being asked to pursue as an educator was akin to the hokey hope that BIPOC students face every day in the classroom. What I felt to be inauthentic or uncritical caring deepened my loss of confidence in my program, my educators, and my own efficacy as an educator (Duncan-Andrade, 2009, p. 183). My resistance was rooted in this loss of confidence and rarely manifested in any visible action. The deconstruction of my resistance in the face of an expectation to “find joy” led me to believe that the need to resist does not always lead to visible or physical resistance. Still, what was not physically displayed took up residence in my body emotionally causing me to distance myself from the profession to which I was initially drawn.
When has learning been a process of joy for me?
Through my academic and professional development, I frequently sensed the dissonance between the preparation I was receiving as a PST, and how I was actually being educated. It felt like the insistence on finding the joy in the middle of a pandemic and racial reckoning ignored the collective, personal, and professional grief that COVID-19 had provoked. In the communities to which I belong, school closures brought forth discussions about food inequity, child-care access, technology access, and countless other supports that schools provide to their students and families (NAACP, 2020). According to Consumer News and Business Channel, school closures also brought forth professional concerns about teacher shortages, digital dexterity, financial compensation, in addition to the personal health concerns the pandemic exacerbated (CNBC, 2020). With only two months remaining in my teacher preparation program, it was within the context of these discussions that I began feeling a real professional community. When the first wave of the pandemic hit, suddenly, all of our discussions about inequity were taken out of the theoretical and into our actual preparation. We began interrogating how our experiences as students were impacted by the shift to remote learning and how this would inform our praxis and our priorities as new teachers in a completely unfamiliar learning environment. Finally, unpacking the realities of grief with people who were talking about the systemic inequities present in schools and how these affect not only students and families, but teachers as well, gave me access to a true and critical joy.
Conclusion & Recommendations
The memory of being policed in a learning space transforms the classroom into a space of harmful suppression. Such memories are painful, but also should be drawn upon as a valuable lived experience which informs how I approach teaching. Without this grounding, centering the joy of teaching felt like erasing my experience of grief and reinforced the idea that suppression of that grief was and is critical to my success as an educator. This unfortunately informed my decision to not enter the teaching profession despite my potential impact.
The pursuit of joy that is responsive to grief led me to conceptualize critical joy. Critical joy is the acknowledgment and reflection of grief, and I suspect that is the type of joy PSTs of color yearn for when considering entering the teaching profession, particularly in the discipline of language education. Understanding how your memories of studentship inform your resistance in spaces of learning allows you to begin pursuing, creating, and building the critical joy that benefits students, teachers and the field in general. Educators must understand the power they hold in the classroom and how the language they use serves to maintain that power, for better or for worse.
References
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2020, September 15). SARS-CoV-2–Associated Deaths Among Persons Aged 21 Years – United States, February 12–July 31, 2020.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6937e4.htm?s_cid=mm6937e4_w.
Duncan-Andrade, Jeffrey. (2009). Note to Educators: Hope Required When Growing Roses in Concrete. Harvard Educational Review. 79.
Freire, P. (1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed (revised). New York: Continuum.
Gudim, A. [@gudim_public]. (2017, June 19). Untitled comic of hand waving from under water [Graphic]. Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BViCi_bFmkQ/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Hess, A. J. (2020, December 14). 27% of teachers are considering quitting because of Covid, survey finds. Retrieved from
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/14/27percent-of-teachers-are-considering-quitting-because-of-covid-survey.html
Ladson-Billings, G., & Tate, I. V. WF (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education, 47-68.
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). (2020, April 1). Coronavirus Impact on Students and Education Systems. Retrieved January 13, 2021, from
https://www.naacp.org/coronavirus/coronavirus-impact-on-students-and-education-systems/
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). (2020, May). Characteristics of Public School Teachers. Retrieved January, 13, 2021, from
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_clr.asp