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Black teachers (BTs) are significantly underrepresented in the US teaching profession, yet there is still little focus on how to best hire, support, and retain them. This collaborative autoethnography documents our work in an urban characteristic school district and university in the southeastern US and how we leveraged our interpersonal and professional experiences with local educational and academic institutions to better understand the challenges associated with creating sustainable and systemic pathway and retention practices that prioritize BTs. We focus on the role of data and research in better understanding the localized experiences of BTs, share our vision for the Southeastern Black Teacher Network through an informal partnership, and offer recommendations for supporting BTs.

This paper is in dialogue with Lisa Marco-Bujosa's article titled, "Soul searching in science teaching: an exploration of critical teaching events through the lens of intersectionality" where the author takes up the ways that Faith's Jamaican immigrant Black woman identities are shaped and how she understood and enacted teaching for social justice. We share ideas that add more nuance to the author's analyses of Faith's beliefs and practices. In doing so, we reframe key concepts on (1) seeing immigrant background as cultural capital in the classroom rather than as an impediment to science teaching, (2) understanding the myth of meritocracy from a critical race theory lens, and (3) expanding transnational notions of the ideological and practical underpinnings inherent in teaching for social justice. We further examine how minoritized forms of cultural capital can work to disrupt oppressive ideology and practices in STEM education.

In efforts to better prepare students for a technology-driven workforce, many states and districts have pushed for clustered teaching of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in K-12 schools, yet science and mathematics remain the cornerstones upon which broader opportunities in STEM education are built. Teachers serve as boundary spanners--connecting knowledge, experiences, and opportunities for access--and for that reason, we focus on teachers as the most promising change agents in science and mathematics education in urban schools. This qualitative study explores the potential for both initial preparation and continued development of practicing teachers to occur simultaneously through a co-learning university-school-community partnership model, summer residency, and coursework, using critical and culturally relevant outdoor experiential learning. Findings suggest that there was a clear shift with practicing teachers to be more open-minded about both the effectiveness and applicability of experiential outdoor learning in urban spaces, and the richness of urban schools and spaces themselves. Future Teachers were able to incorporate critical and culturally relevant experiential learning into their coursework and master's project, and engage with their students and mentors in meaningful ways. The article suggests pathways for partnership development and implications for urban education classrooms.

The fears of pre-service teachers, particularly Teach for America (TFA) teachers. about working in urban classroom settings are framed as racial stress. Racial stress is the threat of well-being when one is unprepared to negotiate a race-related interpersonal encounter. Currently, there exist no measures on racial stress, socialization, and coping for teachers of African American and Latino students. Findings reveal that newly developed and reliable measures of teacher appraisal of racial/ethnic stressful interactions, socialization and coping are related to classroom management self-efficacy and school collegial racial conversations. These findings have implications for racial stress management as key to developing high quality teacher-student relationships.

This collaborative auto‐ethnography provides an account of the sociohistorical context of Black mothering in the United States and highlights how our complex, intersectional identities as Black‐(other)mother‐scholars shape our cultivation of the homeplace—a place where Black children are nurtured as "subjects, not objects," in a society that aims to dominate black bodies. Drawing on Black feminism and Black Woman's Geographies, we document how time at home with our children during COVID‐19 allowed for critical dialogue regarding racial injustice and exposure to culturally sustaining educational content endeavored toward resilience building. This work highlights the strength of Black mothers' collective experiences in fostering resilience amidst crises. Societal implications of COVID‐19 amidst ongoing racial traumas reify the need to reclaim not only our time as Black mothers, but also our voice, agency, and the spaces we cultivate for Black children's liberation. We also discuss recommendations for amplifying Black mothers' voices in education policy efforts such that schools are better prepared to serve Black children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As demonstrated through the disregard for Black humanity and respondent Black social movements throughout Latin America, anti-Black systemic racism is a transnational phenomenon birthed from global White supremacy. Across the Americas, the hemispheric parallels undergirding collective resistance to anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence lend themselves to multifaceted interdisciplinary scholarly examinations. Using transnational anti-Black racism in Latin America as a point of departure, we advance a theorization of critical race theory in education capable of interrogating racist structures of coloniality, modernity, and White supremacy that operate globally to suppress Black humanity and humanness in general. To that extent, we draw from and reposition critical race theory (CRT) from its sociohistoric heritage in the United States and instead conceptualize transnational anti-Black racism vis-à-vis a Black Diaspora reading of CRT. Finally, we return to education as a key site of contestation for transnational anti-Black racism and draw implications for the meaning of this global theorization of CRT in urban education, praxis, and educational research. We end by charting new and old directions for CRT in educational research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents what happened when a teacher in an urban school shifted classroom practice through changing participation structures to incorporate digital technology and multiple modalities into a fifth grade literacy curriculum. This shift in teacher practice provided opportunities for immigrant students to become more visible in the classroom. Through a description of the new participation structures, composing processes, and content of student narratives documented over 4 years, we show how multimodal storytelling provided openings for students who had been previously overlooked by their teachers or disconnected from the academic curriculum to actively participate in academic learning. We conclude that the introduction of multiple modalities and a set of assignments that focused on integrating students' home and community lives into their work shifted the center of the classroom instruction away from mandated texts to student narratives. With the introduction of the multimodal project, immigrant students whose experiences were at the periphery of the classroom discourse, found space to add their voices to the classroom community. As a result, they were able to attain a participatory presence in the classroom.

This autoethnographic piece highlights the tensions inherent in my experiences as a second-generation immigrant of Jamaican descent. I draw on my experiences to address how my positionalities as Black, immigrant, and woman push up against the politics of U.S. academic institutions. Specifically, I explore (a) the ways in which I experienced othering in educational institutions as a transnational Black girl/woman and how those experiences informed my career path, (b) how I have navigated tensions related to my minoritized identities as a university professor, and (c) ways that I attempt to resist my displacement through my presence and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]