Positionality Statement
In an effort to ensure that we live our mission with fidelity -- an accreditation requirement for all schools who are members of the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) -- the Heritage Academy community has methodically worked to implement the recommendations outlined in the school’s comprehensive strategic plan (School website). As part of the effort to breathe life into these published recommendations, at the end of the 2014-2015 school year, Heritage Academy hired a new Director of Learning Support to help coordinate the work of the nine Learning Specialists, three per division, who work to ensure the learning needs of our students are being met. We also welcomed a new Director of Diversity & Community at the start of the 2016-2017 school year to lead and coordinate the efforts of nine faculty members, three per division, who each receive a stipend for their work as Diversity Coordinators which is in addition to their primary roles as full time faculty.
This discussion of my positionality as a practitioner researcher begins with how I conceptualize and experience my contracted role here at Heritage Academy. I then critically reflect on my white racial identity and explain how I grapple with my unconscious anti-Blackness as a white educator who understands himself as working in solidarity with others who are committed to our struggle for social, economic, and environmental justice. #blacklivesmatter
My contracted role
I hold two contracted positions at Heritage Academy: I am one of the three Learning Specialists who work with students in grades 9-12 and one of three Diversity Coordinators who work in the High School. From this vantage point, I can attest there is something magical and awe inspiring about the conversation between student and teacher. When it works, there is excitement, punctuated with long, reflective pauses.
Learning Specialist
As a member of the Learning Support Department, I have found it useful to help all stakeholders, e.g., students and teachers, to understand my position as a Learning Specialist in relation to the conversation between the student and teacher. For example, when a student comes to see me to work on writing, I center our work together around their teacher’s written feedback: “Written feedback is a valuable part of the conversation between you and your teacher. Let’s take a look at what your teacher had to say about your paper.” I also openly share and embrace my own personal struggles in school. I try to be the kind of person who helped me when I needed a safe-haven from “being educated” -- which I experienced as obedience training and Chomsky (n.d.) likens to the indoctrination of the young. By inviting others to conceptualize my role as both an insider and an outsider of educational institutions, I am afforded a unique perspective on the student experience. Bruner (1996) asserts that students struggle to “reconcile their desires, beliefs, and goals with the world around them” (p. 50). For the last six years I have observed first-hand how students attempt to make meaning of their experiences at this school and how they navigate and negotiate the tension(s) between their teachers, families, institutional policy, the college admissions credentialing gauntlet, and their emerging identity.
Since I’m also a faculty member, teachers are typically more candid with me than they are with families when they discuss their concerns about students. In addition, my ten years of experience as a classroom teacher prior to my role as a Learning Specialist at Heritage Academy gave me direct knowledge of how frustrating it can be when educational consultants from the “outside” approached me with “new ideas” about how to “enrich” the student experience in my classroom. #nothanks And so, I have made it a priority to build and maintain my relationships with teachers. Sometimes I joke with both the students and teachers I work with that it feels like I’m running an “internal public relations campaign” on their behalf. It is from this positionality that I have come to understand: 1) teachers are more open to collaboration if they set the terms of the collaboration, 2) teachers are passionate about what they teach, and 3) teachers want all the students in their classes to successfully master the curriculum.
Diversity Coordinator
All three Diversity Coordinators in the Upper School identify as white and have been assigned a specific area of focus by the Director of Diversity and Community. As a Diversity Coordinator who focuses on faculty professional development, I conceptualize my role in much the same way as I conceptualize my role as a Learning Specialist -- that is, as an insider/outsider with regard to the academic life at our school. From my perspective, the work I strive to do as a Diversity Coordinator is similar to one type of “diversity work” described by Ahmed (2012) as “resistance to the casualization of the commitment to diversity” (p.132). Nevertheless, while I have patience with and for the white faculty members in general, I find myself most often frustrated during my interactions with some of the other coordinators who identify as white anti-racist educators (McGeehan, 2018). The following memo was written as a way to reflect after a particularly aggravating cross-divisional meeting, and captures the way I experience and grapple with being a Diversity Coordinator:
I didn’t realize I was so angry. As I looked around the table, I was speechless. Can’t these people see they are part of the problem.
Last year Border Crossers came to our school and led a workshop, Talking about Race, for our faculty. Having been a participant in this workshop the previous Spring, I was really excited that our predominantly white institution was finally creating a space for our faculty to begin talking about race and racism. I wholeheartedly believed that once the school made space for these conversations, our community could really begin to talk about ways to increase our collective racial literacy. I wasn’t expecting a miracle, just an opening to publically begin conversations about how our unconscious biases may impact our relationships with others within our community. Shortly after the workshop concluded, I spoke with a number of faculty members who said the “5-hour history lesson on race in America” was “unnecessarily long” and they wished they had more time to discuss their own questions and experiences with race at our school. After assuring them that this workshop was just the beginning and I would be happy to talk anytime, I thought to myself: “This is great! This was the opening I was hoping for.”
Flash forward to the next afternoon. Our new Director of Diversity and Community, asked the nine Diversity Coordinators to meet after school to debrief our experiences and share the feedback we received from our colleagues. After a year of not having a director, I welcomed the structure and was excited to hear his ideas about next steps -- which I assumed would be something like organizing informal small group discussions to follow up with interested faculty members about the workshop. As I listened to each coordinator share, I was struck by their apathetic tone. Many of the Diversity Coordinators said the people they talked to mainly focused on how the workshop was run, e.g. the groups were too big to have meaningful conversations, the facilitators had a weird dynamic, the unnecessary length of an all-day workshop (8:15 A.M. - 3:30 P.M.) right before the fast for Yom Kippur began. After dutifully noting each of their responses, our new director shared that many people often focus their feedback on the structural aspects of workshops like these rather than the content. He then asked us if our colleagues had shared anything with us that was not about the structure of the day.
One of the coordinators -- a white woman who I had attended a number of white Anti-Racist Educator (W.A.R.E.) meetings with -- added that a male faculty member of color called out to her “Happy Racism Day” as he passed her in the hall. She explained that since she didn’t really know him, she was just letting the director know in case he wanted to follow up. Although our director thoughtfully encouraged her to follow up with this teacher herself, I was surprised she had not engaged with this teacher and was shocked that she didn’t realize she was literally asking our new boss -- a Black man -- to engage with our colleague on her behalf because the thought of having this conversation made her feel too uncomfortable. Isn’t this what we were supposed to be doing as white anti-racist educators?! Having uncomfortable conversations! Leaning into discomfort!
Just then another coordinator -- a white-passing man who immigrated to the United States -- said that he and his colleagues in the Modern Language Department felt they had been forced to sit through a “Kindergarten” lesson because in their department they “always talk about race” and they all think what our school really needs to talk about is socioeconomic status, NOT race. As he continued to explain to our new director that the people in our community are beyond salvation, I felt all the frustration I was harboring from our conversations as a group last year turn to indignant rage.
What I heard when he said “focus on socioeconomic status” was: “I don’t like that rich people have so much power over me and they are always telling me how to do my job. We need to put an end to kids feeling so entitled. These kids are spoiled and their values should be more like mine.” While the extreme wealth of our parent population creates a number of challenging problems, from my perspective the reality is that: 1) we teach at one of the most expensive private day schools in the United States, 2) it feels like we talk about the conflicting interests of families and faculty all the time, and 3) the school has been actively working to implement policies to counteract the pressures resulting from the dramatic economic inequality in our community. You know what we don’t talk about? Race.
Upon reflection, I recognize that the surge of anger I felt occurred shortly after I realized my expectations were not going to be met during this meeting, which I almost immediately attributed to the alleged inferiority of my colleagues, rather than my own unchecked white male privilege and internalized superiority. In reality, I had lost track of why the meeting had been called: to share with our new director and the team how our colleagues had experienced the workshop. As a result, I now pay more attention to the stated purpose of each meeting I call and/or attend. This was also a good reminder that meetings and relationships do not occur in isolation; our prior life experiences with other people play a role in each interaction, whether we realize it or not.
While I realize it’s not all about race, talking about race lifts the veil that obscures reality (DuBois, n.d.). Thus, while extreme wealth is problematic, racism is a system and not talking about it is not going to make it any less oppressive and violent (Ramsey, 2016). On the other hand, increasing our racial literacy gives us the language and shared insight we need to address the impacts of racism (Wildman & Davis, 1997). We are all negatively impacted by racism. By deprioritizing conversations about race and racism, we work to maintain our investment in an unjust, anti-Black status quo, rather than join with others to fight on the side of joy and justice (Lawrence & Tatum, 2004). In other words, if we don’t have the racial literacy and stamina to talk about how racism is experienced in our community, we are not moving toward developing shared understanding and a sense of partnership.