UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Centering the voices and needs of Black women who are training to become teachers could help improve their experiences, according to Mariah Harmon, assistant professor of education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the Penn State College of Education. Harmon has spent her career studying how teacher education programs can better center the developmental needs of minoritized teachers, with the goal of improving their experiences in education. She recently co-authored a study focused on understanding the experiences of Black women pre-service teachers — individuals who have enrolled in teacher education programs but have yet to begin their professional careers — published in the International Journal of Qualitative Methods. Her co-author was Kristina Hunter, a College of Education alum who founded Empowered Youth LLC in Baltimore and has served as chairperson in the special education department for Baltimore City Schools. Hunter is also a student in the curriculum and instruction Ph.D. program at Penn State.
In this Q&A, Harmon discussed what she and her co-author learned from centering the voices of Black women in teacher education programs. The study was funded through dissertation fellowship awards from both the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
Q: What is qualitative research? How does understanding the individuals’ experiences contribute to the broader field of teacher education?
Harmon: Qualitative research is studying what cannot be quantified, things like concepts, experiences and opinions. That's really the focus of this paper — let’s think about how we do qualitative research in a different way to think about how we're really hearing the voices of these participants.
We conducted in-depth interviews with 10 Black women pre-service teachers from around the U.S. Data collection took place during the fall 2020 and spring 2021 semesters. The women also participated in eight two-hour “counterspace” sessions held using Zoom that allowed them to discuss issues with those sharing similar identity markers.
The study investigated participants’ journeys to becoming educators through their experiences as students, their experiences in teacher education, their hopes for their future classrooms, and their overall needs for success. These interviews explored their ideologies and commitments to better understand their development.
Q: In the paper, you found that the participants reported feeling isolated and disappointed, as well as resentment toward teacher education programs. Why?
Harmon: The women we interviewed said they often feel like the curriculum is not for them, and they're not able to see themselves reflected in the pedagogies and practices in their programs. The things that they’re learning in their teacher education programs often don't resonate with what they have been taught previously or what they value. Culturally, there is often this disconnect between the program and what these women have learned to prioritize outside of that space.
There is also the issue of tokenism. If you are one of few people of color in the space, everyone's looking at you to speak for all people of color or to defend a group of people against disparaging — intentional or not — statements toward families and students.
There is a lot of this invisible work that also goes along with just trying to pass classes, just trying to do the work, and just trying to become a good teacher. But Black women are reporting these other factors that are impacting their experience in the classroom, and ultimately, their capacity to be able to learn in a safe environment. I think when you are positioned as the “other,” there are a lot of consequences. Things are normalized through curriculum, through pedagogies that make it so, just even showing up as your authentic self is seen as othered versus part of the norm, of what’s considered centered and valued in the community or in the space.
Q: Can centering Black women’s voices in education help reduce the nationwide teacher shortage?
Harmon: Yes. One of the biggest issues in teacher education, and across our institutions, is belonging. Pre-service teachers of all backgrounds want to be seen, heard, and accepted as their authentic selves. We must expand our definitions of teacher education and what it means to be an effective teacher. This work takes time. We have to understand the experiences, sometimes joyful and sometimes painful, of our future teachers to help them unpack their understandings of what it means to be an effective educator of the next generation.
It takes having more teacher educators who prioritize changing and improving our current systems; however, this work is hard because a teacher shortage means we're up against a timeline.
Digging into those experiences takes time; it takes building a relationship between the pre-service teachers and their instructors. There’s a lot of in-depth work that I think we often overlook because we urgently need teachers in the classroom as soon as possible.
But this is important. What we heard from our study participants is that pre-service teachers are having experiences that impact how they view teaching and how they feel others — colleagues, students, supervisors — view them as teachers. If we can better consider that teachers, especially Black women teachers, are not a monolith of one experience when developing and updating teacher education programs, perhaps the field would be more appealing for more people, especially women of color.
Q: Why is it often assumed teachers from minoritized groups will be able to relate to students from the same group? How do such assumptions impact pre-service teachers?
Harmon: Matching students and teachers’ phenotypic qualities is an easy task. If I look like you, or if I speak like you then we must be similar. While that can be the case, that is a dangerous assumption. Most teachers have attended college and/or graduate school, so they have been successful in this system of school. And so, they may not question the systems that they’ve been navigating. They may not question the discriminatory pedagogies they have endured.
The way that we often think about school is how we experienced it. If you're not critical about — or have those opportunities to question those practices — then we have a tendency to reinforce them.
Sharing an identity marker with somebody else doesn't mean that you are looking at school in the same way.
Instead, let’s unpack your experiences. Let's think about these “ghosts,” which is what I call them in the paper, and bring them back from the past to help us rethink these memories and learn from them. How do I rethink these experiences to now help my students in the future to be able to thrive and not just survive? How do I think about the ways that I had to learn to navigate that may not be the best way for me to run my class in the future?
This approach breaks down what we have experienced — which have often been experiences of oppression in different ways — and pushes us to rethink them to challenge previous ways of thinking and doing in our future teaching practices.