Starting with Ourselves

Most of the folks who study and facilitate learning around equity agree that this important work begins with ourselves. Across your Master’s program so far and through other personal and professional experiences, you have likely already spent some time unpacking your own identity and the ways your history influences how you view the world.

In her book, Identity Affirming Classrooms, Erica Buchanan-Rivera calls this “mirror work,” explaining how critical self-reflection “empowers us to reflect on how we value differences, including the messages we have internalized about people outside our inner circles…the biases that program how we respond and engage with others” (pp. 7-8, 2022). Dena Simmons (2019)1 calls this engaging in “vigilant self-awareness.” Paulo Freire (1970/2005) calls it developing "critical consciousness.” The term is less important than the practice—of continually examining “everyday realities to analyze the relationships between personal contexts and the wider societal forces…that restrict access to opportunity and resources, and thus, sustain inequity and perpetuate injustice that limit well-being and human agency” (Jemel, 2017).

Considering our own identities is also important as a teacher researcher. When we engage in teacher inquiry—like other forms of qualitative research, the researcher (that’s you, a human person!) asks the questions, collects the data, and analyzes the data. That means our own strengths and weaknesses, our own biases, inherently influence our research. However, as Merriam and Grenier (2019) point out, instead of trying to “eliminate these biases or ‘subjectivities,’ it is important to identify them and monitor them as to how they may be shaping the collection and interpretation of data” (pp. 5-6). They go on to explain how, when carefully considered, our ‘subjectivities’ can be an asset to our research as they form our unique perspective to our work.

In other words, our identities and experiences are our superpower as teacher researchers. And yet, if we don’t take time to reflect on our own identities and uncover our biases, we might not only come to flawed conclusions in response to our inquiry questions but, more importantly, we might perpetuate narratives and practices that are harmful to students’ own sense of identity and belonging within the learning environments and experiences we facilitate.

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References

Simmons, D. (2019). How to be an antiracist educator.ASCD Education Update, 61(10).

Freire, P. (1970/2005). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.

Jemal, A. (2017). Critical consciousness: A critique and critical analysis of the literature. The Urban Review, 49(4), 602–626.

Merriam, S. B., & Grenier, R. S. (Eds.). (2019). Qualitative research in practice: Examples for discussion and analysis (2nd edition). Jossey-Bass.