Date of Award

Spring 2023

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Educational Studies

First Advisor

Terrance McAdoo

Abstract

Growing educational research shows that teachers of color are finding themselves working in racially hostile schools through experiencing racism from their White colleagues in explicit and inexplicit ways. There is a need to further categorize how North Carolina teachers of color are experiencing racism in the workplace and identify how they are affected by it through experiential knowledge and analysis underpinned by critical race theory. Through action research, this study’s goals incorporated the implementation and evaluation of a collaborative book as a method of intervention on the effects of racial trauma. The collaborative book presents full counternarratives of teachers of color wishing to share their experiences with racism while working in NC public schools with the intention of contributing their personal chapter of experiences into a non-fiction novel. Participants of this study utilized this intervention to understand how the use of collaborative books might help them cope with racism in the workplace and improve their overall experience as a teacher of color. The findings of this study showed that NC teachers of color are experiencing racism from their White coworkers in numerous ways, such as isolation, microaggressions, undermining, and the denial of racialization from White coworkers. The intervention of collaborative books shows promise as a means of mitigating the problem of practice by providing a means to cope with racial trauma and improve NC teachers of color’s overall experience.

Rights

© 2023, Deborah Stephanie Harrisson

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