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I am a Black, female, second-generation immigrant of Fante and Ashkenazi heritage and a mother to two children attending schools in London. I am also a teacher educator. At the time of writing, I have just submitted my research proposal which is concerned with the overlooked experiences of trainee secondary languages teachers of Colour. The proposal is the culmination of the two-year taught part of the professional doctorate in education (EdD) programme that I completed at the institution in which I am employed. I receive financial help from my employers to cover a significant portion of my course fees. I have a husband who has taken charge of childcare while I have attended scheduled weekend and evening lectures, and on the many occasions when, having relinquished family responsibilities to just work something out for a minute, I spent the entire weekend needing to stay in the zone. While these privileges have undoubtedly enabled me to study, in this blog post I reflect on why I have felt compelled to, and on how doing so helps me to hold up my end of the bargain (Louie, 2012).

The promise of education

Reflecting a well-documented trope relating to the requirement of children of immigrant parents to realise social ascent through education, my value orientations towards academia were hardwired from an early age. In stark contrast with the low educational expectations ascribed to me during my schooling in the 1980s and ’90s, the pursuit of academic success was positioned front and centre at home. The stories I cannot remember first hearing include: my paternal grandmother’s sacrifice and the journey my father made, against his volition, aged 10, from his family home in Cape Coast, to live with his father in Kent to access ‘a world-class education’; European Pogroms, the Holocaust and the notion repeated often that ‘they can take everything away from us except our education’. Evocations of the sacrifice, struggle and liberatory promise of education still loom large in my imagination, making my decision to study the inevitable consequence of, and obligation to, my family histories.

‘The evolution of my EdD research tells the story of shifting convergences between competing personal values and professional duties which play out in my daily working life.’

Reimagining languages education

The evolution of my EdD research tells the story of shifting convergences between competing personal values and professional duties which play out in my daily working life. One such tension relates to my ‘visceral understandings’ (Moreira & Diversi, 2010, p. 458) of the racism encountered by trainees of Colour (Callender, 2020; Warner, 2022) and the dearth of ideological and material spaces afforded by the current policy context to interrogate the structures and ideologies that perpetuate their marginalisation within the professional domain (Cushing, 2023; Smith & Lander, 2023). The EdD programme is affording me the ideological space to reimagine languages education, teacher preparation and my role within it through the centring of trainee languages teachers of Colour. With attention to their stark underrepresentation in the profession (Worth et al., 2022) and to my children – who, like all children, are entitled to the safety of teachers who reflect them and value their worldviews (Kohli, 2021) – and implicated, as I am, within the systems of oppression (Cushing, 2023), I am obliged to use my research as a means through which I assert my resistance.

The EdD then, reflects my efforts to hold up my end of the bargain to my students, my children, my heritage and to my professional integrity.

References��

Callender, C. (2020). Black male teachers, white education spaces: Troubling school practices of othering and surveillance. British Educational Research Journal, 46(5), 1081–1098.

Cushing, I. (2023). Raciolinguistic policy assemblages and white supremacy in teacher education. Curriculum Journal, 34(1).

Kohli, R. (2021). Teachers of color: Resisting racism and reclaiming education. Harvard Education Press.

Louie, V. (2012). Keeping the immigrant bargain: The costs and rewards of success in America. Russell Sage Foundation.

Moreira, C., & Diversi, M. (2010). When janitors dare to become scholars: A betweeners’ view of the politics of knowledge production from decolonizing street-corners. International Review of Qualitative Research, 2(4), 457–474.

Smith, H., & Lander, V. (2023). Finding ‘pockets of possibility’ for anti‐racism in a curriculum for student teachers: From absence to action. Curriculum Journal, 34(1).

Warner, D. (2022). Black and minority ethnic student teachers’ stories as empirical documents of hidden oppressions: Using the personal to turn towards the structural. British Educational Research Journal, 48(6), 1145–1160.

Worth, J., McLean, D., & Sharp, C. (2022). Racial equality in the teacher workforce: An analysis of representation and progression opportunities from initial teacher training to headship. National Foundation for Educational Research.