“Normal wasn’t always productive or helpful”: teachers of Color authentically caring for the humanities of Black, Indigenous, and students of Color during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

As research continues to dissect the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the teaching profession, the experiences of teachers of Color remain overlooked. Thus, this article explicitly centers the lived experiences and insider knowledge of six secondary teachers of Color who taught virtually during the pandemic to answer the question, “How do teachers of Color describe the change in their practices and pedagogies as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?” Their narratives described how they cultivated humanizing relationships with students in a virtual context, how their teaching practices and pedagogies shifted to prioritize students’ needs, and how they rejected deficit, neoliberal discourses of “learning loss” espoused during the pandemic. Collectively, their actions embodied elements of authentic caring that prioritized and sustained the humanities of students of Color during a time of immense upheaval. Their narratives underscore the importance of cultivating and enacting authentic caring to challenge harmful schooling practices during times of crisis and beyond.