The Pushout and Pullout of Black Educators with Dr. Asia Lyons

Dr. Asia Lyons Hi everyone. This is Dr. Asia Lyons. I'm coming on solo today just because I had a few thoughts that I wanted send out into community, and I felt like why wait until one of our next episodes when we just have discussion today. So this week I had the opportunity to work with. An organization that supports preschool teachers here in my area, and I was talking to them.

We were having a conversation about racial battle fatigue, racism related stress, all the things that we talk about here, our podcast, and I talk about my consulting firm as we're having these conversations. One of the people in the group was saying that they hadn't even thought about the layers of racism related stress and how it impacts.

Folks speedy leaving of education. They were thinking, yes, teaching is hard, but they didn't really come to comprehend [00:02:00] that thick layer of racism related stress on top of that. And so we were having this conversation. We were talking about how the response to that stress is racial vital fatigue and the psychological, physiological, emotional and behavioral responses to bodies.

And then we started to talk about how the ways that preschool teachers, specifically in this program, how take that stress, that experience, workplace, home to. And this is the piece that I wanna talk about right here on today's podcast is what does it mean when we talk about retaining and recruiting of black educators, brown educators, into a space?

And we don't think about the impacts of behaviors on the families of those folks when we say, okay, we have 47 black educators in this school district. Or We have 27 indigenous people working within this organization. What we really should be saying is that we have 47 [00:03:00] families working within this space, and the reason why I wanna emphasize families is because families help make decisions with employees about employment.

That's really important that you all understand that. So, for example, we talked about in this meeting last week about this idea of being pushed outta school spaces. And what that means is, you know, experiencing racism from other employees, from different folks, from students parents and things like that.

And so what we're talking about is this kinda push outta these folks, these educators from the space. But I also brought to them this idea of being pulled outta a space. I'll give you an example. When we have folks who are experiencing all types of stress at work and they start to tell their family, which is a response, racial battle fatigue, we're crossing over.

We're telling them what's going on. Well, eventually family members will say one or two things. They'll say, you can do this for two more years, [00:04:00] or whatever, until you can retire. Or they'll say something like, I can help you find a job somewhere else. And that's when the pullout starts to happen, right?

Where it's, let me find you a job here, or Lemme help you find a job over here. Or I know someone is hiring. So really you have to understand when you're thinking about these individual folks, it's not an individual if they're not treated, teachers, educators, administrators, school therapists, if we're not treated in the ways that we.

Our families can help us and a lot of times find other places to be. You have to take that into consideration. So we're talking about recruitment, we're talking about retention. It's really important to think about the family as a dynamic, and when I talk about family here on the podcast, when I talk about family out and community and my other work, Really families defined by however, that person, that educator defines family.

So we're talking roommates, parents, grandparents, [00:05:00] nieces and nephews, fictive kin, play cousins, old colleagues from work, however that goes. But the point that I'm trying to make is all of these people, their stories, their lived experiences come with that person to work and vice versa. So that's really important for folks to be thinking about as we ask that question of like, how can school districts and unions and other groups of folks, how can educators within the space?

We have to remember that it's not just them. It's the families. Cause families are impacted. And I'll just give one more example of this. When I was doing my dissertation research, when I interviewed families, I had two families. When I asked them, like, tell me what are some things, like some ways that this shows up in your household.

They talked about like the person would text all day about this racialized events that were happening in the school. They would then get in the car and call that person and talk to the person about it. Family member, spouse, whatever, and then they [00:06:00] be processing it with them all day. And so they had to said, it's interesting that if I didn't have the racism related stress and racial battle fatigue to talk about, I don't know what I would talk about with my family.  That's heavy.  And when they said that, they paused because they understood how heavy that was, what that meant for important, again, efforts.