Welcome to the Inquiry Oasis, the University of Arizona College of Education's podcast, here in the heart of the Sonoran Desert. We bring you conversations with our esteemed faculty members and staff, whose research impacts lives from Southern Arizona to the far reaches of the globe. We explore the transformative power of education in this border town, where diverse cultures and ideas converge, weaving a tapestry of innovation with compassion and a sense of wonder. So join us as we journey through the sands of curiosity, unearthing insights that enrich and inspire. Sit back and relax as we invite you to dive into the Inquiry Oasis. Thank you for tuning into the Inquiry Oasis. I'm your host, Jeffrey Anthony, and today we're thrilled to be joined by Dr. Ji Hong, a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Arizona. She received her BA from Seoul National University, her MA from Arizona State University and her PhD from the University of Georgia. As a qualitative and mixed method methodologist, her research mainly addresses training and development of pre-service and in-service teachers through the lens of teacher identity. Dr. Hong's, most recent research is on multiple marginalized and underrepresented teachers, and this will be the focus of today's discussion. So, without further ado, let's dive into this journey of exploration and discovery with Dr. Hong here in the inquiry Oasis. Dr. Hong, it's a pleasure to chat with you today.

Dr. Ji Hong: 1:33

Thank you.

Jeffrey Anthony: 1:34

Before we dive into your work on multiple marginalized and underrepresented teachers, can you share a bit about your journey and what's driven you to this field?

Dr. Ji Hong: 1:42

Sure, to answer this question, I think I need to share a little bit of my personal background first. I was born and raised in South Korea in a teacher family. So both my mom and dad were teachers. So naturally I went into College of Education and became a high school teacher.. So my own experience as a teacher definitely impacted my interest and passion to research about teachers, especially teacher identity, teacher motivation, and teacher emotion. And then since I moved to the United States and researching about teachers work and lives in the us, I started noticing something different. So unlike Korea, there is highly homogeneous country in terms of race and ethnicity. So in Korea, approximately 95% are Koreans. But US is different. US had a lot more racial and ethnic diversity, and it came to me as a stark contrast because probably my lens was more sensitized because of my background. So my research about teacher identity often involves qualitative interviews. So I started noticing that there are different stories between white teachers and racially marginalized teachers. So basically all teachers stories include challenges, but for white teachers, . Also teachers whose social identities like, gender identities, sexual identities, are aligned with norms of the society, about what teachers should be, who teachers should be. They are walking into spaces that are welcoming and accepting their being as a person, as a human. So they're not questioned about or interrogated about who they are as a person and as a teacher. But for marginalized teachers, that's a different story. Especially teachers whose social identities are marginalized like racially, gender, or sexual identities, and those identities are not aligned with the norms or master narrative in the society. And they're constantly questioned about who they are as teachers, both explicitly and implicitly. So it's almost like a swimming in the resistance pool that you have to constantly swim against the current. So there's like a microaggression. There's explicit hospitality, there's a stereotype, biases, no promo, homo policy, implicit discourses about the norms. also exclusive practices. And there are so many layers of challenges. And then, as we all know, teaching is not an easy job, but for marginalized teachers, they face even more challenges because of these additional layers of oppression. So when teachers' wellbeing suffers because of that, then that naturally impacts their motivation and and emotion as a teacher. Then it also consequently impacts their quality of instruction, their interaction with the students and all aspects of teachers' work and lives. So I believe that teachers work and lives, especially marginalized teachers', identity, their motivation, their wellbeing, those are really critical for our education and that's what led me to, to pursue this path of research.

Jeffrey Anthony: 4:47

Well, fantastic. I love that jour, I love the journey that you just, explicated there. So we're eager to learn more about the focus of your research. Can you lay out for our audience what multiple marginalized and underrepresented teachers is?

Dr. Ji Hong: 5:00

Sure, um. Multiple marginalized and underrepresented teachers, maybe we can make this a little shorter, um, it's a MMU to, to easier to communicate. And MMU teachers are basically teachers whose multiple social identities are marginalized. For example, not only racially marginalized as a black teacher, but also black and gay teacher. So two aspects of social identities are marginalized simultaneously. So it goes back to the original idea about what identity is. So teachers are first and foremost they are persons. So being a person is just one of many ways that a person can identify. So a person can identify as a, a parent, as a caregiver, as a hiker, as a dog lover. but in particular I'm interested in those social groups that are sensitive to power dynamics in the society, like race, gender, or sexuality. So MMU teachers are, by definition are those teachers who have two or more dimensions of, of social identities are marginalized. As I mentioned before, for example, black and gay teacher, or Hispanic transgender teacher as an example. And because of this multiple dimensions of marginalization, they experienced this intersectionality or intersecting identities, and they experienced this complex, multiple cumulative effect of oppression because of that. So since my dissertation, I was interested in teacher identity development. So teacher identity is basically teachers' own understandings about themselves, as a teacher and it's not fixed thoughts or beliefs. It's changing. It's shaped through those agentic regulating, negotiating processes and that facilitate the interpretation and reinterpretation of their personal and professional experiences. And those experiences are not in vacuum. It's situated within multi-layered social historical context. So because of that, the teacher identity I believe is a central force that informs guides and regulates teachers' actions that impact and are tied to teacher motivation, teacher effectiveness, teacher career decision. So the ways that teachers develop their identity, that they enact their identity, I believe those are core to understand teachers' work and lives. So given that in particular, in my research, I address like how marginalized social identities, and their intersecting dynamics impact the way teachers construct, enact their teacher identity in their school space. If you don't mind, maybe I can share an example to make this little bit more concrete maybe.

Jeffrey Anthony: 7:41

Oh, that would be fantastic. Yes, please.

Dr. Ji Hong: 7:43

Yeah, so maybe I can share an example of Eva, One of my participants, of course, this is a pseudonym. Eva is a fourth grade teacher and she identifies herself as both Latina and lesbian. And Eva experienced a lot of microaggressions and explicit hostility in school space. So, as an example, Eva had to move school because of that, but at her former school, a parent outed her without her consent. Because the parents saw Eva in like two towns over with her girlfriend in a supermarket, and the parents came back to the school and made very explicit and clear communication with the principals and other teachers, why teachers like Eva, referring to her sexuality, should not be a teacher who teaches my child. So after that incident, Eva felt very unsafe in the school, not only mentally, but also physically. So for example, she found that her car, window was broken in the school parking lot and that kind of prompted her to move to the school. This is very different from white heterosexual teacher's experiences that whose personal and professional experiences are usually seamlessly connected and accepted in both inside and outside of the school. Because Eva's sexuality was not only oppressed within the school. But also outside of the school, even posing harm and risk to her life. And that negatively impacts her teacher identity because she cannot fully show up and act as herself, complete self, in the school environment. So she has to balance her safety. Also, her needs to work as a teacher. Eva has to be very strategic about how to communicate her sexuality with other people in school, for example, eva very carefully used the word like even day-to-day, casual communication with other teachers, eva couldn't just say, my girlfriend, Eva has to say my partner, and very carefully communicating that aspect of her identity. But for MMU teachers like Eva, it is not just sexual identity that she has to negotiate it's also racial identity that she has to negotiate in tandem with sexual identity together, which adds more complexity and weight to her daily lives. So Eva has very clear awareness about how those macro levels of racism and heterosexism trickled down to the school space as the norms and culture and how that impacts her, pretty much all dimensions of our interaction with students, her parents, her colleagues, her administrators. So she wanted to stay safe, but also she wants to maximize her teacher identity that she wants to advocate social justice. So she opted to conceal her sexual identity, but foregrounded her racial identity. For example, she created this program for, enhancing marginalized students' social emotional wellbeing. That's the foregrounding part of her, her racial identity. But at the same time, she's strategically hiding her sexual identity so that she can amplify the space for, enacting teacher identity, who can advocate for social justice. So it's very delicate, dynamic and boundary and strategy, she had to enact every day with very clear awareness, so carefully negotiating her intersecting identity that enabled her to stay sort of safe in the school space, but that did not erase her emotional toll because she has to basically play her fractured identity in the school space. So this is one snapshot example about what MMU teachers experiences are like in the school space. And this is part of my recent publication in teachers and teaching, article

entitled The Wellbeing Under Threat: 11:28

Multiple Marginalized and Underrepresented Teachers Intersecting Identities.

Jeffrey Anthony: 11:34

We will share a link to that article in the show notes, Uh, and I'm going to read that as well. So, Dr. Hong, the personal narratives that lead us to our research often enrich its significance. Could you shed light for our audience on why this particular area of study resonates so deeply with you.

Dr. Ji Hong: 11:50

Sure. I think it all goes back to the fundamental question about why we do research for me why I do the research. And I believe that research should be able to address those problems in the society, problems in our education. There are many issues, but I think one of the fundamental issues in education is the lack of true diversity, true inclusiveness, and equity. And those are permeated in every aspect of education. So if we do not have those critical lens, then you basically allow your research to flourish those master narratives, that basically dehumanize marginalized communities, especially in the field of educational psychology. The master narratives have been tied to this assumption about absolutism. So basically psychological processes and constructs are essentially universal and culture free and value free. So it can be universally applicable to across the population. And this assumption sort of justifies the pretense that classrooms and schools are neutral. Space and race can be an apolitical descriptor. So race is devoid of any social, cultural, historical meaning, and without any connection to social structures, social systems or social culture it simply reflects skin color and associated with individual qualities and characteristics. So consequently, the, the absence of intentional effort to centralize and incorporate those social, historical cultural context result in making researchers to attribute those cognitive, motivational, or affective processes and outcomes to all intra-individual innate characteristics. So essentially this translates into deficit perspective. Like, uh, black children, the master narratives are, they, they are not intelligent. And this kind of assumption also strengthens that racial hierarchies and normalize those white supremacist ideologies. So master narratives, if they're not effectively challenged, then they, they can do harm and they have done harm, then they will do harm if they go untested They basically misrepresent this marginalized teachers' and other participants' authentic life experiences. So because of this belief, I basically advocate the research should do greater good and meaning research should engage participants with the intent to humanize and ascribe them to really authentic, truthful, complex experiences that characterize their humanity as the way it is. So in order to do that, we need to incorporate those and centralized social, historical, social context and incorporate those broad empirical lens about the roles of social structures such as race, gender, sexuality, and other marginalized social identities and how they impact teachers' experiences. So I believe that it is through those scholarly work aimed at rehumanizing and engendering respect for diversity and heterogeneity of our communities, that our work can be truly transformative. So that's a little bit of my personal background about how and why I engage this kind of work.

Jeffrey Anthony: 15:03

That was fascinating, and I'm gonna ask something off script But what I'm hearing, you know, my own personal background is, in public policy recently, and one thing that you were saying that resonated with me was the idea of looking at more of a qualitative aspect of a person's life. When you're doing research, a lot of times we think of research in the quantitative realm. We wanna use numbers, and descriptors that, we can generate over and over and over again. But this seems to flatten out the richness and, and the heterogeneity, as you mentioned, of a person's life and their lived experience in the context in which all this is, uh, emerging. is this why, you know, the the methodological approach you take is, is focused on more of a, qualitative aspect and, and how is that qualitative aspect. Received in, in, in, in more of academia like bringing this qualitative in mixed with the quantitative, I'm curious how that, works in, in the real world, as you are a, a real researcher here at the University of Arizona. Yeah.

Dr. Ji Hong: 15:59

Yeah, I think it varies from field to field, but I can speak in the field of educational psychology. So educational psychology has been and still dominantly, quantitatively driven field. So nowadays there's a different branches or movement of QuantCrit that really try to incorporate those social historical aspect of quantitative research too. But educational psychology research, as I mentioned before, rooted in more absolutism idea that this one measure can be applied to everybody. There is no, um, culture or value that is inherently tied to these people's experiences. And because of that quantitative research rooted in objectivism, really foregrounded in educational and psychology research, and naturally consequently, it marginalized and it really cannot capture this complex, dynamic, nuanced experiences of marginalized teachers' authentic experiences because it's not really fitting those master narrative or the major methodological approach in the field. So as a, as a kind of counter movement, there's this, new methodology, not, not quite new, but has been there for a while, but, start using more in educational psychology research about, particular qualitative approach called counter stories or counter narrative. So basically challenging those existing master narrative and really adding the visibility, voice, and authority to marginalized people's experiences. And let them really share, talk about those experiences. And it has a lot of liberatory and, and healing function too. So that's getting more attention and value in this time and era specifically. Also my research is aligned with that types of methodologies more specifically too.

Jeffrey Anthony: 17:46

Well, I, I consider that incredibly important, thank you for explaining that to our audience. And considering the context of our discussion and its relevance to the academic community, why do you believe this research holds significance for the University of Arizona?

Dr. Ji Hong: 17:59

Sure, um. I think it has very direct connection to University of Arizona, especially Colleagues of Education, because I believe one of the key functions for colleagues of education is to prepare future teachers and provide support for practicing teachers. So if we do not truly understand what marginalized teachers' authentic, complex nuanced experiences are, which is often silenced or erased or misrepresented, then we cannot really start addressing how to improve that either. So how can we stop microaggression in the school spaces? How can we stop exclusive practices? How can we change inequitable policies? But if we don't know what's going on first, we cannot really address those problems either. So I believe it's critically important to, as a first step of many steps to understand what's going on first and why this is important and relevant to, to College of Education and the mission of the college. Also, we have to think about the, the kind of consequential effect to, to the student side as well. Cause if teachers are not marginalized, then that impacts their sense of wellbeing. And generally when people feel good about themselves and they can do better about their work. And that impacts of also the teacher quality and teacher's interaction with the students. So overall, this kind of work is critical for better preparing our pre-service teachers. Also better supporting our practicing teachers as well.

Jeffrey Anthony: 19:27

Fantastic. During your research, have there been any discoveries or outcomes that have taken you by surprise?

Dr. Ji Hong: 19:33

Yes. I, I sort of knew that marginalized teachers experience challenges, lots of challenges, also, as being a minority woman living in the United States, I myself have experienced, various forms of microaggression and stereotypes. But as I start doing this research through in-depth interviews, I was really struck by how severe these MMU teachers' experiences are. So I interviewed for this particular project, 54 marginalized teachers, and out of them 14 were MMU teachers. During the interviews, many of them shed tears. Some of them are even literally packing, and I can see the boxes in the background of the Zoom interviews because they were told to leave the school because of their social identities. So until I engaged this research, I really did not know the severity and the multifaceted nature of oppression that these MMU teachers experience from all directions in the interaction with students in the dynamic, with colleague teachers in this relationship with administrators. Or even students', parents on day-to-day basis. Also, how little support they have from the schools, from the teacher education program. And that's just so shocking and surprising, even if I knew it's going on. It's really severe and more serious than I thought. So it ties back to this original, earlier question about why, I do this research and why we need to continue to engage this kind of research to better prepare future teachers, and better support our current practicing teachers for equitable education.

Jeffrey Anthony: 21:10

So if you could jump. Into a time machine and observe the state of K to 12 education, what would you love to see in this future state?

Dr. Ji Hong: 21:17

this is a fun question, I would love to see schools where, um, marginalized teachers are not marginalized anymore. So basically schools are filled with plenty of teachers of color and plenty of teachers who identify with L-G-B-T-Q community. Cause currently marginalized teacher attrition rates are much higher than white teachers. But the better we address those equity issues in education, the more we will see marginalized teachers in our schools and it impacts students directly. There are multiple research reported that, students tend to do better academically, socially, emotionally, when they were taught by teachers who share very similar social identities. So if we have more teachers of color or teachers who identify with L-G-B-T-Q community, then it can positively impact students as a whole and we can create better and safe school space. So I would love to see that marginalized teachers feel welcomed and nurtured in the school space so that they can also welcome and nurture their own students more effectively too.

Jeffrey Anthony: 22:21

I would love to see that future as well. So we're nearing the end of our conversation and we ask all of our guests if they can recommend a book or a paper that has been meaningful to them. Could you share one with our audience and explain how it has impacted you?

Dr. Ji Hong: 22:35

Sure. I would like to recommend a recent article published in Educational Psychologist in 2022. It was actually written by Francesca Lopez, who graduated from UA, and worked at ed psych department as a faculty for a few years, and now she's at Penn State. So the title of this article is "Can Educational Psychology Be Harnessed to Make Changes for the Greater Good?" So this is an excellent article that make a sort of wake up call to the field of educational psychology. And in that article, she criticized the lack of engagement of critical discourse in educational, psychology research. And situated that argument in historical context as well. So it's this really call and the need for equitable educational effort, especially in relation to anti-racist social purpose of schooling and its implication for ed psych research. So whether you are in educational psychology, field or not, overall, I think this article really suggest great direction for equitable education for for educational researchers. So this article really laid the good foundation and, and kind of pointing out the direction for my future research as well.

Jeffrey Anthony: 23:46

It's been a profound pleasure exploring the intricate dimensions of multiple marginalized and underrepresented teachers, and learning about the passion and commitment driving your research. Your dedication to understanding and uplifting the voices of these educators, coupled with your insight on teacher identity is both enlightening and essential. I have to say this interview has been very impactful, we are genuinely excited to see the continued ripple effects of your transformative work in the education realm. And thank you listeners for joining us today in the Inquiry Oasis. We hope our conversation with Dr. Ji Hong has invigorated your curiosity and broadened your understandings. And remember, we're back on the first and third Wednesdays of every month with fresh insights and conversations. So be sure to tune in. Until next time, keep your curiosity alive and remember, knowledge is our oasis.

The Inquiry Oasis: A UArizona College of Education Podcast

Ep 9 Dr. Ji Hong: Navigating the Intricacies of Multiple Marginalized Teacher Identities

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