Waking up to Jacob Blake
Heightened need for systems of self-care for Black Male Educators
Waking up the past couple days has been tough. However, I am grateful to be able to wake up another day. This Monday, a Black father was shot seven times in his back, at point blank range, by police officers in front of his children. Receiving this news through the barrage of media coverage and public responses in the days since Jacob Blake’s shooting in Wisconsin has felt all too familiar. A deep pain in my lower stomach endures, as I repeat the same, painful conversations with my fourteen-year-old daughter, all while thinking about the world my four-year-old son is walking into. These conversations have been exhausting and overwhelming, to say the least. Now, more than ever before, I have begun to pay close attention to my own mental health as I evaluate the specific context of being a Black Male Educator. The convergence of extended quarantines with the continual infliction of police brutality just outside my door, has provided a unique prism for me to look through.
It started on the morning of June 1, 2020. I woke-up after an explosive weekend of protests by citizens around the country who were dissatisfied with the ongoing systemic racism that has plagued the Black community for generations. Over the past sixteen years, as a Black Male Educator in urban schools, I have had to bear the weight of the modern-day lynching of men and women of color with members of school communities. As a teacher I would have to pause class and address how the science topic of the day related to the injustice that was taking place in the world. Now as the Director of Science for over twenty campuses in Philadelphia and Camden, I am trying to support leaders as well as teachers within a global health crisis that disproportionately impacts people of color. While this is not a new challenge, it has been put in a very unique context making me feel vulnerable as a Black Male Educator.
One of my favorite movies growing-up was Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray. A hilarious movie where a weatherman gets stuck in a time loop until he learns important lessons about selflessness and community. According to a 1993 article in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bill Murray explained how he interpreted the original script as a lesson in how people repeat the same day over and over again because they are afraid of change.
The coverage of the recent murders and shooting of Black men and women at the hands of police officers, made me think of this movie as I woke up to the familiar narrative. As I approach the apex of my dissertation research at the University of Pennsylvania, I have had the opportunity to interview Black Male Teachers about their educational trajectory and life circumstances that impact their decision to remain a teacher. As part of my own self-care, I have also pushed myself to be vulnerable and participate in difficult conversations around race, equity and health. In July, I was invited to participate in a virtual panel discussion sponsored by the Aspire Counseling and Wellness Center that focused on the preparation schools are making for the fall semester. Motivated by the collective innovation and collaboration of educators, founder Kindall Tyson organized and facilitated this important discussion centered around how leaders and counselors are positioning themselves to support students, families and teachers among uncertainty.
The combination of these interviews and processing my own experience made me soberly aware of the importance of self-care for Black Male Educators who are experiencing varying levels of social and emotional stress. A short pilot study I conducted with fellow students at the University of Pennsylvania revealed that there are limited social and emotional supports geared toward the unique experience of Black Male Educators.
Overall, the follow-up interviews to our survey revealed that Black Male Educators are still motivated to serve in the education profession even amongst the uncertainty of COVID-19. While many would appreciate structured access to social and emotional supports, their responses indicate that the lack of these structures hasn’t impacted their decision to support students in their chosen capacity as an educator. It is clear among those who were interviewed, that they, as well as others around them, are struggling to maintain healthy mental wellness and feel that schools should offer equitable access to supports that can assist their mental health in ensuring kids have access to quality education.
The interviews revealed that schools are approaching social and emotional support with a dual sense of navigating new territory while continuing the same bad habits and mindsets. One of the participants described how his school has expected him and his colleagues to act as if it is business as usual, “Socially, emotionally like it wasn’t really a lot of support. I think everybody’s dealing with it, how they’re dealing with it but one thing I disliked was that, in schools in general we just try to transition like business as usual especially for the adults, not really taking consideration people are losing family members, people are stressed out, people are stuck at home. People have high anxiety here and all they are worried about really is like, making sure that we’re working for our salary.”
3M Self-care Framework for Educators: Manage your Monitoring and Monitor your Motivation
The 3Ms is an inquiry approach I have developed over my sixteen years as an educator for self-management of personal tasks that impact a team, family or institution in order to better understand the intersection of race, culture and identity. I realized that each time I had a big project or task to complete, I would organize my To Do lists with columns for managing, monitoring and motivating. The relationships between the various spheres of influence deconstructs the idea of Management into the 3Ps (protocols, participation and positioning), while Monitoring is understood through the ideas of the 3As (accountability, accuracy and attentiveness) and finally Motivation is leveraged using the 3Is (innovation, interpersonal, intuition).
→ Management: Establish Protocols that position you to participate in self-care. Establishing and maintaining healthy self-care habits and rituals will allow you to develop the resilience (capacity to bounce back) needed during this time of rapid change.
→ Monitoring: When managing your monitoring systems of self-care and wellness, it is important to make realistic goals while at the same time pushing yourself to expand your knowledge-base and develop skills that might be typically avoided. Systematic daily self-check-ins and journal entries can support the introspections that educators are experiencing during the pandemic.
→ Motivation: Many educators are grappling with notions of their identity as an educator. Identifying the elements of education that genuinely motivate and inspire you to deepen your patience and accelerate your passion for equitable and quality education will be crucial for educators. Don’t shy away from self-talk and creating visual reminders of what goals you want to accomplish during this social hibernation. Recognize those particulars that push your patience and motivation to the limits. Create mechanisms to monitor and counter the pessimism that may come with a social justice revolution and global health crisis.
Personal inquiry is central in using the 3M approach to self-management, thus should be applied as a way to learn about oneself and how to be more efficient when working with others.
