(Dis)Covering Routes: Affective Turnover and Black American Teachers’ Transnational Migration to the United Arab Emirates
2022-05
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(Dis)Covering Routes: Affective Turnover and Black American Teachers’ Transnational Migration to the United Arab Emirates
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2022-05
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The United States (U.S.) is facing what I describe as a double teacher shortage, meaning a national teacher shortage and a shortage of teachers of color. To address the issues of shortage and diversity, educational scholars and policymakers have turned their attention to courting Black teachers into the profession because they have been deemed as role models. Yet, even as a central component of recruitment efforts, the proportion of Black teachers in the PK-12 system has continued to decrease while the proportion of other minoritized teachers has steadily increased. Attempts to understand how to effectively address the declining proportion of Black teachers has resulted in educational studies that focus on their attrition. Though these studies have presented a myriad of factors, they have provided domestic interpretations about Black teachers and have paid little attention to the role that Black teachers’ identities, lived experiences, and affective dimensions play in their decisions to leave. This qualitative dissertation study employed a narrative life history approach to understand the transnational migration decisions of 10 Black American teachers who left schools in the U.S. for schools in the UAE. The life histories of this under-researched population of teachers were significant sites for sense-making because widening the scope of domestic interpretations to a comparative and international one, allowed for a more thorough examination of attrition. The findings from this study were organized into three primary themes: (1) Emotional collisions; (2) Influencers and pain points; and (3) Transnational emotions. To explain the interconnectedness of identities, lived experiences, and the affective dimensions that collectively shaped these Black American teachers’ migration decisions, a new educational theory that I named affective turnover was employed. This theory emerged from this study and was a significant finding to help explain this phenomenon.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2022. Major: Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. Advisor: Frances Vavrus. 1 computer file (PDF); 255 pages.
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Smith, Tiffany. (2022). (Dis)Covering Routes: Affective Turnover and Black American Teachers’ Transnational Migration to the United Arab Emirates. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/241616.
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