This study examines how Black teacher-coaches (BTCs) build and sustain professional and pedagogical networks of support amid divisive concepts legislation that restricts classroom discussions related to race, identity, inequality, and systemic oppression. Drawing upon frameworks of communalism, collective Black identity, and Black historical consciousness, this research investigates how three BTCs collectively responded to legislative pressures that seek to constrain instructional autonomy and limit engagement with Black intellectual traditions. Findings demonstrate that these educators tended to each other with communal efforts that mirrored the purpose and functionality of a Black affinity group. Collectively, the participants supported one another’s beliefs and practices through mutual care, demonstrating what it meant to learn from their respective communities, and how their shared identities as Black educators and athletic coaches shaped their bond. This study contributes to scholarship by highlighting how communal educational practices function as mechanisms of support and resilience under restrictive legislative conditions.
This conceptual commentary examines the ethical ambiguity of mentorship in secondary music education, where long-term teacher-student relationships can become sites of care, belonging, identity formation, emotional overextension, role confusion, and harm. Drawing on care ethics (Noddings, 2013), music education philosophy (Jorgensen, 2010; Jorgensen Yob, 2019), mentoring literature (Arocho Johnson, 2023; Richerme, 2026), music teacher isolation and burnout research (Nápoles, 2022; Sindberg, 2011), educator misconduct literature (Jeglic et al., 2023), Foucauldian theories of power (Foucault, 1980), and the original double-bind formulation (Bateson et al., 1956), this article argues that secondary music education creates a distinctive double-bind: the same conditions that make music teachers powerful mentors can also make harmful dynamics difficult to recognize or interrupt. Sar and Ozturk’s (2006) trauma-related application of the double-bind informs, but does not define, that argument. Methodologically, the article proceeds through thought experiments (Gendler, 2000; Sorensen, 1991), using professionally informed illustrative scenarios to make visible ethical tensions that are difficult to study directly because of their sensitivity and institutional consequences. Rather than treating “bad mentorship” solely as individual moral failure, the article examines how structural and cultural conditions associated with traditional excellence in secondary music education can, when unsupported or misapplied, create conditions for harm. Ultimately, the paper calls for music teacher preparation programs, school districts, and professional organizations to address ethical ambiguity through boundary education, reflective mentorship, and adult support and accountability networks.
Existing wellness frameworks in Canadian institutions often offer individualized solutions to structural problems. For Black women navigating anti-Black institutional and social environments, such frameworks can locate harm in the individual body while remaining silent about the conditions producing it. Drawing on a one-year autoethnographic study with twelve Black women in a Toronto running collective, this paper argues that well-being is socially and structurally produced and that Afrofuturist, embodied, collective practices can constitute an abolitionist alternative to individualized wellness. Grounded in Black feminist thought, Afrofuturism as radical praxis, and abolitionist education, the study employs narrative inquiry, intersectional thematic analysis, and speculative analysis. Three findings emerge: well-being is structurally produced; collective embodied practice constitutes abolitionist care; and community restructures time and knowledge outside institutional capture. The paper considers the implications of these findings for Black women educators and Canadian educational institutions while remaining clear that the participant group was not composed exclusively of educators.
This article presents a remixed version of culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 2014) where the lived experience of participating in the intersecting cultures of basketball, Hip-Hop, and spirituality serves as a remixed version of culturally relevant pedagogy that is enacted outside of “the control of recognized experts” (Woodbine, 2016, p. 25). Using a heuristic inquiry methodology, the study consisted of interviewing participants, analyzing their responses, and using a creative synthesis to elucidate the findings. The study discovered that the lived experience of basketball, Hip-Hop, and spirituality served as a remixed version of culturally relevant pedagogy that was enacted by its participants through its saving their lives by offering direction, offering opportunities for intercultural engagement, offering opportunities for spiritual discovery, offering transferable skills, and providing music as a constant presence. This study and its findings are significant in contributing to validating the experience of all who live within the intersecting cultures of basketball, Hip-Hop, and spirituality, as well as highlighting the values within the experience that can be explicitly shared to help educators understand, support, and encourage students to follow their dreams and passions. In doing so, they can help encourage a form of culturally relevant pedagogy that will help students succeed in and out of the classroom.
Tailored to white female clinical interns (CIs), the prevalent university-centric approach to clinical practice reproduces racialized hierarchical structures in K-12 and higher education and does little to prepare teachers to dismantle educational inequities. Consequently, we know little about the ways clinical teacher education centers underrepresented preservice teachers and positions them to enact culturally relevant and socially just pedagogy. Authored by a white female former CT and three CIs outside this white female norm, this paper argues that a CI-centered approach to clinical practice can disrupt racialized educational inequities, but only if CIs can work with “bad” CTs. Bringing together collaborative autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and pláticas methodologies, we utilized Critical Race Theory to situate CIs’ stories within the ways whiteness, goodness, and smartness as property construct the ideal “good” teacher—an ideal often at odds with teachers who are not white women, who go against school mandates, who question the curriculum, and/or who trouble their own position of knowledge authority. We demonstrate how Ashanty, Jasmin, and Jacob’s “good” CTs enacted gatekeeping practices that limited the authors’ pedagogical and social influences they could have with their students, maintained their CTs’ statuses as “good” compliant teachers, and subsequently discouraged the authors from being “bad” teachers who disrupt the status quo. Arguing that these gatekeeping practices are manifestations of white supremacist logics of control foundational to United States schooling, we conclude by articulating what a CI-centered approach toward clinical practice would entail and demonstrate how this approach would position clinical teacher education as a lever for change.
