Building Community Among K-8 Teachers Through a University-Educator Network Partnership

At this time of national divisiveness in the U.S., it is more important than ever for youth to have teachers who can facilitate critical conversations about race, immigration, gender, and other fraught issues in their classrooms. In this article, we detail how an innovative partnership among key education stakeholders in the state of Oregon fostered a sense of community and continued learning for kindergarten through eighth grade teachers to address these issues. We did so by developing and facilitating a professional development (PD) sequence focused on anti-racist critical literacy. More than 125 educators from 24 districts around the state participated in the sequence between 2021 and 2024. We begin by situating this work in the literature, then providing an overview of the partnership. Finally, we share the perspectives of 19 educators who spoke in interviews about their experience of the PD. We offer this as an example of how colleges of education can establish and nurture partnerships with other stakeholders to ensure that teachers feel supported in their efforts to further social justice, especially for those who lack community or administrative “backup”, as is the case for many educators in rural parts of the U.S.