Terri L. Rodriguez - Invested Stayers: How Teachers Thrive in Challenging Times

Invested Stayers

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Shelbie Witte

Dear reader, if youre reading this book, youve been drawn to it for a specific reason or set of reasons. Perhaps you were intrigued by the title Invested Stayers: How Teachers Thrive in Challenging Times and selected it as a pleasure read, being interested in the topic of teachers and teaching. Maybe you picked up this book in the bookstore or library because of where it is situated, within the sections of education, advocacy, or policy or nestled conveniently within the three. Or conceivably you recognize the editors names on the cover or spine, or the chapter contributors names in the table of contents, knowing their impressive and impactful scholarship individually or collectively.

Perhaps you are a preservice teacher candidate, looking for all of the things you can put your hands on to guide you on your journey as a teacher. If so, I hope this book will show you examples of the importance of culturally sustaining pedagogies, social justice and cultural competencies, persistence in advocating for yourself and your students, and examples of teachers who are thriving in the challenging but rewarding profession of teaching.

Maybe you are an invested stayer, an educator who has shown persistence in the face of change and found ways to use these challenges to innovate. You may see a reflection of yourself in these stories, or reflections of colleagues who work alongside you, and find optimism in their successes and their willingness to share transparently how theyve met their challenges with fervent tenacity.

It may be that you are an invested leaver, a former educator who left the profession for personal or professional reasons but still feel a connection to the stories of teachers and their experiences. You might have left the classroom out of circumstances beyond your control, or perchance you left as a sign of resistance and advocacy as to no longer entertain the undue pressures and outside influences prevalent in your autonomy and your profession.

For all one knows, you may not consider yourself any of these and instead have come to this collection as an invested lurker with an interest in education and more specifically, teachers. Maybe you are a stakeholder, a policymaker, or someone genuinely curious about the profession of teaching. Maybe you are looking for answers to What could be so hard about it? or Why do teachers get summers off? You might want to learn more about what you are hearing on the news, at the coffee shop, or at family dinners when folks share their concerns about schools these days.

Ive come to this book as a reader with a combination of the lenses above and with a solemn intention to find examples of thrive within these pages to counter the unproductive dystopian narratives of education and teachers. I bring with me to this text experience as an educator of middle school, high school, and college/university undergraduate and graduate students, threads and characteristics of whom I recognize within the stories shared here. I also bring with me a scholarship of teacher advocacy and teacher professional development that shapes my unequivocal belief that positive relationships (teacher to teacher, teacher to stakeholder, teacher to student, student to student) are the common denominator for any effective and sustainable catalytic change within education.

I read these authors to make sense of how we got here, how education and the profession of teaching, in particular, have arrived to a world of landmark changes and catalysts with remarkable influence on what happens in every classroom without much, if any, input from those it most affects. I come to these chapters to remind myself of the investments made in the lives of teachers and students that pay dividends for generations to come.

As you read these stories, I hope you will notice the relationships between the authors of each chapter and consider the strength each draws from the reciprocal mentoring among one another. I hope you also see the strands of social justice work happening at each turn, making sustainable and fundamental changes to the way educators approach students and curriculum. I hope you recognize the consistent struggle to remain an invested stayer and the ways that the impact of the social, political, and disciplinary contexts and demographics of those who remain.

Whatever has brought you here, thank you. Im so glad you have the opportunity to read this book, too, and to share in the stories of teacher resilience and fortitude, to share in the lessons of sustainability of the teaching profession, and to embrace the opportunities that long-term mentoring relationships provide for all of us.

This book features chapters coauthored by PK12 teachers and teacher educators across the country, and these chapters reflect how the teachers persist and thrive in the teaching profession. Premised on the idea that coauthors are colleagues and mentors to each other, this book conceptualizes contributors as invested stayers. Chapters feature how particular catalysts, or landmark changes in education, have produced growth, agency, and even resistance across the arc of contributors professional lives.