2022-2023 Grant in Aid of Research
Stories of Adventist Teachers of Color and their Voluntary Job Mobility During their Early Years of Teaching in the North American Division.
Dollene Trott-Smith
Teachers of color (TOC) play a significant role in motivating SOC to achieve academically. They also serve as role models to these students and provide social and emotional support to countless few. In spite of the positive attributes stated about these valued educators, current literature indicates that TOC in U. S. public and private schools move from one school to another in search of better teaching opportunities and environments or leave teaching faster than their White counterparts. Many do so within the first five years of their teaching careers. The largest subset of these TOC include Blacks and Hispanics, whose collective percentage totals 13.9%. This percentage is lower than the number of Black & Hispanic students (35.6%) who attend public schools in the U.S. While efforts to recruit TOC have been successful over the past three decades, efforts made to retain the number of TOC recruited seems somewhat futile. The 21.7% gap between TOC workforce and the increasing SOC enrollment continues to persist. Given the personal, institutional, and educational cost associated with teacher turnover in North America, additional studies regarding this job mobility crisis among these valued educators is warranted. As such, this transcendental phenomenological qualitative research study will explore the voluntary job mobility of 8 novice TOC who teach in P-12 Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) schools in North America. This educational entity is reported as the fourth largest private school system in North America.