By Nadia Clarke Cordick
When I began teaching, I was the only Black educator on staff at my Ontario school.
In addition to my official responsibilities, I was often called on to translate cultural dynamics, support students experiencing racism and provide emotional labour for colleagues — for instance by serving as a shoulder to cry on.
As research related to Ontario and elsewhere in Canada shows, both these situations — of finding myself the sole Black educator on a staff, and being expected to provide emotional labour — are common for Black teachers.
No one named the cultural translation and emotional labour tasks, they were simply expected. While professional development days offered “wellness” sessions on mindfulness and stress reduction, they never addressed the racialized stress I was experiencing or named a systemic problem to be solved.
While often well-intentioned, as researchers across sectors have examined, “wellness” focused on individual responsibility can often be interpreted as asking individuals to cope better, rather than asking institutions, cultures or social structures to change.
Now, in my doctoral studies, I am developing a research plan to conduct a qualitative study with Black women educators in Ontario, where I explore how they experience burnout and care in predominantly white school systems — and how they re-imagine those systems as places of dignity, rest and belonging.
Wellness focused on the individual
Teacher wellness strategies comprise things like short-term initiatives and professional development focused on stress management. These may be offered by school boards, teacher unions or third-party organizations.
Approaches to teacher wellness often ignore deeper contexts, including around racialized and gendered inequities: for example, that Black women educators face disproportionate stress due to systemic racism, isolation and exploitative emotional labour.
Research shows that generic self-care programming fails to acknowledge how race and gender shape the experience of burnout in education. Without addressing institutional conditions, these “solutions” become bandages on a structural wound.
The weight Black women carry in schools
Black women are often positioned as caretakers, expected to support students, serve on equity committees and manage diversity work, all while navigating workplace bias and surveillance. These added burdens are rarely acknowledged or compensated.
A 2023 doctoral dissertation called this out directly: “wellness” for Black women educators often becomes a form of resistance, not just recovery, in the face of institutional neglect. Emotional exhaustion is not a personal failure, but a predictable outcome of systems that extract care without offering care in return.
Many Black women educators also report experiencing “racial battle fatigue,” a term describing the cumulative toll of daily microaggressions, stereotype threats and constant self-monitoring in predominantly white environments.
In exploratory conversations conducted as part of developing my research, I am hearing that Black women educators are experiencing harm in the very systems that claim to support their well-being — that we are being asked to survive conditions that need to change. One educator in Durham Region shared the following:
“In 2011 and again in 2019, I had white colleagues reach out and touch my hair, one of them during an introduction by my administrator. I had to tell them it made me uncomfortable, and that conversation was hard. But it’s the kind of emotional labour we carry, quietly.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, emotional labour became even more visible. The same educator recalled that after George Floyd’s murder:
“Our admin opened a staff meeting by asking how we were feeling. There was no prep. No follow-up. It felt like emotional voyeurism. What were they offering in return for that vulnerability?”
Afrofuturism offers a liberatory framework
To truly support Black women educators, we need frameworks that centre justice, imagination and collective care, not just resilience.
One such approach is Afrofuturism: a Black radical tradition that blends memory, imagination and the envisioning of liberated futures and new worlds beyond racial violence.
In educational contexts, Afrofuturism has been used to disrupt deficit narratives and imagine liberatory possibilities for Black learners and educators alike.
Informed by Afrofuturist and Black feminist thought, my emerging research identifies four recurring principles that reframe well-being as political, collective and embodied:
- Speculative imagination: Dreaming of educational spaces that don’t yet exist.
- Embodiment: Honouring the body as a site of knowledge and resistance.
- Fugitivity: Refusing harmful systems and finding joy outside their boundaries.
- World-making: Creating new models of care, rest and belonging.
‘Affinity spaces’
These Afrofuturist and Black feminist principles partly emerged in practice during my earlier research in social justice studies, when I collaborated with Hill Run Club, a Toronto-based Black women’s running and wellness collective.
Working alongside 12 Black women over the course of a year, I engaged as both a researcher and a run coach through movement, reflective journaling and vision boarding. This community-rooted project was co-created with participants and explored how Black women experience wellness, safety, body politics and belonging in predominantly white fitness spaces.
This work countered dominant wellness narratives by engaging in speculative reimagining and centring community-rooted care as acts of resistance. It also laid the methodological and theoretical foundation for my current research.
In a narrative interview, Aaries Clarke Cordick, a teacher candidate in Ontario, shared what Afrofuturist wellness means to her:
“Affinity spaces make a difference. Being around colleagues with similar philosophies of inclusion, or even just seeing teachers who reflect the diversity of our students matters. We need PD [professional development] that speaks directly to racial battle fatigue and burnout, especially for those working with marginalized students but in staff cultures that aren’t Black.”
How we can actually do better
So what would it mean to take Black women educators’ well-being seriously?
My work will continue to engage three approaches that shift the focus from individualized “self-care” toward structural, community-rooted change:
Institutionalize sister circles: These peer-led spaces are already being used informally for mutual support, mentorship and storytelling. Schools should recognize and resource them as formal professional learning structures.
Build radical rest into policy: Instead of encouraging teachers to “unplug” after work, school boards can conduct equity audits and provide protected wellness time during the school day.
Co-create wellness initiatives: Black women educators must be at the centre of designing wellness policies that reflect their lived realities, not treated as afterthoughts in generic programming.
These changes require commitment, but they are not impossible. They ask school systems to shift from extractive relationships to reciprocal ones, where care is not just encouraged but embedded.
Afrofuturism invites us to envision education as a site of liberation, not just endurance. In doing so, it reminds us that the well-being of Black women educators is not a luxury. It is a political imperative, and a blueprint for better schools for everyone.
Nadia Clarke Cordick, PhD Student, Educational Studies, Lakehead University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
