Teaching Black Youth After the Dual Pandemics is the result of a multi-year mixed-method study of roughly 85 teachers working in high-need mid-Atlantic urban schools during and after COVID-19. The project draws on interviews, focus groups, classroom observations, reflective journals, and survey data to capture how teachers are making sense of rapidly shifting expectations, a youth mental health crisis, the sabotaging of public schools, and growing  racial and political divisions. Rather than presenting a clean narrative of “what works,” the book traces how teachers have evolved (for better and worse) and, in some cases, are fundamentally rethinking their roles. All the chapters bring readers inside those moments.
 

• Multiple chapters examine how teachers responded to student trauma, showing how trauma-informed practices are being adopted unevenly or misunderstood in practice.
   

• Another focuses on racial dynamics in the classroom, including how teachers interpret and respond to the renewed understanding of anti-Black racism after 2020, and how those interpretations are affecting student trust and engagement.
   

• A central section explores teacher identity and efforts of teachers to influence student identity, highlighting how educators’ beliefs about authority race and background and ideas around caring and empathy influence their sense of responsibility and the ways it plays out.
   

• Later chapters turn to the teacher exodus from the profession, clarifying what it would actually mean to prepare and support teachers differently in the years ahead, given what this period is revealing.

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