Teacher Beliefs About Race, Empathy, and Black Boys: S-TEAAM 2.0

Humanizing social interactions with Black children help to oppose the harmful impacts of antiblackness. While empathy is found to improve the quality of teachers’ social interactions with Black students, too little research explores the relationship between teachers’ racial beliefs and expression of empathy. This study describes evidence supporting the validity of the Teacher Beliefs About Race (TBAR), a new subscale added to a previously published measure of teacher empathy with Black boys. The TBAR shows evidence of reliability (𝛼=.88) and is positively associated with how teachers conceptualize and enact empathy across a range of professional teaching tasks. The paper concludes with discussion of the influence antiblackness may have on expression of empathy, the TBAR’s associations with teacher characteristics (e.g., gender), and recommendations for future research.