Practicing Awareness of Microaggressions

The child development program aboard our military installation has a variety of resources available to us to help with all types of classroom challenges.  One in particular is our behavior specialist.  This person assesses classrooms and the children within those classrooms that need additional support.  This is a fairly new position within our organization and we have received little to no guidance on the person’s role and or her jurisdiction when it comes to performance expectations among staff members.  This team member is of equal seniority/ rank as I am the director.  The behavior specialist has a completely separate supervisor, and I have no say in what the behavior specialist implements inside my classroom.  Ideally this is supposed to be a partnership, however micro aggression is slowly tearing this, potentially amazing team, apart.  It’s my experience since accepting a role as an administrator that the most common form of micro aggression I experience is through mass distribution email.  Through these emails statements are made to insinuate that administration does not “have correct staff in classrooms”, “that directors need to learn get rooms under control before progress with children can be made,” and “they do not have a clue what is going on with these classrooms.” All of the emails are copied to all of upper management and never discussed privately with individual director.  It is so hurtful to be lumped together, and I feel like I had no sense of individual center identity.  I have been able to get more clarity on the different forms and the varying degrees of discrimination.  Micro aggression may sound small and insignificant in descriptive term, but its implications are tremendous