Enhancing Antiracist Teacher Education: Critical Witnessing through Pairing YA Literature and Adult Nonfiction (original) (raw)

The Permanence of Racism in Teacher Education

Using the chronicles of three friends, this chapter presents a counterstory that sets the stage for the examination of racism in teacher education, within the United States of America, using critical race theory (CRT) as an analytical tool. The setting of these chronicles is during a time when postracial rhetoric in the United States was at its highest—just after the 2008 election of President Barack Obama. The three friends take the readers on a journey through their graduate experience in teacher education and into their first faculty position in teacher education. Their experiences , as students and junior faculty, are akin to what many faculty and students of color and their White allies experience daily in teacher education programs across the United States. The analysis of their chronicle , using CRT, reveals that postracial discourse has disguised racism and racial microaggression in teacher education. Racial microaggres-sion is as pernicious as other forms of racism and, through its passive-aggressive orientation, validates institutional and individual lack of attention to issues of race.

2 3 The Urban Review Issues and Ideas in Public Education On Being Named a Black Supremacist and a Race Traitor: The Problem of White Racial Domination and Domestic Terrorism in U.S. Teacher Education

This article is concerned with the preparation of future teachers and the continued Whiteness of teacher education. Using the critical race theory methodology of counter-storytelling, this article presents a composite story to highlight and analyze how race and racism influence the preparation of future teachers in ways that typically sustain rather than challenge the Whiteness of education despite widespread self-reports of successful multicultural teacher education. While a great deal has been written about the need to better prepare future teachers for the multicultural realities of contemporary public schools, less examined is the modus operandi of race-based dominance in teacher education. This article seeks to use an examination of the intersections of White racial domination and the daily business of teacher preparation as a learning tool for pushing forward endeavors to prepare all teachers to successfully teach all students.

WHITE TEACHERS, RACE MATTERS: Preparing Teachers for the New Millennium

Faculty Publications, 2002

Educational anthropologists address in their works the legacy of an enduring history of racial oppression in the United States. Drawing on observations from teaching courses on multicultural education I examine the ideologies of future white teachers forged in particular racial and class locations. Students' faith in the existence of equality of opportunity emerges as significant in shaping their receptivity in interrogating the status quo. Course activities provide contrary evidence, permitting greater engagement with anthropological theories.

The unexamined Whiteness of teaching: how White teachers maintain and enact dominant racial ideologies

While much research that explores the role of race in education focuses on children of color, this article explores an aspect of the predominately White teaching force that educates them. This article explores findings from a qualitative study that posed questions about the ways in which White pre-service teachers’ life experiences influenced understandings of race and difference, and how these preservice teachers negotiated the challenges a critical multicultural education course offered those beliefs. In keeping with the tenet of critical race theory that racism is an inherent and normalized aspect of American society, the author found that through previous life-experiences, the participants gained hegemonic understandings about race and difference. Participants responded to challenges to these understandings by relying on a set of ‘tools of Whiteness’ designed to protect and maintain dominant and stereotypical understandings of race – tools that were emotional, ideological, and performative. This phenomenon is typically referred to as resistance in the literature on White teachers and multicultural education. The author contends, however, that these tools are not simply a passive resistance to but much more of an active protection of the incoming hegemonic stories and White supremacy and therefore require analysis to better understand when and how these tools are strategically used. Understanding how these tools of Whiteness protect dominant and stereotypical understandings of race can advise teacher education programs how to better organize to transform the ideologies of White teachers.

Critical Race Theory: Disruption in Teacher Education Pedagogy

Journal of Culture and Values in Education, 2020

Teacher education programs are charged with preparing teacher candidates to successfully educate student populations that are more racially and culturally diverse than ever. However, a look at graduation rates among teacher education programs proves that the majority still produce, on average, a teaching force that is 80% White, although White students make up less than 49% the total Kindergarten-12th grade public school population (U.S. Department of Education, 2016). Absent from the dialogue on diversity in teacher education is a discussion on how race and racism are institutionalized and maintained within such programs (Sleeter, 2016). In this article, the use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) offers tools to examine the role of race and racism in teacher education. I further consider the role CRT can play in the disruption of postsecondary rhetoric about teacher education programs. Focus is placed on my own experiences in a Teaching Internship Seminar course when applying the struct...