WHITE TEACHERS, RACE MATTERS: Preparing Teachers for the New Millennium (original) (raw)
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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 and the Whiteness of Teacher Education
This article uses three tenets of critical race theory to critique the common pattern of teacher education focusing on preparing predominantly White cohorts of teacher candidates for racially and ethnically diverse students. The tenet of interest convergence asks how White interests are served through incremental steps. The tenet of color blindness prompts asking how structures that seem neutral, such as teacher testing, reinforce Whiteness and White interests. The tenet of experiential knowledge prompts asking whose voices are being heard. The article argues that much about teacher education can be changed, offering suggestions that derive from these tenets.
Decentering Whiteness in Teacher Education: Addressing the Questions of Who, With Whom, and How
Journal of Teacher Education, 2021
The work of preparing teachers and adequately supporting them in schools requires that we ensure their ability to meet the academic, socioemotional, and sociocultural needs of young people. It also requires countering the normative culture of Whiteness in teacher education and the perpetuation of its oppressive and debilitating impact on program design and implementation, pedagogy, and community interactions and partnerships. Calderon (2006) states that “the reproduction of whiteness in structures serves to oppress raced, gendered, and classed individuals and communities who deviate from the norms established by the ideology of whiteness” (p. 73). While the field of teacher education has made strides in efforts to be more social justice focused and responsive to persistent challenges facing teachers, schools, and families, there is still much work to do to eliminate the presence and use of White supremacist logics in teacher education programs, policy development and implementation,...
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...
Not a 'Who Done it' Mystery: On How Whiteness Sabotages Equity Aims in Teacher Preparation Programs
The Urban Review, 2019
This essay interrogates the seeming diversity paradox of multicultural teacher education and its connection to the White world of education. Applying a critical race methodology and concepts from critical whiteness studies and the Black radical tradition, the authors draw from their combined lived experiences as teacher educators at institutions located across the U.S. as an important source of critical knowledge about the White world of education to highlight specific, representative moments of practices typical in many U.S. teacher preparation programs. The authors’ purpose is to critically examine these moments of teacher preparation practices as one way to better understand and push toward ameliorating the mechanisms and modus operandi of Whiteness in teacher preparation and expose how equity-oriented aims are daily sabotaged; it is not to blame individuals or programs or to promote White defensiveness or guilt. For multicultural teacher education to realize its equity-oriented goals, the realities of active complicity in protecting the Whiteness embedded within teacher preparation must be exposed and challenged. The persistent Whiteness in education is not accidentally or coincidentally [re]created behind the backs of individuals and programs—as if it were a kind of “who done it” mystery, despite historical collective cries of [White] innocence.
There Is No Culturally Responsive Teaching Spoken Here: A Critical Race Perspective
2012
In this article, we are concerned with White racial domination as a process that occurs in teacher education and the ways it operates to hinder the preparation of teachers to effectively teach all students. Our purpose is to identify and highlight moments within processes of White racial domination when individuals and groups have and make choices to support rather than to challenge White supremacy. By highlighting and critically examining moments when White racial domination has been instantiated and recreated within our own experiences, we attempt to open up a venue for imagining and re-creating teacher education in ways that are not grounded in and dedicated to perpetuating White supremacy.
Despite efforts to redesign an urban teacher education program for social justice and equity, faculty became aware of racialized issues Teacher Candidates of Color faced in the program. Therefore, this study examined the perspectives of teacher candidates to learn about how race is impacting teaching and learning for pre-service teachers. Overall, we discovered the dominant narratives, often called majoritarian stories (Love, 2004), were extremely difficult to disrupt and essentially remained largely intact for teacher candidates in our program. In addition, we found that majoritarian stories helped to maintain a level of superficiality for teacher candidates regarding issues of race. For this reason, we argue that there is a need to "Push it real good!" using Critical Whiteness to engage in deeper level work with teacher candidates in order to help develop strong teacher activists with the skills, dispositions, and knowledge necessary to substantially disrupt the inequita...
Encyclopedia Entry: Whiteness and Teacher Education
Encyclopedia of Teacher Education, 2019
This entry starts with an explanation of the importance of diversity in the teaching force, then draws on the concept of Whiteness and the frame of critical race theory (CRT) to analyze the gap between diversity discourses and practice in teacher education. Finally, it presents components identified by the literature as central to the transformation of teacher education.