Teacher education for social change: shifting from race-evasiveness to racial literacy (original) (raw)

Racism and race-evasiveness in teacher education 283 Race-evasive curriculum in teacher education 284 Race-evasive approaches to white student resistance in teacher education 284 Racial literacy in teacher education 285 Teacher education programs must actively support diversification 285 Teacher education programs must actively shift their ideological commitments 286 Discussion 286 References 287 Teacher education is a powerful socializing institution that shapes who K-12 educators are and how they approach teaching. In the United States, teacher education programs were established 200 years ago, in the 1820s, with the growth of normal schools. They were modeled after European teacher training institutions, guiding educators on how to engage students, utilize limited resources, and create a positive learning environment within the newly emerging systems of education (Ducharme and Ducharme, 2022). For many working class and students of Color, these education systems were designed as a form of control, socializing students to their place within the hierarchy of American society; and teachers were instrumental to this project (Gratz, 2009). In Nebraska, the Teachers' Committee was cited as stating, How can we have a national spirit in a Commonwealth where there is an infusion of the language and blood of many nations, unless there is a very strong effort made to socialize the different elements and weld them into a unified whole? It therefore becomes evident how important it is that the teacher be an American in sympathy, ideals, training and loyalty. Gratz (2009, p. 55). They were calling for teachers who embodied nationalism and assimilationist goals. By the mid-20th century, normal school teacher training programs had expanded into 4 year colleges and universities across the nation (Ducharme and Ducharme, 2022). In 2022, where over half of public school students in the nation are students of Color, teacher education programs carry many of the same principles and structures of their origins. Today, 70% of teacher candidates, 87% of adjunct instructors, and 91% of tenured/tenure track instructors are white (King and Hampel, 2018) and predominantly monolingual, and teacher education programs continue to be critiqued for maintaining and reproducing whiteness. Scholars such as Sleeter (2001, 2016), Cross (2005), and Souto-Manning (2019) have argued of an ever-present whiteness in teacher education, where programs are complicit in "White ways and systems of knowing which. further White interests through the invisibility and/or normalizing of systemic racism" (p. 100). And while this manifests through student resistance or teacher educator race-evasiveness, it is important to understand the complexity of racism in teacher education as a structural issue (Kohli and Pizarro, 2022). Kohli et al. (2021) argue that there must be a systematized effort to address racism and whiteness within the multiple facets of teacher education, from admissions processes and the recruitment of teacher candidates, to the curriculum and pedagogy of coursework, field placements, and the retention of teacher candidates of Color. Building from higher education research on racial climate, they offer a five dimensional model for a healthy racial climate in teacher education programs, that includes a shift from a race-evasive approachdwhere programs ignore and invisibilize the prevalence of racial inequity and racismdto one of racial literacydwhere program leaders, teacher educators, and teacher candidates are able to effectively identify racism and are committed to disrupting it. In this entry, we build upon this model and posit that for teacher education programs to become pivotal spaces of change and transformation they must operate in ways that embody racial literacy. Racism and race-evasiveness in teacher education Teacher education has historically been complicit in upholding and maintaining forms of racism through the policies and practices it enacts. Today, rather than overt discrimination, teacher education engages in subtle and more sophisticated practices that are just as effective in maintaining the racial status quo of white superiority and dominance (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). One of the primary tools