Discomforting racism: using collaborative autoethnography against white normativity in teacher education practices

Background PE curricula and pedagogy maintain dominant discourses of whiteness as normalized, lacking in cultural relevancy and disregarding racially minoritized students’ cultural knowledges (Azzarito 2019, “‘Look to the Bottom’: Re-Writing the Body Curriculum Through Storylines.” Sport, Education and Society 24 (6): 638–650; Clark 2020, “Toward a Critical Race Pedagogy of Physical Education.” Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy 25 (4): 439–450; Culp 2020, “Thirdspace Investigations: Geography, Dehumanization, and Seeking Spatial Justice in Kinesiology: National Association for Kinesiology in Higher Education 39th Dudley Allen Sargent Commemorative Lecture 2020.” Quest (grand Rapids, Mich) 72 (2): 153–166; Flintoff and Dowling 2019, “‘I Just Treat Them all the Same, Really’: Teachers, Whiteness and (Anti) Racism in Physical Education.” Sport, Education and Society 24 (2): 121–133). Both pre-service and in-service PE teachers of color often experience marginalization, hypervisiblity, exclusion, racism, and must consistently negotiate an additional emotional ‘load’ when located within white educational spaces (Flintoff 2014, “Tales from the Playing Field: Black and Minority Ethnic Students’ Experiences of Physical Education Teacher Education.” Race, Ethnicity and Education 17 (3): 346–366, 2015, “Playing the ‘Race’ Card? Black and Minority Ethnic Students’ Experiences of Physical Education Teacher Education.” Sport, Education and Society 20: 190–211; Simon and Azzarito 2019a, “‘Singled out Because of Skin Color … ’: Exploring Ethnic Minority Female Teachers’ Embodiment in Physical Education.” Sport, Education and Society 24 (2): 105–120, 2019b, ““Putting Blinders on”: Ethnic Minority Female PE Teachers’ Identity Struggles Negotiating Racialized Discourses.” Journal of Teaching in Physical Education 38 (4): 367–376.). Purpose This study aimed to understand Black and Latinx pre-service PE teachers’ negotiations of whiteness, and the accompanying emotional ‘load,’ at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). We utilized Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, and emotionality to establish a framework that included interrogating normalized discourses of whiteness through counternarratives (Milner and Howard 2013, “Counter-narrative as Method: Race, Policy and Research for Teacher Education.” Race, Ethnicity and Education 16 (4): 536–561), destabilizing a white/‘other’ dichotomy, and validating emotions connected to racialized identities (Ahmed 2014, Cultural Politics of Emotions. Edinburgh University Press). Method This qualitative study employed visual narrative methods, extricating, via counternarratives to whiteness (Miller, Liu, and Ball 2020, “Critical Counter-Narrative as Transformative Methodology for Educational Equity.” Review of Research in Education 44 (1): 269–300), the racialized experiential knowledge of 10 Black and Latinx pre-service PE teachers enrolled in predominantly white PE teacher education (PETE) programs. The researchers collected data through interviews, written reflections, and visual texts. Data, including interview transcriptions, participant-generated images, and researcher reflections, were analyzed both inductively and deductively. Results The results of this study demonstrated how participants first presented emotionally distanced negotiations of overwhelming whiteness in their PETE programs, engaging in a self-preservation response to inherent ‘othering’ and hypervisibility (Evans-Winters and Esposito 2010). With time and developed rapport with the researchers, ‘cracks’ in their positive narratives appeared as more details emerged about the pain caused by consistent experiences of racism in their PWIs. It was clear that participants’ racialization through dominant whiteness presented a multi-layered emotionality that had to be masked in order to be accepted within their white educational communities (Kohli 2018, “Behind School Doors: The Impact of Hostile Racial Climates on Urban Teachers of Color.” Urban Education 53 (3): 307–333). Conclusion Participants’ emotional responses to racially ‘othered’ hypervisibility provided insights to program attrition by students of color, and how teacher education maintains racialized discourses of whiteness. The results of this research support the idea that PE teacher educators need to demonstrate an outright and long-standing commitment to racial equity and to minoritized students’ emotional well-being before students of color may open up and share what’s ‘really going on,’ thus furthering emotional connections and understandings that can prevent pre-service teacher of color attrition. In the case of the Black and Latinx teachers in this study, the norms of whiteness which underpinned their educational context denied them their humanity regarding their potentially strong emotions towards their experiences of racism, prejudice, discrimination, biases, and stereotypes, placing them as ‘outsiders’ within predominantly white ‘collective bodies’ (their PETE programs and institutions).

This article builds on Charles W. Mills’ foundational concept of white racial ignorance to expand his work by exploring the inner dynamics and practices of teacher education (its rationales, student teaching, practicums, pedagogies, curriculum) and explaining how the emotionalities of whiteness play a significant role in the ways that whiteness persists perniciously in teacher education. In order to hold whiteness accountable and culpable, it is argued that teacher education needs to stop emotionally deflecting anti-racist critiques by over pontificating their lackluster commitments to race, a practice which only ignores, and diverts attention away from the hegemonic presence of whiteness. It suggests that teacher educators need to help pre-service and in-service teachers be attentive to how racial politics are felt, acted upon, and reproduced, and how emotionalities of whiteness become ‘ordinary’ in everyday life in schools. The article concludes by outlining some implications for research and theory in critical whiteness studies.

Understanding the Nature and Development of Self-Study.- A History and Context of Self-Study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices.- The Nature of Teaching and Learning in Self-Study*.- Self-Study As Teaching.- Finding A Way Through The Swamp: A Case For Self-Study As Research*.- Learning Through Self-Study: The Influence Of Purpose, Participants And Context*.- Fundamental Features and Approaches of The S-Step Enterprise*.- Voice in Self-Study*.- Self-Study In Professional Practice*.- Thinking about the Thinking about Self-Study: An Analysis of Eight Chapters.- Developing a Professional Knowledge Base for Teaching.- Professional Knowledge, Teacher Education and Self-Study*.- Links between Self-Study and Teacher Education Reform*.- Research, Practice, and Academia in North America*.- Humanistic Research in Self-Study: A History of Transformation*.- The Significance of Race and Social Class for Self-Study and The Professional Knowledge Base of Teacher Education$*$.- Knowledge, Narrative And Self-Study.- Practitioner Inquiry, Knowledge, and University Culture*.- Knowledge, Social Justice and Self-Study*.- Examples of Practice: Professional Knowledge and Self-Study in Multicultural Teacher Education.- Revisioning And Recreating Practice: Collaboration In Self-Study*.- The Dialectics of Passion and Theory: Exploring The Relation Between Self-Study and Emotion*.- Representing Self-Study in Research and Practice.- The Methodology of Self-Study and Its Theoretical Underpinnings.- What Counts as Evidence in Self-Studies of Teacher Education Practices.- Self-Study Through Personal History.- Self-Study Through Action Research.- Visual Artistic Modes of Representation for Self-Study.- Using Information and Communication Technologies for the Self-Study of Teaching.- The Reflective Portfolio in Self-Study: Inquiring Into and Representing A Knowledge of Practice.- The Epistemological Dimensions and Dynamics of Professional Dialogue In Self-Study.- Afterword Moving The Methodology of Self-Study Research and Practice Forward: Challenges and Opportunities.- Self-Study in Teaching and Teacher Education.- Tracing the Development of Self-Study in Teacher Education Research and Practice.- Factors Important for the Scholarship of Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices.- Self-Study in School Teaching: Teachers' Perspectives.- The Preservice Practicum: Learning Through Self-Study In A Professional Setting.- Self Study in Teaching About Teaching.- Self-Study Research in the Context of Teacher Education Programs.- Administrators also do Self-Study: Issues of Power and Community, Social Justice and Teacher Education Reform.- Identifying Ethical Issues in Self-Study Proposals.- Interpreting The What, Why and How of Self-Study In Teaching And Teacher Education.

The challenges facing those who seek to prepare mathematics teachers are well established in the literature. Most of the research to date has focused on the perceptions and understandings of pre-service teachers, but not on the perceptions and understandings of teacher educators. In this study, we explore how four teacher educators understand their pre-service secondary teachers as the pre-service teachers attempt to make sense of teaching through the investigation of a multimedia case study of practice. We found that the teacher educators adopted two different implementation strategies: one strategy tended to be open-ended and exploratory; the other was more focused on the teacher educators' goals of anticipating student understanding and developing mathematical content knowledge for teaching. We also found that, in using the case study, teacher educators elicited pre-service teachers' thinking about the complexities of the teacher's role in small group work, about the value of explicitly revealing the teacher's reflections on the lessons, about the role of planning and preparation, and about the limits of pre-service teachers' abilities to understand and appreciate students' thinking and to extend lesson ideas. Both teacher educators and their pre-service teachers gained perspectives on the role of a teacher's mathematical content knowledge. These results imply that multimedia case studies of practice can serve as vehicles for revealing the knowledge and practice of teacher educators, as they engage in supporting the professional development of pre-service teachers.

Teachers' Sense of Efficacy: An Important Factor in School Improvement

A litany of literature exists on teacher preparation programs, known as teacher education, and whiteness, which is the historical, systematic, and structural processes that maintain the race-based superiority of white people over people of color. The theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) are used to explore whiteness and teacher education separately; whiteness within teacher education; the impact of teacher education and whiteness on white educators, educators of Color, and their students; and cautions and recommendations for teacher education and whiteness. Although teacher education and whiteness are situated within the current US sociopolitical context, the historical colonial contexts of other countries may find parallel examples of whiteness. Within this context, the historical purposes behind teacher education and the need for quality teachers in an increasingly diverse student population are identified using transdisciplinary approaches in CRT and CWS to define and describe operations of whiteness in teacher education. Particularly, race education scholars entertain the psychoanalytic, philosophical, and sociological ruminations of race, racism, and white supremacy in society and education to understand more fully how whiteness operates within teacher education. For example, an analysis of psychological attachments found in racial identities, particularly between whiteness and Blackness, helps to fully comprehend racial dynamics between teachers, who are overwhelmingly racially identified as white, and students, who are predominantly racially identified as of Color. Whiteness in teacher education, left intact, ultimately affects K-12 schooling and students, particularly students of Color, in ways that recycle institutionalized white supremacy in schooling practices. Acknowledging how reinforcing hegemonic whiteness in teacher education ultimately reifies institutional white supremacy in education altogether; implications and cautions as well as recommendations are offered to debunk the hegemonic whiteness that inoculates teacher education. Note: To symbolically reverse the racial hierarchy in our research, the authors opt to use lowercase lettering for white and whiteness, and to capitalize “people of Color” to recognize it as a proper noun along with Black and Brown.

Background Research in teacher education practice explicitly highlights how learning to teach teachers is a complex, messy, sophisticated process, filled with uncertainty and perpetual challenges. While this applies to all aspects of teacher education, we focus here on the process of learning to teach pre-service teachers (PSTs) how to teach about, through, and for social justice (pedagogies) by enacting the Socially-Just Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (SJ-TPSR) approach. Purpose This research was guided by the following research question: What are the realities of enacting a SJ-TPSR approach in physical education teacher education (PETE)? Method Utilising a collaborative self-study approach two physical education teacher educators, supported by two critical friends, enacted the SJ-TPSR approach in a 10-week outdoor and adventure activities module with pre-service generalist primary school teachers. Data included: critical friend meetings, pedagogical decision-making documents and interviews with the teacher educators and PSTs. Findings The findings revolve around three categories: (i) Teaching about teaching and learning about teaching the SJ-TPSR approach; (ii) The importance of learning together; and (iii) A pedagogy of vulnerability needed? The findings demonstrated the need to take a gradual approach to teaching about teaching the SJ-TPSR approach and learning about teaching along with the SJ-TPSR approach. It was a daunting experience but reflection and sharing our thoughts mitigated most of these feelings. The importance of learning together was highlighted by both teacher educators. Co-constructing this new knowledge with the PSTs further supported this process. Finally, when enacting a new pedagogical approach, particularly in the area of social justice, required an additional pedagogical approach that of vulnerability. Discussion Our collaborative self-study on the enactment of the SJ-TPSR approach is an explicit example of reframing pedagogy and practice not only from a social change and social justice perspective, but about, through, and for social justice and change. We first reconceptualised the TPSR approach to the SJ-TPSR approach from a social justice perspective, but then examined our practice and developed practices that also support the teaching and learning about, through, and for social justice. The practices developed have implications for the enactment of the SJ-TPSR approach which hold possibilities for other innovative practices (e.g. layering), and also for self-study research, namely ways in which collaborative self-study can be conducted and in which self-study can work from a social change and social justice perspective Conclusion We trust that sharing our journey thus far will support others interested in enacting the SJ-TPSR approach, and that we, in turn, can learn from others enacting, examining, and articulating their experiences with the approach.

In this article, we share the collaborative curricular work of an interdisciplinary Social Justice Teaching Collaborative (SJTC) from a PWI university. Members of the SJTC worked strategically to center social justice across required courses pre-service teachers are required to take: Introduction to Education, Sociocultural Studies in Education, and Inclusive Education. We share our conceptualization of social justice and guiding theoretical frameworks that have shaped our pedagogy and curriculum. These frameworks include democratic education, critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, critical disability studies, and feminist and intersectionality theory. We then detail changes made across courses including examples of readings and assignments. Finally, we conclude by offering reflections, challenges, and lessons learned for collaborative work within teacher education and educational leadership.

This study, entitled 'An analysis of ICT policy development and practice in teacher education in Kenya between 1997 and 2007', is a qualitative study that uses a historical interpretive approach involving documentary analysis, interviews and case 'studies, to document the evolution of ICT policies relevant to teacher education in post independence Kenya, and explore the practices among teachers and teacher educators with ICT between 1997 and 2007. It examines the policy- practice relationship in the context of teacher education. The thesis draws from the work of Elmore and also Fullan to understand the change process with educational ICT policies. Not much research has been done in this area in Kenya and this study is therefore a useful contribution to the body of knowledge on leT policy development and practice in teacher education in developing country contexts. The ICT policy process for teacher education in Kenya takes place in a 4-Tier framework that involves international organisations at Tier 1, the Ministry of Education, other ministries and associated bodies at Tier 2, private or public sector organisations at Tier 3, and pre-service and in-service teacher education programmes at Tier 4. There is lack of co-ordination within and between these Tiers, which results in varied practices that portray differential understandings and interpretations of policy in regard to the place of ICT in teacher education.Despite the exposure to ICT training programmes, availability of computers in various institutions and in some instances, a national ICT curriculum, teacher educators' and teachers' practices in subject teaching do not reflect the policy provisions on ICT pedagogic practice. The national ICT policy, therefore, is hyperationalised and not necessarily policy in action as seen in the Case programmes. The policy discourse disjunction and stratification in the 4-Tier ICT policy development and implementation framework is responsible for the slow pace of change in training and teaching practices in Kenya. This thesis proposes that teacher needs and competencies with ICT should be identified in a backward mapping approach. This will ensure transformative practices in teaching and teacher education, reduce the occurrence of hyperationalisation and allow for consensus building regarding the place of ICT in teacher education programmes and teaching in Kenya.

Context: Proposed more than two decades ago, culturally relevant/responsive teaching or pedagogy (CRP) is one promising approach to transforming the education experience of historically marginalized groups. The development of CRP has since inspired changes in teacher education programs and resulted in considerable research on preparing teachers for CRP. However, critics have argued that much work on CRP has not fulfilled its transformative potential of addressing racism and the white-supremacist foundations underlying teacher education research and practice and have urged CRP research to grow from the existing knowledge base and to innovate. Purpose of Study: This study critically examines the research practices of empirical studies on preparing K-12 preservice teachers for CRP in the United States by merging ideas of research as social practice with critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and Indigenous epistemologies to argue for research as racialized social practice. The goal is to provide perspectives and lines of research that are true to the radical shifts the original theories called for, yet might not have been fully fulfilled. Research Design: This critical literature review applies the research-as-racialized-social-practice lens to examine how CRP research studies frame problems and research questions, elaborate theoretical frameworks and research methodology, and discuss findings and implications. Our analysis positions CRP research on the research-as-racialized-social-practice continuum, ranging from maintaining the racist status quo to intentionally disrupting it. Findings: Our analysis reveals that dominant research practices—emphasizing the problem of individual deficiencies rather than inequitable systems, employing a research logic focusing on linearity rather than complexity, and lacking in-depth examination of racialized and cultural ways of knowing for both researchers and participants—maintain the inequitable status quo rather than disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions and practices. While we recognize the important work and useful knowledge accumulated by this body of literature over two decades, we urge teacher educators and researchers to stay vigilant and resist research epistemologies and practices that recenter, recycle, and maintain whiteness, perpetuating the racist status quo. Conclusions: We recommend that teacher education researchers can construct research questions capable of generating new knowledge to disrupt racial injustice; utilize and further develop critical theoretical frameworks that sufficiently attend to various aspects of race and racism in teaching, learning, and society, and are meaningfully linked to disruptive research methodologies; and, finally, attend clearly to the ability of research to disrupt the racist status quo within their findings and implications.

There is urgency for teacher educators to instruct preservice teachers in the tenants of social justice education. This urgency is based upon the American demographic landscape and the responsibility of educators to teach for social justice. Preservice teachers report feeling inadequately prepared to educate for social justice when entering the classroom setting (citations from below). Feelings of incompetence in social justice teaching expressed among preservice teachers coupled with minimal examination in the literature of the effects of teacher education practices that aid in the readiness to teach for social justice provided the foundation for this study. This study examined experiential methodologies that can prepare preservice teachers to teach for social justice, particularly within a social studies context. The study focused on two research questions: (a) How do preservice elementary teachers in a social studies methods course conceptualize teaching for social justice within an experiential framework? (b) In what ways did preservice teachers operationalize teaching for social justice in the practicum classroom? Also examined was how the development of community in a social studies methodology course fostered the understanding of teaching for social justice. The findings highlight how preservice teachers were able to conceptualize building communities with experiential methods to teach for social justice and how doing so created an effective learning community. Although the preservice teachers valued the implementation of experiential methods to foster the teaching of social justice, difficulties were expressed in their incorporation of experiential methods in the practicum environment due to a lack of confidence, teaching competence, or collegial support.

ABSTRACTThe physical education teacher education (PETE) pipeline makes it clear to historically racially minoritized pre-service teachers the value of White norms and experiences while simultaneously “othering” their cultural knowledge. Using Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, and emotionality as theoretical frameworks, this visual narrative inquiry explored self-identified Black and Latinx pre-service physical education teachers’ (n = 10) stories of a racialized identity within predominantly White PETE programs as well as the emotionality of whiteness for myself as a White researcher and teacher educator. I utilized narrative-based semi-structured and conversational interviews, along with photo-elicitation, as methods of data collection. The results contrast participants’ experiences of normalized racism with my heightened emotions of shock and dismay, shedding light on my own white emotionality toward racism. The critical examination of the emotions of whiteness demonstrated the potential to lead PETE faculty toward deeper reflection as to how whiteness is upheld, but also how they might further work to de-center whiteness within their pedagogies, curricula, and programs.

Aunty Mary Graham, Kombu-merri elder and philosopher, says: "You are not alone in the world." We have a responsibility to each other, as well as to the land; and violence is the refusal of this relationship that binds us (Rose). In this paper, I use Emannuel Levinas’s ethics as first philosophy and epistemological violence to consider how non-Indigenous educators come to know Indigenous people. In his philosophy, Levinas presents a paradox: that to act as if one is a free being, as first philosophy, is to ignore that one is not alone in the world and that the presence of others evokes responsibility. However, to claim to know another is to bring them into one’s totality, one’s knowledge framework; an act of reducing another to who you think they are. We must find a new relationship to knowledge, one that is not based on possession. For non-Indigenous educators learning about teaching Indigenous students and perspectives in schools, much of the curricular material draws on the corpus of knowledge constructed by non-Indigenous researchers, politicians, and professionals about Indigenous people (Nakata, Cultural Interface). This material is already bound by others' interests and motivations. How can non-Indigenous educators engage with Indigenous peoples, histories and knowledges in a way that foregrounds the responsibility that our entanglement prompts? In this paper, I present data from my research into pre-service teachers undertaking a compulsory university subject in Indigenous education, where the pre-service teachers wrote weekly reflective learning journals. This data is drawn primarily from the end of the semester, where students reflected on what their learning would mean as they moved into future practice. I explore the role of responsibility in regards to the ethical violence that Levinas discusses.

This research evaluated the effect of guided inquiry approach-based laboratory activity within the scope of lifelong learning, in which daily life context is used, on developing pre-service science teachers' learning processes. The study groups the research consisted of six pre-service science teachers who were seniors in the science education department at a university in the west of Turkey. The holistic single-case design was used as the research method in this study. One of the topics related to enzymes we encounter in many areas of daily life is the concept of enzymatic browning. In this study, starting from a daily life context, an activity that includes the chemical change emphasis underlying the enzymatic browning event and the factors affecting the work of enzymes is discussed. In this context, the guided inquiry learning approach, in which the hypothetico-deductive reasoning cycle is used in laboratory practices in teacher education, is based on the activity. At the end of the activity, experiment reports, science journals, and concept maps were evaluated. As a result of the evaluation, it was seen that the students not only designed scientific research and tested their hypotheses consistently and accurately but also obtained the subject gains related to enzymes and chemical change. Since it is understood that the activity supports lifelong learning in terms of both the skills developed and the ideas reflected by the pre-service teachers, using similar practices in teacher education can be recommended.

Introduction: Effective teaching should demonstrate a match between what learners are intended to know and be able to do, the opportunities they receive to learn and practice, and how we assess for learning. In turn, this promotes more worthwhile and meaningful learning. The purpose of this paper is to add to the limited examples of practices that directly connect with the coherent alignment of learning outcomes, assessment and instructional practices in physical education teacher education (PETE) programmes. We do this by introducing instructional alignment as a practically plausible way in which to exemplify the coherent planning of learning outcomes, assessment and instruction. Methods: Using the backward design process to design aligned learning opportunities, three examples of how instructional alignment can be embedded in PETE modules are shared. These examples are drawn from our own practice in teacher education and have been implemented within our various teacher education programmes to assist pre-service teachers in the design of instructionally aligned lessons. Results and discussion: While we encourage using the backward design process to design aligned learning opportunities, the decisions made may be substantially different depending on the context and the learners. While each of the examples demonstrate instructional alignment, and are dependent on the context and the learners, three nuances within each are discussed – alignment should support learning progression, clarity of success criteria and enhancing learning by embedding assessment into the learning experience/activity. Conclusion: Effectively embedding instructional alignment in PETE includes (i) buy-in from all programme faculty as to their understanding, and enactment, of instructional alignment as a central pillar of the module/programme, (ii) modelling good practice in supporting and delivering instructional alignment with pre-service teachers and (iii) encouraging pre-service teachers to embed instructional alignment in their planning, preparation and practices as beginning teachers.