Elementary pre-service teachers’ practice of racial literacy: analysis of small stories in online critical inquiry communities

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite pedagogical efforts to promote preservice teachers’ racial literacy, preservice teachers may resist critical racial pedagogies. Such resistance has serious, detrimental consequences in classrooms populated with students of Color. To study how interracial groups of preservice teachers (PSTs) engage with issues of race outside of their coursework and fieldwork, I investigated preservice teachers’ engagement with race in discussing Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in an informal online space. The preservice teachers were embedded in an urban emergent elementary school in a predominantly African-American community in the Southeastern U.S. I asked: (1) how do PSTs use their racial literacy in an online critical inquiry community? (2) how might we understand the possibilities and constraints of PSTs’ practice of racial literacy? I found that some students continued to see issues of race and racism as an intellectual rather than a lived problem. Other students wrestled with their lived experiences of racism and those shared by their peers in response to their text. This work provides insight into how informal online spaces and small storytelling can be used to teach racial literacy, understand resistance, and implement antiracist action within teacher education.