Fleshing out enactments of Whiteness in antiracist pedagogy: snapshot of a White teacher educator’s practice

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article paints a partial portrait of a White, antiracist, university-based teacher educator in the United States, and provides a snapshot of her antiracist pedagogy in practice. This snapshot is juxtaposed against (her own and others’) theorising of antiracist pedagogy. Using reflexivity as methodology, I pay attention to my noticings of my participant’s antiracist pedagogy as evidenced through her navigation of a racialised, affectively charged classroom encounter involving the teacher educator, a Black student, and me, a Black researcher. I analyze the embodied and affective aspects of that experience through a racialised lens and find that the teacher educator’s (re)actions represent an enactment of Whiteness. The enactment relates to the enfleshed material body. Thus, I contend that the development of an antiracist pedagogy that moves beyond rhetoric in resisting rather than reinforcing Whiteness – and therefore, that contributes meaningfully to racial justice – requires attunement to affects produced via interembodiment, in theory and practice.