Making the Emperor's New Clothes Visible in Anti-Racist Teacher Education: Enacting a Pedagogy of Discomfort with White Preservice Teachers

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe failures of university-based teacher education programs in the United States with regard to the preparation of White preservice teachers for engagement with students who embody marginalized racial identities in public schools are well documented. One such shortcoming is the inadequate attention paid to the unholy trinity of race, racism, and White supremacy. This article details how I, a Black teacher educator, performed a self-study on my utilization of a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999) in a course housed in a social justice-oriented program that enrolled primarily White preservice teachers. Using critical theories on race and affect in my analysis of a racialized, affectively-charged classroom incident, I find that enacting discomfort as pedagogy provoked both the preservice teachers and me to individually and collectively make meaning of the contours of racial oppression by noticing and listening to the interactions between our bodies and emotions. Additionally, employing a pedagogy of discomfort cultivated White preservice teachers' emotional openness to supporting each other in a learning community premised on political relationships as vessels for deepening critical consciousness (Freire, 1968/2000) specific to race, racism, and White supremacy. These findings illuminate the radical affordances of discomfort vis-à-vis pedagogical subversion in learning spaces, particularly those designed to trouble the tight yet seemingly invisible hold that White supremacy maintains on teacher education.