‘You can say that they were being racist’: confronting white comfort in anti-racist teacher education

Abstract

ABSTRACT If teacher education is to become a site for disrupting racism and promoting racial justice, teacher educators must critically analyse how whiteness shapes our work and develop strategies to avoid reproducing it in our instruction. Here, I examine an instance of my own teacher education practice in which I, a white woman teacher educator, attempted to use an instance of classroom teaching to support teacher candidates’ development of anti-racist practice. I find that I made a series of moves and non-moves to construct and maintain white comfort zones that interfered with teacher candidate learning. I explore how I prioritised white safety and white emotionalities in ways that undermined my stated anti-racist instructional goals. I offer implications of this analysis for teacher education focused on disrupting racism and promoting justice.