Anti-racist Teacher Education Research Articles

Midwest nice and whiteness: Poetic exploration of geographical psychology influences on preservice teachers in the United States

Racial turmoil and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests across the United States in 2020 heightened awareness of systemic racism for preservice teachers. Thus, for teacher educators, understanding how geographical psychology can impact preservice teachers is vital to socially just, antiracist teacher education. This article explores through poetic inquiry: 1) if and how preservice teachers see systemic racism relating to themselves; 2) how preservice teachers use “Midwest Nice” as coping mechanisms when confronting emotional issues such as systemic racism; and 3) analysis of preservice teachers’ teacher identity relating to systemic racism and the implications of whiteness with/in teacher preparation.

Discussion boards as a pedagogical tool engendering critical race conversations: Meeting anti-racist aims to raise consciousness and disrupt whiteness

This study's purpose was to offer an explanation into how intentionally-designed and anti-racist discussion board prompts influence preservice teachers' written critical race conversations. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: Instruction-As-Usual (IAU) or Disrupting Whiteness (DW), with the latter group assigned discussion board prompts that included prompts that tasked students to interrogate structural racism. Qualitative analyses of discussion board post data were merged through integrating survey response relationship interpretations. Our results indicate that whiteness disruption and racial consciousness racialized constructs were present. Moreover, DW students evidenced more frequent critical race conversations, and integrated results reaffirmed a more holistic, anti-racist teacher education strategy. We conclude with implications for anti-racist teacher educators who use DBs in their pedagogy.

Seizing the moment: A critical place-based partnership for antiracist elementary social studies teacher education

ABSTRACT We designed and implemented a hybrid elementary social studies education elective focused on antiracist teacher education, place-based teacher education, and archaeology with partners at an historic site, James Madison’s Montpelier. Our action research study indicates that, in the midst of injustices highlighted in 2020, participants engaged in meaningful race reflection in ways that demonstrated shifts toward becoming more antiracist individuals and teachers. Purposeful course work and interactions with course texts and participants, as well as the power of the place itself, supported students’ race reflections toward increased racial awareness and understandings of how to facilitate their future elementary students’ racial literacy. Implications include that critical place-based experiences have the potential to serve as powerful learning experiences to prepare preservice social studies teachers to teach children about race and racism.

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

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.

“My job is to unsettle folks”: Perspectives on a praxis toward racial justice

Using phenomenographic case study, this article explores antiracist teacher education praxis through the perspectives of student-nominated faculty. I theorize four concrete practices that serve to move teacher education pedagogy closer to active antiracism: 1) model vulnerability; 2) shift agency; 3) build community; and 4) pose questions. These practices are further explicated and understood as existing at the root of humanization and criticality. I ultimately argue that teacher education must be a project in humanization in order to be truly antiracist, and that teacher preparation programs must be grounded in critical race theories. Implications for future research are also discussed.

Learning from Our Stories: Incorporating Free Spaces as a Necessity in Antiracist Social Studies Teacher Education

ABSTRACT This instrumental case study illustrates the necessity of free spaces within antiracist teacher education. The author uses antiracism and free spaces as a theoretical lens to examine the experiences of 11 social studies teacher educators (SSTEs) who teach and research antiracist social studies. The findings portray the SSTEs’ need for free space to persevere in antiracist teacher education as well as to improve their scholarship in antiracist social studies education, yet the SSTEs do not explicitly include the need for a free space within their course syllabi and readings for pre-service teachers. Based on these findings, the author argues the need to consider how free spaces can be extended to teacher education instruction and to alumni who desire to be K-12 antiracist educators.

The Narratives of an Indigenous Cree, a Brazilian, and a Canadian about Vulnerability, Privilege, and Responsibility in Anti-Racist Teacher Education

ABSTRACT In this article, the authors aim at presenting a lived experience and the meaning-making constructed by them as they participate in a simulation of the history of contact between Europeans and Indigenous peoples in the country now named Canada and inquire into their stories within the three-dimensional narrative inquiry space. Considering relational ethics, the teacher educators and researchers lived, told, retold, and relived the stories of their own experiences, co-composing stories of anti-racist teacher education, playfulness, inclusion, privilege, and responsibility, through the eyes of an Indigenous Cree, a Brazilian, and a Canadian woman, towards increasing understanding of decolonizing education.

Unmasking white fragility: how whiteness and white student resistance impacts anti-racist education

ABSTRACT The authors analyse how white undergraduate pre-service teachers resist anti-racist teacher education courses, and how acts of white fragility and white student resistance are employed against Black female professors. In this discussion, we draw from our experiences as two Black women faculty at two predominately white institutions (PWI). Using Critical Race Feminism we discuss how white student resistance is manifested in social interactions with Black female faculty, and how the racialized and gendered spaces of higher education, specifically teacher education, impacts teaching and learning. We introduce a conceptual framework for elucidating white student resistance using psychological and sociological concepts including 1) passive-aggressive behaviours, 2) groupthink, 3) lynch mob, and 4) bystander’s effect. This article advances scholarship on white student resistance to non-hegemonic curriculum in higher education, and how whiteness structures student’s ability to develop anti-racist praxis.

Working through Resistance to Resistance in Anti-racist Teacher Education

This paper grapples with the idea that challenging racism in teacher education opens the landscape of racial melancholia by psychoanalytically exploring the author's affective reaction to white teacher candidates’ resistance. Drawing on critical multicultural education classes at a university in a mid-Western rural state in the US, the author, an Asian American teacher educator contends that she must negotiate the loss of idealised objects during critical race dialogues for her to better serve containing function in supporting teacher candidates’ encounters with race work. While the author cannot see what it is that has been lost, the powerful emotions that at times display aggressive impulses signal toward wounded subjectivity and her desire to hold onto intrinsically ambivalent lost objects. Following Freud's assertion that the unconscious desire can be mediated only through efforts to symbolise and Bion's assertion that the containing mind involves active process, the author attempts to investigate what racial melancholia may represent for herself as a teacher educator. In the final section, the author interprets the manifestations of racial melancholia as an effect of racialised society and concludes that while the conscious meaning cannot exceed the unconscious, by working through the state of racial melancholia, she is able to create new meanings for her affective responses and make better sense of teacher candidates’ resistance and their anxiety.

Pedagogies of discomfort and empathy in multicultural teacher education

To show the potential and limitations of pedagogies of discomfort and empathy in anti-racist and multicultural teacher education, this paper engages in an in-depth analysis of two ‘critical moments’ that are drawn from a series of teacher workshops. The purpose of the analysis is to show how discomfort and empathy may be combined together pedagogically in the context of multicultural and antiracist teacher education. The contribution to the literature is to highlight the importance of foregrounding attention to teachers’ discomfort and its pedagogical implications in multicultural teacher education.

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

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.

Enhancing Antiracist Teacher Education: Critical Witnessing through Pairing YA Literature and Adult Nonfiction

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A educação inclusiva na Amazônia brasileira: um caminho a ser percorrido

This article is based on the analysis and translation of the article by Tara Goldstein, ‘I’m not white’: anti-racist teacher education for white early childhood educators’, a study that argues and proposes methods for education aimed at social inclusion starting from classes in early childhood. From Goldstein's reflections, a study was done on the problems of social and cultural inclusion in the Brazilian Amazon and of the main actors involved in this process: educators and children. In this article, I point out the real necessity of an education for teachers who work with child or basic education in the Brazilian Amazon in search of knowledge about themselves and their own prejudices so that, in their own pedagogical practices, they can act with empathy and seek for inclusive pedagogy starting from classes in childhood.

Distancing Strategies

This study describes White women preservice teachers’ talk in and about an antiracist teacher education course aimed at raising students’ awareness of racial inequities. Rather than be fully engaged participants in classroom discussions, White women distanced themselves through strategies of silence, social disassociation, and separation from responsibility. They used these strategies in response to perceptions that they were being positioned as racist, directly implicated in institutional racism, or responsible for racial discrimination. The article concludes with thoughts about how instructors might engage White women and antiracist curriculum, and therefore affect their ability to effectively teach students from various cultural backgrounds, through metadialogic approaches to race discussions.

‘I'm Not White’: Anti-Racist Teacher Education for White Early Childhood Educators

Conceptualising and implementing early childhood teacher education for racial and cultural diversity is a complex task that involves learning about social stratification and race, acknowledging the privileges associated with whiteness, and finding ways to create positive racial teaching identities. This article discusses three ways that teacher educators might prepare white early childhood education students for anti-racist work in their classrooms.

Hong Kong, Canada: Performed ethnography for anti-racist teacher education

For the last four years, I have been conducting critical ethnographic fieldwork in a Canadian multilingual high school, and thinking about the ways I might write up my findings. In an attempt to represent the experiences of those who participated in my study in a way that does not lead to the reproduction of the policies and practices of colonialism and racism I mean to challenge, I have experimented with the genre of playwriting. As a critical educational ethnographer who is also a teacher educator, I want my ethnographic writing to engage my teacher education students in critical analysis and practice. My experiments with ethnographic playwriting and performed ethnography endeavor to represent the research subjects in a way that not only facilitates their truths but also matters to people who were going to be asked to listen to and act upon these truths. This article describes a fictional, but ethnographically-informed play about some of the linguistic and academic dilemmas facing immigrant youth and their Canadian-born classmates. The article also provides a summary of the reasons why I believe that research-based drama holds exciting possibilities for critical teacher education.

Beyond Race Awareness: White Racial Identity and Multicultural Teaching

White teacher education students often distance themselves from racism (Sleeter, 1995a; Tatum, 1992b, 1994). White people can easily say, Racism has nothing to do with me; I'm not racist (Frankenberg, 1993, p. 6). Wellman's (1993) case studies of White racism support this view. The White women and men he interviewed tended to believe that racism was synonymous with personal prejudice, and because they did not feel prejudiced, racism must be someone else's problem. Whites can seem to remove themselves from racism, but they cannot escape their Whiteness. It is impossible to say, as Frankenberg (1993) notes, Whiteness has nothing to do with me, I'm not White (p. 6). The concept of Whiteness, like the concept of race, is socially constructed and can have several layers of meaning. One layer, Whiteness as description, encompasses the characteristics of light skin and Western European physical features. Another, Whiteness as experience, describes the state of being race-privileged, the daily experience of receiving unearned privileges from which Whites benefit. A deeper and more influential layer, the ideology of Whiteness, refers to beliefs, policies, and practices (often unarticulated) that enable Whites to maintain power and control in society (Thompson & White Women Challenging Racism, 1997). Many White college students readily recognize themselves as White by description but often fail to acknowledge or understand the privileges their white skin grants them. Their White privilege is often invisible to them; so is their participation in the ideology of Whiteness. Some teacher educators and teacher education programs have responded to White students' need for greater understanding of race-related topics by providing opportunities for learning about multicultural education (Gollnick, 1995; Grant & Tate, 1995; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Research involving White undergraduates in antiracist teacher education courses suggests the courses can help students recognize racial oppression in schools (Bennet, Niggle, & Stage, 1990; Bollin & Finkel, 1995; McCall, 1995) and help them gain insight into their Whiteness (Lawrence, 1996; Lawrence & Bunche, 1996; Tatum, 1992b; Valli, 1995). These studies of race-focused multicultural education courses suggest they can be influential in changing expressed attitudes and convictions during the course. They provide little information on whether or how students' new learning or heightened awareness translates into teaching action once that class is over. I wanted to know for my own teaching whether teacher education students' changed attitudes about racism and themselves would carry over into classrooms with their students. Multicultural Education as a Catalyst for Racial Identity Development In a previous study (Lawrence & Bunche, 1996), I utilized interview and writing sample data from five students to illustrate how a multicultural education course was a catalyst facilitating racial identity development of White undergraduates. Data analyzed in accordance with Helms's theory of White racial identity development (1990, 1995) revealed that some students made slight changes from their previously held color-blind views, while others made more profound shifts in their thinking about racial privileging and the injustices of institutional racism. Helms (1990, 1995) theorizes that all persons undergo a process of racial identity development characterized by different statuses extending from those least developmentally mature to most developmentally mature (1995, p. 184). White persons experience a developmental process involving six statuses: contact, disintegration, reintegration, pseudoindependence, immersion/emersion, and autonomy. These developmental statuses are not rigid and exclusive; one status may be more dominant during one period of time; others may be also be operating. White students exhibiting dominant contact status characteristics are typically unaware of racism and its effects and often claim to view all people through a color-blind lens. …

Anti-Racism, Feminism and Critical Approaches to Education

Series Foreword by Henry A. Giroux Introduction Multicultural and Anti-Racist Education: Comparative and Critical Perspectives Multicultural Education: Anti-Racist Education and Critical Pedagogy Reflections on Everyday Practice by Goli Rezai-Rashti Multicultural Policy Discourses on Racial Inequality in American Education by Cameron McCarthy Multicultural and Anti-Racist Teacher Education: A Comparison of Canadian and British Experiences in the 1970s and 1980s by Jon Young Reflections on Critical Approaches to Education Warrior as Pedagogue, Pedagogue as Warrior: Reflections on Aboriginal Anti-Racist Pedagogy by Robert Regnier Connecting Racism and Sexism: The Dilemma of Working with Minority Female Students by Goli Rezai-Rashti Aboriginal Teachers as Organic Intellectuals by Rick Hesch Teaching Against the Grain: Contradictions and Possibilities by Roxana Ng References Index