White Male Teachers Research Articles

Examining “precarious privilege” in international schooling: white male teachers negotiating contract non-renewal

ABSTRACT Although international school teachers have always been hired on short-term contracts (usually from two to three years in duration), there has been relatively little research examining this aspect of international schooling. Whilst short-term contracts may appear to be a positive feature of international schooling, particularly for younger teachers who are keen to be mobile, recent studies have begun to examine the short-term as a feature of precarity and the precaritisation of international schooling. This paper adds to this small but growing body of scholarship by focusing on contract non-renewal as a form of international school precarity. In order to explore this issue, this paper utilises autoethnography, drawing on the author’s experiences of contract renewal in an internationalised school in Shanghai, as well as interviews with two participants. Whilst the author’s experiences of precarity as a foreign teacher in China were characterised by vulnerability and discrimination, his positionality as a white, British male teacher enabled him to negotiate contract non-renewal relatively easily, something that women teachers or minority groups might be unable to do due to the differential nature of precarity. Despite being privileged, white male international school teachers must still negotiate contractual employment and diminished white-skin privilege. This paper goes some way to bringing into focus white male teachers’ “precarious privilege”.

Profiles of teachers’ occupational health: Associations with classroom management practices, gender, and race

Despite research linking teachers’ occupational health to student outcomes, the processes through which these associations exist are unknown. In a sample of 516 teachers, four latent profiles of occupational health were identified, indicated by job stress, occupational burnout, and teaching self-efficacy: lowest occupational health (17%), low-to-mid occupational health/mid self-efficacy (38%), mid-to-high occupational health/mid-self-efficacy (30%), and highest (15%) occupational health. Proactive behavior management practices were observed less frequently for teachers in the lowest (vs. highest) occupational health profile. White female teachers were associated with profiles of low occupational health more than White male teachers, and male and female teachers of color.

Refocusing science professional learning: social justice at the heart.

This paper emerges from a reflection inspired by Kristen A. Searle et al.’s Whiteness at work in the elementary classroom: A case study. Through the lens of Whiteness, the authors explored how a White male elementary teacher, who engaged in an integrated technology professional development, implemented culturally responsive teaching. Unfortunately, the teacher was described as falling short of achieving the pedagogy and practice set out by the professional development. With this, we were left to wonder how the outcome of the study would have differed, if the authors chose to focus on social justice education, rather than make it a companion to their professional development on integrated technology. Therefore, in this piece, we explore how science teacher education, like the one presented in Kristen A. Searle et al.'s work, would look if it prioritized the development of socially just science teachers.

A FUNDAMENTAL CONDITION FOR ETHICAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE TEACHING OF THE BIBLE BY WHITE MALE EXEGETES: RECORDING AND CLAIMING THE SPECIFITY OF OUR PERSPECTIVE

This essay is a report on ‘work in progress’. It is a critical reflection on a project that we have been developing for more than one year. Provisionally entitled, ‘Teaching the Bible in Pluralistic Contexts: Ethical Accountability and White Male Exegetes’, this collaborative project in its present form is the beneficiary of a year-long Lilly Endowment-sponsored planning grant which feature a major conference held in March 1991 at Vanderbilt University. In attendance were twenty African-American, Hispanic-American, and European-American women and men trained in biblical studies and ethics. Originally conceived to explore questions about the disciplinary relationships between ethics and biblical studies (both in teaching and research expressions), our project is now centered upon a specific two-fold ethical question: what is the nature of the ethical accountability of white (i.e. European-American) male teachers of the Bible toward students? and: what are the direct and indirect effects of our teaching and research upon students?

FROM THE EDITOR

The contributions to this special edition were originally presented as papers at the first Consultation on Contextual Hermeneutics organized by the Centre for Contextual Hermeneutics at Stellenbosch during April 1991. The aim was to explore the concept of contextuality and to discuss the most recent results of researchers working in this field.We were very fortunate to have as special Professor Daniel Patte of Vanderbilt University. As leaders of a major project funded by the Lily Foundation, he and Gary Phillips are engaged in research dealing with issues fundamental to contextual hermeneutics. Their special focus is on the accountability of white male teachers of the Bible and the effect of their teaching and research on students.

Ideology and Identity Among White Male Teachers in an All-Black, All-Male High School

National data trends underscore the “problem” of Black male achievement. Beneath the causes and consequences are the ideologies used to frame the problem and its solutions. The ideology of meritocracy is routinely employed to rationalize educational disparities. This article examined how White male teachers, in a charter school designed to promote academic success among Black boys, made sense of boys’ academic achievement patterns. Interview analysis revealed the persistence of meritocracy, as teachers (a) located the problem within Black boys’ identities; (b) constructed race, masculinity, and social class as barriers to students’ academic success and teachers’ effectiveness; and (c) positioned themselves relationally away from their students and the problem itself. We discuss implications for the academic development of Black boys.

Teaching with understanding while teaching for understanding

This manuscript focuses on the experiences of a science teacher educator’s initial engagement in reconceptualization of the construct of equity in classrooms through the use of praxis. What might equity look like if conceptualized as a dynamic interaction between teacher and individual students? Utilizing a critically situated perspective, this work explores the evolution of mutual and reciprocal understanding between a white male teacher educator and one student. It then questions the outcomes produced by this exploration. This work provides an example of how separating equity into two components—equity as interactive, and equity as complex and dynamic, may help pre-service teachers (PSTs) and practicing teacher educators negotiate meaning through discussion on a long-term basis. By utilizing a concrete conceptualization of equity, and examples for discussion, findings can inform PSTs, teacher educators, and practicing teachers of a starting point for de/reconstructing personal conceptualizations of equity in classrooms.

Meaningful Ambivalence, Incommensurability, and Vulnerability in an Antiracist Project: Answers to Unasked Questions

The author reports the findings from a yearlong antiracist project involving three White male preservice teachers in a Midwestern rural U.S. state. Drawing on second-wave White teacher identity literature and Emotional Tools of Whiteness, the project focuses on collaborative critical self-reflection to explore the participants’ individual relationships with race and racism. The study reveals some important misconceptions relating to ambivalence, incommensurability, and vulnerability. The author attends to the participants’ affective responses to the misconceptions and discusses how their affects are indicative of both larger social structures and of the way in which the project was conceptualized initially, focusing on the ideals and outcomes rather than the actual practice of engaging in the self-reflection. The author argues for the need to account for complexity of preservice teachers’ experiences as they engage in antiracist work.

Physics Champions Among White Women and People of Color

If a person were to observe my classroom when I taught high school physics, he or she would find the traditional labs with the lectures, notes, and problems to solve that enhanced understanding. As I became more skilled in my profession, I promoted inquiry and critical thinking skills. However, the necessity was never obvious to me, nor was I ever taught how, to address social inequity in physics (let alone did I fully understand it myself). Why was that? My job was to teach concepts such as momentum, forces, inertia, circuits, etc. This list goes on and on. It wasn’t until years later in my career that I began to understand the importance of bringing social inequities in physics to the front of the classroom. It started to become obvious I needed to do something at least in my own classroom when I had difficulties highlighting anyone in physics who was not White and not male. Though this was never my intent while teaching, I believe I helped maintain this social inequity, and perpetuate the idea that physics is for White males (and yes, I am a White male teacher). This article provides arguments and resources for teaching explicitly about equity issues in introductory physics.

Whiteness as a Dissonant State: Exploring One White Male Student Teacher’s Experiences in Urban Contexts

Studies on student teaching continue to suggest that preservice teachers’ feelings of dissonance are related to disparate views of teaching and learning between universities and schools. Drawing on interview, artifact, and observation data, the authors utilize Cognitive Dissonance and Critical Whiteness Studies to make different sense of the experiences of one White student teacher (Brett). Results indicate that Brett experienced dissonance related to fractured relationships, misaligned teaching strategies, and disengagement as he taught youth of color. Importantly, the use of Critical Whiteness Studies helped to additionally reveal the way Whiteness affected Brett’s movements toward consonance—mainly through rationalization and problematic notions of perseverance. The authors suggest that Whiteness itself is a dissonant state, and argue that conversations focused on dissonance from misaligned university theory and K-12 schooling practices is dangerously incomplete. Implications for research and practice are included.

A privileged perspective: How a racially conscious White male teacher interacts with his students

The goal of this interpretive study was to further research in the field of Whiteness studies by empirically analysing how a racially conscious white male teacher interacts with his minoritised and White students. The teacher’s classroom was examined using Critical Race and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). Two empirical assertions were developed based on the continual search for disconfirming evidence within interview and observational data. Results show the teacher participant created a learning environment in which his black minoritised students felt comfortable, trusted, and respected.

Co-existence of race-evasiveness and race-visibility identifications: Complexifying one white male teachers’ racial knowledge

Co-existence of race-evasiveness and race-visibility identifications: Complexifying one white male teachers’ racial knowledge

School Desegregation and Black Teacher Employment

Prior to the racial integration of schools in the southern United States, predominantly African American schools were staffed almost exclusively by African American teachers as well, and teaching constituted an extraordinarily large share of professional employment among southern blacks. The large-scale desegregation of southern schools occurring after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act represented a potential threat to this employment base, and this paper estimates how student integration affected black teacher employment. Using newly assembled archival data from 781 southern school districts observed between 1964 and 1972, I estimate that a school district transitioning from fully segregated to fully integrated education, which approximates the experience of the modal southern district in this period, led to a 31.8% reduction in black teacher employment. A series of tests indicate that these employment reductions were not due to school district self-selection into desegregation or unobserved district characteristics associated with desegregation. Additional analyses estimate changes in the occupational distribution by race in the 1960 and 1970 Decennial Censuses and indicate that displaced southern black teachers either entered lower skill occupations within the South or migrated out of the region to continue teaching, and that southern school districts compensated for reduced black teacher employment by employing fewer total teachers and by increasing their recruitment of white teachers, especially less experienced white teachers and white male teachers. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Play of the unconscious in pre-service teachers’ self-reflection around race and racism

Reading psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious desire for wholeness in the light of the notion of white racial supremacy, this study explores a constituted difficulty that self-reflection around the issues of race and racism confronts by exploring three white male pre-service teachers’ emotional experiences inscribed in their responses to the process of engaging in self-reflection. The pervasiveness of strong emotional reactions to the process of engaging in self-reflection spoke volumes not only about how uncomfortable the participants felt in the face of ambivalence, incommensurability and vulnerability but also about their active resistance against their emotional states to defend their unconscious desire for wholeness that is intensified by the forces of white racial supremacy. This study also seeks to elaborate problems inherent in teachers’ self-reflection and why and how unknown and unconscious emotional world filters and at times hinders the participants’ willingness to inquire into their own relationship to race and racism. In the final section, the author discusses how the findings may be used to imagine how teachers’ unknown and unconscious emotional world can become subjective curriculum which in turn becomes a foundation for students’ learning or lack thereof and also informs the field of teacher education engaging in critical self-reflection.

Talk About a Racial Eclipse

During a student teaching experience, teacher education candidates affiliated with an urban School of Education school–university partnership witnessed a disturbing interaction between an early career White male teacher and a first-grade Black male student at an assigned elementary school. The subsequent interactions among the teacher, principal, district administrators, and university partners illumine the racial implications at varying levels from the individual to the structural level. The ways in which race is centered, yet is evaded by school actors, raises important considerations for leadership. Authors suggest combining critical race theory with organizational narratives to explore the dilemmas at various structural levels, but in particular for the principal and district-level administrators.

White Western male teachers constructing academic identities in Japanese higher education

In research on gender and teaching in higher education, the experiences of male teachers as men, and of whiteness in a non-majority-white context have received little attention. As one step towards addressing this gap in the literature, this paper analyses interview accounts of white Western men working as English language teachers in Japanese higher education. The paper demonstrates, first, ways in which disembodied academic identities are constructed by erasing the men's racialised gender and sexuality. Second, it shows how favourable images of white Western male teachers are produced through a series of negative contrasts based on gender and race. Third, it suggests that men's homosocial networks may serve to facilitate male predominance in the Japanese university system. The analysis contributes to current understandings about the construction of white Western masculinities in academic institutions, in international education, and in English language teaching as a globalised industry.

What are white progressive masculinities? Counternarratives and contradictions of committed white male teachers in inner-city schools

This life history reflection aims to constitute, generate, and proliferate complex progressive masculinities for male teachers and advance notions of progressive masculinities writ large in education and elsewhere. This reflection, working with life story interviews of white male teachers in US inner-city schools, positions this research within the researcher's life history. Informed by existing literatures on male teachers emphasising crisis-shortage and gender workplace issues, this reflection expands these literatures by developing life narrative concepts that replace static masculinities with narrativised identifications, lived counternarratives, and contradictory progressive masculinities. Key to respondents' progressive masculinities, this life history reflection provides four lived counternarratives including respondents' illegal drug use, process spirituality, alternative media, and critical politics. Through these counternarratives, respondents' contradictory progressive masculinities emerge as bifurcated phenomena that reify privileges yet drive respondents, precariously situated between nihilistic impotency and political potential, towards passively conjugated alliances with subaltern others.

The Lost Carpetbagger

The following discussion highlights the impact depression and anxiety can have on perceptions of psychological and geographical “place” for a Southern, White male teacher studying racism and prejudice in the predominantly White rural high school community he lives and works. The teacher-researcher utilizes autoethnographical and psychoanalytical techniques of critical reflection and self-applied transportation theory, and arts-based research to unravel these perceptions and to enhance his autobiographical findings of both geographical and psychological place. One intent of the nonnative teacher-researcher was to uncover one predominantly White Texas high school community’s actions and thoughts of racism and prejudice through his own eyes while at times suffering from a relapse of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and anxiety. Another intent was to give the teacher-researcher further perspectives into his biography, his own attitudes of racism, prejudice, and inequality, and further understandings into the underlying causes of depression that bound his experiences in geographical and psychological place. Findings suggest that this teacher-researcher’s use of psychological techniques while suffering from a relapse of MDD and anxiety can negatively impact his ability to locate physical and psychological aspects of place.

Committed White Male Teachers and Identifications: Toward Creative Identifications and a “Second Wave” of White Identity Studies

Committed White male teachers of inner-city students seeks to supersede previous research on White teacher and other White identities by narrating respondents’ “creative identifications” and initiating a “second wave” of White identity studies. This research reflection articulates complex, viable, and creative White identities, reconceptualized here as creative identifications. Using life history methodology, this research reflection articulates respondents’ identifications as they emerge in life histories. Critiquing, engaging, and extending scholarship on White teachers, this reflection reveals respondents’ recodings of White identifications and articulates how these recodings become useful in classrooms. Specifically, respondents recode bounded identifications, at times in progressive ways, using alternative media, illegal drug experiences, process spirituality, and other cultural resources in processes of “self” identification. This reflection articulates these complex and nuanced White teacher identifications as they relate to classrooms and race visible, rather than color-blind, identifications. These findings critique activist-interventionist research on White teachers’ “false consciousnesses” for its essentialzing tendencies and suggest a move toward creative identifications and a “second wave” of White identity studies illuminating them. The second wave of White identity studies, which this research exemplifies and calls for, emphasizes respondents’ narrative becoming rather than essentialized being as a basis for a continued research on White identities.

White male teachers on difference: narratives of contact and tensions

This research reflection explores a narrative pattern that emerged in participants’ interviews on student differences. In exploring this narrative pattern, this reflection reveals tensions between participants’ structural and deficit understandings of student differences of race, class, culture, and language. Framing participants’ understandings of structural and deficit thinking, this reflection articulates three discursive contexts relating to participants’ work. Articulating participants’ structural and deficit thinking within discursive contexts, this reflection seeks to re‐initiate the conversation on white teachers through increased attention to researcher positionality, discursive contexts, and research pedagogy.