White Teachers Research Articles

“Because the rules out there are different…”: a case study of pre-service teachers’ experiences in remote Australian Indigenous education

ABSTRACT Pre-service teachers are required to become reflective practitioners who can adapt their skills to a range of contexts and the diverse needs of learners. Many consider the practicum experience as critical to forming values and dispositions that are essential to a professional teacher identity. This article focuses on the experiences of five White pre-service teachers who volunteered to teach in remote Indigenous communities in South Australia, specifically the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands, a desert environment in the far northwest of the state. As these pre-service teachers document their experiences, we draw upon Gee’s work on identity to gain insights into how they understand the “rules” of their context and their own positionality. Our research reveals the ways privilege can foster possibilities and constraints, which afford certain subject positions for these pre-service teachers. We focus specifically on a prominent theme in their narratives – “authenticity” concerning their conception of teaching and learning.

Emotional rules in two history classrooms

Drawing on feminist and sociocultural theories of emotion that focus on the social, political, and dynamic nature of emotions in history teachers' pedagogical decision-making, this article presents findings from the analysis of interviews with two white teachers on the role of emotions in their teaching of history in comprehensive, urban high schools. While the teachers perceived that students’ emotional connection to historical content was a necessary step in learning history, each teacher negotiated different emotional rules in their classrooms, creating unique learning experiences for their students. This study demonstrates the significance of emotions in history teaching, providing examples of the complexity of how teachers navigate dominant discourses about students and education and their own personal goals when it comes to teaching about the past.

Instructional Supervision: Is it Culturally Responsive? A Textbook Analysis

The purpose of this study was to determine whether and to what degree textbooks are preparing aspiring principals as culturally responsive instructional supervisors. After evaluating multiple textbooks against selection criteria, SuperVision and Instructional Leadership: A Developmental Approach, was identified as the study’s unit of analysis. An audit of the subject index was conducted to answer: How are culturally responsive instructional supervision competencies addressed in this leading supervision textbook? Findings revealed content related to cultural responsiveness was concentrated in a chapter at the back of the textbook and the clinical supervision cycle, a powerful means of changing instructional practices (Gordon, 2016; Grissom et al., 2021), was all but devoid of references to culture. As future and current school leaders prepare to supervise a still predominantly White teacher population, with the aim of instructional improvement for an even more diverse student population, the need for supervision that is culturally centered is imperative.

‘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.

White elementary teachers and learning to teach race in the social studies classroom: A 6-year longitudinal study

ABSTRACT In this 6-year longitudinal interpretative case study, the researcher examined four white elementary teachers’ beliefs and practices related to teaching race. Interview, observation, and classroom artefact data were collected from their teacher preparation program through their fifth year in the classroom. Using critical race theory and critical whiteness as the lens, the researcher found: (1) A division exists between tolerance- and equity-oriented teachers. (2) While two teachers had relatively fixed orientations, two teachers shifted their orientations over time; these shifts related to their school culture and their professional development opportunities. (3) The teachers were more likely to teach about race in schools where they had dedicated time for social studies. This study revealed the influence that teacher preparation and school context had on the white teachers’ development in teaching about race. This study also drew connections between teacher preparation programs and race-related practices during the teachers’ beginning years.

Preschool Children's Observed Interactions with Teachers: Implications for Understanding Teacher-Child Relationships.

Theory and research point to the daily interactions between individual children and teachers as formative to teacher-child relationships, yet observed dyadic teacher-child interactions in preschool classrooms have largely been overlooked. This study provides a descriptive examination of the quality of individual children's interactions with their teacher as a basis for understanding one source of information theorized to inform children's and teachers' perceptions of their relationships with each other. Children's dyadic interactions with teachers, including their positive engagement, communication, and conflict, were observed across a large and racially/ethnically diverse sample of 767 preschool children (M = 4.39 years) at three time points in the year. On average, most children displayed low-to-moderate levels of positive engagement (78%), while nearly all children showed rare communication (81%) and conflict (99%) with the teacher. Boys demonstrated lower positive engagement and higher conflict with the teacher than girls. Black children were observed to demonstrate higher positive engagement with the teacher compared to White children. No differences in interaction quality were observed for Black children with a White teacher compared to White child-White teacher or Black child-Black teacher pairs. Results advance our understanding of dyadic teacher-child interactions in preschool classrooms and raise new questions to expand our knowledge of how teacher-child relationships are established, maintained, and modified, to ultimately support teachers in building strong relationships with each and every preschooler.

White Teachers

The author reflects on some of her disturbingly racialized experiences working as a White learning mentor and carer for vulnerable children from a variety of backgrounds.

Making (Critical) Meaning of Meaning-making: Complicating the Racialization of Asian Indian American Youth

ABSTRACT This article examines the racializing processes throughlining the meaning-making of a Guru Vandana—an annual teacher appreciation event organized by many Asian Indian communities across the U.S.—that took place in a Midwestern city in 2019. Guided by a framework of transmodalities (a novel lens for the analysis of multimodal semiosis) and critical bifocality (a methodological approach to connect discursive and lived practices with broader structural arrangements), the author drew on interview and observational data of a set of Indian American parents and children and white teachers who attended the event to trace and analyze meanings intended, made, and missed of featured performances (e.g., dance, chants, and yoga demonstrations by the children). Indexing the deep embedment of Indian American positioning within multiple translocal and transnational hierarchies, findings reveal Guru Vandana’s tacit operation as a space wherein varied framings and understandings of Indianness circulate to both contest and (re)produce racialization, stereotypes, and caste subjectivity.

Acts of racial microdefense: embodied whiteness in social studies teacher education

ABSTRACT Embodied whiteness within teacher education operates in resistance to pedagogies, curriculum, discourse, and policy that seek to disrupt the influence of white supremacy in education. This study explores how five white pre-service teachers at a predominantly white institution (PWI) embodied whiteness as acts of racial microdefense to learning to teach for anti-racism in a social studies method course. Findings indicate that racial microdefense was utilised to project and promote the continued influence of whiteness within secondary social studies teacher education. Implications for teacher education are discussed.

Culturally Responsive Teaching: A Bridge over the Diversity Divide in Historically White Multicultural Schools of South Africa

The purpose of this paper is to report on white teacher perceptions of the characteristics associated with multicultural education and the related classroom practices in promoting Cultural Responsive Teaching (CRT) in historically white schools (HWS) in the Northern Cape province of South Africa. The pre-democratic South African education system was characterised by inequality based mainly on race. There were enormous inequalities between the education provided for blacks and whites. The advent of a democratic South Africa in 1994 made it possible for black learners to enroll at HWS. The majority of schools reacted by assuming an assimilation approach. This resulted in a number of challenges for HWS's. The authors argue that the promotion of CRT in HWS's could serve as a bridge to address the diversity divide experienced in most HWS's. The researchers are elected to employ the quantitative research method, to ascertain white teachers' perceptions of the characteristics of multicultural education and their perceptions of multicultural classroom practices in promoting CRT in HWS's in South Africa. Some of the findings of the study indicate that white teachers regard the eradication of fear and suspicion as an important multicultural characteristic to promote CRT.

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Disentangling SEL: Advocating for Black sociality, questioning white teachers’ emotionality

ABSTRACT This article disentangles social and emotional learning (SEL) into its 2 constitutive parts—sociality and emotionality through a backward mapping of the School Development Program (SDP) developed by James Comer. This article argues that Comer’s school-level intervention is a process model for how to achieve SEL outcomes given its intentionality toward making schooling a homeplace and its capacity to buildout conditions of Black sociality. The SDP also challenges how teacher preparation programs perpetuates harm to students of color by codifying white emotionality. This harm suggests a need to reimagine teacher preparation. This article thus concludes by recommending that teacher preparation programs should study more models and processes like the SDP and confront color-evasiveness.

Centering Racialized Educators in Collaborative Teacher Education: The Development of the Intersectionally Conscious Collaboration Protocol

The intersectionally conscious collaboration protocol for teacher educators (ICC-TE) expands on existing models of collaboration by drawing from intersectionality as conceptualized by Black feminist theorists, collaborative teacher education, and frameworks for stakeholders to establish and maintain ethical, student-centered relationships. The ICC-TE promotes approaches that honor sociocultural differences, model collaboration, and support the development of these practices in preservice teacher education. The authors analyzed the responses of four Latina teacher educators at a predominately white teacher preparation program and teaching artifacts created while using the ICC-TE as they co-taught a special education course. As a result of this study, the researchers refined the protocol. All participants indicated the need for more training on intersectionality, for both teacher educators of color and their white colleagues. A connecting thread across all sources of data was how institutional culture and faculty morale shaped collegiality.

Use of Critical Race Theory to Understand the Experiences of an African American Male During School Psychology Graduate Education

This study used an exploratory case study approach to explore the race-related experiences of a Black male specialist level school psychology graduate student. We used the CRT tenets of racism as normal and permanent and intersectionality and antiessentialism to help us make sense of the findings. Findings revealed that race and racism did not negatively impact the case study participant’s experiences within his school psychology program at the university. However, racism was pervasive during his internship year, as it influenced interactions with white teachers and parents. Implications for school psychology graduate education are discussed, including the need for school psychologists to actively engage behaviors that disrupt systems of oppression like racism if the profession is to meet its antiracist aims. Impact Statement This case study uses Critical Race Theory to help us make sense of a Black male’s experiences in a school psychology program. Findings showed the participant did not perceive his race or racism as a barrier to relationships with program peers or faculty, but racism negatively impacted his experience at his field-based internship sites. Implications suggest the need for school psychology graduate programs to enroll students who are inclusive and open to engaging racial issues, faculty who engage culturally-responsive mentoring practices, and the presence of school psychologists of color as university professors and supervisors in PK–12 schools.

W.A.A.C.K. C.S.P.: the tensions and overlaps between Whiteness and culturally sustaining pedagogies

This article takes up the questions: How does Whiteness affect conceptions of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP)? Specifically, when it comes to Whiteness, is there a culture worth sustaining? To begin this examination, we first outline what CSP and Whiteness are. Second, we review the literature within Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) that takes up pedagogical questions. Third, we theorize the tensions and places of overlap across CSP and CWS—specifically that when it comes to Whiteness there is not a culture worth sustaining, but there is space for White people within CSP as long as they take account of Whiteness. Fourth, we propose a framework for merging CSP and CWS, W.A.A.C.K. C.S.P. (White folks Applying Anti-Racist Cultural Knowledge for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies). We conclude with implications of this framework for future educational research and practical implications for White teachers and White students.

Disparities in Teachers’ Access to Schools’ Collective Social Assets Based on Role, Race, and Poverty

A schools’ collective social assets (i.e., school culture, administrative support, and satisfied colleagues) are especially important for beginning teachers at higher risk of attrition, including special educators, teachers of color, teachers in high-poverty schools, and teachers in schools serving predominantly students of color. These teachers often report experiencing less social support than general educators, White teachers, teachers in low-poverty schools, and teachers serving predominantly White students, respectively; we labeled this inequitable access to schools’ collective social assets intersectional professional vulnerability. Using data from the Schools and Staffing Survey and structural equation modeling, we examined how beginning teachers’ race/ethnicity and their students’ race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and disability status related to perceptions of their U.S. schools’ collective social assets and how those perceptions shaped intent to continue teaching. We found significant differences in access to collective social assets based on their race/ethnicity, role as special versus general educators, and students served within their school.

Whiteness at work when students call their white and black teachers racist

The author analyzes two episodic moments when a white teacher, Mr. Drake, teaching in a racially diverse school and a Black teacher, Dr. Selise, teaching in a mostly white school context are called racist by their students. This research demonstrated that the contexts of these teachers’ work was grounded in and shaped by whiteness. What happens when two teachers from different racial backgrounds are called racist in different sociopolitical contexts? What precipitates students’ accusation and the teachers responses to the accusation? What roles do contexts play in reifying whiteness and racism in, during, and after these discursive moments? A whiteness frame can shed light on the ways in which two different teachers experience and rationalize an accusation of being racist. Implications for theory, research and practice are considered.

The Impact of Racial Socialization on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Facilitation: A Critical Collaborative Autoethnography Among Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Teacher-Educators

This critical collaborative autoethnography critically examines how three women (Black, Asian American, and white) teacher educators negotiated their roles as diversity, equity, and inclusion facilitators for a national alternative educator preparation program. A major category that emerged from the research was how our racialized experiences impacted our work as DEI facilitators. Our reliance on individual experiences and identities shaped by race created a narrow vision of DEI development. This work adds to the limited literature around the experiences of DEI facilitators in alternative educator preparation programs and the personal nature of the professional role. The research considers future implications for teacher preparation programs in their recruitment and training of teacher educators.

White Racial Awareness: Complexities and Contexts of White Educator Identities

This study utilizes life history methodology to understand how White teachers develop racial awareness while also exploring how the education profession acts as an inflection point for racialized understandings of the world. Furthermore, as the educators in this study grew in their racial awareness, there was a rise in conflicting and ambivalent feelings as they attempted to teach in ways that aligned with their newly developed awareness. These feelings surfaced as the educators grappled with issues of race, Whiteness, and systemic inequality in both their profession and in their personal lives. Using a framework of Critical Whiteness Studies, this study provides a nuanced and contextual discussion of White identity development. Ultimately, findings show that educators begin to understand race through proximity, exposure, and repeated interaction with students of Color. This holds major implications not only for educators and teacher education programs but also for students of Color.

Race Evasion and Race Cognizance in Elementary Math Teaching: A Study of White Teacher Candidates' Learning, Discourse, and Early Practice

Race Evasion and Race Cognizance in Elementary Math Teaching: A Study of White Teacher Candidates' Learning, Discourse, and Early Practice