White Teachers Research Articles

Becoming Teachers of Inner-City Students

Broadly speaking, this reflection approaches the on-going concern of capacitating an overwhelmingly White teaching profession for effectively teaching inner-city students attending de facto segregated schools. Using professional identifications, this reflection presents narrativized understanding of respondents’ becoming committed teachers of inner-city students through identification creativity driven by alternative masculinity. Respondents’ professional identifications, articulating identification creativity, provide an understanding of curriculum wisdom for teaching in inner-city schools that includes race visibility, difference within difference, and relational-experiential pedagogy. Last, this reflection urges researchers toward a second wave of White teacher identity studies based on directions emerging in this research.

An Ethnography of Two Teachers’ Antiracist and Critical Multicultural Practices

Educational theorists concerned with antiracist and critical multicultural practices have identified the need for teachers to begin changing the processes of social exclusion which children of colour experience in the school system. An ethnographic study of critical educators teaching practices is provided as a useful directive. The study examines how two critical educators respond to the diversity represented in their school by incorporating antiracist and critical multicultural approaches in their teaching practice. Of interest in relation to Julia Neuman’s practice is the question: How do white teachers negotiate their ‘whiteness’ in relation to the diversity in student population? In the case of Sita Ramana a South Asian teacher, the study considers how cultural and linguistic congruence with her students engages their interests in culturally response reading programs that involve dual language books as well as parent - student active participation in heritage language programs.

Acquiring Double Images: White Preservice Teachers Locating Themselves in a Raced World

In this article, Barbara Seidl and Stephen Hancock introduce the concept of a double image, which they argue is central to the development of a mature, antiracist identity for White people. Similar in some ways to Dubois's (1903) concept of double consciousness, a double image is a sensibility or consciousness that gives White people a deeper understanding of how they are seen and raced by others, particularly People of Color. Drawing on eight years as antiracist teacher educators, Seidl and Hancock demonstrate how White preservice teachers in a cross-cultural internship begin to develop a double image, the obstacles they come across, and the pedagogies that can assist them in this process.

Toward a critical pedagogy for nonviolence in urban school contexts

This paper explores the intersection of critical pedagogy and nonviolence in a case study of a white novice teacher at an urban school in the Midwestern United States. Drawing on various theoretical streams that contribute to this possible marriage of critical pedagogy, non-violence and critical peace education, the authors formulate the notion of critical pedagogy for nonviolence, which includes a holistic integration of nonviolence, the productive use of power relations, and an interrogation of emotion as constitutive of ideology and practice. Data drawn from the participant’s reflections and teaching practices show her struggles – some positive, others disheartening – to implement a critical pedagogy for nonviolence. Discussion of the implications for teaching and teacher education includes how a critical pedagogy for nonviolence opens spaces of possibility for greater justice.

Culturally Relevant Teaching: Lessons from Elementary Classrooms

How do teachers operationalize culturally relevant pedagogies (CRP)? Although preservice teachers often learn about multicultural education in college courses and discuss diversity in university settings, putting these understandings into practice is often more challenging. The translation piece, at times, is missing. This study of successful White teachers of children of color looks at ways in which they concretely apply culturally relevant practices in their classrooms. The study provides insights into how teachers can move away from superficial efforts to include diversity in their classrooms and towards more critically-conscious pedagogies.

Race, School, and Seinfeld

Applying the Deluzoguattarian concept of the trace, this article explores interactions between a White teacher and his Black students and the way race is coconstructed therein. Using a short story by the Argentine mystery writer Jorge Luis Borges as a frame, the author connects the poststructural philosophy of the trace to current notions of postracial color blindness. His own experience, however, as demonstrated through autoethnographic sketches, is posited as experiential evidence that contests the chimerical nature of such color-blind claims. A caesura, rather than a conclusion, is reached through a gloss of an episode of the television series Seinfeld. The author believes this piece of pop culture demonstrates the tensions existing between the idealism of postracial color blindness and the realities of the trace.

These American lives: becoming a culturally responsive teacher and the ‘risks of empathy’

Do teacher candidates who identify as White and European American think about issues of difference in ways that vary distinctly from teacher candidates who identify as Latina/o or Hispanic? In this article, we engage with the literature on culturally relevant teaching that suggests teacher candidates of color are more likely to have some of the characteristics of culturally responsive teachers than are White teacher candidates when they enter teacher preparation programs. By comparing the attitudes of teacher candidates from a majority Hispanic-serving university and a university that serves mostly White and European American students, we question the idea that certain bodies are coterminous with particular ideologies.

Learning to see: the development of race and class consciousness in white teachers

This is a study of White teachers and their identity development. Using a qualitative approach steeped in the tenants of critical race theory and storytelling, this study investigated how White teachers learn about race, class and diversity in meaningful ways, with a close eye on the role their own personal histories played in their development. To better understand this phenomenon, three White teachers – all believed to be exceptionally skilled in educating children of color in urban centers – were interviewed over the course of several meetings. Their data provides insights into the factors and experiences that shape the race and class consciousness of successful White teachers in urban schools. Through the teachers’ stories, we glean an awareness of the salient life experiences that help build solidarity between students and teachers, help White teachers understand their own racial positioning, and illuminate ways in which teacher education programs can broaden their understanding of ‘quality’ teachers.

The Minority Teacher Shortage: Fact or Fable?

For several decades, shortages of minority teachers have been a big issue for the nation's schools. Policy makers and recent presidents have agreed that our elementary and secondary teaching force should look like America. But the conventional wisdom is that as the nation's population and students have grown more diverse, the teaching force has done the opposite--grown more white and less diverse. The result, we are told, is that minority students in the nation's schools increasingly lack minority adult role models, contact with teachers who understand their racial and cultural background, and often qualified teachers of any background, because white teachers eschew schools with large percentages of minorities. The minority teacher shortage in turn, we are told, is a major reason for the minority achievement gap and, ultimately, unequal occupational and life outcomes for disadvantaged students. In short, the minority teacher shortage is a civil rights issue. The main source of this shortage, conventional wisdom holds, is a problem with the teacher supply pipeline. Too few minority students enter and complete college, and those who do have an increasing number of career and employment options aside from teaching. Moreover, when minority candidates do seek to enter teaching, this view holds, they encounter barriers--in particular, teaching entry tests, on which minority candidates have lower pass rates. The result is the minority teacher shortage. The prescription, understandably enough, has been to try to recruit more minority candidates into teaching. In recent decades, numerous government and nongovernment organizations have tried a variety of minority teacher recruitment programs and initiatives, including future educator programs in high schools, partnerships between community colleges and four-year teacher education programs, career ladders for paraprofessionals in schools, and alternative teacher certification programs. Support for these efforts has been substantial. For instance, beginning in the late 1980s, the Ford Foundation, along with the DeWitt Wallace Readers' Digest Fund, committed over $60 million to minority teacher recruitment and preparation programs. Many of these initiatives have been designed to bring minority teachers into schools serving predominantly minority student populations, often in low-income, urban school districts. Some of these initiatives have been designed specifically to recruit male minority teachers, who are often considered to be in the shortest supply. Today, over half the states have some sort of minority teacher recruitment policies or programs in place. Have these efforts been successful? Has the teaching force grown more diverse? And, if not, why not? A couple of years ago, with support from the Flora Family Foundation, we set out to answer these questions. We analyzed two decades worth of data from the late 1980s to 2009 from a large U.S. Department of Education national survey of teachers and administrators. We didn't focus on the contentious question of whether minority teachers are better at teaching minority students. Rather, our objective was to use the best national data available to ground the debate over the extent of shortages. We asked: * Have the numbers of minority teachers been going up or down? What changes have there been, if any, in the numbers of minority students and numbers of minority teachers in the school system, and how does this compare with white students and teachers? * Where are minority teachers employed? Are minority teachers more likely than white teachers to be employed in schools serving high-poverty, urban, and high-minority student populations? * How does minority teacher retention compare to that of white teachers, and has it been going up or down? We were surprised by what we found. From the viewpoint of the minority teacher shortage and of the efforts to address it, there is both good news and bad news. …

Inhabiting the ‘tragic gap’: pre-service teachers practicing racial literacy

Set in the context of a teacher education program, this study examined how three White pre-service teachers participate in book club discussions of children’s literature. We asked: When White pre-service teachers are in a context that enables talk about race, racism and anti-racism, what do they talk about? What conceptual and discursive tools do they use? We were guided by these questions, along with theoretical perspectives of racial literacy, multicultural discourses and a form of critical discourse analysis referred to as ‘positive discourse analysis’ or ‘reconstructive discourse analysis’. Our analysis illustrates that the participants held two questions, what constitutes racism and what makes a person a White ally, without firm resolution in the form and function of their talk. Their discourses illustrate that racial literacy involves what teachers say and also a willingness to stand in the space of indeterminacy, which may create space for new social positions. We argue for a continued theorization of critical discourse analysis alongside of racial literacy and multicultural discourses.

Raceblindness in Mexico: implications for teacher education in the United States

The demographic make‐up of US public schools indicates an increasing divergence between the racial background of teachers and that of their students: Whites represent approximately 90% of all public school teachers whereas 40% of students are of color. Further complicating the situation is the fact that many of the students of color are first‐generation immigrants. The US education system is struggling to adapt to the changing nature of America’s classrooms. Many have pointed out how the US educational system has become dysfunctional, especially for children who are not part of the linguistic and racial mainstream. Some scholars blame an inconsistency between the racial frames held by White teachers and those embraced by their students of color. It is argued that Whites are oftentimes colorblind whereas students of color are usually color conscious. However, this assumption may not hold for first‐generation immigrants who bring their racial discourses from their home countries. For example, Mexican immigrants may bring color‐blind frameworks which are common in Mexico. In this article I outline the predominant racial frames used by mixed‐race Mexicans. I draw on 109 semi‐structured interviews and focus group data collected over the course of one year in Veracruz, Mexico. In discussing racial frames in Mexico, I seek to provide teachers and educators in the US with conceptual tools to work with the Mexican immigrant population. Finally, I propose that we should address issues of racial frames from a broader, global perspective, incorporating the experiences of various racial and ethnic groups into teacher education.

Becoming white: reinterpreting a family story by putting race back into the picture

Many teacher educators attempt to prompt teacher candidates, who are usually majority white, to examine themselves as culturally and historically located beings in order to prepare for multicultural and anti‐racist teaching. But with white teacher candidates in colonialist societies, this work is difficult. Family history stories that white teacher candidates tell tend to disassociate individuals from the context of race and class relations in which they lived. Using insights from Critical Race Theory, critical whiteness studies, and post‐positivist realist identity theory, I probe below the surface of a ‘heroic individual’ story I grew up hearing about one of my immigrant great‐great‐grandmothers. This paper reports detailed historical research that situates her life in a social and cultural context, thereby making racism visible. Using a research methodology I am calling ‘critical family history,’ I uncover the story’s silences related to her claiming of a white identity in the context of racism and competition for economic resources. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for how teacher educators work with family history and racism in order to move from uncovering how racism was constructed and how it works, to how white people today might act differently.

Living and learning in Mexico: developing empathy for English language learners through study abroad

This paper provides a qualitative examination of university student experiences with culture, language, and race in a short‐term study abroad program in Cuernavaca, Mexico. All participants were White teacher education students from the United States earning their English as a Second Language (ESL) teaching endorsement and hoped to teach English language learners (ELLs). During the three week program, students took ESL Methods and Spanish for Teachers classes, and lived with host families in Cuernavaca. In addition to academic goals, the study abroad program was designed to help students develop empathy for the challenges faced by ELLs in the US through immersion in Mexico. Given that most teachers in the US are monolingual, native English speaking Whites and the majority of ELLs are native Spanish speakers, this study abroad experience provided many opportunities to develop empathy for ELL schoolchildren that the students’ usual milieu in the US did not. Daily journal entries, instructors’ observations, and pre‐ and post‐experience questionnaires were examined. Through our analysis, we found that students struggled with the cultural, linguistic, and racial dimensions of their short‐term study abroad experience and that most channeled these frustrations into some measure of empathetic understanding for the challenges facing ELLs in the US.

Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 (review)

Reviewed by: Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 Kate Culkin (bio) Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876. By Ronald E. Butchart. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. x, 336. $39.95 cloth) Ronald E. Butchart's Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861-1876 offers an important corrective to historians' understanding of the education of African Americans during Reconstruction. In engaging prose and drawing on scrupulous research, Butchart upends conventional wisdom about the teachers' backgrounds and provides new insight into the teaching and learning that occurred in the classrooms. Historians have long argued that well-off, white abolitionist "Yankee schoolmarms" made up the majority of the teaching corps in the Reconstruction South. While the interpretations of the teachers' motivations, effectiveness, and influence have differed, the basic portrait has remained the same. Butchart paints a radically different picture, in which African Americans from the North and the South, white Southerners, and men play a much bigger role. He introduces statistics such as the fact that African Americans made up a third of the teachers, that there were up to six thousand white southern teachers by 1871 and that the majority of northern white teachers did not have a strong commitment to abolition. The book provides ample documentation of his claims, not only within the text, but also with tables and two appendixes that break up the teaching population by race, gender, and geographic origin. Butchart's conclusions are based on the work of the Freedmen's Teacher Project, which he founded to answer questions raised through his work on Northern Schools, Southern Blacks, and Reconstruction (1980). The goal of the project is "to positively identify as many as possible of the women and men who taught in southern black schools between 1861 and 1876," and it has compiled information [End Page 106] on over 11,600 people (p. xvii). Butchart estimates that two-thirds of the teachers have been identified, speculating that it may be impossible to recover the rest. Earlier scholars have leaned heavily on the American Missionary Association archives; while not dismissing their importance, Butchart and his researchers have turned to a broader range of sources, including the Freedmen's Bureau, military and pension records, college archives, and city directories. Far from offering a dry statistical analysis, Butchart includes biographical profiles at the beginning and end of each chapter specifically about the teaching population, as well as weaving details throughout the text; he often uses the teachers' own words. These details, along with his lucid writing, bring to life these historical actors and create a complex, compelling portrait of the motivations and experiences of the teachers and the freed people. Butchart's analysis of what was actually taught and the pedagogy employed is also revelatory. He outlines the debates about curriculum, looks carefully at curricular material and its distribution, and ultimately concludes, "The very fact that the teachers expected their black students to master the same curriculum as white students, using exactly the same curricular material, and the students' unmistakable success in mastering that curriculum, taught powerful lessons to the freed people about their teachers' expectations and their own capabilities" (p. 131). He also notes that some teachers adopted a modern, "urban" pedagogy, although Butchart's passionate claims about the significance of this development ring like a rare moment of overreaching in this work. While the book opens with a rumination on the significance of education for the freed people, Butchart concludes by tying the attacks on schools, teachers, and students to white Southerners' violent opposition to the black franchise. He forcefully argues that they both stood in defiance of white supremacy and together symbolized African American agency and determination. Butchart finally laments, however, that education "proved, in the final analysis, inadequate in the face of white oppression" (p. 178). [End Page 107] Schooling the Freed People is an important piece in historians' long project of revising their understanding of Reconstruction. But it is also a model of how to integrate detailed statistical information into a compelling narrative. For that, it deserves to be...

Desiring silence: gender, race and pedagogy in education

In my work with white teachers, predominantly female, I assert that ‘desire’ is functioning to produce silent discourses that serve to perpetuate a continuation of white privilege. Based on a qualitative research study exploring the nature of silences in teacher education classrooms, this paper seeks to explore how desire is functioning to produce such silences and how they can be productively understood. Using the concept of desire as presented by Deleuze, this paper engages a notion of desire that is not spawned from lack but a desire that is generative and seeking, resulting in the production of privilege, power and voice.

Planning micro-level language education reform in new diaspora sites: two-way immersion education in the rural Midwest

Discontinuities are often found between top-down language education policies and local language policy enactments, as de facto language policymaking results from stakeholders’ negotiation and interpretation of policy mandates. Teachers occupy a particular role in the execution of language education policies, as they are the “final arbiters” of what takes place in the classroom. Due to the spreading of the Latino Diaspora to non-metropolitan areas, US rural school districts experiencing a flow of English language learners represent salient new contexts for language policy implementation. Since 1973, the state of Illinois has mandated a top-down K-12 Transitional Bilingual Education policy for English language learners, which some school districts have contested by creating two-way immersion programs. Drawing on teacher and administrator personal narratives, this study describes a case of primarily White teachers’ reintepretation and “correction” of macrolevel language policies and development of a two-way immersion program in rural Illinois. It traces the processes educators experienced when enacting state language policies with limited educational resources and no professional expertise. It also unveils how the implementation of subtractive bilingual education and professional development opportunities shaped teachers’ language ideologies and transformed them into resisters of top-down mandates and enactors of a bottom-up dual language policy. While the interplay of macrolevel language policies, teachers’ individual professional experiences and evolving language ideologies generated imple- mentational and ideological spaces challenging remedial educational approaches, programmatic choices were also constrained by social forces, as community members challenged the teachers’ choice of bilingual teaching for all children.

School Teacher Perceptions of Barriers That Limit the Participation of African American Males in Public School Gifted Programs

This study used data from questionnaires completed by teachers employed in North Carolina schools (N = 370) to determine if teachers felt that non-school-related or school-related factors served as barriers that limited the number of African American male children from participating in gifted programs. The majority of the teachers taught 3rd- to 5th-grade students. African American, Hispanic, and other minority teachers accounted for 29.8% of the teachers. White teachers identified barriers that were not related to school personnel, practices, or policies. Minority teachers identified both school-related and non-school-related factors as major barriers. No differences were found on barriers identified by teachers who had exposure to gifted development activities and those who did not. Recommendations for engaging teachers' commitment to African American male student learning through professional development programming are described.

PERFORMANCE AND PASSING RATE DIFFERENCES OF AFRICAN AMERICAN AND WHITE PROSPECTIVE TEACHERS ON PRAXISTM EXAMINATIONS: A JOINT PROJECT OF THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION (NEA) AND EDUCATIONAL TESTING SERVICE (ETS)

ABSTRACTThis report focuses on two aspects of teacher supply and quality: (a) the under‐representation of racial/ethnic minorities, especially African Americans in the teaching pool, and (b) teacher candidates' performance on licensure assessments, including general skills tests in reading, writing, and mathematics (known as Praxis I®) and selected tests covering areas of content and pedagogy (known as Praxis II®). The report presents trends in the overall and minority teaching workforce, utilizes some of the available PraxisTM program data, combined with interviews of faculty and students involved in college and university teacher preparation programs, to address supply, achievement, and performance gaps between prospective minority and White teachers. African American candidates are the focal group in this report, in order to gauge the effect that Praxis has on the supply of prospective African American teachers and to generate ideas for closing gaps. Other minority Praxis test‐taking populations in the selected states are not included because these are not large enough to produce sufficient data from which to make valid inferences.The research was collaboratively planned and guided by National Education Association and Educational Testing Service to use Praxis data for addressing the following questions: (a) What are the trends in minority representation among teacher candidates, (b) What are the differences between majority and minority candidates' performance on both Praxis I and Praxis II, (c) Are the performance differences reflected in the state licensing pass rates of majority and minority candidates, and (d) What factors should be targeted to reduce racial/ethnic group performance differences on Praxis I and Praxis II.

Playing with power and privilege: Theatre games in teacher education

In preparing White teachers to educate a diverse society, teacher educators must help them see the veil which colors their views of the world and privileges them. This study explores the need for playing with power and privilege to deconstruct the concept of meritocracy and challenge the idea of one-ness, thereby fostering more conscious locations of White pre-service teachers. It proposes that Boalian theatre games can serve as powerful yet playful and innovative approaches for accessing values and beliefs shaping pre-service teachers’ views of the(ir) world, influencing their roles as teachers and the pedagogies in which they plan to engage.

Bringing Freire Behind the Walls: The Perils and Pluses of Critical Pedagogy in Prison Education

James Kilgore (from Radical Teacher 90, May 2011, 57-66) Introduction For more than 20 years before my incarceration, I was an educator. I worked as a high school math and history teacher in Zimbabwe and in South Africa as a college lecturer and educator/trainer for unions and social movements. As a white teacher in a part of the world with a history steeped in racism, I was accustomed to being a minority and had extensive experience discussing race at both as broad political context and at the level of personal interaction in an educational setting. The critical pedagogy of Paolo Freire ii was my primary inspiration in this work. This Freirian approach had been useful in a wide range of situations, from formal college Economics classes to organizational training for municipal workers with very low levels of education. This was the background I carried with me when in August, 2004, nearly two years into my sentence, I became a math tutor in the G.E.D. certificate program at United States Penitentiary (U.S.P.) Lompoc, California. During my first few days in the classroom at Lompoc I felt quite nervous. A U.S. prison felt very different from South Africa where I had taught in a highly politicized environment, one in which nearly all learners had fully adopted a philosophy of non-racialism. In places like Lompoc racial hatred, even violent confrontations between various “racial groups”, was commonplace. Stabbings over drug deals or debts were regular events. In light of all this, I didn’t know how I would be received. While previous experience provided much grounding for adjusting to the classroom at Lompoc, I also had a lot to learn. In the end, I had to modify many of my techniques and teaching strategies to perform effectively as a prison educator. In this article, I will detail my first year as a G.E.D. math tutor in light of my prior education work as a “free” person. I will begin by describing the education program at U.S.P. Lompoc. From there I will summarize my practice in the classroom, then offer some concluding observations relating my experience in the prison to critical pedagogy.