Embodying English: Performing and Positioning “White Teacher” in an English Classroom

• In Event: What Is the Body Doing in Educational Theory and Justice-Oriented Pedagogy? Taking the Body Turn

Abstract

Purposes
Integrating pop culture texts into curriculum is a strategy that often intersects with teachers’ desires for designing responsive curriculum to engage students’ experiences and interests. Research on pop culture in school rarely considers varying roles educators play when such texts are engaged (Hobbs, 1998) or ways performing as a teacher complicates them (Broughton, 2008). Here I portray Ms. Nicole Phagan’s (a tenth grade English teacher’s) White racial identity performances to and through pop culture texts across a calendar year, discourses that circulated these performances, and moments of “performative politics,” i.e., times when Ms. Phagan disrupted or subverted prevailing discourses of “urban” student/teacher difference.

Theoretical Perspectives
Identities are discursively performed, positioned, and produced (Bettie, 2003; Butler, 1999). Performance theories emphasize the ways repetitive behaviors reproduce and disrupt discourses and discursive subjectivities (Blackburn, 2003). This notion of identity as performed and performative allows me to: a) forefront ways a teacher is showing, telling, doing, and undoing what it means to teach with pop culture texts and b) explore how macro-level discourses of White “urban” teaching shaped and were shaped by her embodied identity performances to and through pop culture texts across the year.

Methods
Critical performance ethnography informed data collection and analysis (Denzin, 1997; Madison, 2005) as I conducted participant observations in an English class from 2006-2007. Focus on performative politics, (i.e., moments when participants performed identities positioned otherwise or unrecognizable), warranted coding for patterns and conflicts in discourses and identities across data sources, (e.g., fieldnotes, audiotapes, interviews, artifacts and participant photo-ethnographies). Post-academic year interviews focused on participant meanings for these discursive conflicts. Here I analyze Nicole’s raced identities and subjectivities, i.e., ways she used words, gesture, and dress to identify herself racially and ways participants and I positioned her.

Data Sources and Results
In interviews with me (a White, middle class, female graduate student of education), Nicole Phagan performed the White teacher struggling to lure students of color to canonical texts like Animal Farm and To Kill a Mockingbird, the White teacher with lived experiences in the African continent and a syllabus balanced with protagonists of color, the White teacher protecting female students of color from media texts that centered White models, and the White teacher leveraging her husband’s older White subjectivity (a symbol of the “middle-aged White guy” comic trope for “out-of- it-ness”) to position pop culture text disconnects. Classroom identity performances before students of color contrasted as efforts to bridge or ignore racial divides through literacy practices that carried elusive traces of whiteness (Gutierrez, 2005/6) and performances to confound aged and teacherly subjectivities.

Scholarly Significance
Attending to the range of subjectivities one person performs within and against pinpoints the infinite, daily opportunities teachers have to reinscribe what it means to be White (Myers, 2008), situates the body in pop culture text teaching, and counters pervasive discourses of White teachers as a “monolithic and deficient group of learners” (Lowenstein, 2009).

Author

• Elisabeth Johnson, College of Staten Island - CUNY