Critical Race Realism as a Lens to Supporting Prospective Teachers’ Understandings of Race, Racism, and Racial Justice

• In Event: Keeping the Vision in Changing Times: Preparing Teachers With Commitments to Equity and Social Justice

Abstract

Objectives & Significance

A growing body of scholars in education has drawn on critical race theory, emphasizing the power of the narrative of people of color in exposing how racism pervades institutions. On the other hand, with contemporary educational policy’s focus on tying measures of teacher success to student learning outcomes on standardized tests, many educational researchers and policy makers address perfunctory statistics regarding the racial achievement gap but continue to obscure any deep engagement with racism. As a field, we have reached an impasse, with critical race theorists indicting others for hiding behind the veil of empiricism as they reproduce the inequitable status quo, and others critiquing the methodological validity of critical race theorists’ reliance on narrative. This paper explores how the methodology of critical race realism, which is a “synthesis of critical race theory, empirical social science, and public policy” (Parks, Jones, & Cardi, 2008, p. xv), offers a way for teacher educators to examine their pedagogy and emphasize the centrality of race within a sociopolitical context that has “turned sharply in favor of quantified and empirical analyses” (Kang, 2008, p. 128).

Theoretical Framework

A number of legal scholars who are rooted in a framework of critical race theory have argued for an approach that explores common ground with advances in empirical social science research, particularly research in social cognition. These scholars have argued that in the contemporary sociopolitical context that privileges “quantified and empirical analyses,” critical race theory’s heavy reliance on the personal narrative of people of color are unlikely “to persuade those sitting on one side of the fence to jump to the other” (Kang, 2008, p. 127-128). While they recognize and are cautious of the “limits of scientific methods” and the “ignominious history of pseudoscience’s complicity in brutally subordinating entire people’s,” they argue that findings in social cognition allow race scholars to employ empirical analyses to “fight fire with fire” and “substantively profit from a body of science that supports, particularizes, and checks what we intuit as the truth of our lived experiences” (Kang, 2008, p. 127-128). This study builds on critical race realism and theories of learning, particularly conceptual change (diSessa, 1998; diSessa & Sherin, 1998; Wagner, 2003) to explore possibilities in engaging teachers in understanding racism and racial justice, within the contemporary political landscape, inside and outside of the classroom.

Methods, Data Sources & Results

Drawing from a large corpus of multi-year data from a teacher education program, which includes in-depth interviews with prospective teachers and observations of these teachers in university-based courses, this study contrasts the insights offered by critical race realism analyses of prospective teachers’ sense-making about race and racism as well as the pedagogical opportunities that are created in programs of teacher education in contrast to a.) critical race theory approaches and b.) social cognition perspectives that lack historical and structural analyses of race.

Author

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Los Angeles