Amplifying Silences: Reconsidering White Preservice Teachers’ Engagement With Race

• In Event: Race and Privilege in Teaching and Learning

Abstract

This proposed conceptual paper suggests that preservice teachers’ ignorance with regard to race—their disavowal of knowledge/knowing about race—should not be considered simply as a lack of knowledge about race that we, as teacher educators, then rectify through instruction. Rather, it ought to also be explored as an active desire to ignore race and its issues. This active form of ignorance should be heard and interpreted in teacher education as articulations of knowledge about race rather than an absence of such articulations. This understanding, we argue, has significant consequences for how we, as teacher educators, could engage preservice students with race more meaningfully, complexly, and generatively in the context of teacher education.

Authors

• H. James Garrett, University of Georgia

• Avner Segall, Michigan State University