When You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know: Racial Touchstones and White Teachers’ Racial Sense Making

• In Event: Identity and Teachers: Teacher Sense-Making in Context

Abstract

Locating classroom teachers as key levers for educational and racial justice, this study is centrally interested in examining the dynamic relationship between white teachers’ racial “knowledge” and their everyday classroom practices. This study finds that white teachers use racial touchstones, personal experiences that they believe best approximate of the experience of racism, to guide their ongoing racial negotiations and interpretations. School context plays a key role in the selection and application of these touchstones. This study seeks to trouble the assumption that teachers’ racial understandings are fixed, finite, or formulaic, but instead, suggests that the process of coming to know—and the school and classroom context in which racial knowledge is constructed—are fertile sites for policy and professional development interventions.

Author

• Amanda J. Taylor, Harvard University