Conceptualizing White Teachers’ Vacillating Criticalities: The Importance of Liminality

• In Event: White Teachers, Where Are You Now? New Research on White Teacher Identity: Identifications—Processes—Becoming

Abstract

The purpose of this presentation is to present new research on White teacher identity that understands White teacher identity as liminal. Liminal, in basic terms, refers to potentials found in occupying a position on both sides of a threshold at the same time.

Using life history and teacher story research (Goodson & Sikes 2001), this research interviewed ten veteran White teachers collecting qualitative life and teacher story interviews, student work samples, and other curricular representations. Working from the perspective of critical White studies, one significant finding of this research are vacillating criticalities, or, consciousness that is both critical and non-critical, race evasive and race cognizant at the same time. Though such a hybrid-like characterization of White identity in whiteness literatures is not rare (Eichstedt, 2001; Frankenberg, 2001; Hartmann, Gerteis, & Croll, 2009; Magnet, 2006; McDermott & Samson, 2005), references to whiteness as a liminal state, however, are. Warren and Hytten’s (2004) “Critical Democrat” is one of very few references to a liminal state of whiteness. According to Warren and Hytten, the White individual occupying a liminal position is able to balance opposing tensions (p. 330) and “possesses the ability to listen with a new heart” (p. 335).

Liminal consciousness, as demonstrated in life history and teacher story data analysis, drives at the following understandings for preservice and in-service teacher development:

1.White teachers’ professional development must be understood as process oriented rather than zero-sum game of consciousness intervention;

2.“Critical understanding,” as part of White teachers’ process oriented in-service or preservice development, requires continued practice, enactment, and development; and,

3.White teachers’ professional development, understood as enactment, is a practice of liminal movement or standing on a potential threshold.
Overall, this presentation drives at new more fluid concepts for understanding White teachers’ critical development.

References
Eichstedt, J. L. (2001). Problematic White identities and a search for racial justice. Sociological Forum, 16(3), 445-470.

Frankenberg, R. (2001). The mirage of an unmarked whiteness. In B. Brander Rasmussen, E. Klinenberg, I. J. Nexica, & M. Wray (Eds.), The making and unmaking of whiteness (pp. 72-96). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Goodson, I.F. & Sikes, P. (2001). Life history research in educational settings. Berkshire: McGraw Hill.

Hartmann, D., Gerteis, J., & Croll, P. R. (2009). An empirical assessment of whiteness theory: Hidden from how many? Social Problems, 56(3), 403-424.

Hopcke, R. H. (1991). On the threshold of change: Synchronistic events and their liminal context in analysis. In N. Schwartz-Salant & M. Stein (Eds.), Liminality and transitional phenomena (115-132). Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications.

Magnet, S. (2006). Protesting privilege: An autoethnographic look at whiteness. Qualitative Inquiry, 12(4), 736-749.

McDermott, M., & Samson, F. L. (2005). White racial and ethnic identity in the United States. Annual Review of Sociology, 31, 245-261.

Warren, J. T., & Hytten, K. (2004). The faces of whiteness: Pitfalls and the critical democrat. Communication Education, 53(4), 321-339.

Author

• Anthony Miele