This Is Not the Urban Cohort: Mediating and Resisting Racism in a Preservice Literacy Course

• In Event: 26.080 - Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: 26.080-10 - Pivotal Uncertainties: Taking Stock and Taking Action in Critical Early Childhood Ethnographic Research

Abstract

Objective/Purpose: The objective of this presentation is to share findings in the form of a performance narrative from a critical ethnography that used critical race theory (CRT) to foreground issues of race and racism in an early childhood literacy methods course. I share findings about 1) the use of white racial discourse to resist and circumvent issues of race and racism by preservice teachers and myself, and 2) how foregrounding race and racism bred new understandings and insights (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002). I also highlight a primary implication suggested by this study, that explorations of race and racism must be integral actions in early childhood teacher education. Naming such actions anti-racist interventions (Nash & Miller, forthcoming) I suggest practical means for carrying such actions out within the critical and tense spaces of early childhood teacher education.

Theoretical Framework: Critical race theory (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Lynn & Dixon, 2013) guided both the method and theory behind this study. CRT demands critique of how educational structures, processes, and discourses function to maintain racism in education and insists upon forefronting the experiences of people of color. This study was also grounded in the idea that whiteness must be interrogated to examine how white norms are perpetuated in our teaching work with young children (Earick, 2009). Critical sociocultural theory also informed this study (Gregory, Long & Volk, 2004; Long & Volk, 2010).

Methods/Research Question/Data Sources: I asked: What impact can the study of early childhood literacy education from a critical race perspective have on preservice teachers’ attitudes, dispositions, and beliefs about the teaching and learning of literacy in an early childhood classroom? Preservice teacher participants included 26 white and one African American student. I collected multiple reference points of data over the nine-month ethnography, including daily observations, responses to a pre/post racial attitudes questionnaire, preservice teacher reflections and assignments, 54 hours of recorded audio discussions, structured classroom observations, and over 20 hours of audio taped, in-depth phenomenological interviews (Seidman, 2006). I inductively analyzed data, utilizing performance analysis (Denzin, 2003) to narratively construct a record of the “ambiguities, crises and deeply felt problems” (Madison, 2005, p. 160) that arose as a result of foregrounding race and racism in the course.

Significance: This study contributes to work that examines how we might better educate ourselves as early childhood teacher educators and teachers to recognize and question unequal and inequitable structures (e.g. racism, whiteness) and understand the role of race and racism in our failure to educate all children.

Author

• Kindel Allison Turner-Nash, University of South Carolina