Challenging and Appropriating Discourses of Power: Listening to and Learning From Successful Teachers of Color

• In Event: 16.034 - Attending to the Preparation and Support of Teachers of Color: Preservice Through Induction Years

Abstract

In light of the great racial and linguistic mismatch between teachers and students in early educational settings and the critical need for more teachers of Color, this study examines the ways in which six early childhood teachers of Color reconciled their racial and linguistic identities and/in the construction of their teacher identities during their teacher education program and within their first three years of teaching. This study employed Critical Narrative Analysis (CNA) (Author, 2014), which proposes that when individuals make sense of their experiences through narratives, they bring together the micro (personal) and the macro (social or institutional) situations in place. CNA allows for the critical analysis of narratives in the lifeworld--the everyday stories people tell--within the context of institutional discourses. Utilizing CNA, this study explored: (a) how the discursive space of early childhood teacher education shapes the practices, beliefs, and experiences of early childhood teachers of Color; (b) the language practices early childhood teachers of Color employ along with the ways they perceive their identities being constructed by their language practices; and (c) the impact of being a teacher of Color with a non-dominant racial and linguistic background on one's construction of a teacher identity. It documented the reasons leading teachers of Color decide to stay in early childhood education and the ways they forged their path through their first three years of teaching.
The authors interviewed six women of Color who were identified by colleagues, families, and community members as being committed to teaching children of Color. Data were collected via in-depth interviewing methodology, drawing on feminist qualitative research traditions. Each of the participants participated in three conversational interviews. After identifying themes within and across interviews and individuals, the authors analyzed the ways in which these teachers negotiated a discursive context, which often excluded them. Of particular interest was the ways oppressive, exclusionary and/or deficit-based paradigmatic discourses were appropriated and resisted by these teachers of Color. The key macro discourses identified within and across all conversational narratives were:
A. Whiteness as the norm;
B. Racialized and veiled experiences—as student teachers and as teachers; and
C. Multiple selves, borderland identities, and bifurcated voices.
From participants’ perspectives, the larger institutional discourses of early childhood teacher education equate successful teachers with White, middle-class, Mainstream American English linguistic and cultural practices. Instead of being oppressed by these larger discourses, teachers in this study appropriated and redefined these larger discourses in their counternarratives, by refuting and challenging their power. This study sheds light onto the pressing need to illuminate the ways in which early childhood teachers of Color "become" teachers while battling both socially-imposed and self-internalized discourses of themselves as marginalized learners (Haddix, 2010). Its implications point toward the need for teachers of Color to develop a critical analysis of institutional discourses (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 1999) as a matter of survival and the role of teacher educators in supporting teachers of Color to become successful in non-normative, hopeful and expansive ways.

Authors

• Mariana Souto-Manning, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Ranita Cheruvu, William Paterson University