Uneasy "Experts": White Teachers and Antiracist Action

• In Event: 31.032 - Conflict, Complexity, and Devastation: Whiteness and White Racial Identities in Education

Abstract

1. Purposes

As white (teacher) educators, we have a responsibility to work with other white teachers to dismantle white supremacy and believe that many traditional approaches (e.g., white privilege pedagogy [see Logue, 2005]) do not lead to sustainable antiracist action and pedagogy. Resisting the tropes of confession, we sought to build a professional development seminar on whiteness and antiracism that opened spaces for participants to act. During 2012-13 and 2013-14, we met monthly with eight white teachers to reflect upon the historical, social, and economic construction of whiteness, white racial identity, and structural racism in the United States as well as on antiracist pedagogy and practices. We aimed to enact meaningful professional development focusing on how white teachers' racial identities impact their teaching practices and empowering them to undertake structural, antiracist change.

2. Theoretical frameworks

In developing the seminar, we engaged critical whiteness studies (e.g., Du Bois, 1992/1935; Frankenberg, 1993; Jacobson, 1998; Lipsitz, 2006; Morrison, 1992; Roediger, 2007), critical pedagogy (e.g., Freire, 2000; hooks, 1994; Shor, 1987), and scholarship on whiteness and antiracism in educational research (e.g., McIntyre, 1997; Picower, 2009). We also drew on literature critiquing teacher professional development as not aligning content and pedagogy or being “one size fits all” (e.g., Randi & Zeichner, 2004; Wilson & Berne, 1999).

3. Methods of inquiry

We used multiple interpretative methods. Critical ethnography (e.g., Madison, 2005) and teacher self-study (e.g., Loughran, 2007) informed our data collection and analysis.

4. Data sources and materials

Data sources include our curriculum (both theoretical and practical tools), field notes from and audiorecordings of the 17 sessions, interviews with and artifacts from participants, formal program evaluations, and self-study reflections and analytic memos from the two co-facilitators. For this paper, we focus specifically on one participant: Amelia.

5. Results

Amelia is a high school chemistry teacher in a racially diverse, high-poverty, urban public school. Although she struggled to articulate her own antiracist commitments and teaching identity over the course of our two years together, she enacted material antiracist practices in grading and advising and came to be viewed as an equity leader in her school. Amelia's work—particularly her antiracism—stem from commitments she struggles to name yet enacts in her classroom practices and her building.

6. Scholarly significance of the study

Many school districts have invested much time and money in professional development to address ethnic and racial diversity, the education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006), and cultural and/or racial differences between teachers and students. While many of these programs have worthy aims and a commitment to equity, they have largely failed at sustaining ongoing work to combat structural racism. During our years together, our participants, including Amelia, enacted substantive antiracist changes in their classrooms and were positioned as experts. Building on the ongoing collaborative work of this professional development seminar, we argue that antiracist pedagogies and practices are inherently possible, despite white teachers' trepidation and uneasiness around being positioned as an antiracist “expert.”

Authors

• Shannon McManimon, Science Museum of Minnesota

• Zachary A. Casey, Rhodes College