Digital Storytelling as Racial Justice: Digital Hopes for Deconstructing Whiteness in Teacher Education

• In Event: 16.019 - "We All Have Stories to Tell": Pedagogical Possibilities Toward Educational Justice Through Digital Storytelling

Abstract

The permanence of race in education continues to manifest in all educational sectors (Bell, 1992; Leonardo, 2013). Indeed, teacher education, as one such sector, is replete with an overwhelming presence of whiteness, one that, if not explicitly interrogated, recycles hegemonic whiteness (Sleeter, 2001). As such, there must be pedagogical strategies that exposes the hegemonic invisibility of whiteness, lest be complicit in its reification. This critical reflection draws from a teacher educator of color’s application of digitalstorytelling to pedagogically deconstruct whiteness in a predominately white urban-focused teacher education course—a necessary deconstruction if these teacher candidates are to teach urban students of color. In particular, the paper deconstructs four academic years of digital stories produced in a mandatory diversity course in an urban teacher education program and illustrates how digitalstorytelling itself promotes a critical self-revelation that confront whiteness in white teacher candidates. That is, instead of having to reveal whiteness in a direct instructional manner (from professor to teacher candidates) it encourages teacher candidates to partake in the burden of understanding their own whiteness. Such a process is essential when acknowledging that daily racial microaggressions occur when the professor is the only person of color in a course designed to have white teacher candidates deconstruct their own whiteness; thus becoming a semester long racial microaggression (Author1, 2013). In order for whiteness to be deconstructed the bulk of the emotional work much be undertaken by the white teacher candidates themselves. As such, a process of constant self-reflection is required. However, in a digital age how can digital storytelling be a medium that facilitates the deconstruction of whiteness and to what extent is it successful?

In order to theoretically investigate the pedagogical effectiveness of digitalstorytelling as a strategy for deconstructing whiteness this paper employs critical whiteness studies and parallels the racially just quality of digital storytelling to critical race theory’s counterstorytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). However instead of applying CRT’s counterstorytelling as a mode of racial expression for the racially colonized, the application of digitalstorytelling in this paper will be used to decolonize the racial colonizer’s mind. Additionally, to gauge the effectiveness—in terms of personal internalization of the content—the paper engages critical emotional theories (i.e. Ahmed, 2004; Boler, 1999; Zembylas, 2004). The preliminary analyses suggest that digitalstorytelling is a racially just way of having white teacher candidates self-reflect on their own whiteness in a multitude of ways: 1) a process of problematizing their white identities; 2) emotionally engaging in race; and 3) taking onus of their portion of the burden of race.

Authors

• Cheryl E. Matias, University of Colorado - Denver

• Tanetha Jamay Grosland, University of South Florida