Resisting Confession and Pushing Past Privilege With White Practicing Teachers

• In Event: 56.034 - Second-Wave White Teacher Identity Studies: Toward Whiteness Pedagogies in Teaching and Learning About Race

Abstract

This presentation outlines an approach to professional development with white practicing teachers that incorporates findings from second wave critical whiteness studies in education to advance antiracist praxis in school contexts.

This work is rooted in the intersections of critical whiteness studies (Du Bois, 1935/1992; Jacobson, 1998; Roediger, 2007), critical pedagogy, (Author 2015; in press; Freire, 2006; hooks, 1994), and second wave white teacher identity studies (Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016; Lensmire, et. al. 2013).

Relying on “Freirean Critical Study” (see Author, in press), I synthesize empirical research findings, critical conceptual research, and my own inquiry and praxis on white racial identity and antiracist pedagogies. While this is conceptual research, I mobilize findings from past studies of white practicing teachers, particularly interview data and classroom observations (see Author, 2015; 2016).

I analyze the trope/frame of “confession” in traditional white privilege pedagogies to identify the ways in which such confessions stand in for antiracist praxis. Mobilizing insights from a two-year professional development seminar I co-facilitated with eight white practicing teachers, I discuss ways of building on formative understandings of white privilege and oppression. Pushing past privilege necessitates engagement with contextualizing and understanding oppression on at least three levels: the personal, the local, and the systemic. Examples of white practicing teachers combatting racism on each of these three levels are discussed.

This work is critically significant, especially given our present reality of white supremacy engulfing the nation. The struggle to combat racism in schools necessitates careful and critical scholarship into the limits and possibilities of such work. This presentation advances the aims of “Achieving the Promise of Equal Educational Opportunity”, with explicit attention to the ways in which many efforts to equip white teachers for antiracist praxis have stifled such efforts.

References

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1992/1935). Black reconstruction in America. New York: The Free Press.

Freire, P. (2006). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. NewYork: Westview Press.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New
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Jacobson, M. (1998). Whiteness of a different color: European immigrants and the alchemy of race. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jupp, J. C., Berry, T. R., & Lensmire, T. (2016). Second-wave White teacher identity studies: A review of White teacher identity literatures from 2004 through 2014. Review of Educational Research. Advance online publication doi:10.3102/0034654316629798

Kumashiro, K. K. (2008). The seduction of common sense: how the right has framed the debate on America's schools. New York: Teachers College Press.

Lakoff, G. (2004). Don’t think of an elephant!: Know your values and frame the debate :
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Lensmire, T., et.al. (2013). Mcintosh as synecdoche: how teacher education’s focus on
white privilege undermines antiracism. Harvard Educational Review, 83(3), 410-430.

Roediger, D. R. (2007). The wages of whiteness: Race and the making of the American
working class. New York: Version.

Author

• Zachary A. Casey, Rhodes College