Feeling Black and Blue in Teacher Education: Negotiating Race, Embodiment, and Emotion With White Preservice Teachers

• In Event: 56.081 - Roundtable Session 24
  In Roundtable Session: 56.081-3 - Difficult Subjects: Radical Teaching in the Neoliberal University

Abstract

Teacher education has been criticized for the “overwhelming presence of whiteness” characterizing the focus of many curricular efforts that purport to prepare culturally responsive teachers (Sleeter, 2001). In this chapter, we describe particular challenges and opportunities that we have encountered as teacher educators of color endeavoring to dismantle this veil of whiteness in our work with primarily white, middle class pre-service teachers. We begin by sharing classroom-based narratives of our antiracist teaching that juxtapose the tensions between feelings of vulnerability and pain—which sometimes manifest as hostility—displayed by our white preservice teachers against the racialized vulnerability and pain that we experience as instructors. We conclude by detailing concrete pedagogical strategies that we employ to probe issues of racial difference and identity as marked on bodies in our efforts to weaken the grasp of whiteness in teacher education. Specifically, we illustrate the radical affordances of a pedagogy of embodiment as a counter-hegemonic approach to teaching in the neoliberal university.

Authors

• Sherry Lynn Deckman, Lehman College, CUNY

• Esther Oganda Ohito, Mills College