Confronting Racism: Teacher Educators and Critical Practice

• In Event: 30.080 - Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: 30.080-4 - Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Building for Transformation

Abstract

Objectives
This paper aims to understand how critical teacher educators confront racialization, whiteness and institutional racism while working to advance racial justice in their field. There is a cultural disconnect between increasingly diverse student populations in public schools and the overwhelmingly White and middle class teaching force (Boser, 2011; Easton Brooks, 2015). Thus, concurrent to content and methods, teacher educators must pass on an understanding of how race operates not only in K-12 settings, but must also work to confront racism within teacher education itself.

Theoretical framework
With an 88% White teacher education force (Ladson-Billings, 2005), much of the research from K-12 settings on racially hostile climates (Kohli, 2016) also pertains to teacher educators from non-dominant positionalities. The hegemonic ideological beliefs of many teacher educators (Kea, Campbell-Whatley, & Richards, 2006) calls into question their capacity to integrate issues of race throughout their programs (Kea, Trent, & Davis, 2002). Cross (2005) in her conceptualization of the “new racism of teacher education” exposes how in teacher education programs, “White privilege is maintained through invisible, insidious operations of power that foster whiteness and racism” (p. 267).

Methods
This paper used qualitative methods to analyze a group of counternarratives from 15 teacher educators about their experiences confronting racism in teacher education. A counternarrative is a story that reveals structures and practices that contribute to inequality and challenges deficit myths (Yosso, 2006). Milner and Howard (2013) argue that counternarratives can be used as “an analytic tool and method through a CRT lens...to complement, nuance, disrupt and counter storylines in teacher education” that maintain the dominant perspective as race is consistently overlooked or undertheorized in this field.

Data
The authors sent a call for chapter proposals for teacher educators to center their voice and experiences as they confront racism in or through teacher education. We narrowed the 120 proposals to a smaller group representing diverse positionalities whose narratives spoke to working toward racial justice. We invited fuller stories from these 16 authors and then analyzed them using grounded theory, coding for themes of how they attempted to confront racism in their critical practice.

Results and conclusions:
Findings indicate that a major strategy for confronting racism was to use their positionalities to build bridges as a means to challenge racial injustice. From bringing one’s whole self to the classroom; to developing allies and solidarity with students, to questioning who is privileged within democratic pedagogy, to building on teachable moments; each of these narratives emphasizes the significance of positionality in relationality and transformation.

Significance
This paper explores how teacher educators approach racial justice work while navigating their own intersectional identities. By analyzing their individual stories, complex and nuanced themes emerged that uncover the challenges and strategies in this work. Compiling their narrative accounts, their stories disrupt the notion that teacher educators enter racial justice work from the same place, expose the strength in their collective struggle for justice, and provide insights and strategies for antiracist teacher education.

Authors

• Rita Kohli, University of California - Riverside

• Bree Picower, Montclair State University