An Ideological Unveiling: Using Critical Narrative and Discourse Analysis to Examine Discursive White Teacher Identity

• In Event: 16.035 - Analyses of Whiteness: Identities and Dilemmas in Teaching

Abstract

Teacher education continues to produce higher proportions of white teachers ill-equipped to meet the needs of students who differ from them across sociocultural lines. This qualitative case study employs critical discourse and critical narrative analyses to examine the discursive identity of one white preservice teacher following her experience in a critically oriented early childhood mathematics methods course. Drawing from a theoretical framework that extends the concept of identity to being a discursive outcome of ideology, this paper highlights the analysis of one interview in which the participant reflects upon issues of racial (in)justice within her teaching. Findings further illuminate the well-established need for teacher education and schools to decenter whiteness in the struggle toward antiracism and justice.

Author

• Beth Coleman, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill