Pedagogical Turns in Challenging the Pervasive White "Lady Bountiful" in Red State Teacher Education

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Abstract

Our students are majority white, women, middle income, and Christian. Our ethical obligations as pedagogues have encouraged us to challenge a particular version of white womanhood -- the “Lady Bountiful” or colonial white savior -- that our state’s political context and our students’ backgrounds seem to pervasively reproduce. In this paper, we undertake a year-long pedagogical self-study of our own fraught experiences teaching Meiners’ (2002) “Disengaging from the Lady Bountiful in Teacher Education Classrooms”. We discuss pedagogical moves in response to students’ identity crises and defense of the trope. We conclude with an argument for institutional support to take on this common and oppressive notion of white womanhood and to reexamine practices for evaluating teaching.

Authors

• Erin Lee Dyke, Oklahoma State University

• Lisa Lynn, Oklahoma State University