Impossibilities of Social Justice Education: White Educators and Mixed-Race Youth Reproducing Whiteness in the Classroom

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 31
  In Roundtable Session: Whiteness and White Supremacy in Education: Pedagogy and Power in K–12 and Higher Education

Abstract

This research project examines some impossibilities of social justice oriented education by exploring the discourses of race of 13-16 year-old youth in social studies classes. An ethnography was conducted to investigate how the students used discourses of race in their interactions in and out of the classroom by drawing on critical, Indigenous, and poststructural theories. Based on this study, I argue that multiracial and mixed-race youth and the White teacher and researcher who collaborated on this project reproduced social discourses of whiteness in ways that can be harmful to racialized youth. As scholars and educators working in increasingly diverse communities, we can benefit from understanding how discourses that exclude, marginalize, and silence are reproduced in public schools.

Author

• Sara Schroeter, University of Regina