Reimagining White Teacher Education: Cultural Competence as De/reterritorialization

• In Event: 75.041 - MTCC Roundtable Session 33
  In Roundtable Session: 75.041-6 - Decentering Whiteness: Developing the Self-Reflexivity and Critical Practices of White Teacher Education Candidates

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an ethnographic study on a multicultural education class within a teacher education program in the Northeast of the United States. The course made use of co-constructed pedagogies and ethnographic methodologies to resist the caricaturing and problematizing of White teacher candidates in the current literature on cultural competence. The results of the study indicated that White teacher candidates learn about race in complex ways that are geographically bound; these three ways—including guarding, pushing/pulling, and inviting—are termed de-/reterritorialization. Understanding White teacher candidate learning as de-/reterritorialization, rather than resistance, has tremendous potential to change the ways in which teacher educators conceive of, and teach, White teacher candidates.

Author

• Melissa Winchell, Bridgewater State University