Working Through and With Fear and Ambivalence: White Teachers Engaging the Complexity of Antiracist Work

• In Event: 63.049 - Whiteness at the Table: Whiteness and White Racial Identities in Education

Abstract

Purpose

The paper aims to understand the experiences of three white teachers, who, while participating in antiracist professional development (PD), enacted material antiracist changes and experienced uneasiness, ambivalence, and fear. Rather than working to resolve this contradiction in teacher professional development and teacher education, we need to name and exist in the ambivalence.

Perspectives

The PD program was grounded in interdisciplinary critical whiteness studies (e.g., Du Bois, 1935/2005; Lipsitz, 1995) and responded to concerns over the inadequacies of much teacher PD, such as non-consideration of local contexts or concrete strategies for implementing change (e.g., Helsing et al., 2008). This study is positioned within “second-wave” whiteness studies, paying attention to the nuances and complexities of white teachers who face race and their own racial identities (Jupp & Lensmire, 2016).

Modes of Inquiry and Data

This paper draws on a two-year antiracist PD experience whose cofaciltiators embedded a practitioner inquiry research study (see, e.g., Dinkelman, 2003). Data included audiorecordings and fieldnotes of sessions and planning, interviews, evaluations, and artifacts from teachers and schools. This paper reports on the PD cofacilitators/researchers coding (following Saldaña, 2009) of interview data with three teachers that revealed three sets of fears.

Arguments

Amelia, Morgan, and Veronica enacted antiracist practices, changing grading practices that substantively altered the racial makeup of AP courses, intervening on behalf of students of color, developing antiracist curriculum, and leading building racial equity work. Yet they expressed constant ambivalence and unease, stemming from fears of 1.) harming existing relationships (such as with colleagues); 2.) getting it wrong (not doing the “right thing” to combat white supremacy); 3.) not doing enough. These fears expose the complicated and contradictory social location of whiteness and point to the necessity of addressing this ambivalence and fear as part of antiracist work.

Scholarly Significance

To democratize evidence, we as researchers must pay attention to both actions and emotions. Here, this revealed a both-and conception of white racial identity: white people have both a “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz, 1995) leading to fears about the difficulties of antiracist work and powerful desires to enact antiracism. The idea of ambivalence is both hopeful and helpful in understanding such moments.

References

Dinkelman, T. (2003). Self-study in teacher education: A means and ends tool for promoting reflective teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 54(1), 6-18.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1992/1935). Black reconstruction in America. New York: The Free Press.

Helsing, D., Howell, A., Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. (2008). Putting the “development” in professional development: Understanding and overturning educational leaders’ immunities to change. Harvard Educational Review, 78(3), 437-465.

Jupp, J. & Lensmire, T. J. (2016). Second-wave White teacher identity studies: Toward complexity and reflexivity in the racial conscientization of white teachers. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 8, 985-1068.

Lipsitz, G. (1995). The possessive investment in Whiteness: Racialized social democracy and the “white” problem in American Studies. American Quarterly, 47(3), 369-387.

Saldaña, J. (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Author

• Shannon McManimon, SUNY - College at New Paltz