Recentering Race and Teacher Identity in an Elementary Teacher Education Program

• In Event: 47.047 - Examining the Role of Teacher Education as Identity-Forming Site: Democratizing Our Work as Teacher Educators

Abstract

Purpose
This presentation provides an examination of how the concept and practice of teacher identity was integrated in an elementary teacher education program over several years. This was done mainly through the development of a course sequence which focused on language, identity and equity, as well as through teacher educators initiating and organizing race-based caucuses for teacher candidates.

Perspective
In this work, teaching was viewed as a complex, social, and embodied process involving the relational core created by teacher and student(s) (Alsup, 2006; Britzman; 2003; Edwards & Blake, 2007; Evans, 2002). In contrast to some recent work in practice-based teacher education that at times focuses on a mechanistic approach to teaching (Philip et al., in press), attempts in the program highlighted here involved understanding teaching as more than a set of behaviors with specific and predictable outcomes associated with such behaviors. Programmatic shifts also emphasized the centrality of power, especially when considering the racialized subjectivities of teachers. Drawing upon Edwards and Blake, this paper positions engagement with teacher subjectivity as a way to question “the . . . belief in an objective, transcendent rationality, the assumption that there is a neutral vantage point from which student teachers . . . may discern order, laws and clarity across teaching dilemmas” (p. 34).

Methods
I provide a rationale for the centering of teacher identity in the program, a description of the course sequence and the race-based caucuses, as well as findings from data collected through the perspectives of teacher educators and teacher candidates through this process and focus. The setting is an elementary teacher education masters and credentialing program at a large research institution in the Pacific Northwest.

Data Sources
Data sources for this presentation include five transcribed interviews with teacher educators involved in the program that focused on teacher identity, and twenty dialogue journals and assignments of teacher candidates which illustrated their perspectives on how their teacher identity related to their teaching.

Results
Findings from teacher educator data illustrate the importance and the challenges of centering teacher identity in the program, and how this dimension of the program evolved over time. Data from teacher candidates showed the affordances and difficulties of delving into their teacher identities, especially in terms of race and other social categories associated with power while being asked to engage in routines and practices in most of their courses and their school placements.

Significance
Findings from this study show how the recent emphasis on practice-based approaches in teacher education programs relieves teachers and teacher educators from considering the “spatio-historical contingency and political complexity” (Edwards & Blake, 2007, p. 37) of embodying subjectivities in classrooms. Teacher education is always an identity-troubling and identity-forming site, and centering this dimension remains critical to our work as teacher educators. This aim is particularly important as more programs move towards practice-based teacher education, and it is important to highlight lessons learned around centering teacher identity and teachers’ racialized subjectivities in these programs as well as documenting the challenges in doing so.

Author

• Manka M. Varghese, University of Washington