Student and Teacher Challenges of Whiteness in Social Studies Education

• In Event: 47.091 - Marking the Invisible: Articulating Whiteness in Social Studies

Abstract

Papers in the fourth grouping provide rich discussion about students’ and teachers’ engagements with whiteness. In the first paper, data from two larger studies were used: one three-year phenomenological interview study of student experiences (n=20) in secondary social studies courses and the other a youth participatory action research project (YPAR). The study context was an independent, urban high school in the upper midwest. Almost all the participants in these studies are students that I have taught for at least one semester. Findings show that student of color resistance within the classroom was experienced through detachment with the content, such as “checking” oneself at the door, in the goal of self-preservation and to reflect the Cartesian separation of mind and body (Grosfoguel, 2007; Paraskeva, 2016). Outside of the classroom, students of color created and used affinity group settings to develop culturally affirming knowledge and strategies to counteract master narratives. As a result, students leveraged public venues for discussion within the school to challenge their peers, teachers, and administrators to recognize the reality of White supremacy.

To learn more about how White teachers can meet the needs of non-White students, the second paper focuses on the collaborative implementation and design of a curricular intervention between a Latinx researcher and three White teachers working in a low-income, predominantly Latinx-serving elementary school in the Southwest. The unit had the curricular goal of increasing students’ civic proficiencies (Torney-Purta, 2002; Torney-Purta, Lehmann, Oswald, & Schulz, 2001) by engaging students with locally-relevant and appropriate public issues. From these data, two major findings emerged. First, teachers did not share the identities of the majority of their students, which presented complications at the beginning of our time together in addressing increasingly more complex and sensitive societal issues. However, as time went on, teachers learned more about students through the design-based process and became more comfortable in both planning and teaching this unit. Second, the contentious socio-political contexts that emerged during the time period that we worked together impacted the design and teaching of this unit.

The third paper paper describes an intergroup dialogue (IGD) course situated within a teacher education program. Pre-service teachers engaged in sustained dialogue on social justice issues, such as race and ethnicity. The goals were to prepare future teachers to become critically self-reflective, to consider how schools and society maintain racism and normalize whiteness, and gain skills to promote age-appropriate dialogue with students. Taken simultaneously as their social studies methods course, the two courses together impacted pre-service teachers and encouraged them to engage in future critical pedagogy. Pre-service teachers reported that engaging in IGD impacted what they learned in social studies as well as what they taught during student teaching. Some attempted dialogue with their students during student teaching; others created curriculum that intentionally took into account multiple perspectives. There was evidence that pre-service teachers thought more critically about lessons they taught as well. Additionally, most pre-service teachers reported a newfound comfort level to address controversial issues and foster conversations around race and racism.

Authors

• Ryan Oto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• William Toledo, University of Nevada - Reno

• Natasha C. Murray-Everett, West Virginia University