Pushing Through and Tripping Over the Boundaries of Whiteness in Social Studies Education

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

Abstract

Papers in the fifth grouping expand previous groups’ rich discussions about students’ and teachers’ engagements with whiteness. The first paper investigates White students’ performances of what might be construed as anti-racism but are more aptly described as non-racist. The empirical data comes from two studies: First, a two-year action-research project in an independent urban high school course called “the History of Race in the U.S” (n=32); Second, data gathered by students of color in a youth participatory action research project. Preliminary findings suggest that White students can acknowledge the historical and material reality of White supremacy but yearn for recognition as an ally above all else. While performances of allyship in the fight for racial justice occur, an undercurrent of White students needing to be seen as “good people” superseded opportunities to take conversations about content or power dynamics further, thereby avoiding unlearning White commonsense (Chandler & Branscombe, 2015; Kumashiro, 2015). Those White students who did attempt to challenge their common-sense epistemology found themselves in existential crises about their role in perpetuating oppression, thereby leaving them emotionally and intellectually stuck.

The second paper utilizes findings from two cases of a larger multi-case study in order to illuminate how two teachers, one elementary and one high school, navigated teaching about Civil Rights despite being constrained by difficult knowledge and blinded by whiteness. This study is grounded in sociocultural theories of learning (Vygostsky, 1980) and employs the theories of whiteness (Picower, 2009; Bush, 2004), critical theories of race (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012), and difficult knowledge (Garrett, 2011; 2015; Britzman, 1998) from psychoanalytic theory. The study was grounded in the axioms of naturalistic inquiry (Lincoln & Guba, 1985) to understand two activity systems (Engeström, Miettinen, & Punamäki, 1999) of teachers teaching the civil rights. The multi-case study (Merriam, 1998) used ethnographic and phenomenological methods for data collection. The focus of each case is one curriculum unit, chosen by the participant, which they felt best exemplified their efforts in using disciplinary inquiry practices to meet their social justice-oriented goals. The implementation of each teacher’s selected unit was observed.

The third paper draws on Critical Race Theory (Bell, 1980; Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) to analyze normative conceptions of high-quality civics, represented by the literature on civic education and in three civics frameworks—the NCSS C3 Framework (2013), the Center for Civic Education’s (2014) national standards, and the Annenberg Institute for Civic Education’s report Guardians of Democracy (Gould, 2011)—and argue that dominant approaches to civic education, even those hailed as high quality, reinforce white supremacy by perpetuating silences around the racial contract that structures Western democracy. The paper uses the fourth tenet of CRT, counter-storytelling, to consider how race-conscious civics might approach these topics, arguing that pedagogies that help marginalized students build political power—such as youth participatory action research (Mirra, Garcia, & Morrell, 2015), youth participatory politics (Kahne, Hodgin, & Eidman-Aadahl, 2016), civic translanguaging (Martin-Beltrán, 2014), and community organizing (Fehrman & Schutz, 2011)—are more able to challenge the color-blind stance of our racial and political contract.

Authors

• Ryan Oto, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

• Jennifer Lynn Gallagher, East Carolina University

• Melissa Leigh Gibson, Marquette University