Addressing Whiteness in Social Studies Teacher Education

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

Abstract

The final group of papers turns our session discussion towards teacher education and research. The first paper uses the results of a self-study to examine the ways certain sacred cows of social studies education work as tools of whiteness. These sacred cows include the desire for a safe space, a belief in the importance of remaining unbiased (Flanagan & Hindley, 2017;) and an insistence on “just teaching the facts.” Critical Race Theory explores the world through the lens of race. Using the tenets of racial realism, critique of liberalism, revisionist history and counterstories, (Delgado & Stefancic, 2001) we can reflect on whiteness in social studies. Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) further illuminates the ways whiteness functions; how the dominant assumptions, ideologies and ways of being in the world and how these support white supremacy (Frankenberg, 1993; Leonardo, 2009). Chandler and Branscombe (2015) combine CRT and CWS to identify characteristics of White Social Studies (WSS) many of which connect to the three sacred cows.

In the second paper, the author put into perspective some ideas about whiteness and history to help clarify some ways of being white as enactments of those ideas. Drawing from the literature on historical consciousness, critical whiteness studies in teacher education, political philosophy, and history, he seeks to understand boundaries of racialized epistemologies as thresholds of knowledge that can be difficult for many researchers and educators to occupy. Instead, many epistemologies of racism maintain distance from those boundaries. These epistemologies allow abstractions of racialized being to persist. Through critical discourse analysis, authors investigate and trouble some of these abstractions, this paper identifies some of the gaps that separate many researchers and teachers from historical consciousness of racism, particularly the modern world-historical phenomenon of white supremacy.

The third paper examines course development, implementation, and student engagement of a History of Education course and how it presents and challenges whiteness and white supremacy. Employing postcolonial theories to challenge the “difference as deficit” model (Andreotti, 2010, p. 244), this paper pays particular attention to the author’s intentionality in selecting curriculum content aimed directly at opening up conversations about race/racism with preservice teachers, as well as the outcomes of such conversations. For this analysis, the author employed two “postcolonial strands” (Andreotti, 2010) that relate to the aims of this course. These strands propose “hyper-self-reflexivity as a strategy that acknowledges everyone’s complicities and investments in coercive and repressive belief systems… [and] focus on reviving and protecting voices that have historically been subjugated by colonial violence” (p. 243). In writing about the “invisible hand of theory” in social studies, Crocco (2006/2010) emphasizes the need for theorizing that works in order to “build bridges to teacher educators and scholars whose preoccupations are chiefly practical” (p. 234). She reminds us that that the intellectual health of social studies requires scholars to “sharpen their own perspectives, make what is hidden, visible, and clearly communicate the ways in which theory shapes their research and practice” (p. 235).

Authors

• Elizabeth A Kenyon, Kent State University

• Travis L Seay, University of Florida

• Amy Mungur, Michigan State University