"A Lot of Wink-Wink": Navigating Shared Whiteness in Antiracist Teacher Education

• In Event: 75.041 - MTCC Roundtable Session 33
  In Roundtable Session: 75.041-6 - Decentering Whiteness: Developing the Self-Reflexivity and Critical Practices of White Teacher Education Candidates

Abstract

There are numerous examples within teacher education (TE) of efforts to prepare classroom teachers to interrupt racism through their work with kids. To better support this work, it is necessary to understand how Whiteness—which may include the Whiteness of the teacher educator, the Whiteness of novices, and/or the Whiteness of TE as an intellectual space—structures and complicates the pedagogical relationships among teacher educators, novice teachers, and anti-racist TE content. Here, I analyze an incident from a field methods course between myself, a White teacher educator, and a White novice teacher, Fay, to illustrate some of the complexities of navigating Whiteness in pedagogical relationships in anti-racist TE. Implications for anti-racist teacher education are discussed.

Author

• Rebecca Gadd, Boston Public Schools