Teacher Education Gap: The Experiences of Three Black Women Professors Navigating White Resistance in the South

• In Event: 18.028 - "Well Situated to Do the Work": Female Professors of Color Navigating White Academia

Abstract

The field of education has seen decades of research surrounding the comparison between the academic performance of students of color and their White counterparts coined the “achievement gap.” However, this manufactured gap does not take into account the historical and present roots of slavery, classism, and racism that affects our schools daily. A disruption in this deficit thinking is the opportunity gap, which calls attention to the lack of support and resources for students of color. The objective of this presentation is to examine yet another gap: the teacher education gap. This gap highlights the lack of an essential set of experiences and knowledge in pre-service teachers who aspire to teach students of color. Through the narratives of three Black women professors teaching at a PWI in the South, this presentation examines the manifestation of this gap in our teacher education classrooms.

Three women of color, teacher educators engaged in ongoing discussion to understand how they made sense of their experiences as instructors of an orientation to social justice teaching course at a Southeastern PWI. Data for this study was collected across three sections of the same introductory Early Childhood Education course taught by all three presenters at a large, southeastern, public university. The findings represent our narratives, coupled with student reflections, that illuminate what happens when we privilege lenses and frames that decenter whiteness, how students resist that decentering, and barriers we encounter as critical teacher educators. The authors constructed individual narratives to represent the tensions they encountered with predominantly White teacher candidates in the classroom. The narratives were then coded and re-coded for emergent themes and patterns and Black feminist theory guided the analysis as we developed and made sense of the themes (Miles and Huberman, 1994). The teacher education gap, as it was embedded across the narratives, emerged as a salient concept. Applying Black feminist epistemologies, the presenters will describe approaches to cultivating humanizing teaching methods in a teacher education program; approaches that counter the harmful conditions that marginalized K12 students face in schools. The significance of this work is to redress the K12 “achievement” or “opportunity” gaps by discussing the “teacher education gap;” that supports the existence of what is happening in K12 spaces.

Authors

• Sherell A. McArthur, University of Georgia - Athens

• Morgan Faison, University of Georgia

• Bettina L. Love, University of Georgia