When Whiteness Clouds Mindfulness: Exploring Cognitively Based Compassion Trainings for Teachers

• In Event: (Re)Imagining Possibilities: Working to Create Change

Abstract

This paper describes results from a critical co-ethnography focused on mindfulness trainings for new and veteran educators in an urban school district in the southeastern region of the US. Working across racial difference, and utilizing critical race theory and critical whiteness studies as lenses through which to view this programming, the co-ethnographers found that despite being situated in a larger teacher residency program with a mission centered on the realization of equity and racial justice in schools, the mindfulness training was fraught with racial tensions that went unnamed and unexplored. Despite efforts to do the opposite, ideologies of whiteness were present and further perpetuated during all 4 training days. Implications for mindfulness programs and urban teacher residency models are explored.

Authors

• Camea Davis, Georgia State University

• Stephanie Behm Cross, Georgia State University