"I Didn't Know a Damn Thing": Disrupting Whiteness in Rural Teacher Education

• In Event: Anti-Oppressive Social Studies: Pursuing Justice Through an Ethic of Incommensurability

Abstract

According to the 2010 census, 51 million residents claim the rural United States as their home, living in communities with varied geographies, demographics, and economic interests. Tieken (2014) observed, “Rural America covers Native American reservation communities in the West, small mostly white New England fishing villages, midwestern farm towns with growing Latino populations, African American communities scattered along the Mississippi Delta, and isolated hamlets tucked into the Appalachians and Rockies” (p. 6). As a result, rural schools are responsible for the education of one-fifth of students in the United States.

Given the suburban and urban location of many teacher education programs, conversations around whiteness and antiracism are often not targeted to address these issues specifically in rural contexts (Bryant & Pini, 2011; Neal & Waters, 2008; Pini & Bhopal, 2017). As a result, many teacher education students interested in teaching in rural spaces fail to make the necessary connections between antiracist teaching and their rural contexts. While there is no excusing the enactment of color-evasive pedagogies in any context, without direct attention to the racialization of rural spaces, preservice teachers will find ways to avoid critical engagements with race, racism, and whiteness in their future classrooms. Research must explore ways to disrupt the prevailing sentiment that rural educators “didn’t know a damn thing” (Ray, 2018) when it comes to race, racism, and whiteness in their rural communities.

This paper utilizes self-study methodology (Dinkelman, 2003; Loughran, 2007) to examine the ways that a teacher educator utilized critical pedagogy of place (Gruenewald, 2003) to disrupt the whiteness of social studies content and pedagogy within a rural social studies teacher education program. Located at an institution in the intermountain West, the teacher education program shares a land grant mission to serve all students and communities across the state, which is constituted predominantly by rural and semi-rural communities. Through self-study, the author traces their personal experiences engaging rural teacher education students in disruptions of the prevailing assumptions surrounding the unexamined whiteness of rural communities and schools and offers recommendations for continued research at the intersections of rural and antiracist education. Findings from this self-study can be utilized to engage teacher educators in broader discussions of how to prepare preservice teachers for acknowledging and disrupting whiteness within their rural classrooms (LaBoskey, 2004).

Author

• Andrea M Hawkman, Utah State University