Race and Reasoning in Text-Based Discussions

• In Event: Centering Justice in Planning and Enactment

Abstract

Background
While scholarship is rife with arguments about the necessity of facilitating dialogue about race and racism with students (Thomas, 2015), this work remains either rare or shallow in many schools (Howard & Navarro, 2016). The importance of this work paired with the absence poses a particular challenge for professional development (PD) providers: how can teachers be supported to engage in practices that they rarely see in schools and are, in some cases, actively discouraged from enacting by colleagues and administrators (Lent, 2008)? We wondered what would happen if we engaged teachers in experiences facilitating text-based discussions about race and racism. We designed and studied a series of PD experiences for K-8 teachers where they planned and enacted text-based discussions with texts relating to racial identity.

We ground our investigation in sociocultural theories of learning and critical perspectives on the purpose of education as a tool for social transformation. Our perspective on learning as participatory (Lave & Wenger, 1991), social, situated (Lave, 1991), and mediated by tools (Vygotsky, 1978) undergirded both our PD design and our coding scheme. In addition, our grounding in critical perspectives on education (Freire, 1970) as a tool for dismantling historic and ongoing injustices (Hooks, 1994), particularly those rooted in legacies of racism (Kalin, 2002), influenced the focus of both our professional development and of our inquiry.

Method
This study was conducted during the first year of a school-university partnership in a large city in the United States. Using a qualitative case study approach (Yin, 2009), we drew on three primary data sources: video and field notes of learning labs that focused on planning for and enacting discussions; and all artifacts. Analysis included inductive and deductive coding using codes created and honed iteratively. Twenty percent of all data sources were double coded to ensure consistency in interpretation.

Results
Research findings suggest participants experienced fear and anxiety about using texts and opening up discussions about race, specifically about the possibility of creating spaces for open-ended interpretive work that left open the possibility that students might express biases. Over the course of the year teachers began to feel less anxious. Through an analysis of talk, we discovered that teacher talk steadily decreased and student talk steadily increased. To understand this change we analyzed teachers’ reasoning during planning and enactment and identified two types of teacher reasoning: proactive reasoning, which occurs when teachers make pedagogical decisions prior to entering the classroom; and responsive reasoning, which occurs when teachers actively decide to leave a dilemma unresolved to make the decision in consideration of contextual factors during instruction. As teachers became more comfortable and student talk increased, teachers went from engaging only proactive pedagogical reasoning to balancing that with responsive pedagogical reasoning.

Scholarly significance
Both the contemporary political and scholarly conversations are rife with tensions relating to how best to engage young people in explicit conversations about race and racism. This study makes an important contribution to a topic that is timely both to studies of teacher learning and studies of anti-racist pedagogy.

Authors

• Katie Danielson, University of Portland

• Sarah Schneider Kavanagh, University of Pennsylvania

• Elizabeth Gotwalt, University of Pennsylvania