Reparative Curricula for Decolonizing Teacher Education

• In Event: The Unbearable Whiteness of Teacher Education: Theorizing a Decolonizing Framework

Abstract

The institutionalized white supremacy of U.S. schooling (Spring, 2006) is especially visible in teacher education discourses that center conversations of equity around framings of ‘diverse’ and ‘marginal’ students underperforming within white normativities of educational institutions (Moll et al., 1992; Sleeter, 2001). Deficit framings in these discourses name students as the location of the interruption in a benevolent ecology of schooling and opportunity (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Guided observations of this historicized framing in practice allow for continued troubling of these assumptions within the development of professional anti-racist stances (Au, 2012). Supporting developmental articulations of practice-based anti-racist frameworks for teachers in their emerging professional identity constructions (Santoro, 2011) partners with a curricular rendering of teacher activism and social resistance (Dell’Angelo & Mawhinney, 2017; Patel, 2016).

This paper presents an approach to critical engagement with structural and interpersonal imperialism in schools through examinations of the role of public schooling across a history of colonization (Au et al, 2016), and through the development of critical teaching dispositions that position new teachers to disrupt inequitable spaces in public schools (Love, 2019). These dispositions support ongoing critiques of both structural mandates and interpersonal relating through foundational premising that schools are designed to be locations of oppressions, that teachers can work toward disrupting (Philip et al, 2019).

For decades premier scholars of teacher preparation have argued for the increasing role of rigorous and globally-comparative teacher education in the U.S. (Cochran-Smith, 2009; Darling-Hammond, 2010; Zeichner, 2014). Such arguments establish core foundational approaches to teacher education based on critical understandings of equity with nuances for content and context (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Sleeter, 2001). Leading scholars have shaped national frameworks of teacher education in ways that open conversations about the manners in which schools reify social inequities, and how teachers might mitigate forces of policy and economy (Gorski, 2008; Hinchey, 2008).

Social justice positions within teacher education have been challenged by shifts in critical examinations of whiteness at its core (Feagin, 2013; Leonardo, 2013). Structural analyses of institutions of teacher education combine with the personal experiences of white supremacy (Dumas, 2014; Matias, 2016) to push teacher educators to examine racism as foundational to programs of teacher preparation, in terms of white-normalized expectations and practices and the surfacing of racist framings of students and their emerging teachers. Similarly, challenges abound to examine racist propensities in the candidates who enroll in teacher education programs, and to develop an architecture of learning and unlearning that can sustain their resilience and resistance (Patel, 2016; Philip, 2011).

Author

• Victoria F. Trinder, University of Illinois at Chicago