Reconstructing Foundations and Re-Centering Race

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

Abstract

Centering teacher development around critical examinations of both structural and interpersonal manifestations of racism can help surface next iterations in the evolution of equity-focused, race-centered foundations curricula (Sleeter & Bernal, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 1991). As our colleagues have also argued, clarifying the relationship between race and racism as ideological forces on systems of education is necessary to clearly and productively define urban education as its own, distinctive domain (see Milner, 2012; also see Larnell & Bullock, 2018; Martin & Larnell, 2013). The central challenge for our redeveloped three-course foundations sequence, therefore, was to support preservice teachers’ initial engagement with historical and contemporary issues with a variety of interdisciplinary, academic, and popular literature and other media; the goal is to guide these students through the systemic relationship between schooling, ideology, political economy; race, ethnicity, place, personhood, and community; and the practices, tensions, and possibilities of teaching.

This paper represents our ongoing work in the foundations courses to scaffold undergraduate students’ experiences as they begin to both consider elementary teaching as a possible career and encounter conceptions of urban schooling, place, community, and political economy that may be familiar but new or unfamiliar yet necessary to their journey. In the initial course, we focus on curricular experiences that relate urban schooling to fundamental idea of public and private goods (see Labaree, 1997); the histories, migrations, and contemporary realities of various demographic groups throughout the United States (and related to other national contexts); and as a signature aspect of the course, we relate the institutions and logics of schooling to those of other public institutions (e.g., public housing, criminal justice, public health). Inasmuch as we introduce issues of race, racism, ethnicity, and ethnic diversity and diaspora in the introductory course, we dive deeper within the second course of the sequence, with parallel attention to the ideological requirements and systemic conditions of colonialism and settler colonialism, capitalism, neoliberalism, etc. Later in the foundations sequence, we spiral back and begin to suture those largely theoretical ideas to teaching practices. In this paper, we discuss the initial, collaborative work to establish and implement this curricular redesign-in alignment with the program’s broader decolonizing framework.

Authors

• Gregory V. Larnell, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Torica L. Webb, University of Illinois at Chicago