Deconstructing Whiteness in Literacy Teacher Education

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

Abstract

In schools, children tend to be positioned as incomplete “persons in the making,” (Shalaby, 2017, p. 178), and neoliberal currents perpetuate objectification, sorting, and categorizing (Lipman, 2017). A White, monocultural, hegemonic curriculum proliferates in education (Paris & Alim, 2014) and the discipline of English language arts (Bomer, 2017). In elementary literacy classrooms, this dominance materialized through diagnostics, through text selection, and through the cultivation of dehumanizing learning environments that fail to attend to power and discourse patterns in classrooms. This dehumanization is exacerbated for Black and Brown youth, who also experience the insidious effects of racism (Love, 2019) and must forge literary and academic identities inside matrices of whiteness attached to their emerging capacities to read words and the world (Freire, 1996).

In this paper, we unpack three instantiations of assessment and instructional practices in elementary literacy that are grounded in and structured by whiteness, and our attempts as teacher educators to deliberately disrupt this whiteness in our work with teacher candidates. First, we describe the way in which we disrupted the “struggling reader label”--by building candidates’ understanding of the dynamic nature of reading and learning and using think aloud protocols to develop fuller understandings of readers and their text comprehension (Schutz et al, 2018). Second, we share how we supported candidates in disruptive work within a module focused on facilitating text-based discussions by questioning and offering alternatives to the ways in which we typically see teachers leading discussions. This included a focus on supporting candidates’ asset perspectives, cultivating positive learning environments that disrupt discourse patterns privileged in schools (e.g., I-R-E), and incorporating the use of “facilitative texts” (Howard & Ticknor, 2019, p. 32) (Schutz et al, in press). Finally, we describe how we implemented critical writing pedagogies to disrupt traditional instantiations of writing curriculum and instruction (Woodard & Schutz, under review). Within each of these cases, we draw attention to the ways in which whiteness is intertwined in typical K-8 literacy pedagogies and traditional literacy teacher preparation curriculum and instruction. We conclude by describing the tensions we experienced as we engaged in these disruptions and reflect on the role of our own whiteness in naming, unpacking, and reflecting on whiteness in literacy teacher preparation.

Authors

• Kristine M. Schutz, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Rebecca Woodard, University of Illinois at Chicago