The Unbearable Whiteness of Teacher Education: Theorizing a Decolonizing Framework

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

Education of new critically-conscious teacher candidates that aims to be transformative and in-service of social justice must deal with the ‘unbearable whiteness of schooling’ (Leonardo, 2013). This symposium engages four papers that present teachable tensions in the shift from teacher education as hegemonic engine toward professional learning and unlearning of whiteness. The preparation of teachers for complex navigations of structural oppressions mandates individualized development of critically-conscious dispositions that read for intersectional injustices and negotiate leverage for resistance against institutionalized racism (Au, 2012; Patel, 2016). Developing anti-imperialist frameworks for classroom instruction contributes to the reclaiming of public schools from their history of neo-colonialist policies and structured white normativity. Political complexities in enacting transformative teaching frameworks highlight the urgency of ever-developing critical race analyses of ‘public education’ for emerging teachers (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Leonardo, 2012).

This symposium explores the tensions and possibilities of theorizing teacher education from a decolonial framework (see Figure 1) as organized curricularly, programmatically, and pedagogically. In the context of an urban education program, panelists discuss possibilities and challenges in implementing a critical, decolonial framework throughout an undergraduate teacher education program. From disciplinary positions in this theorizing, panelists present efforts to invert whiteness and interrupt anti-blackness in the development of new teachers in a highly-segregated and racially-inequitable context. Discussions cover the ongoing development of a teacher education model designed as a reparative curriculum and the interconnectedness of approaching this conceptual work from a variety of academic and professional positions. Through the dialectic of theory and praxis, panelists discuss foundational content knowledge for teachers, anti-racist disciplinary pedagogies, pre-professional fieldwork sequencing, educating for language-rich classrooms, and the resilience, resistance, and identity development of new teachers of color inside the colonial project of schooling. (Leonardo, 2009; Love, 2019; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002).

The decimation of the urban public education system in neoliberal times intersects with reopened racial aggressions surrounding the development of new teachers (Philip, 2012). Urban education programs must disentangle genocidal histories and social-justice missions of public educational institutions. Teacher education programs similarly must wrestle with inherent tensions in meeting state standards while working to disrupt state-structured inequities and oppressions. Anti-racist pedagogy within a critical framework for teacher education establishes these histories and names pillars where educators can enact resistance. Naming practices that might mitigate the imperial whiteness of education and resist ongoing colonial structures that continually re-render and instantiate our history of inequality in American schooling is foundational to supporting dispositions of disruption (Hinchey, 1998)

Sub Unit

• Social Justice Action Committee

Chair

• Angela Valenzuela, The University of Texas at Austin

Papers

• Reparative Curricula for Decolonizing Teacher Education - Victoria F. Trinder, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Reconstructing Foundations and Re-Centering Race - Gregory V. Larnell, University of Illinois at Chicago; Torica L. Webb, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Deconstructing Whiteness in Literacy Teacher Education - Kristine M. Schutz, University of Illinois at Chicago; Rebecca Woodard, University of Illinois at Chicago

• Imagining Decolonized Bilingual Education: Unlearning Whiteness in Teacher Education - P. Zitlali Morales, University of Illinois at Chicago; Victoria F. Trinder, University of Illinois at Chicago

Discussant

• Thomas M. Philip, University of California - Berkeley