Teachers and the Pressure for Perfection of Appearance

• In Event: Fairmont Roundtable Session Thirteen
  In Roundtable Session: Diversification Efforts in K–12 and Teacher Ed (Table 5)

Abstract

There has been a push by many PWIs to increase the diversity of their student bodies. This is true of the Teacher’s College at the university where I teach, which is complicated by the fact that the larger university is considerably more diverse than the college. While some of this may be related to the fact that teacher education everywhere suffers from whiteness, I wanted to conduct a study to explore what aspects of our Teacher’s College building are reinforcing whiteness and discouraging Students of Color from pursuing the major. What I found was that dominant narratives and whiteness made it difficult for my students to see the ways that race impacts beliefs about what a teacher should look like.

Author

• Kirsten Robbins, SUNY - College at Oneonta
  Presenting Author