Dis/placing Whiteness in Teacher Education

• In Event: Elevating the Dialogue About Equity and Teacher Education: An Intergenerational Structured Dialogue

Abstract

Because of the power that academia and teacher education has in producing and legitimizing knowledge, whiteness in teacher education serves as a broader systemic problem of practice (Carter et al, 2021; Authors, 2019). Cooks (2003) defines whiteness as “a set of rhetorical strategies employed to construct and maintain a dominant white culture and identities” (p. 1 as cited in Cooks & Simpson, 2007). We are troubled by how the white supremacist cultural values, over all, “one right way” (Okun, 2021), directing what teacher education programs perceive to be the best ways to prepare preservice teachers (PSTs) for the current realities of teaching within specific contexts. Current realities include knowing how to take prescribed curriculum, think critically about it, and adapt it to meet the needs of one’s actual current students. It’s also inclusive of an on-the-ground understanding of what it means to enact humanizing pedagogies (del Carmen Salazar, 2013) in the context of the pandemic, mental health crisis, assault on anti-racist teaching, etc. Teacher education programs must adapt to current realities that prepare future teachers for what it means to teach today. Specific contexts include deep knowledge of the school community where one will teach, not a one-sized-fits-all approach to “best practices”' that were developed based on theories and practices in dissimilar contexts with white students. We also see this as reflective of “one right way” because it promotes uniformity that is not inclusive of the diversity of histories, experiences, and cultural practices embodied by students and pre-service teachers of color. It centers cisgender, white males and results in hierarchical, layered marginalization. This approach is carried forth into teaching internship models that prioritize learning teaching as approximation and replication (Author, 2011a) that rely on expert mentor teachers to model effective teaching practices that often serve to reproduce decontextualized and acultural practices that are harmful and ineffective for Black and Brown learners (Authors, 2019). This is dehumanizing and de-professionalizes aspiring educators by failing to teach them how to trust their professional judgment and interpretation of their learners and teaching context. It also minimizes opportunities for pre-service teachers of color to build upon their culturally situated ways of knowing and being as valid components of pedagogical content knowledge and limits their ability to imagine otherwise possibilities before they even become educators.

Some of the practices that we’ve had success with include working with community partners at schools to determine the needs of the community and how we might leverage community and university resources to meet those needs; listening to community members, school leaders, and teacher interns about what is happening in their school sites and adapting learning, coaching, supports to align with needs/strengths/challenges; providing wrap-around support of teacher candidates and close collaboration between mentor teachers, site liaisons, principals, coaches, and education department professors to support teacher candidates who are struggling for various reasons (academic, mental health, financial); and approaching learning to teach as an interpretive process(Author, 2011) that makes space for PST’s improvisation and efficacy as they center what they know and observe about their students within teaching cycles (Author, 2018).

Authors

• Keisha McIntosh Allen, University of Maryland
  Presenting Author

• Corey Carter, University of Maryland - Baltimore County
  Presenting Author

• Jackie Matise Peng, WestEd
  Presenting Author

• Rehana Shafi, University of Maryland - Baltimore County
  Presenting Author