Additional(ly) Antiblack: Interrogating Optional Responses in a Black Male Teacher Educator's Student Evaluations

• In Event: Our Truths: Interrogating Black Male Teaching and Teacher Education Experiences for Consequential Changes

Abstract

Teacher education is characterized by an overwhelming presence of whiteness, including a workforce primarily of white women (Sleeter, 2001; Hussar et al., 2020). Although there are continuous efforts to recruit educators of Color (Philip & Brown, 2020), teacher education largely reflects a culture of hegemonic whiteness (Cabrera, 2018). Often missing from institutional responses are acknowledgments of how student evaluations of teaching (SET) are complicit in maintaining anti-Blackness and white normativity, and significant actions to blunt/eradicate SET’s negative impact on Black (male) instructors. Teacher education needs to interrogate SET’s role in perpetuating hegemonic whiteness. Therefore, firstly, this presentation will identify some ways that one Black male instructor experienced, and perceived harms meted out against him while teaching in two HWIs. Secondly, it will highlight how the sections of SET for optional responses become sites for additional anti-Black (and often misandrist) commentary. Thirdly, it will offer critique and recommendations for ways teacher education might be transformed for continuous interrogation and critical actions that demonstrate a commitment to consequential research in pursuit of truths, and consequential practices and cultures in support of the lived truths of Black (male) instructors.

The theoretical framework of this presentation is a fusion of critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017) and hegemonic whiteness (Cabrera, 2018), with the specificity of a BlackCrit (Dumas & ross, 2016) analytic. Together they axiomatize the importance of experiential knowledge from individuals who have been made vulnerable by systems and facilitate a specific analysis of Black male teaching in classrooms at HWIs.

Informed by a critical race methodology (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), this presentation shares details from the practitioner research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) of one instructor who taught five courses across two HWIs in the northeastern region of the US.

The presentation will draw on anonymous qualitative data collected from 112 SET across two HWIs. An analysis of those data provides details that inform the insights detailed in this presentation.


This final presentation will highlight three key insights. Firstly, sections of SET for optional comments were notably sites for additional anti-Black commentary, demonstrating tensions with more favorable or nuanced commentary. Secondly, institutional mis/use of said data have consequential impacts on the Black male instructors. Finally, the presentation will call upon teacher education to transform institutional cultures, specifically for SET, so that they may contribute to the critical work of interrogating the conditions of teaching in teacher education and engaging in related consequential research in pursuit of truths. This is important for Black male instructors.


The increased visibility of violence against Black males in the wider society renewed calls for higher education institutions to consider their roles in Black suffering (Dumas, 2014). This presentation centralizes the instructional presence of Black males in teacher education and highlights some ways they encounter the endemicity of anti-Blackness in teacher education--not just in the wider society. Furthermore, it contributes to the literature on Black males in teaching, and to teacher education policy-making. Therefore, this presentation advances important recommendations for continuously interrogating consequential education research in pursuit of truth and justice.

Author

• Shawn S. Savage, University of North Carolina - Wilmington
  Presenting Author