Critical Consciousness: Understanding White Elementary School Teachers’ Experiences Engaging With White, Middle-Class Students

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 2:30 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting Normativity and Engaging Criticality (Table 26)

Abstract

Within the current political, racialized tensions throughout the US, this paper investigates six, white elementary school teachers engaging in disruption of business-as-usual schooling practices with their predominantly white, middle-class students. Critical consciousness served as a framework for understanding how teachers implemented strategies and made pedagogical choices that supported their work for critically engaging students in questioning, challenging, and taking action towards disrupting the status quo of schooling and societal inequities. Given complexities of teacher surveillance and current legislative initiatives, case studies provided an opportunity for in-depth data collection, including interviews, documents, artifacts, critical incidents, and researcher’s journal. Findings indicate teachers grounded this risky work within approved curriculum. Fear was a dominant theme present in disruption of the status quo.

Author

• Meredith Valentine, Montclair State University