Dialogic Deconstructions of Whiteness in the Ghanian Third Space

• In Event: Exploring Race and Identity in International Education Experiences

Abstract

Objectives:

Engaging White teacher candidates (TCs) in dialogue around race remains a challenge (Carter Andrews, 2021; Jupp et al., 2019). Immersing teacher candidates in an international context holds potential for transformative learning around race. This paper shares the experience of one White graduate study abroad in education participant (author) in a three-week program that centered Black knowledges, pedagogies and practices in Ghana, West Africa (Dillard, 2022). The focus of this paper is the author’s learning and programmatic elements that afforded such learning.

Theoretical Framework:

This study used Friere’s (1970/1993) theory of conscientização, or critical consciousness to critically reflect on topics of race, social inequity, and its causes during the study abroad experience through nightly discussions and critically reflective prompts. The Ghanian context served as a “Third Space” (Bhaba, 1990) in which identity and community were realized through language. The Ghanian context, in part, afforded participants the possibility for identity de- and re-construction in dialogue with others. One concept made visible in discussions was Whiteness (DuBois, 1903/2014; Hartman, 2004). Whiteness refers to “the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege by uncovering the particular social, economic, political, social control, and ideological mechanisms responsible for the reproduction of racial privilege in a society” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018).

Methods:

This study was an autoethnographic account of the author’s study abroad experience which explored connections between the concepts of critical consciousness, the Third Space, and Whiteness. Autoethnography was used to document the author’s personal experience to examine and/or critique a cultural experience (Jones et al., 2013). The author used theoretical comparison (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) to help position her gaze at her experience in an attempt to make it possible to regard oneself as “other” (Foley, 2002). Data included journal entries and an analysis of critically reflective prompts.

Results:

Critical reflections revealed evidence of new learning. The Ghanian Third Space allowed for nuanced noticings around race that when critically interrogated, showed destabilization of the author’s identity as White person. For example, the author saw that White identities were not centered in the program (Dillard, 2022). The author heard the phrase “the Whites” used with a negative connotation in a discussion by a Ghanian school principal explaining the history of the Transatlantic slave trade and the atrocity of the sale of Black human beings. The deprecatory connotation of the White race was at once jarring, unusual, and shameful to the author because White was not referred to with positivity, appropriately so, by the principal as White typically was in the U.S. Whiteness was uncovered on a macro- and micro-level and later discussed by the mixed-race study abroad group. Other experiences on the trip such as critical reflections on participants’ first rememberings of race and observations between the U.S. and Ghana were interrogated, de-constructed, and re-constructed through scaffolded critical reflection prompts and in dialogue with faculty and study abroad participants using race as a lens to think through experiences—past, present, and future.

Author

• Danielle M. Carrier, University of Southern Mississippi