Disrupting White Supremacy in Education: Fostering Teacher Agency Toward Antiracist Organizational Change

• In Event: Friday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Leveraging Organizational Theory to Understand and Address Racial Inequities (Table 17)

Abstract

This conceptual paper confronts the reproduction of white supremacy in school systems by examining the complexities involved in creating the conditions for teacher agency to result in anti-racist organizational changes. The educator workforce is overwhelmingly white, and white social norms and “professional” behavior shape school culture. By understanding organizational change versus stasis as rooted in an organization’s capacity to either reproduce or disrupt white supremacy, we apply a critical perspective to Bridwell-Mitchell’s (2015) theory of teachers’ practical evaluative agency by drawing from Irby’s (2021) framework of organizational change toward racial equity. The resulting framework surfaces how the racialization of teachers’ social environment must be disrupted before teachers’ agency leads toward racial equity.

Authors

• Sarah Clancey, Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction

• Brett Baldauf, University of Washington

• Lindsey J. Kaiser, University of Maine