The (Continued) Unbearable Whiteness of Teacher Education: Four Faculty of Color Navigating White Supremacist Entanglements

• In Event: Sunday Roundtable Session 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Complicating Ideas of Inclusivity and Equity for Teacher Educators (Table 22)

Abstract

Four teacher educators of color engaged in collective memory work over 14 months to process our experiences working in teacher education programs. Using critical race theory, we find that both individually and collectively we all experienced hardships around navigating institutional white supremacy. While our individual narratives point to curricular colonization, tokenism, and professional vulnerabilities, taken together our narratives demonstrate a refusal to accept a pre-defined and isolating script of white hegemony. To create space together, make sense of and design ways to challenge white supremacy is inherently liberatory. While teacher education remains overwhelmingly white with little change over the last twenty years, teacher educators of color have a central role in critiquing, explaining and challenging whiteness within TEPs.

Authors

• Sharon Leathers, Ramapo College

• Ramon Vasquez, University of Minnesota

• Amos Joon Lee, University of California - Riverside

• Ranita Cheruvu, University of North Texas