Teacher Education’s Racial Discourses and Novice Teacher Reflections: Questions Raised for Programs’ Racial Equity Initiatives

• In Event: Studies of Equity-Minded Organizational Learning in Educational Contexts

Abstract

This paper examines racial equity engagement within University-Based Teacher Education (UBTE) Programs through the perspectives of recent graduates. Racial equity remains an urgent focus for UBTE, but attention is rarely organization-wide (Philip & Benin, 2014). Furthermore, UBTE, must attend to its own organizational learning, while keeping central graduates’ future classrooms or schools. Drawing on illustrative cases from three UBTEs, this paper extends literature on UBTE equity efforts to investigate the influence of UBTE organizational racial equity discourses in novice teachers’ sensemaking.

I leveraged multileveled and multi-sited sociopolitical learning theories that consider the positional, social, organizational, and societal relations of power that co-constitute learning to guide my study (Nasir et al., 2020). With specific attention to organizational learning, this framework necessitates a critical interrogation the enduring “overwhelming whiteness” in the identities and epistemologies of teacher education (Sleeter, 2016). I follow multi-sited ethnographies of three university UBTE programs that attend to what “takes hold as people and practices move across time and space” (Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014, p. 604), or from UBTE to schools. Drawn from a larger project on novice teacher learning, this paper analyzed semi-structured interviews with novice teachers from one midwestern and one west coast state regarding their UBTE Programs’ attention to race, equity, and identity, including course content and discussions and overall program objectives. Data analysis employed a flexible, inductive and deductive approach (Erickson, 2004). Illustrative cases with white teachers were selected to illuminate three different types of engagement with racial equity within UBTE programs.

I present findings from three cases: Saint University addressed racism, whiteness, and critical multiculturalism, but centered the work of the teacher within “happy diversity” discourses (Bell & Hartmann, 2007). Reflecting on a school incident where white students started a rumor about newcomer students “eating dogs,” rather than talking about it as racism, Danny downplayed it as “dumb,” adolescent “bullying.” Vista State added courses on racism and oppression in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, but messy implementation resulted in the few students of color taking on much of the implementation labor. In her first year, Ashley struggled to stop non-Black students from using the n-word in class. Eventually, she began relying on the two Black girls in class to call out the perpetrators (Lerma et al., 2020). Grove University explicitly attended to the sociopolitical purposes of their program and engaged in iterative re-design towards justice-oriented practice. They embedded protocols to talk about race into every course. In her first year teaching, Katherine took on a political-advocacy role (Nieto, 2006), pressing for collaboration time for teachers of newcomer students and championing language-affirming pedagogies.

Examining the implications of UBTE racial equity discourses within novices’ interviews, these different cases illustrate potential multi-sited impacts of racial equity initiatives. As such, this study prompts provocative questions around organizational initiatives such as what equity initiatives might open up, structure, or foreclose; if and how they trouble the overwhelming whiteness of Teacher Education; and how researching graduates’ experiences might inform and prompt organizational learning and change.

Author

• Joy Esboldt, University of Delaware