Speculating Into the Hauntings of Whiteness in Teaching Through Shadow Poems

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Sunday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Art and New Materialisms: Creative Approaches to Inquiry (Table 5)

Abstract

Teaching is a profession haunted by racialized expectations of what learning is supposed to be like and how bodies are supposed to be organized and stratified at school. This paper draws from a study that makes a cut into these ghostly normalizing resonances by following the residue of the material-affective-embodied ways of whiteness in teaching. It focuses on a research practice of shadow poetry, constructed from the absences in interviews with white teacher participants, speculating into what was not said, but still lurking as a presence. This method of speculative poetry opens possibilities in qualitative research towards rendering “absent presences” that haunt practices, spaces, and temporalities of teaching, inviting ways to imagine teaching beyond the normative, reaching towards the reparative.

Author

• Maddie Neufeld, Teachers College, Columbia University