Telling the Truth: Critical Race Theory, Teacher Preparation, and the Urgency of (Re)membering Anti-Racist Education

• In Event: Looking Back, Envisioning Forward: Teacher Educators of Color Unsettling Whiteness for Collective Liberation

Abstract

Objectives
This paper seeks to advance a transformative vision for anti-racist teacher education by critically examining the intersections of teacher preparation, truth-telling, and Critical Race Theory (CRT). It aims to expose how whiteness and white supremacy continue to structure teacher preparation programs, while honoring the historical and ongoing contributions of teacher educators of Color. Through a CRT-informed composite narrative, this paper amplifies the lived experiences of educators of Color who navigate racially hostile environments. Ultimately, this paper aims to challenge dominant paradigms and reimagine teacher education through a justice-centered lens, grounded in the realities and experiences of marginalized communities.

Theoretical Framework
This research is grounded in CRT as articulated in the seminal work of Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995), which emphasizes the permanence of racism in U.S. society and its pervasiveness in education. CRT enables a critical interrogation of how white racial domination is normalized in teacher preparation, curricula, and pedagogy. This research also draws on whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) to frame the necessity of truth-telling in teacher education. CRT offers the following guiding tenets for this study:
The centrality of race and racism
The challenge to dominant ideology
The commitment to social justice
The centrality of experiential knowledge
An interdisciplinary approach

Methods & Data
This study employs a qualitative narrative methodology centered on the creation and analysis of a composite counter-story (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002), a method commonly used in CRT research. The counter-story blends lived experiences, professional accounts, and scholarly insights to construct a representative narrative that reveals the silence and violence of white supremacy in teacher preparation.

Results
The composite counter-story reveals that most teacher preparation programs do not meaningfully engage with racial identity development, critical pedagogy, or anti-racist teaching. Instead, they perpetuate a vision of education aligned with white, middle-class, monolingual, nuclear-family norms. This racialized, genderized, and classist normativity renders many teachers ill-prepared to support students from diverse racial, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. My composite counter-story also highlights how educators of Color are often compelled to navigate survival in teacher education programs that were not designed with them in mind. Telling the truth through these counter-narratives disrupts the sanitized, race-evasive discourse that dominates teacher education policy and practice.

Scholarly Significance
This paper contributes to the field of teacher education by expanding the application of CRT-informed narrative methodologies in empirical educational research, offering practical implications for redesigning teacher education to center racial justice and truth-telling, challenging teacher educators and policymakers to confront white supremacy in institutional design and curriculum, and building a bridge between theory and praxis to empower educators in creating humanizing learning environments for all students. By recentering the truth in teacher preparation, this paper calls on all teacher educators to (re)member the history of anti-racist educational struggles and open pathways for authentic, transformative change in how we prepare teachers for today’s classrooms.

Author

• Cleveland Hayes, Indiana University - Indianapolis