Disrupting Whiteness Through an Early Childhood Teacher Educator Critical Community of Practice

• In Event: Anti-Racism in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

In the United States, early childhood teacher education has historically been a hierarchical and unjust environment that functions to perpetuate dominant power structures (Carter Andrews et al., 2021; Escayg, 2020; Milner et al., 2013). While placing critical light on honing preservice teachers’ critical consciousness, Early Childhood Teacher Educators (ECTEs) seldom question their role in perpetuating whiteness. Without critical reflection, dominant power structures will most likely persist (Matias & Mackey, 2016; Sleeter, 2017). When ECTEs lack preparedness to confront racism and whiteness, they are likely to revert to the established hierarchical and racialized status quo (Matias & Mackey, 2016; Picower & Kohli, 2017).

In our paper, we address significant researchers' concerns regarding the persistent disparity between the proclaimed practices of ECTEs and the ongoing generation of teachers who fail to fulfill the needs of children through reparative, antiracist, and liberatory praxis (e.g., Sleeter, 2017). Escayg (2020) emphasizes the importance of ECTEs constructing and modeling antiracist, humanizing frames in classrooms as a necessary first step in addressing this concern. The study describes how four women scholars of various institutional ranks (from beginning graduate students to tenured faculty) at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI) developed and engaged in a critical community of practice (Hamilton et al., 2022; herein CCoP). According to Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998), Communities of Practice (CoP) are social practice groups that are unified around a common goal. Although CoP, which has its roots in sociocultural learning theory, addresses situated learning, it frequently ignores the part that race and power play in social practice. In pursuit of a liberatory stance, we expanded the CoP framework to explicitly center race, racism (Bell, 1987), and critical whiteness (Matias et al., 2014) in order to focus on institutional power dynamics (Zaidi et al., 2023) that exist in ECTE praxis.

For two academic years, our CCoP studied the classroom practices of a tenured ECTE in an Early Childhood Education course, with two members serving as coaches. During the course, our CCoP worked on planning and coaching, followed by debriefings. This narrative case study employs critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2013; CDA), with a focus on one CCoP debrief. Analytically, CDA allows for a critical examination of language, viewing spoken and written utterances as discursively produced artifacts within sociopolitical and ideological settings. At its core, CDA explicitly seeks to deconstruct ideologies and power in relation to race and racism.
Our paper also discusses the necessary components of constructing and sustaining this CCoP in our PWI and beyond. We describe how CCoP necessitates humanizing and critical approaches that unseat existing institutional hierarchies and patterns of intersectional dominance. Our narrative illustrates the efficacy of our CCoP, which facilitates continuous engagement and acknowledges systemic obstacles within the realm of ECE, while confronting race evasiveness and the comforts of niceness. This work has implications for how teacher education programs can transform their infrastructure to better confront whiteness and encourage reflexivity in ECTEs.

Authors

• Azaria I. Cunningham, Boston University

• Allison Sterling Henward, Pennsylvania State University

• Quiana M. Jackson, Bermuda Ministry of Education

• Michelle N. Brown, Pennsylvania State University