Sleeping Police in Teacher Education: The Politics of Techniques for Sensitizing Science Teachers to ‘Diversity’

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 9:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: The Limitations of Reform: Recognizing the gaps in scripted curriculum and transformative efforts

Abstract

Our study examines how techniques of science teacher education have historically enacted racializing premises in attempts to replace teacher prejudices with research-based knowledge of student diversity. Through archival and literature analysis, we excavate what Ruha Benjamin terms default settings of post-Brown teacher education. We trace shifts in techniques designed to sensitize science teachers to the ‘culturally deprived’ (1950s–80s) versus ‘culturally diverse’ (1990s–2020s). We conceptualize these tools (e.g., attitude surveys, home observation templates) as what Latour calls sleeping police: carrying delegated premises of past actors into the present. At stake is how teacher education reconstitutes hierarchies: not despite scientific self-correction, but precisely through efforts to more fairly, correctly discriminate who is already scientific versus who needs help to become so.

Authors

• Kathryn Lewkowicz Kirchgasler, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Curtis O'Dwyer, University of Wisconsin - Madison