"A Nice White Lady": Critical Whiteness Studies, Teacher Education, and City Schools

• In Event: Beyond Epiphanies: Critique of Whiteness in Teacher Education and Society by Women of Color

Abstract

Overview
Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) has been used to think about several important topics, including teacher education. Using the imbrications of CWS and curriculum theory, this paper will focus on the “nice white lady” phenomenon that is co-constituted through intra-actions within teacher education programs.

Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to explore what is learned through an enacted curriculum of whiteness when Critical Whiteness Studies is used by mainly white voices for the consumption of mostly white teacher candidates. By an enacted curriculum, the authors are attending to the norms and values that are co-constituted through the many intra-actions that happen in and across educational contexts.

Methods and Data Sources
The authors identify as a queer, Brown Assistant Professor and as a Black educator who graduated from a teacher education program in May 2021. Given the overlap in the author’s experiences with whiteness and education, this paper uses a duo-autoethnographic (Hughes & Pennington, 2017) narrative style that emerged from teaching and learning in university spaces. Data sources include a thick description as given by author one of an event where, despite CWS being a backbone of the teacher education program, the comfort of white teacher candidates was consistently prioritized over the dignity of Black students by fellow faculty members. Similarly, coming from the same teacher education program, author two uses data from a series of text messages collected from a public group chat within the program as teacher candidates pushed back on the necessity to think about police brutality and the murder of George Floyd as people preparing to teach elementary school students.

Substantiated Conclusions & Scholarly Significance of the Work
By considering how CWS was a central part of the enacted curriculum, this paper concludes with several salient points. The authors discuss what can be conceived as a curriculum of whiteness and its impact in teacher education programs not just on Black student teachers but on the students in the schools where they serve. Additionally, it is important to consider how students of color and white students alike absorb these messages in and through an enacted curriculum of whiteness.

Connection to Conference Theme
The authors recognize how CWS can be an important tool in teacher education for helping students unpack the whiteness of the formal curriculum and its impact on students of color and their White peers. However, the authors argue that as we consider questions of equity and access for the 21st century, we recognize that the field of curriculum studies is too often left out of teacher education programs. This means that students are not often asked to trace the tensions within the enacted curriculum, further allowing them to be entrenched in whiteness and, over time, they risk becoming the “nice white ladies” of schools, rather than critical educators seeking to abolish racist teaching practices.

Author

• Boni Wozolek, Penn State University, Abington College