Rhetorically Speaking: On White Preservice Teachers' Failure to Imagine an Antiracist English Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: Honoring Black Youth Living: Dismantling Anti-Black Literacy Education Systems and Imagining Futures

Abstract

Through an examination of their former preservice teachers’ (PSTs’) responses to readings (e.g., readings centering culturally relevant, culturally sustaining, and culturally responsive education) and class assignments (e.g., English education autobiography and diversity statement), the presenters discuss how white PSTs often fail to imagine equitable classroom spaces for Black and Brown youth. Specifically, the authors center the following questions: What rhetorical moves do white preservice teachers make to defer responsibility for anti-racist pedagogy? How might teacher educators respond to these moves to activate preservice teachers’ imagination of Black and Brown life? To respond to these questions, the authors center abolitionist teaching and the radical imagination as a conceptual foundation to think through the connections between Black and Brown futurity, educational anti-blackness, and the dismantling of oppressionist structures in education. With these concepts in mind, the presenters moved to the collected data, using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2019) to examine the rhetorical moves their preservice teachers made to defer responsibility for anti-racist teaching. Initial codes included superlatives, centering whiteness, deferring responsibility, forward thinking, and barriers. After the initial coding and discussion process, we looked for patterns of shared meaning, stories about particular patterns across our dataset (Braun and Clarke, 2019), rather than relying on domain summaries, or “summaries of the range of meaning in the data related to a particular topic or ‘domain’ of discussion” (p. 592). To do this, presenters examined the coded data for links that could help them not only explain the rhetorical strategies the PSTs used, but also to explain the story behind those rhetorical moves. Findings show preservice teachers’ rhetorical moves across three themes: failure to imagine Black and Brown humanity, failure to imagine a connection between theory and practice, and failure to imagine curriculum and schooling beyond whiteness. Rather than centering a narrow focus on two higher education classrooms, however, the presenters consider how the larger field of English education also fails to imagine Black and Brown life, how the classrooms were a microcosm of the larger educational world. In broadening the discussion beyond one institution, the presenters offer other pathways through which educators and English education programs can assist their faculty and students in activating their imaginations in the pursuit of antiracist, abolitionist teaching.

Authors

• Stephanie R Toliver, University of Colorado - Boulder

• Heidi L Hadley, Missouri State University