Principled Resistance as Enactments of Political Clarity: Developing White Novice Teachers' Capacity for Antiracist Teaching

• In Event: The (Anti)Racist Education of White Teachers and Students

Abstract

Schools and classrooms in the United States and throughout the world continue to be sites of racial injustice. Knowing this, we must educate teachers to recognize the daily permutations of antiblackness and white normativity in their everyday decisions and actions in the classroom and prepare them to resist the discourses, practices, and policies that serve to reproduce racial violence and inequality. In this paper, I advance a notion of teacher resistance that is purposefully oriented toward antiracism and justice. I situate this resistance as the practical enactments of one’s political clarity (Madkins & McKinney de Royston, 2019), and I present qualitative data to illustrate one white preservice teacher’s developing political clarity and her movement toward practicing principled resistance.

Author

• Kimberly Oamek, University of Wisconsin - Madison