Conceptualizing contours of commitments to social justice, performance and resistance in preservice teachers’ Discourses about race

• In Event: Reckoning with Ignorance: Mapping Authentic Arenas of Resistance

Abstract

We explore students' rhetorical commitments to social justice literally— through findings as part of a larger study of early-stage preservice teacher candidates’ evolving senses of self, identity, race, and education. Additionally we explore students’ culminating papers at the end of a yearlong social foundations in education course sequence in one teacher education program (TEP) using critical race theory critical Discourse analysis. We argue that TEPs need to more closely examine how they create curricular and pedagogical permission structures for “virtue-signaling” superficial or abstract commitments to social justice, and instead focus attention on ways to support students in deepening their engagement with their situatedness within a paradigm of white supremacy. In response, we offer a methodology for analytically transcending students’ rhetorical commitments in written work, and highlight pedagogical-programmatic implications for TEPs to support preservice teachers in locating and enacting their roles within a social movement against interlocking systems of oppression.

Authors

• Travon Jefferson, Michigan State University

• Taneya Chavis, Michigan State University

• Kyle Chong, Michigan State University