Poster #87 - Anti-racist behaviors, inequity beliefs, and racialized emotion biases in teachers

• In Event: Poster Session 05

Abstract

Teachers’ ability to understand and take the perspectives of their students is foundational to teacher-student relationships, as they inform teacher expectations and responses to student behavior (Mainhard et al., 2018; Rucinski et al., 2018). Yet teachers’ inaccurate perception and extreme characterization of emotions expressed by Black children has been identified, and may be a mechanism by which racism makes its way into classrooms (e.g. Cooke & Halberstadt, 2021; Halberstadt et al., 2018; 2020). Indeed, recent research found that teachers' socioemotional training supports relationships with White but not Black students (Legette et al., 2021), suggesting anti-racist awareness and other factors may be important in reducing persistent emotion recognition biases shown by teachers.

Thus, the present study asked the following questions: 1) How are teachers’ individual anti-racist behaviors related to their multicultural competency skills and beliefs about racial inequity? 2) What is the relation of teachers’ multicultural competency skills, anti-racism behaviors, and racial inequity beliefs to teachers’ racialized recognition of happiness, anger, fear, and sadness for Black versus White children?

Methods
Participants in this cross-sectional, online pilot study were Kindergarten through 8th grade public school teachers who were recruited via email and snowball sampling; the majority were female and White (n = 40; Table 1). To assess the accuracy of emotion perception and recognition, we first employed the PerCEIVED task on Qualtrics (n=40), with Facial Action Coding System (FACS) coded facial emotion expression stimuli of White and Black children (Halberstadt et al., 2019). Participants then completed three self-reported questionnaires. Subscales from the Multicultural Teaching Competency Scale (MTCS; Spanierman et al., 2011), the Anti-Racism Behavioral Inventory (ARBI; Pieterse et al., 2016), and the Racism and Inequity Beliefs questionnaire (RIB; Legette et al., 2021) were employed to measure multicultural teaching skills, anti-racism behaviors, and beliefs about the underlying causes of racial inequity.

Results
Teacher age. Age had a strong, negative correlation with beliefs in systemic and school Racism; younger teachers tended to believe that systemic and school-based injustices are causes of racial inequity more than older teachers did, r(24) = -.61, p = 0.001.

Correlations Among Multicultural Skills, Racial Inequity Beliefs, and Antiracism. As expected, antiracism behaviors had a moderate negative correlation with teachers’ cultural deficit beliefs, r(27) = -.54, p =.002, but a low positive correlation with their beliefs around systemic and schooling racism r(28) = .20, p =.28. An unexpected finding, however, was the strong negative correlation between teachers’ multicultural skills and their antiracism behaviors r(24) = -.66, p < .001. See Table 2 for descriptives and correlations.

Emotion Recognition Task. Data from the emotion recognition task have not yet been analyzed. We will test a latent variable path model with four predictors (i.e., multicultural competencies, anti-racism behaviors, cultural deficit beliefs, and systemic and schooling racism beliefs) of concurrent racialized emotion recognition. We anticipate that antiracism behaviors, in addition to schooling and systemic racism beliefs, will be the strongest predictors of racialized emotion bias.

Authors

• Shannon W Martin Dantzler, University of Maryland - College Park
  Presenting Author

• Colleen O'Neal, University of Maryland - College Park

• Alison N Cooke, Duke University

• Kamilah Legette, University of Denver

• Amy Halberstadt, North Carolina State University