White Bread as Food for Racial Conscientization

• In Event: 69.037 - Critical Family History and the Novel as Tools of Whiteness Pedagogies: A Theory-to-Practice Symposium

Abstract

Frameworks
This paper is based on the reflections of a teacher educator who engaged White Bread along with second wave whiteness pedagogies (Session Organizer) and critical race pedagogies (Solorzano & Yosso, 2000; Marx & Pennington, 2003; Jennings & Lynn, 2005) with approximately 50 in-service teachers at a major Mountain West research-intensive university.

Context of teaching and goals
While nearly 75% of the teachers are white, all the teachers taught in a region and in schools where whiteness was entrenched in everyday discourses, practices, and policies. The overall purpose of the course was to assist teachers in building effective partnerships between their classrooms/schools and marginalized, especially Latina/o, families and communities. In order to build these kinds of partnership, it is important that teachers can first identify themselves as racialized beings and explore how their history shapes who they are as educators. The course was designed to help students begin to do this and then to explore asset-based approaches to community engagement in order to recognize Latina/o families as holders and creators of knowledge (Presenter 1). Two of the course goals included students being able to 1) evaluate, examine, and question personal history, strengths, and biases one brings to her/his interactions with communities of color and 2) develop an asset-based discourse that describes the experiences of Latina/o
 and other marginalized families.

Data sources and analyses
Data collection included work samples, field notes and recollections, and informal conversations and interviews with the students on their course progress. According to grounded theory protocols (Straus & Corbin, 1990), these data sources were analyzed for thematic patterns through second-wave whiteness and critical race pedagogies’ concepts.

Substantiated observations and scholarly significance
Observations indicate that teachers were able to draw upon the novel in important ways to critically examine similarities between characters in White Bread and their own personal history. Teachers also engaged a new (to them) discourse of critical concepts such as community cultural wealth, authentic care, microagressions, and deficit thinking to reflect on their dreams for their next year of teaching and in their written Community Engagement Plans. However, despite the immediate positive results, the author points to the difficulties of teaching this type of course in isolation from a critical social justice oriented teacher education program and the challenges teachers face in further developing their conscientization outside of and after the course.

References

Jennings, M. E., and Marvin, M. (2005). "The house that race built: Critical pedagogy, African-American education, and the re-conceptualization of a critical race pedagogy." The Journal of Educational Foundations 19.3/4: 15.

Marx, S. and Pennington, J. (2003). "Pedagogies of critical race theory: Experimentations with white preservice teachers." International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 16.1: 91-110.

Solorzano, D. G., and Yosso, T.J. (2000). "Maintaining social justice hopes within academic realities: A Freirean approach to critical race/LatCrit pedagogy." Denv. UL Rev. 78: 595.

Straus, A., & Corbin, J. (1990). Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.

Author

• Dolores Delgado Bernal, California State University - Los Angeles