Can We Call It Racism? Exploring Connections Between Teachers' Color-Blind Racial Attitudes and Linguistic Biases

• In Event: 52.049 - Improving, Inquiring, and Innovating (3 Is) Teacher Educators and Teachers Through an Ever-Evolving Professional Learning Community

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate how teachers’ attitudes towards accents intersected with racial attitudes. Many teachers do not feel prepared to teach an increasingly diverse student population (Hollins & Guzman, 2005). It is incumbent on teacher educators to prepare teacher candidates for diverse student populations, taking into consideration many facets of diversity. There is a need to deconstruct the myth that TESOL inherently embraces diversity (Kubota, 2002; Motha, 2006; Romney, 2010).
Due to the invisible nature of Whiteness, many White teachers have limited experience with other cultures and are unaware that they are racialized beings with their own cultures (Hollins & Guzman, 2005; Liggett, 2009; Ullucci & Battey, 2011). Black and Latino teachers can hold internalized racism (Dixson, 2006; Knight, 2004; Roberts, 2010). If a teacher has unchallenged racial biases, it is possible that not only will this teacher fail to help students of color, but she may actually unintentionally bring them harm (Hyland, 2005; Lewis, 2003). Further, it is possible for colorblindness to mask unconscious and implicit racism, what Bonilla-Silva (2002) termed colorblind racism.
Based on the assumption that language is racialized, we included material about the social construction of “race” in a cross-cultural communication PDs. As a pre-test, we gave the QTEL cohorts two surveys: the Color-blind Racial Attitudes Scale (COBRAS) (Neville & Lilly, 2000) and the Measure of Prejudice Against Accented English Scale (MPAAE) (Ura, Preston, & Mearns, 2015) to analyze the intersection of racial and linguistic prejudice. Both pre- and inservice teacher groups scored low on both scales and there was no significant difference between the two cohorts. We will give a post-test of the same surveys at the end of July 2016, and we will report any significance between pre- and post- surveys. In addition to survey data, we are conducting interviews with randomly selected pre and inservice teachers, which will be also reported
We argue these cohorts felt compelled to answer what they thought may be the "right" answers on the surveys. There might be very little chance that we would get really honest scores on these surveys given the context of the class. However, during interviews and PD discussions, we saw that there were problematic underlying beliefs, including bias against accented English, internalized racism on the part of Black teachers, and racist views on the part of the White teachers.
This study emphasizes the limitations of survey methods when we attempt to look at teachers’ attitudes. Teacher educators need to consider qualitative methods and "courageous conversations" in order to help cohort teachers open up about their beliefs and help push those beliefs in the right direction. It is impossible to establish a clear relationship between colorblind racial attitudes and linguistic bias; however, both can exist at the same time. As teacher educators, we have to disrupt both colorblind attitudes and out-right racist attitudes against students of color, while at the same time teasing out how language is racialized.

Author

• Lauren Rea Preston, Saint Louis Public Schools