Transforming Teacher Candidates' Understandings and Experiences of Racialization and Teaching Identities Through Race-Based Affinity Groups

• In Event: Teacher Educators Creating Critical and Anti-Oppressive Alternative Spaces Within University-Based Programs

Abstract

This study offers teacher educators an understanding of the potential of race-based affinity groups within an elementary teacher education program to support teachers in developing critical and racially literate teaching identities (Michael, 2014; DiAngelo, 2012).

In creating race-based affinity groups within our teacher education program, Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012, Stovall, 2016) and Critical Whiteness Studies (Applebaum, 2010; Frankenberg, 1993; Marx, 2006; McIntyre, 1997) allowed us to develop asymmetrical structures and expectations across our affinity groups for candidates of color and White candidates. We also drew from recent understandings of raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) in order to complicate the understanding of the mutually constitutive relationships between race and language. The three overlapping frameworks were used to understand candidates’ evolving identities as teachers of color (Tatum, 1997; Parsons & Ridley, 2000) and as White teachers (McIntyre 1997; Michael, 2014).

Using a Participatory Action Research framework (Erickson, 2006; McIntyre, 2003, McCutcheon & Jung, 1990), our approach as teacher educators was to respond to the needs that the teacher candidates were communicating while our role shifted between teacher, facilitator, advocate, and learner in fluid accommodation. We met as three affinity groups (one of color and two White) throughout the teacher candidates’ year in the program. Data consisted of recordings of affinity group meetings, facilitators’ notes, and notes from facilitators’ meetings while for the analysis we used our theoretical frameworks.



Significant findings emerged from the study. The first was that race-based affinity groups created important alternative spaces in which teacher candidates and facilitators were able to discuss racialization, ask different kinds of questions of one another, the larger cohort, and the program. Our second finding was the ways students, White and of color, in the affinity groups spoke about the space. White teacher candidates described the affinity group space as critical for pushing them and being held accountable in working through and developing a racial consciousness in more productive ways than coursework or their student teaching placement seemed to allow; whereas, teacher candidates of color described the affinity group space as helping them develop a sense of agency and critical awareness of racialization and how it plays out in becoming a teacher. Further, affinity groups offered a place to share painful moments in their coursework and placements, to examine their prior racial socialization, and feel safe from potential microaggressions and White interrogation. As members of diverse ethnic and cultural groups and as a coalition of people of color, their political and linguistic awareness increased. The affinity groups also helped them advocate for themselves, prompting some students to say the following: “I wouldn’t have made it” (without the group) and that the group “kept me sane”.

The Race-based affinity groups were vital - although in different ways - to both white teacher candidates and candidates of color in terms of challenging normative ways of understanding and envisioning their teaching identities and offered considerable insights to teacher educators in the program.

Authors

• Manka M. Varghese, University of Washington

• Julia R. Daniels, University of Washington - Seattle

• Caryn C. Park, Antioch University - Seattle