Disrupting "Safety" in Preservice Teacher Education

• In Event: 21.061 - MTCC Roundtable Session Five
  In Roundtable Session: 21.061-4 - Beyond Permit Patty and Barbecue Becky: Racial Hierarchy and Spatial Justice in Education

Abstract

In teacher education for social justice, field supervisors of color are often positioned to foster critical consciousness, the “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (Freire, 1970, p.17) in their work with preservice teachers. Preservice teachers are typically “middle-class, monolingual, White females who have had little sustained and substantive interactions with people of color” (Gay & Kirkland, 2003, p.182). As field supervisors engage in critical multicultural education (McLaren,1995; Grant & Sleeter, 2006; Gorski, 2009) towards this end, there is a need to better understand the racialized spaces in which field supervisors of color work to build both theoretical understandings and actual teaching practices centered on social justice.
This paper will share findings from a Critical Race Spatial Analysis (CRSA) of three classroom spaces (public school field placement, university, online) where field supervisors of color navigate and chart the spatial arrangements and dynamics through which field supervisors of color work on unsettling whiteness (Vélez & Solórzano, 2017). Utilizing CRSA, alongside a narrative analysis of field supervisor field notes of classroom observations, written feedback to preservice teacher university work, and online video analysis, the researcher and field supervisor were able to map the flexibility and resiliency of racism in classroom spaces and the degree to which field supervisors become either reluctant cosigners of superficial equity efforts or disruptors of spaces that create safety for whiteness (Leonardo & Porter, 2010). Charting the locations where field supervisors unwittingly perform in reprisals of colonial relationships--namely “nanny” to the white narcissism of preservice teachers--uncovered where the “White Lady Bountiful” archetype (Meiners, 2002) finds quarter even in intentionally non-white teacher education spaces.
Findings suggest that field supervisors of color work in racialized spaces where participants invested in Whiteness unleash a barrage of detours, namely evocations of fragility (DiAngelo, 2008), medicalizing and pathologizing discomfort, and institutionally provided alibis in order to flee from criticality. This phenomena further reifies hierarchies of space where field supervisors’ work is delegitimized, effectively stripping authority from field supervisors of color (citation withheld). Facing university pressures rooted in neoliberal demands to deliver on shallow racial diversity efforts, while also being subject to harsher student evaluations for “racializing” teaching and learning, field supervisors of color work within a terrorized space.
This paper will recount how findings were used in a participatory action research (PAR) project to design theater of the oppressed techniques (participatory theater) centered on creating the positive, disruptive violence (Leonardo & Porter, 2010) necessary to unlodge dysconsciousness (King, 1991) and unmask colonial roles in teacher education, as well as the White Zone of Proximal Development that serves as the hidden referent in pedagogy design in preservice teacher education (Leonardo & Manning, 2015). Findings suggest that critical field supervisors can, through fierce love and an unflinching focus on creating spaces of risk-taking, begin to unsettle the colonial relationships entrenched in teacher education.

Author

• Sonal Patel, California State University - East Bay