Possessing English Education: Liberal Teacher Education Spaces and the Reproduction of White Settler Sovereignty

• In Event: Interrogating Sovereignty: Settler Colonialism, Antiblackness, and Language Across Educational Research

Abstract

White liberal educational spaces proclaim a commitment to equity while concurrently concealing social processes that secure relations of domination. Co-opting antiracist movements and subsuming these into “official antiracisms” (Melamed 2011; Flores 2016), teacher education programs enact liberal discourses in ways that appropriate and deaden antiracisms that address material conditions. They also commodify urban communities to construct, what we term, the “white sovereign teacher-subject,” where white teacher-candidates are fashioned as sole possessors of the knowledge and expertise needed for teaching BIPOC youth and occupying space in the antiracist, urban teaching profession.

In this paper, we theorize how discourses of antiracism serve to foment a patriarchal white sovereignty where teacher-candidates are contracted into, and imbued with, a sense of belonging and ownership (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 122) over urban schools and students. As such, we show how white teacher-candidates, as both beneficiaries and enforcers of the anti-black and settler nation-state, are protected by and socialized into institutional practices that disperse sovereignty through the construction of urban schooling geographies and where this white possession is normalized and desired (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 46; McKittrick, 2006, p. xi, xiii; Tuck, 2010). Furthermore, it is this desire to possess-- as part of a”good” white, liberal ethic (Thompson, 2003; Lipsitz, 1998)--that we view as inseparable from the political project of settler colonialism.

This paper brings the practices encountered within an English Language Arts teacher preparation program into conversation with theorizations of both settler colonialism and anti-blackness in the U.S. context. Our goal is to expand the literature on English Education as in need of intervention in terms of both critical race (Baker-Bell, Butler, & Johnson, 2017) and anti-settler colonial practices. To do so, we engage in practitioner inquiry (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009; Hsieh, 2017) through a testimonio in dialogue (Prieto & Villenas, 2012). We draw from reflections accumulated throughout our time as teacher educators working with future secondary English teachers in the SF Bay Area at a large, public institution.

Findings show the white sovereign teacher-subject was reproduced in opposition to our non-white positionalities. This was most clearly evident in the continual dismissal of our experiential knowledges and the policing of our interactions with preservice teachers. We also demonstrate how institutional structures, histories, and the politics of place circumscribe (im)possible pedagogies for social justice in spaces such as these. In this way, we argue that liberal antiracist discourses and practices need not be explicitly anti-black or anti-indigenous to be inherently complicit in their reification.

The significance of this work is in its interrogation of liberal English Education spaces as entrenched in simultaneously desiring social change while maintaining comfort for its white practitioners and participants. It demonstrates how professionalization of antiracism discourses in teacher education function to reify settler sovereignty among the teacher body. Further, as we name, reframe, and question the taken-for-grantedness of liberal, reformist schooling spaces, this approach to inquiry reasserts our own sovereignty toward being in service rather than in opposition to the sovereignties of Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color.

Authors

• Dinorah Sanchez Loza, The Ohio State University

• Theresa Burruel Stone, Sonoma State University