Dismantling Whiteness in Teacher Education: Cultivating Socially Just Classrooms Through LTIP (Learning Teaching as an Interpretive Process) and Culturally Relevant Pedagogies

• In Event: Borderlands: Constructing Educational Possibilities Across P–20 Systems: A Structured Conversation Between Educational Leadership and Teacher Education

Abstract

Numerous scholars have argued that the whiteness of teacher education serves as a threat to teacher diversity and pedagogies that affirm the lives of Black, Indigenous, students of color and support them in reaching their highest potential and achieving self-determination (Carter Andrews, et al., 2021; Sleeter, 2017; Souto Manning & Winn, 2019). More specifically, teacher education has been critiqued for the extent to which the ontologies and epistemologies upheld within the field are rooted in whiteness (Souto-Manning & Winn, 2019). Despite stated commitments to preparing teacher candidates for all students, common practices such as separating diversity courses from core program curricula and framing internship experiences as learning to teach by approximation (LTRAP) serve as significant barriers to racial equity in p-12 schools. In such programs, asset pedagogies and critical perspectives of teaching and learning are detached from real classrooms and teaching dilemmas that students encounter in their field experiences and internships. LTRAP also reproduces professional dynamics that position educators as passive, empty vessels and an outsider as an all-knowing expert, regardless of context. These practices undermine teacher candidates’ ability to develop student-centered, context-specific, culturally responsive teaching practices that are authentic to candidates’ developing teacher identity, perspectives, and lived experiences, particularly within teacher candidates of color.

The epistemic practices embedded within Hollins’ (2015) learning teaching as an interpretive process (LTIP) cultivates novice teachers who are able to “move away from teaching to a community that presumably shares certain traits to teaching a learner with unique cultural experiences” (Warner et al., 2016, p.60). For example, a Black early childhood educator who is an alum of the program we aligned with LTIP shared that as a novice teacher, she felt empowered to reject whitewashed curricula and revise it to be culturally relevant for her Black and Brown students. Black teachers are often recognized solely for their management of Black children and not the brilliance of their liberatory and/or culturally relevant pedagogical practices. This example helps us to see how the practice of engaging teacher candidates in thinking critically about an area of practice, particularly as it relates to educational equity and Black and Brown learners, and then supporting them in using that knowledge as a lens to interpret a problem of practice aids novice teachers in trusting their judgment and building more socially just classrooms that challenge the status quo.

Authors

• Keisha McIntosh Allen, University of Maryland

• Jackie Matise Peng, WestEd

• Corey Carter, University of Maryland - Baltimore County