‘You can say that they were being racist’: confronting white comfort in anti-racist teacher education

ABSTRACT

If teacher education is to become a site for disrupting racism and promoting racial justice, teacher educators must critically analyse how whiteness shapes our work and develop strategies to avoid reproducing it in our instruction. Here, I examine an instance of my own teacher education practice in which I, a white woman teacher educator, attempted to use an instance of classroom teaching to support teacher candidates’ development of anti-racist practice. I find that I made a series of moves and non-moves to construct and maintain white comfort zones that interfered with teacher candidate learning. I explore how I prioritised white safety and white emotionalities in ways that undermined my stated anti-racist instructional goals. I offer implications of this analysis for teacher education focused on disrupting racism and promoting justice.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher education
• anti-racism
• white comfort

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I refer to young people as ‘kids’ rather than ‘students’ because the latter is an institutional role that obscures their humanity. Further, I use ‘kids’ because I’ve always taught and prepared TCs to teach adolescents, and ‘kids’ is the word my former middle schoolers most often used to refer to themselves.

2. White hegemonic norms may operate whether white people are present or not. Cherry-McDaniel (2016), for example, has described settler teacher syndrome in which she observed white supremacist norms and values at work in a teacher education programme at an HBCU.