Wrestling with problematics of whiteness in teacher education

Teacher education programs in countries where minoritized students¹ experience systematic and persistent racial discrimination face tension between (1) producing teachers equipped to reverse discrimination in classrooms and schools, especially those attended by minoritized students, and (2) helping everyone considering teaching to develop their knowledge of how they can address racial discrimination, even if most teacher candidates take only baby steps. This tension, not limited to the United States (see e.g. Howard, 2014; Penetito, 2010), has run through most of my career as a teacher educator.

On the one hand, many who strongly critique interpreting minoritized students through a deficit paradigm hesitate to apply that same paradigm to their own White teacher candidates. Of course our students are capable of learning! Further, because White teacher candidates far outnumber those from minoritized groups, it is necessary to prepare them as best possible to teach everyone. Yet, helping White teacher candidates to confront racism takes up so much pedagogical and scholarly energy that, while writing a research review 15 years ago, I found myself dismayed by the ‘overwhelming presence of whiteness in teacher education’ (Sleeter, 2001). In other words, by taking seriously the teach-ability of everyone, including the ability of White people to learn to confront racism, teacher education may well produce better teachers, but at a cost.

The cost is producing too few teachers who will consistently support their minoritized students and persistently address racism because doing so would require doing teacher education differently (Sleeter, Neal, & Kumashiro, 2014). We know from case studies what such teaching looks like. For example, Ladson-Billings (1995) studied eight teachers nominated as highly successful with African-American students, Irizarry and Raible (2011) studied 10 nominated as highly successful with Latino students, and Jupp (2013) studied nine highly committed White male teachers of inner-city students. All three studies found that the teachers, both White and of color, explicitly acknowledged culture and race, saw themselves as members of students’ communities, and linked teaching with students’ community-based knowledge. The teachers’ primary source of learning was extended engagement with the local community, particularly relationships they built with the students and their families. Through such engagement and dialog, they became familiar with local knowledge and knowledge resources, which they regularly brought into the classroom. They persistently demanded and supported students to reach high academic expectations. Seeing themselves professionally as curriculum-makers, they made their curriculum relevant to their students. They further acknowledged racism in students’ lives, helping them learn to critique and navigate its manifestations.

Across these three studies, only about half of the teachers were White. Producing more such teachers requires that teacher education programs collaborate with communities of color to recruit and select teacher candidates, engage teacher candidates with communities as well as schools, and engage excellent teachers of minoritized students as teacher educators – things teacher education generally does to only a limited extent.

One can view this special issue as attempting to bridge the tension between these two framings by asking how both can be addressed when it comes to White teacher candidates. As Ulysse, Berry, and Jupp ask, how can we de-essentialize whiteness to identify a generative politics of place on race that prompts meaningful growth and change? This issue offers snapshots of whiteness in the teacher education classroom, impacts of whiteness on students of color, portraits of White teacher candidates grappling with racism, exploration of contexts that impact on White teachers’ learning and teaching, and analyses of White identities that probe entry points for racial learning.

Yukari Takamoto Amos shows how White teacher candidates enacted whiteness (such as joking about racist remarks, and avoiding learning by claiming to already understand another culture) in a class taught by a professor of color, and how these enactments silenced the few teacher candidates of color in the class who worried about consequences of confronting White peers not only in class, but also later on in schools where they might be hired. For candidates of color, this prevalent whiteness was agonizing, even terrorizing. Amos’s portrait of White teacher candidate behavior is not new (Haviland, 2008; McIntyre, 1997), nor is her rendering of its painful and silencing impact on teacher candidates of color (e.g. Burant, 1999). Given the many studies of whiteness in teacher education extending back at least 20 years, teacher educators cannot claim ignorance about White candidates collectively victimizing peers (and faculty) of color. Then why is such victimization allowed to continue, and how will it affect children of color when White teacher candidates like these become their teachers? Amos places these questions squarely on the table.

Christina Berchini asks why an early-career White teacher, who had been developing a racial consciousness and culturally competent teaching practices, adhered to a curriculum that screened out discussion of racism, consequently affirming her White students while shutting down her Black students? This fascinating, detailed case study illustrates the fluidity and complexity of racial identity, highlighting the power of context to shape or reshape it. Yet, while I appreciate attention to context and especially how curriculum structures particular ways of seeing, I was pained as the teacher shut down Black students’ attempts to link the oppression of Jews during the Holocaust with ongoing racial oppression of African-Americans today. The teacher faced an ethical dilemma: adhere to a mandated curriculum (with awareness of her vulnerability as first-year teacher), or support attempts by students of color to engage with it. Despite her burgeoning awareness of racism, context pushed her to align her behavior with whiteness. But not every teacher would have allowed that to happen, which raises the question: If institutional racism permeates schools including the curriculum, how can teacher educators recruit, prepare, and support those who will resist it?

Ryan Crowley directs our attention to the circuitous learning of White teacher candidates who are committed to engaging with race and racism. These are not the ‘resisters’ in Amos’ study, but rather those who are making an effort to become the kind of teacher who will push back against racism in schools. Crowley astutely argues that tensions inherent in White people’s knowledge about race and racism provide openings for learning. His six case studies show two competing themes in the teachers’ racial knowledge: transgressive knowledge that pushes beyond how White people commonly view race, mainly at an intellectual level, and negotiated racial knowledge that expresses White teachers’ emotional concerns about their own safety and what they should do. (These themes resonate with the conflict in Berchini’s study.) I appreciate Crowley’s insistence that White people’s knowledge about race has inherent tensions that can provide a generative space for learning. At the same time, since the study took place within the teacher education program, we don’t know how the teacher candidates actually approached their practice in the classroom. Might their emotional concerns for their own safety lead them to acquiesce to whiteness? Or does their intellectual understanding of racism help them recognize and confront it? What kind of support would enable that to happen? This would be very important to know.

Ann Mogush Mason lucidly situates multicultural education coursework within the larger project of dismantling racism, and racial learning within the larger constellation of teacher candidates’ life experiences, asking what it is reasonable to expect of such coursework. Her three case studies show how interaction between coursework and other experiences (such as a powerful extracurricular experience, a prior life experience, and time to process new learning) prompted growth in White racial consciousness. As I read her article, I regarded her students, who are about 95% White, as fortunate to have her as a professor because not only of the depth of her knowledge and commitment, but also the care she invests in working with them. By highlighting limitations of what we do in our courses, however, her article poses a difficult question: To what extent can teacher education coursework transform White teacher candidates’ perspectives about race, given the power of experiential learning that may (or may not) complement that coursework? How can we as teacher educators attune ourselves and our pedagogy to draw on students’ larger constellations of experiences?

Finally, Baudelaire Ulysse, Theodorea Regina Berry, and James C. Jupp name the ‘elephant’ than runs through this special issue: the recognition that White educators can do race work, the fact that Whites can genuinely advocate for social justice without necessarily dismantling the power of our own place of privilege, and the search for generative spaces that enable White people to learn to confront white power positioning. Their incisive theoretical analysis walks the tension between the reality of racism and racial power, and the possibility of change. The authors argue that the present moments we all inhabit are anchored in a historical construction of racism that cannot be simply wished away. Yet, the self is highly complex. As Critical Black Feminists maintain, we have multiple positions from which to know and act, and as ‘second-wave’ Critical Whiteness Studies² show, White identities are not monolithic, but rather laced with spaces for learning, such as those made visible by Berchini, Crowley, and Mason. The authors challenge us to reject the assumption of a fixed White identity and to seek out those spaces for learning, without forgetting the racialized places we continue to inhabit.

Indeed, such work has consumed a good part of my own professional career both as a scholar and as a teacher educator. Yet, increasingly I am plagued by the urgency of locating, supporting, producing many more teachers like those described by Ladson-Billings (1995), Irizarry and Raible (2011), Jupp (2013) and Milner (2010) because these are the teachers minoritized students need – students who now make up majorities across the US. Certainly, some of these teachers will be White people who grapple with race from a racialized location of power and privilege that they recognize. But the energy of teacher educators must also be directed toward the work of reconfiguring teacher education in a way that invites and supports a population of candidates that mirrors the demographics of children and youth in the schools.

I see the project of educating racially aware White people as related to but not identical with certifying teachers who K-12 students need. White people certainly should be educated about racism; indeed, everyone should be so educated. But teacher educators’ effort to do so does not necessarily produce enough teachers like those in the studies by Ladson-Billings (1995), Irizarry and Raible’s (2011), and Jupp (2013). Programmatically, I believe that teacher education needs to shift its center of gravity from concentrating mainly on preparing candidates who come to programs as they operate now, and toward collaboration with communities of color to rework teacher education itself. Programs should become far more selective in admitting White teacher candidates, and to the extent possible, educate those who are admitted in racially diverse rather than predominantly White cohorts.

This special issue suggests directions for future research. First, while I embrace the value of focusing on how White teacher candidates engage with race and racism, I am concerned that we lack direction for working with those who persistently resist. Our research effectively documents what White resistance looks like, as well as racial learning involving what may well be a minority of White people. Even if teacher education becomes far more selective in admitting White teacher candidates, educators still need guidance in how the White population at large might begin to break through the resistance so commonly documented in the research.

Second, with the exception of Mason’s article, the potential power of learning contexts outside teacher education was not directly addressed in this special issue, although authors mention limitations of grappling with race and racism in the predominantly White context of teacher education. Cross-cultural community-based experiences were crucial to my own learning, a powerful teaching venue I used as a teacher educator, and a very promising venue in the research on teacher education (see e.g. McDonald, Bowman, & Brayko, 2013; Seidl, 2007). We need more research investigating the impact of community-based learning embedded in teacher education on the abilities of teacher candidates – both White and of color – to engage with and teach people who are racially and culturally different from themselves.

Third, we need research studies that follow teacher candidates into the classroom after they are certified. Most research in teacher education does not do this (Sleeter, 2014). Berchini’s study should caution us about claims based on research involving White teacher candidate growth while in their certification programs. When they leave and begin to work with students in schools, what happens? How can the racial learning begun in teacher education be supported through induction and on through a teacher’s career? As the group White Women against Racism pointed out, working against racism is a lifelong project, partly because racism is so deeply embedded in White people and also because of White people’s ongoing racialized experiences every day (Case, 2012).

In short, the insightful articles in this special issue offer rich insights and questions for teacher education programs, faculty members in those programs, and researchers. The problematics of whiteness will not simply disappear. I applaud work such as this that helps us wrestle with it more vigilantly.

Christine Sleeter
California State University, Monterey Bay, USA

Notes

1. As Shields, Bishop, and Mazawi (2005) explain, the term ‘minoritized’ refers to those who, while not necessarily in the numerical minority, are ascribed characteristics of a minority and treated as if their position and perspective is of less worth. I use the term here because the problem this special issue addresses is relevant in many parts of the world where power disparities exist across racial/ethnic groups.

2. I put ‘second-wave’ in quotation marks because I see the matter more as a question of research emphasis than of when the research was produced.