Second-wave white teacher identity studies: toward complexity and reflexivity in the racial conscientization of white teachers

Abstract

In this article, we introduce our special issue, ‘Second-Wave White Teacher Identity Studies: Toward Complexity and Reflexivity in the Racial Conscientization of White Teachers.’ We characterize white teacher identity studies as a developing field with important implications for education research and teacher education. Early work in this field focused on documenting, how white teachers denied and evaded the significance of race and white privilege in their work and lives. The articles in this special issue exemplify a second wave of white teacher identity studies which builds on and responds critically to this earlier work. Crucial concerns of this second-wave work include attending to the nuances and complexities of white racial identities, as well as examining the pedagogical, curricular, and institutional contexts within which these identities are taken up.

Keywords:

• White teachers
• white identity
• teacher education
• second-wave

Our special issue assumes an account or story about white teacher identity studies, a body of educational research that explores how to prepare and conscientize a predominantly white preservice and professional teaching force for teaching and learning across cultural differences in public schools. In this account – which James Jupp has been elaborating across a series of publications (see Jupp, 2013; Jupp, Berry, & Lensmire, 2016; Jupp & Slattery, 2010) – white teacher identity studies is seen as building on crucial foundations provided by African-American intellectual traditions, as well as more recent work in critical white studies, in order to respond to the demographic imperative and to confront the pervasive and enduring institutional and individual racism that characterizes policy and practice in US schools.

Early, first-wave work in this field focused on documenting and describing all the ways that white teachers denied and resisted the significance of race and white privilege in their work and lives. In other words, first-wave research emphasized the evasion of race by white people. For example, when summarizing her findings on a critical multicultural staff development project, Sleeter (1993) wrote:

Faced with the paradox of liking and helping students of color while explaining away the subordination of people of color and adhering to social structures that benefit themselves and their own children, the white teachers I studied responded in patterned ways. Many simply refused to ‘see’ color… Discussing race or multiculturalism meant discussing ‘them,’ not the social structure. (p. 168)

Similarly, McIntyre (1997) documented what she called the ‘white talk’ of her preservice teachers: talk that ‘serves to insulate white people from examining their/our individual and collective roles in the perpetuation of racism’ (p. 45) and that frustrates consciousness-raising efforts in teacher education.

Within our story of white teacher identity studies, this first wave of research culminates in 2003, with the publication in this journal of a special issue on whiteness and teacher education, edited by Marx (2003). This special issue contained not only oft-cited articles such as Thompson’s (2003) on dangerous re-investments in whiteness by white antiracists, but also an important critique of first-wave work by Cameron McCarthy (2003) that would foreshadow a series of such critiques in the coming years (see, for example, Asher, 2007; Lensmire & Snaza, 2010; Lowenstein, 2009). In his article, McCarthy (2003) worried that, within first-wave studies, whiteness was represented as a sort of ‘deposit, a stable cultural and biological sediment that separates whites from blacks and other minorities’ (p. 131). He argued that, instead, whiteness and race should be conceptualized as historically and socially variable, and that educational researchers should pay more attention to complexity within white racial identities and to the social contexts within which white people lived and worked. For McCarthy,

You cannot understand the social, cultural, or political behavior of any group by looking at their putative racial location to the exclusion of a more complex examination of their social biographies and the complex and constantly changing social context of the modern world in which we live. (p. 132)

The decade since Marx’s special issue has seen a proliferation of research and writing within white teacher identity studies, a second wave that has not only explored new aspects of the race-evasive identities of White preservice and professional teachers, but, more significantly, has (1) paid careful attention to the nuances and complexities of white race-visible identities and (2) provided detailed accounts of the actual pedagogies and curricula that form the complex contexts of white teachers’ identities (see Jupp et al., 2016, for a review of this research). In other words, the second wave of white teacher identity studies examines the identities of white teachers who, with more and less success, are attempting to come to grips with their own complexity and complicity in a white-supremacist system and seeking to learn how to fight against it. In addition, this second wave of white teacher identity studies emphasizes that our interpretation, as researchers, of white teachers’ identities requires careful consideration of the contexts of their meaning-making and action.

The five featured articles in this special issue exemplify second-wave white teacher identity studies and represent significant developments within this body of work. In the first article, Baudelaire Ulysse, Theodorea Regina Berry, and James C. Jupp draw on contributions from the history of race, cultural neuro-psychology, critical race feminism, and critical white studies, and demonstrate that it is possible to recognize and confront the realness and stubbornness of racism without losing sight of racial identity complexity. Their article not only embodies the sort of rich and potent interdisciplinarity that often characterizes second-wave work in white teacher identity studies, but also points to an underlying tension for scholars in this field. A commitment to describing and theorizing complexities and conflicts at the heart of white racial identities can make one seem soft on white racism, perhaps even an apologist for it. Ulysse, Berry, and Jupp argue, instead, that by creating more nuanced accounts of racial identities we might better be able to understand, intervene in, and combat racism.

Within this special issue’s set of research studies, the second article, by Yukari T. Amos, is a cautionary tale. If second-wave white teacher identity studies, as a field, has focused more attention on the complex identities of white preservice teachers, Amos’s work reminds us that, even as these white students are finding their way (or not), they are also in relationship with students of color in their teacher education classes. Amos’s study explores the experiences of four students of color in her multicultural education class. Specifically, she examines the strong negative impacts white students had on the experiences and learning of these students, and how the larger teacher education program’s structure did little to interrupt what Amos calls the ‘overwhelming silencing power of whiteness’. In addition to its function as a cautionary tale, Amos’s article reminds us that people of color have often been our most incisive theorists of whiteness – Amos’s article performs this fact both in her authorship and in her commitment to positioning students of color as key contributors to our understandings of whiteness and white racial identity.

In the third article, Ryan Crowley identifies two sorts of knowledge being developed by six white, race-conscious preservice teachers, as they learned about race and racism in an urban-focused teacher preparation program. The first he calls transgressive white racial knowledge, in which these students violated established boundaries of white racial discourse in order to make visible and criticize the normalization of whiteness and to counter the deficit models white people usually bring to their thinking about urban education. However, this transgressive knowledge was not the only one being pursued by these white students. Crowley also documents what he calls negotiated white racial knowledge, in which students expressed ambivalent feelings and stances toward race and struggled to come to grips with their own personal complicity with racial inequality.

Crowley’s article, appropriately enough, sits in the middle of the five articles in our special issue. His identification of multiple racial knowledges (rather than just one) that are at play and in tension within the identities and learning of these white preservice teachers exemplifies second-wave commitments to nuance and complexity. In addition (and as in Amos’s study and the fourth and fifth articles by Christina Berchini and Anne Mogush Mason), Crowley’s findings emerge from a close and reciprocal relationship with his work as a teacher educator. That is, a crucial characteristic and contribution of second-wave white teacher identity studies is that its representations of white teacher identity are fashioned in a way that already anticipate their consequences for future work with white preservice and professional teachers. As Jupp, Berry, and Lensmire (2016) put it: ‘These representations are already built to recycle back into practice’ (p. 44).

Another crucial characteristic of second-wave studies is a commitment to paying closer attention to the social contexts within which white teachers learn and work. Too often, first-wave studies seemed almost to assume that white preservice and professional teachers were making up their identities in a vacuum. The identities of white teachers were documented and criticized without any description of the pedagogies, curricula, and institutional contexts within which these identities arose.

In her article, Christina Berchini seeks to rectify this lack in past work through close attention to the social contexts and discourses that structured the racial identity and teaching practice of a white, novice high school English teacher. In particular, Berchini explores how a required unit on the Holocaust (required, she notes, not only for students, but also for this first-year teacher) ends up pitting this racially conscious white teacher against herself and her own critical orientations, as she attempts to live out the goals and activities of a unit created by senior colleagues in her department. Berchini wonders, correctly, why we would ever think we could understand the white racial identity this teacher performs in her classroom without accounting for the ways that this identity is shot through with powerful discourses and hierarchies in the school.

The final article, by Anne Mogush Mason, also features careful descriptions of context – in this case, the teacher education program and courses within which Mason and her students interact. An even more important quality of Mason’s work is its reflexivity. Across three vignettes describing her work with three white preservice teachers, Mason explores the complex dynamics and contextual factors that contribute to her students’ learning. Hers is a searching inquiry into how the lives of preservice teachers and teacher educators might be organized in order for there to be time and place for complicated conversations – conversations that break apart and break down what Mason calls diversity discourse and its code words; conversations that support white preservice teachers in their slow and messy processes of becoming racially conscious.

Mason’s study is a fitting conclusion to our set of articles for this special issue on second-wave white teacher identity studies. Her work is, at every moment, critically aware of how white teachers have been represented in past research and critically aware of the need for alternative representations, if our research is to make more powerful contributions to teaching and teacher education for social justice.

Finally, our special issue features short response articles from Natasha Flowers and Christine Sleeter. We are grateful to them for how they have strengthened and enriched this special issue with their careful, critical responses.

Notes on cotributors

JAMES C. JUPP has spent 18 years in majority ‘minority’ Title I schools teaching predominantly Latino and African-American students, and has spent the last decade on research on teaching and learning across race, class, language, and other differences. His main line of research focuses on White teachers’ racial conscientization and race-visible teaching practices in urban contexts.

TIMOTHY J. LENSMIRE has spent the last two and half decades studying and writing about the problems and possibilities of progressive and critical pedagogies. His current research seeks to contribute more nuanced descriptions and theorizations of Whiteness and White racial identities, as part of the broader project to mobilize White people for antiracist action.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.