Multiple pathways to whiteness: white teachers’ unsteady racial identities

Abstract

Teacher education programs in the US, recognizing the mismatch that exists in preschool provision between mostly white teachers and a very diverse intake of young children, have begun to explore ways of raising racial awareness among pre-service teachers, with the aim of improving non-white children’s classroom experiences and outcomes. This paper analyzes 60 critical memoirs written by students about their own awareness of their identity to demonstrate the intersectionality of teacher identity, and in particular the impact of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and religion on the processes whereby white students acquire a successful white teacher identity. In doing so, it highlights the ways white pre-service teachers who hope to work with young children imagine or realize their whiteness as it intersects with other aspects of their identities.

Keywords:

• Teacher education
• white teacher identity
• young children

Acknowledgements

I want to acknowledge one of my greatest mentors, Timothy Lensmire, for helping me imagine new ways to consider the racial identifications of white women.

Notes

1. All participants in the study were given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. I received approval to use the data for this research study on 22 January 2015 from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s University Institutional Review Board (IRB). According to the IRB protocol, these data – original work collected from former students –.are considered to be exempt as archival data under category 4 (45 DFR 46.101).

2. An urban emergent district has characteristics of a large city but has less than one million residents (Milner 2012).

3. It is important to note that one student could have written two narratives within the same memoir that fell into different categories for analysis. For example, Lauren described in one narrative how she was generally successfully white because of her middle-class background, but that she experienced conflicts related to her whiteness as a military child who had lived oversees and spoke German as her primary language when entering public schools in the United States. Learning to be white meant abandoning her German language and speaking ‘perfect’ American English which she felt she achieved one day as she perfectly recited The Pledge of Allegiance for her entire school.