White teachers talking race

Abstract

In light of the increasing racial diversity in American schools and the consistently homogenous teacher workforce in the United States, understanding the ways white teachers consider and attend to racial issues is of crucial importance to the educational landscape. This paper, based on a qualitative study, explores five white American teachers’ talk about race following their viewing of a documentary film about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. The paper adds to the already rich literature on white teachers’ talk about race by using three kinds of analytic tools: narrative analysis, discourse analysis, and psychoanalytically-informed notions of ignorance and resistance that complicate the existing literature’s exploration of white teachers’ avoidance of racial issues. The authors argue that white teachers have sophisticated knowledge about race, despite the common suppositions otherwise, and suggest attention be paid to the ways in which this knowledge is activated, ignored, and/or resisted. The paper concludes with implications for teacher education.

Keywords:

• teacher thinking and knowledge
• teacher education
• race

Notes

1. Though the hurricane’s final death toll is still in dispute, the number of Louisiana victims is estimated at 1,464. Approximately 275,000 homes were lost due to the hurricane and the ensuing flooding, ten times the number in any other US. natural disaster. (The Houston Chronicle, 2010, August 31). Retrieved from http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/7177268.html.

2. For a review and synopsis of the film, see http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/345875/When-the-Levees-Broke-A-Requiem-in-Four-Acts/overview. For a curriculum package to accompany the film, constructed at Teachers College, see www.teachingthelevees.org.

3. While there was much denial by the police that such an incident ever took place, a court decision on July 2006 convicted six police officers for these shootings in which two residents died and four others were wounded (New York Times, 2010, July 4).