Getting read as rad: Performances of “nice white lady” and tensions in teaching about white supremacy

Abstract

Two white women professors who teach courses on diversity in education in different social, political, and geographical contexts analyze our performances of our experiences with students. We individually and collaboratively explore how our students read us in gendered and racialized ways while we enacted anti-racist pedagogies in our white, female bodies. We draw on performance studies and our shared history with collective memory work to analyze our experiences, with the aim of offering tools for analysis that go beyond the personal to include recognizing the ways cultural scripts live in our bodies, and working to understand, disrupt, and rewrite them.

Notes

1 In the teaching narratives described here, Colleen's context is a small private college in an urban community in Minnesota, and Erin's context is a mid-size public university in rural Maryland.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Colleen H. Clements

Colleen H. Clements, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Dr. Clements’ research focuses on social class and racialized identity, critical foundations in education, and anti-racist pedagogy. Her scholarly work primarily concerns a critical examination of idealized white femininity as a racialized identity in white, hetero-normative, patriarchal U.S. society and its relation to teaching in both formal and informal learning spaces. In much of her work, she draws on her background in theater, using performance studies and arts-based methodologies in her inquiry to examine the cultural and social role of dominant and counter-narratives in shaping human experience. Her teaching interests are in the areas of social class and education, critical social foundations, and anti-racist pedagogy and leadership. Her most recent research is centered on the question how to create inclusive curricula and pedagogical practices for anti-racist pedagogies to engage multiple and varying racialized identities in teacher education programs. Twitter: @colleenhclem

Erin Stutelberg

Erin Stutelberg, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Secondary and Physical Education at Salisbury University. At SU she coordinates, teaches, and supervises in the undergraduate and MAT secondary English education program. Prior to her career in higher education, Dr. Stutelberg taught middle and high school English. She earned her Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction: Critical Literacy and English Education, from the University of Minnesota in 2016. Her scholarship engages sociocultural theories of literacy and feminist and critical race theories to study literacy practices and teacher identity. Her dissertation research took up feminist and collective research methodologies to explore beginning teachers’ memories of race, gender, embodiment, and identity in the classroom. Twitter: @stutelbe