![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
When teacher candidates learn to teach for equity and social justice during their practicum, they must learn to deal with the emotional conflict and tension that arise from fraught racial dynamics. Because limited research has focused on teacher candidates of Color during their practicum, little is known about how they agentively navigate conflicting emotions vis-à-vis the racial power dynamics at their field placement. Informed by critical race theory and its conceptualization of emotion work and capital, in this study, I examined what types of emotional tensions one Latinx and two African American teacher candidates experienced during their practicum. I drew on counter-narrative methodology and used written reflection, interview, and field note data for the analysis. The participants often drew on their community cultural wealth—the knowledge, skills, abilities, and contacts possessed and utilized by communities of Color to survive and resist macroscale and microscale forms of oppression—to navigate conflicting and contradictory emotional norms that governed how participants ought to behave and feel at their field placement. In this article, I argue for explicit attention to the power-laden emotion work of teacher candidates of Color in their access to and embodiment of community cultural wealth during teacher education.
Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to the three teacher candidates of Color for participating in this study and sharing their stories with me.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. I use the term intersectionally minoritized because issues of race and racism intersect with other social constructs, such as gender, sexuality, class, and languages (e.g., Maddamsetti, Citation2020c; Maddamsetti et al., Citation2018; Souto-Manning & Martell, Citation2019). I also capitalize the terms Color, White, and Whiteness to highlight their salience to ongoing processes of sociohistorical, cultural, and political marginalization and racialization (e.g., Kohli, Citation2014).
2. In this article, emotion work refers to the situated embodiment and activation of emotional management, expression, and experience within interactional emotional norms (e.g., expectations for what and how to feel; Hochschild, Citation1983) and social hierarchies of power (Ahmed, Citation2004; Evans, Citation2013; Ohito, Citation2016, Citation2019; Zembylas, Citation2011).
3. All names are pseudonyms.
4. Even though I adopted Yosso’s (Citation2005) CRT-fueled epistemic stance, I acknowledge that my problematic word choices, such as capital and assets, in describing TCCs’ persistence and strength are situated within the histories and ongoing projects of racist settler colonialism in the United States (Hinton, Citation2015; Patel, Citation2014).
5. For the purpose of this study, I focused on the racialized dimensions of emotional labor demanded of TCCs. However, I acknowledge that race and its intersections with various social positions collectively underpin “a psychological, physiological, and academic toll” (Pérez Huber & Solorzano, Citation2015, p. 298) on TCCs.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jihea Maddamsetti
Jihea Maddamsetti is an assistant professor of elementary education in the Department of Teaching & Learning at Old Dominion University. Her research interests include humanizing pedagogy and critical race theory in teacher education. She earned her PhD in curriculum instruction and teacher education at Michigan State University.