White male teachers on difference: narratives of contact and tensions

Abstract

This research reflection explores a narrative pattern that emerged in participants’ interviews on student differences. In exploring this narrative pattern, this reflection reveals tensions between participants’ structural and deficit understandings of student differences of race, class, culture, and language. Framing participants’ understandings of structural and deficit thinking, this reflection articulates three discursive contexts relating to participants’ work. Articulating participants’ structural and deficit thinking within discursive contexts, this reflection seeks to re‐initiate the conversation on white teachers through increased attention to researcher positionality, discursive contexts, and research pedagogy.

Keywords:

• whiteness
• white teachers
• student differences
• narrative context

Notes

1. All participants’ names, with the exception of the researchers’, are pseudonyms throughout this piece. All place names are also pseudonyms.

2. Although many types of story and narrative research resist accusations of ‘formalism’, a systems understanding (Crotty 2003) of human science privileges no system as having special access claims on ontology, epistemology, and axiology. Instead, all systems work within limits and constraints, and as systems, each ‘type’ contains orthodoxies or formalisms, even narrative ones.