The Role of Teacher Education Programs in Developing Teacher Candidates’ Antiracist Stance on Teaching

ABSTRACT

This article presents an argument that although teacher education programs may aim to prepare teachers to be antiracist agents of change, they often fall short of doing so and that investigations of why can provide essential insights for teacher education. The authors use the critique of liberalism tenet of critical race theory to analyze three teacher candidates’ experiences learning to teach across three different types of teacher preparation programs and discuss the implications for preparing teachers to be antiracist agents of change. The authors then propose guiding principles for developing teacher candidates’ antiracist stance on teaching by situating race and justice in relation to the task of teaching, offering sufficient opportunities to learn about schools and communities as socio-historical and cultural settings, and leveraging pre-teacher education identities for antiracist teaching.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2023.2248468

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Original texts use the term color blindness, however CRT scholars have more recently shifted to the usage of race evasiveness. This updated term reframes the deficit and ableist language for a more accurate depiction of how racism operates. To be race evasive describes the avoidance of race or racism as an action as opposed to a person’s dis/ability, trait, or condition. This reframing suggests, then, that a person can choose to stop evading race (Annamma et al., 2017).

2. Participants’ names, course titles, cities, and the names of institutions are pseudonyms except Teach For America because Sean’s data is from a study in which the organization is named.

3. The conflation of rural with an absence of diversity is a common and erroneous view often expressed in rural TEPs (Miretzky & Stevens, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tanya Maloney

Tanya Maloney is an associate professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Montclair State University and co-director of the Transformative Education Network, a collection of grantfunded teacher education programs. Her research considers issues of race, racism, and justice in teacher education, leadership education, and mathematics education.

Douglas B. Larkin

Douglas B. Larkin is a professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Montclair State University. His research involves teacher preparation, culturally relevant science teaching, and science teacher retention, and is currently the principal investigator on two National Science Foundation grants.

Nushrat Hoque

Nushrat J. Hoque is a doctoral student at Penn State University. She is a former K-12 public-school teacher in New Jersey and has taught undergraduate courses in Science Education and Outreach.