Examining whiteness as an obstacle to positively approaching immigrant families in US early childhood educational settings

Abstract

This article examines whiteness at the intersection of immigration and early childhood education as it was made visible during interviews with 50 preschool teachers in five US cities as part of the Children Crossing Borders (CCB) study. Findings show whiteness acting not only as a construct of privilege but also as an idea that manifests itself in ways that affect schooling, even in early educational settings like preschool. Whiteness is made visible through a combination of multivocal ethnographic methodology, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and post-structural analytical tools all used within a comparative framework to understand whiteness from the perspective of white teachers responding to newly arrived immigrant families and subsequently from the counterexamples of immigrant teachers working in cities with longer histories of immigration. Findings suggest that the logic of whiteness used to respond to immigrant families includes blaming them, distancing from them and charging them with responsibility to change while at the same time being grateful for their presence in the school. Whiteness was found to prevent teachers from responding in engaged and positive ways to immigrant families and the manifestations of whiteness revealed by the white teachers in this study mirror larger societal tensions around immigration and race.

Keywords:

• whiteness
• immigrant teachers
• early childhood education
• young children of immigrants
• multivocal ethnography