The Challenges of Supporting Equity Literacy Skill Development in White Teacher Candidates: A Self-Study of Two White Field Instructors

Abstract

In classrooms, race-based bias, discrimination, and inequities result in unsafe and unproductive learning environments. Teacher educators are charged with helping preservice teachers develop racial literacy skills. This self-study explores the ways in which two White teacher educators recognize and attempt to manage challenges during field instruction of White teacher candidates. The teacher educator researchers explore their own Whiteness and use a racial lens to critique their practices. Post-lesson-debriefing conferences between teacher educators and their candidates are shared as illustrative vignettes to reveal instructors’ teaching challenges and failures. Implications for working with White teacher candidates, improvements to field instruction practices, student teaching curricula revisions, and programmatic changes are posited.

En las salas de clase, los sesgos de raza, discriminación e inequidades producen ambientes de aprendizaje improductivos y poco seguros. Los formadores de docentes tienen la responsabilidad de ayudar a sus estudiantes a desarrollar habilidades de alfabetización racial. Este self-study explora las maneras en que dos formadores blancos reconocen e intentan lidiar con desafíos que surgen durante las experiencias en terreno con estudiantes blancos. Los formadores investigadores exploran su propia “blancura” y utilizan un lente racial para criticar sus prácticas. Se utilizan extractos de las conversaciones de retroalimentación que se entablan con los estudiantes posterior a sus clases como viñetas que revelan los desafíos para la enseñanza de los formadores, así como también sus errores. Se plantean implicancias para el trabajo con estudiantes de pedagogía blancos, mejoras para las prácticas de enseñanza en terreno, revisiones del currículum de la formación docente y modificaciones programáticas.

Keywords:

• Self-study
• teacher education
• student teaching
• race

Palabras clave:

• Self-study
• formación docente
• enseñanza de estudiantes
• raza

Notes

1. We are aware that there are controversies over capitalizing the “b” and “w” in Black and White when referring to race. Some White supremacist outlets capitalize White and not Black. We, of course, do not want to align ourselves with White supremacist outlets. We struggled with what to do, since many of the cited work within in this paper also capitalize White and Black. We also thought about only capitalizing Black and not White, as a print-based way to push back on White supremacy. However, following the commentary of Perlman (2015) from the Columbia Journalism Review, we decided to capitalize both White and Black to draw particular attention to the construct of race, because the issue of race is central to this article.