Beyond discomfort? Equity coaching to disrupt whiteness

ABSTRACT

White discourse is a discourse that functions to support white supremacy. Based on an ethnographic study in a U.S. elementary school, this article analyses how white teachers use appeals to discomfort as a form of white discourse to resist school-based racial equity work. It also examines how equity coaching – an approach to professional development rooted in critical race theory – can be used to augment the voices of teachers of colour, reframe narratives of discomfort, and disrupt the power of white discourse.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical race theory (CRT)
• white discourse
• equity coaching
• counternarrative
• dialogic performance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use the first person to indicate my own complicity, as a white person, in whiteness. However, I maintain the third person in quotes and paraphrases.

2. All names other than that of the author are pseudonyms.

3. I was previously a teacher in the district and had conducted racial equity trainings at various schools in the region since 2007.

4. I share specific examples of how we used these concepts to analyse daily practices in another piece (Blaisdell 2017). Here I focus on how CRT specifically helped us resist white discourse.