Counter-narrative as method: race,policy and research for teacher education

The authors argue for a research and conceptual agenda that complicates and disrupts common narratives in teacher education that have serious implications for race. Building on the pivotal work of legal scholar Derrick Bell and through a critical race theory (CRT) lens, this article challenges researchers to broaden and complexify traditional ideologies related to: (1) characteristics of ideal teachers recruited into the field; (2) the amount of time teachers should be expected to remain in the field through alternative programs such as Teach for America; (3)weight placed on teacher entrance examinations; (4)racial diversity of P-12 teachers; (5)racial and ethnic makeup of teacher educators; and (6)over-reliance on subject matter knowledge in teacher preparation to the exclusion of other aspects of learning to teach. The authors argue given the present racial divide in schools between teachers and students it is imperative for teacher education programs to complicate and intensify the utility of race in their recruitment, retention, and support of teacher education practices and policies. The authors offer a counter narrative framework and agenda to advance policy and research through a CRT lens.     

Surviving teacher education: a community cultural capital framework of persistence

In this article, we communicate the experiences of a bilingual/biracial Peruvian-Anglo European student teacher, Serina, enrolled in a ‘teacher education for diversity’ program. Although the majority of the 13 (mostly Anglo European) students in Serina’s cohort expressed satisfaction with the social justice focus of the program, Serina was frustrated by the mixed messages she received about teacher professionalism as both teaching for social change and as deference to power. Serina was often vocal in her critique and, as a result, endured and negotiated cumulative microaggressions throughout her teacher education program. Despite these challenges, she drew on her community cultural capital to become a credentialed science teacher in an underserved urban middle school. Serina’s experiences compel us to think about how teacher educators might better support pre-service Teachers of Color – particularly as we strive to more actively recruit Teachers of Color to our teacher education programs. Implications for ‘becoming’ more socially just teacher educators are also discussed.     

‘The world they’ve been born into’: Black male teachers on Blackness,masculinities and leadership

ABSTRACT

In this article, life history methodology and principles of counterstorytelling are used to examine moments when one Black male preservice social studies teacher and three Black male social studies teachers challenge Black masculinist visions of leadership, and moments when they seem complicit in perpetuating these visions. Findings indicate that these educators’ understandings of Blackness, maleness, and the pursuit of Black masculine recognition are fluid, developing and sometimes contradictory. We argue that while necessary across disciplines, interrogations of Black masculinity are uniquely imperative in social studies teacher education due to how assumptions about Blackness and maleness have shaped struggles for Black civic recognition.     

Teaching in color: a critical race theory in education analysis of the literature on preservice teachers of color and teacher education in the US

In this article I take seriously the call for recruiting and retaining more preservice teachers of color by critically considering some of the pressing challenges they might encounter in teacher preparation programs. I draw from critical race theory (CRT) in education to review the extant literature on preservice teachers of color and teacher education in the US. I excavate how the dominant, (dis)embodied and normalized culture of Whiteness, White privilege and White hegemony pervades contemporary teacher education, and presents a formidable challenge to the goal of preparing teachers (of color) to teach in a manner that is relevant, critical and humanizing while also socially and individually transformative. I conclude by envisioning how teacher education programs might address these challenges in such a way that more effectively meets the needs of preservice teachers.     

Advancing teacher preparation through ethnic studies: portraits of Filipino American self-identified male teachers

ABSTRACT

At once a political and cultural intervention, Ethnic Studies as a field sought to create an education whereby students’ knowledges and experiences were valued. While research demonstrating how Ethnic Studies affects students’ academic and social-emotional outcomes, the prowess of Ethnic Studies, as a site for teacher preparation remains under examined in empirical research. Drawing from portraiture, critical race and Ethnic Studies frameworks, I analyze in-depth interviews, focus groups, and artifacts with Filipino American self-identified male teachers. I work to make explicit how Ethnic Studies prepared these teachers in ways their formal teacher education did not. I conclude with recommendations for how teacher education steeped in Ethnic Studies supports culturally sustaining, critically conscious, and community responsive learning for students and teachers committed to justice.     

Making it relevant: how a black male teacher sustained professional relationships through culturally responsive discourse

What we know about the experiences of black teachers is limited, especially considering the vast amount of research conducted on and about black boys and young men. This article describes and analyzes how a black teacher at a suburban high school in the Midwestern United States negotiated professional relationships through culturally relevant discourse. Anthony Bell was the only black male teacher participating in a classroom discourse analysis study group at a diverse suburban high school. Throughout the course of the semester, Anthony’s stated objective for learning discourse analysis was to understand, structure, and facilitate more productive conversations with a struggling student teacher he was mentoring. Yet Anthony also used his discursive inquiry to “trouble the water” in his classroom and in the study group workshops. Participation in the study group provided Anthony with metalinguistic tools to critique his interactions with his students, student teacher, and professional peers. Anthony’s analyses of his own teaching, his student teacher’s work, the study group, and the school index themes in critical and critical race theory in education. As he became a teacher researcher, Anthony reported a greater sense of professional self-efficacy, eventually facilitating a successful workshop at a national teacher conference. Anthony’s case is an exemplar of the unique and critical role of black men who teach, as well as the imperative of practitioner research within the current climate in teacher education.     

Thinking through the flesh: a critical autoethnography of racial body politics in urban teacher education

Although the ubiquitous nature of whiteness has been scrutinized in research on teacher preparation in the United States, scholarship on how this concept impinges upon the field’s overall culture, as well as on pedagogy, is scarce. Thus, I perform a critical autoethnographic study on the relationships among whiteness, pedagogy, and urban teacher education. The inquiry threads Critical Race Theory and feminist theorizing on (Black) bodies, affects, and assemblages, and extends from extant literature illustrating that the dichotomous thinking characteristic of whiteness undergirds the disembodied approaches to teaching and learning prevalent in teacher education programs. This, I discover, leaves one White pre-service teacher ill-equipped to discern and disrupt the materialization of whiteness in an (inter)corporeal encounter with a Black youth in an urban classroom. Additionally, a pedagogy of disembodiment hinders this pre-service teacher from developing robust understandings of how latent within his lived-in, socio-historically situated White body is the potent potential to exacerbate the psychic pain that racism inflicts upon the racially othered children and youth who navigate urban classrooms under the scorching glare of whiteness. These findings underpin my call for urban teacher educators to embrace a pedagogy of embodiment in order to build pre-service teachers’ capacities to teach racially marginalized children and youth in ways that broaden the boundaries of the human beyond the scope of whiteness.     

Ideal liberal subjects and Muslim “Others”: liberal nationalism and the racialization of Muslim youth in a progressive Danish school

Drawing on an ethnographic case study of Muslim youth in a Danish lower secondary school, this article explores teacher talk about Muslim immigrant students and how teachers engaged liberal ideals of respect, individualism, and equality in ways that racialized immigrant students. I consider moments of vacillation in teacher talk to explore tensions between teacher’s desires to assimilate immigrant students to national norms of belonging and their desires to be perceived as inclusive and ‘open.’ In doing so, I ask how visions of liberal schooling impose ideas of what a ‘normal’ citizen should be and how teachers produce ‘ideal’ liberal subjects in their talk and in the everyday practices of schools. I argue that teachers engage the ideals of abstract liberalism to establish a colorblind discourse of non-racism. While educators described the school as an idealized space where students are encouraged to freely express themselves, to develop unique individual outlooks, it was clear that this vision of ‘openness’ did not include Muslim students’ attachments to religious and cultural identities.     

Border stories: using critical race and Latino critical theories to understand the experiences of Latino/a children

The number of school-age children of color in US schools is increasing, while the teaching force continues to be dominated by white teachers. According to the 2013 Digest of Education Statistics in the 2011–2012 school year, 81.9% of public school teachers were white, while the projected number of Hispanic students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools is expected to increase 33% between 2011 and 2022. In my experience, the issue of immigration is often ignored by the majority white teacher population, but, as I will share in this article, it is part of the lived experience of Latino children. I present my students’ border stories as discussed in relation to Latino children’s literature. I am using the words ‘border stories’ to represent the narratives my students shared about their families’ experiences crossing the US–Mexico border as well as what they felt about the societal discourse around ‘illegal immigrants.’ Critical race theory (CRT) and Latino critical theory (LatCrit) are used to frame these border stories to speak against the majoritarian story.     

Unpacking racial identities: the salience of ethnicity in Southeast Asian-American youth’s schooling experience

This article reconceptualizes white teachers’ notion of their Asian-American students’ racial identity. Forty urban Southeast Asian-American (SEAA) students and seven of their white European-American teachers were examined to determine how the students responded to the white teachers’ assumptions about their identity. This study provides an overview of the U.S. historical and political contexts that shape the positionality of Southeast Asian-American youth in the black–white racial discourse. It found that despite the fact that the teachers lumped the SEAA students into one category, the students highlighted the salience of ethnicity in their lives. One implication of this study is for teacher education programs to train new teacher candidates to move beyond simple racial categorization or race-blind approaches. Instead, teachers should be taught to acknowledge the importance of ethnicity to their students; to examine their own positionalities; and to incorporate more culturally relevant pedagogies into their instructional practices.     

Exploring Politicized Trust in a Racially Diverse Computer Science Classroom

ABSTRACT

Over the past decade, abroad range of policymakers, corporations, educators, and scholars in the United States have catapulted computer science (CS) education from the sidelines to the center of K-12 public education discourse. While calls for CS education are often framed in terms of national and economic competitiveness, there is a growing interest amongst equity scholars in curricular interventions that directly engage the ethical and sociopolitical issues surrounding CS and its role in society. Yet, less attention has been given to how sociocultural dynamics of classrooms play a mediating role in these spaces. Drawing on video data from an equity-oriented CS classroom, we argue aconflict that arose during design activities was rooted in alack of trust and solidarity between students. Ultimately, we make the case that in addition to curricular innovations, equity efforts in CS education must prioritize the cultivation of positive student relationships.     

Critical race pedagogy 2.0: lessons from Derrick Bell

In this article, we attempt to honor the rich legacy of Derrick Bell by detailing how exploring his specific contributions to critical race theory (CRT) provided lessons for developing and refining critical race pedagogy (CRP). We examine Bell’s racial realism thesis in connection with his pedagogical work. In doing so, we find that he was as committed to developing a ‘community-based’ law classroom as he was to articulating a strong critique of the law (Radice 1991). As part of his teaching philosophy, Bell wrote extensively about the value and importance of a student-centered humanist pedagogy (Bell 1980, 1982, 1997; Bell and Edmonds 1993; Delgado and Stefancic 2005). We draw parallels between Bell’s humanist student-centered pedagogy and the tenets of CRP as a way to expand the accessibility of this framework. Finally, as the ultimate homage to the work of Derrick Bell, we end with a futuristic mini-chronicle that takes place in a school district boardroom. The chronicle features a fictitious character who happens to be a distant relative of Bell’s. As we will discuss, we believe that the use of chronicles and storytelling hold the possibility for helping us to name extant challenges and illuminate further possibilities of CRP as a tool for battling globalized oppression at the intersection of race, class, gender and sexuality in education.     

Dealing with racist incidents: what do beginning teachers learn from schools?

This article focuses on how schools respond to racist incidents, and what new teachers learn from their involvement in those processes. It analyses four incidents involving the pupils of four beginning teachers. The article suggests that in each case, schools either partly or wholly avoided addressing the incident, and that this avoidance can be understood in terms of the colour and power evasive discourse, which is the dominant discourse on race in Western societies, and in most schools. One aspect of this discourse is that racism is defined on the basis of individual intentions, not outcomes. The article argues that it may be possible to adopt a more race cognisant approach with student teachers and staff in schools, building on nascent understandings of institutional racism, which shifts the focus to outcomes rather than intentions. The article demonstrates this approach, analysing each incident in terms of its consequences for the learning of the new teacher, and for the promotion of race equality in the school. While the small number of incidents may initially appear heartening, their negative impact on both teacher confidence and children’s understanding may be significant. The findings suggest that in the changing context of initial teacher education in England, approaches to supporting both schools and new teachers in this often misunderstood area are much needed, and that one way forward may be to give teachers time and support to critically reflect on and discuss their experiences.     

Using our voices,losing our bodies: Michael Brown,Trayvon Martin,and the spirit murders of Black male professors in the academy

Abstract

The recent deaths of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and other Black males have generated new civil rights urgencies in Black communities and spirited academic discourses in higher education regarding the educational and social plight of Black males in America. Connecting the deaths of Black males to our lived experiences in the academy, we use a text messaging performative writing style to demonstrate how Black males are not only gunned down in the streets of America by police but also are metaphorically gunned down in the academy. That is to say, white colleagues and students attempt to use what we call the bullet of rejection, the bullet of silencing, and the bullet of disrespect to destroy us and our academic agenda. We conclude with a call to action for teacher education programs as a way to deepen their understanding of the racialized experiences of Black males in the academy and Black males in America.     

Race still matters: preparing culturally relevant teachers

This qualitative study explores racial identity development of teacher candidates during a teacher preparation program dedicated to preparing teachers for diverse classrooms. Two black teacher candidates in the US demonstrate their racial identity development through critical reflections offered throughout the program. Findings suggest that teachers’ racial identities shaped their constructions of culturally relevant (CR) pedagogy. Implications for teacher education programs include considering how the development of CR pedagogues is influenced by teacher candidates’ racial identities and experiences.     

Reclaiming ourselves through Testimonio pedagogy: reflections on a curriculum design lab in teacher education

This article details one teacher preparation course centering Latin American Testimonio narratives of struggle/survival amid structural oppression for use in secondary curriculum. As our class of predominantly Latina/o students and two Latina instructors engaged Testimonio pedagogy, we fashioned a hopeful alternative to our own experiences of intergenerational oppression. While research indicates that the experiences and histories of pre-service Teachers of Color lend pedagogical strength and critical consciousness to teacher education, three Latina pre-service students highlight the ways in which Testimonio became more than a pedagogical approach. Testimonio’s collectivity, resistance, hope, and assertions of voice and dignity moved through them not as educators first but as (great-grand)daughters of oppressed though still-resilient People(s). Testimonio emboldened these Latina pre-service educators to recognize and validate their own inherited multiliteracies, (re)claim their connectedness to land, and articulate their visions for more equitable schooling. This work advances research into the essentiality of engaging race and ethnicity in K-12 and teacher education curriculum and pedagogy.     

Crossing borders in initial teacher education: mapping dispositions to diversity and inequity

In this article, we share a study focused on engaging teacher candidates with multiple forms of diversity and inequity to study emerging patterns of dispositions. Our primary concern is in understanding the processes through which societal inequity becomes reconstituted through teacher education. Our study attempts to deepen discourses of ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ in education, to consider the ways teacher candidates relate to broader systems of power and global and local inequities through their role as educators. Inspired by both decolonial and Western critical theories, we frame this as research that seeks ‘otherwise’ as we invite teacher candidates to ‘cross borders’ to what is ‘other’ to themselves. In this article, we share our study’s priorities, methods, methodological/theoretical framework, data analysis and findings. Our findings identify a significant gap between the priorities of social equity to which teacher candidates state they commit and the educational practices that would affirm those commitments.     

Using an adult development model to help explain pre-service teacher resistance to learning about race

This article shows the potential usefulness of applying Kegan’s constructive-developmental model to White teacher education students’ difficulties in understanding racial dynamics in US society. The data for this analysis come from a study examining the evolution of White teacher candidates’ understandings and practices related to diversity as they experienced different parts of an undergraduate teacher education program over a two-semester period. We describe the case of one of the students, Michelle, focusing on the contradiction between Michelle’s intense engagement, hard work and enjoyment in her required Foundations course and her simultaneous rejection of core ideas of the course. We show how Kegan’s model is helpful in explaining this contradiction and discuss implications for teacher educators.     

Tales from the playing field: black and minority ethnic students’ experiences of physical education teacher education

This article presents findings from recent research exploring black and minority ethnic (BME) students’ experiences of Physical Education teacher education (PETE) in England (Flintoff, 2008). Despite policy initiatives to increase the ethnic diversity of teacher education cohorts, BME students are under-represented in PETE, making up just 2.94% of the 2007/8 national cohort, the year in which this research was conducted. Drawing on in-depth interviews and questionnaires with 25 BME students in PETE, the study sought to contribute to our limited knowledge and understanding of racial and ethnic difference in PE, and to show how ‘race,’ ethnicity and gender are interwoven in individuals’ embodied, everyday experiences of learning how to teach. In the article, two narratives in the form of fictional stories are used to present the findings. I suggest that narratives can be useful for engaging with the experiences of those previously silenced or ignored within Physical Education (PE); they are also designed to provoke an emotional as well as an intellectual response in the reader. Given that teacher education is a place where we should be engaging students, emotionally and politically, to think deeply about teaching, education and social justice and their place within these, I suggest that such stories of difference might have a useful place within a critical PETE pedagogy.