Critically-oriented pedagogical tact: learning about and through our compulsions as teacher educators

The work of critical teacher education centers on making sure future teachers learn to be critically-oriented practitioners. In this article, I assert that this sort of learning must first begin with the critical teacher educators themselves, and that much of the most fruitful learning manifests itself in the teacher educator’s compulsions. Drawing on a key finding from a phenomenological study that focused on cultivating pedagogical tact in teaching, I suggest that the ways in which I compulsively strategized at times limited what I could accomplish as a critically-oriented teacher educator; that each of us as teacher educators have compulsions that limit just as much as they make possible; and that our examinations of these compulsions are important for our students’ growth as critically-oriented practitioners.     

Second-wave white teacher identity studies: toward complexity and reflexivity in the racial conscientization of white teachers

Abstract

In this article, we introduce our special issue, ‘Second-Wave White Teacher Identity Studies: Toward Complexity and Reflexivity in the Racial Conscientization of White Teachers.’ We characterize white teacher identity studies as a developing field with important implications for education research and teacher education. Early work in this field focused on documenting, how white teachers denied and evaded the significance of race and white privilege in their work and lives. The articles in this special issue exemplify a second wave of white teacher identity studies which builds on and responds critically to this earlier work. Crucial concerns of this second-wave work include attending to the nuances and complexities of white racial identities, as well as examining the pedagogical, curricular, and institutional contexts within which these identities are taken up.     

Discourses of whiteness and blackness: an ethnographic study of three young children learning to be white

In blatant, but nuanced and often invisible ways, racism continues to exist globally, nationally and locally, implicating us all. The insidious nature of racism is deeply rooted in the lives of young children. In order to interrupt and reverse those practices, we must know how race is constructed during the early years. This study looked closely at the lives of three white children to identify and examine discourses in their worlds that unveiled how they learned to be raced.     

Education policy as an act of white supremacy: whiteness,critical race theory and education reform

The paper presents an empirical analysis of education policy in England that is informed by recent developments in US critical theory. In particular, I draw on ‘whiteness studies’ and the application of critical race theory (CRT). These perspectives offer a new and radical way of conceptualizing the role of racism in education. Although the US literature has paid little or no regard to issues outside North America, I argue that a similar understanding of racism (as a multifaceted, deeply embedded, often taken‐for‐granted aspect of power relations) lies at the heart of recent attempts to understand institutional racism in the UK. Having set out the conceptual terrain in the first half of the paper, I then apply this approach to recent changes in the English education system to reveal the central role accorded the defence (and extension) of race inequity. Finally, the paper touches on the question of racism and intentionality: although race inequity may not be a planned and deliberate goal of education policy neither is it accidental. The patterning of racial advantage and inequity is structured in domination and its continuation represents a form of tacit intentionality on the part of white powerholders and policy‐makers. It is in this sense that education policy is an act of white supremacy. Following others in the CRT tradition, therefore, the paper’s analysis concludes that the most dangerous form of ‘white supremacy’ is not the obvious and extreme fascistic posturing of small neo‐nazi groups, but rather the taken‐for‐granted routine privileging of white interests that goes unremarked in the political mainstream.     

Taking the risk to engage in race talk: professional development in elementary schools

Developing public education where every child has the right to learn requires that teachers pay attention to and engage in race talk – open discussion about race, social construction of race, and racism. While it is clear that children engage and reflect critically about these aspects of race even at a young age, teachers rarely engage in race talk with them. In this study, an African-American preservice teacher and a White teacher educator explore how African-American, Polynesian, and White in-service teachers, participating in Courageous Conversations professional development, address or avoid race talk in their elementary schools through the lens of Critical Race Theory (CRT) and what risks they take when they do. Findings, through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, demonstrate that (1) racism was observed and/or experienced by all teachers in elementary schools; (2) lived racial experiences impacted teachers’ approach to conversations about race; (3) creating an open space was crucial for race conversations; (4) Courageous Conversations provided a ‘new language’ to talk about race; and (5) administrative support facilitated more attention to race. Findings indicate the road to greater equity in schools requires more professional development about race talk in elementary schools.     

Intersections of race and sexuality in a teacher education course

This paper examines the ways that one group of US pre‐service teachers, enrolled in an alternate route teacher education class, expressed and challenged each other’s contradictory discourses about teaching for social justice. Particularly significant are the many ways that this group of students enacted subject positions around race and sexuality as various combinations of African American, White, gay, straight, lesbian, Christian, and as members of this class. Epiphanic moments about race and sexual orientation are examined to illuminate the ways that subject positions were contested, reified, or renegotiated in order to preserve a sense of community within the class. This research demonstrates the ways that social justice teacher education differentially positions people who have been historically marginalized and how it can at times reify a hierarchy of marginality.     

Audience Matters: Teaching issues of race and racism for a predominantly minority student body

Some of the literature about teaching issues of race and racism in classrooms has addressed matters of audience. Zeus Leonardo, for example, has argued that teachers should use the language of white domination, rather than white privilege, when teaching about race and racism because the former language presupposes a minority audience, while the latter addresses an imaginary or presupposed white one. However, there seems to be little discussion in the literature about teaching these issues to an audience that is in fact predominantly minority. Leonardo assumes that minority students need little convincing about the reality of white domination, but students of color are not a monolithic group. The paper addresses some specific challenges the author has faced teaching theories of white domination to a predominantly minority student audience in New York City. Leonardo is right that audience matters, but audience turns out to matter in ways that defy common assumptions.     

Reading an ethnology museum as pedagogical space: a multitext study

Ethnology museums have a troubled lineage as they are inheritors of a violent colonial legacy while being steeped in a positivist epistemology that seeks to order and categorize an otherwise disordered world. Educational research, similarly, is often predicated on realist knowledge principles as people are made objects to demonstrate their interactions to predict likely outcomes of various interventions. This article considers how an ethnology museum, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City, can be used as a learning site by student teachers as they experience reading a museum. Student teachers, having considered examples of postcolonial theory, use this scholarship to think through and critically read AMNH. The inquiry into how student teachers read AMNH as a pedagogical space is reframed, however, by multitext interjections offered by participants themselves. The study, then, is oriented around two principal areas: how student teachers can read an ethnology museum critically and how multitexts may work to address representational problems inherent in social science research, such as education.     

The Burden of Teaching Teachers: Memoirs of Race Discourse in Teacher Education

This paper presents the views and educational experiences of two African American female scholars, from a critical race and black feminist theorist perspective, teaching in the area of social justice to predominantly white female pre-service teachers. These testimonies reveal the struggles encountered by these scholars when engaging students in a historical and contemporary examination of race, privilege, and systemic inequalities. The objectives of this paper are to expand on the literary dialogue of such resistance and attempt to bring awareness into the arenas that need the most exposure, i.e. departmental, faculty, and tenure review meetings. It is commonly written and verbalized that institutions are interested in attracting and retaining faculty of color. We argue that the ways we are supported must shift. This problem of student resistance, who they resist and why, should become open for discussion on college campuses across the nation. Dawn G. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration and Policy at Howard University. Venus Evans-Winters is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University.     

化学研究性学习实施策略研究

在化学学科教学中开展研究性学习,教师应通过创设生动的问题情境,提高学生分析和解决问题的能力;针对不同的学习内容和教学进度采取不同的学习形式,使学生主动地进入积极思考、努力实践的理想境界;教学过程要发扬民主、创设民主和谐的教学氛围,使学生自觉参与到学习活动中去;同时,教师要帮助学生建立自信,要教会学生怎样学习、怎样思考、帮助学生养成严谨求实的科学态度和不断追求、勇于探究的进取精神;在实施过程中,教师应以极大的热情关注学生的学习过程,努力探索建立科学的评价方式.     

'I Might as Well Give Up': Self-esteem and mature students' feelings about feedback on assignments

Lecturers working with adult students balance the need to provide feedback and assess students' work with a concern to protect vulnerable students. This article is based on a small-scale quantitative research project that looked at Access students' responses to feedback on assignments. All students found the first assignment problematic, but thereafter great variations were found, which related to varying levels of self-esteem. Students varied in their attitudes to receiving feedback, their perceptions of the messages they were receiving and whether it was important to them that they receive positive comments. They also differed in the extent of the impact of the feedback, for some students, it was 'only work'; for others, their whole sense of self was at stake.     

教师工作专业化:理念与行动

教师工作专业化是当前世界师范教育改革和发展中所面临的核心问题。为保证教师具有较高的专业认同感、专业自主性和持续的专业成长 ,需构建教师专业知识基础、发展专业技能和专业情感。我国高等师范教育 ,应以专业化为导向 ,通过将科研引入教学过程、整合课程结构和强化实习工作等举措来深化教学改革     

International graduate students' difficulties: graduate classes as a community of practices

This study explores the factors that cause international graduate students to struggle and these students' ways of dealing with such problems in light of sociocultural theory, which views learning as a social and cultural act. The findings show that graduate classes function as communities of practices in which classmates and professors mutually engage with each other, share a repertoire and engage in joint enterprises. The practices were not always transparent to international students, which became a source of difficulty and often led them to feel excluded. Peripheral participation comprised a significant part of some students' learning process and identity formation, but it allowed them to participate in course-related activities as fully as they felt comfortable doing. This study suggests a need for more sensitive and dialogical efforts by educators in higher education to provide better learning environments for international learners.     

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

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.     

Translocal assemblage and the practice of alternative media toward racial justice: a pedagogical perspective

There is a growing cultural and social movement among youth who draw on spoken word poetry and documentary style videos to participate in the new media landscape. Many multimedia poems have appeared on social media sites such as YouTube and Vimeo as a form of participatory politics. In this article, the author takes up a discussion of translocal practices and ‘translocal assemblage’ wherein individuals and groups engage in the exchange of ideas across space and time. One example is a multimedia poem about the underrepresentation and invisibility of racialized minority students at a major American university. This viral multimedia poem remixed elsewhere based on students’ experiences at another university demonstrates not only the potential of translocal assemblage in participatory politics but also the practice of alternative media in the movement toward racial justice. That is, young people are finding civic resources and building on each other’s work to challenge the social order. Pedagogically, the author built on the theoretical underpinning of translocal assemblage to shape work with students in the college classroom who, in turn, produced other genres of alternative media. The resultant video documentaries about locally unjust social arrangements make evident the subtle nature of cultural flows that have direct consequences for critical studies in education.     

Working together within a system: educative mentoring and novice teacher learning

Using a framework of activity theory, I follow one mentor/student teacher pair through a yearlong student teaching experience, investigating their interactions around the practice of educative co-planning. Evidence from multiple data sources collected over the course of one year is analyzed to understand the role co-planning played in the mentor/student teacher relationship, the experience of being a mentor, and in the development of the student teacher’s practices. Findings reveal the mentor and student teacher used the educative practice of co-planning to productively mediate tensions and navigate their relationship.     

Synergistic scaffolds as a means to support preservice teacher learning

This study investigates the role of synergistic scaffolds in supporting preservice teachers’ knowledge of self-as-teacher. Data include preservice teacher papers written before and after the introduction of scaffolds, surveys, and interviews. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to analyze differences in the quality of the papers, the relationship between the scaffolds and the preservice teachers’ revisions, and the preservice teachers’ perceptions of which scaffolds best supported their learning. We conclude that carefully designed synergistic scaffolds can support preservice teachers in their exploration of self-as-teacher. Implications of our findings for teacher education and suggested areas for further research and development are discussed.     

Diversity as a natural occurrence: an enrichment strategy of peer learning

Business educators are concerned with integrating diversity-related topics and seek methods by which to teach them. This paper suggests that as classes become more heterogeneous, the opportunity to examine diverse perspectives and experiences naturally arises in the course of class assignments and activities. The differential experiences of majorities and minorities are revealed when students discuss and write about their own experiences related to the content of various business courses. The issues of self and group identity and perceptions of others emerge in the context of small group discussions when students share their experiences as recorded in learning logs, personal cases, research assignments, and typical class discussions. The opportunity for community learning in heterogeneous groups provides a forum for diverse perspectives and experiences to be shared. Students and professors learn about different perceptions and reactions to personal and current events as well as their own perspectives, creating a culture of inclusion in the class. Implications and suggestions for a wider application of our methods to a global context are also offered.     

实习支教,置换培训：一种双赢的教师教育模式

师范生实习支教,置换教师培训是通过组织高师院校师范生到农村中小学进行教育实习,在一定时期内顶替现职农村学校教师的岗位,被置换出的农村教师参加由高师院校组织的短期脱产培训。这是一种双赢的教学和培训模式,它有效提高了师范生的教学技能,切实解决农村教师队伍素质不高这一制约农村基础教育发展的根本问题。文章从当前教育实习和教师培训中存在的问题入手,讨论＂实习支教,置换培训＂的实践价值并对其有效实施提出了相关的建议。