Knowing we are White: narrative as critical praxis

A critical concern in preparing teachers for urban schools is helping them make sense of race, identity and racism in schools. Teacher education programs struggle with how to address these issues in classes of primarily White students. Through a document analysis, the present study highlights?how teacher educators can use narrative – particularly autobiographies – to help understand the racial and cultural consciousness of White teachers. Narrative construction?provides a method to highlight how White teachers understand their identities and how Whiteness functions in society. Places of resistance, and stories yet untold, are also explored as a teacher educator looks to refine her own practice.     

Student and teacher negotiations of racial identity in an Afro‐Ecuadorian region

In this article, using data collected primarily through interviews and observations the researcher explores how students and teachers of African descent at the Jaime Hurtado Academy understand and interpret race and racism in the city and province of Esmeraldas, which is the only region of the country where Afro‐Ecuadorians comprise the largest proportion of the population. The findings reveal that students often distanced themselves from their Blackness through racial mixture, and that parents played a critical socializing role in their students’ negotiations of racial identity. Additionally, it was found that teachers universally embraced their Blackness, although they simultaneously acknowledged their mixed racial ancestry. These findings contest literate understandings of race and ideological attempts by elites to exclude Afro‐Ecuadorians within the dominant discourse of national identity.     

Silence speaks: Whiteness revealed in the absence of voice

In this hybrid article, the author attempts to weave together the theoretical implications of whiteness theory and a theorizing of silence on teacher education practices, research with her own students that explored these implications, and reflections on her own pedagogical practices and location as a white teacher educator teaching about race and diversity. In teacher education courses intended to explore issues regarding the implications of diversity in schools, silence is often encountered in work with white students who have not examined their identity in the context of a racial discourse. This article explores the nature and intent of these racially inhabited silences that emerged in two teacher education courses comprised predominately of white preservice teachers.     

“I think at first glance people would not expect me to be interested in science”: Exploring the racialized science experiences of high school students of color

The underrepresentation of high school students of color in advanced science courses and the need to increase racial diversity in science fields is well documented. The persistence of racial disparities in science suggests that factors influencing participation include and extend beyond those currently being explored. This study explores how high school students of color make sense of racialized narratives about who does and can do science in circulation in society and their lives, and how this shapes their positioning and identity construction in science. Using interviews and surveys this study examines youths' accounts of their racialized science experiences, including how they envision scientists, make sense of racial disparities in the science community, and navigate their positioning in science. In addition, this study examines how youths' sense of their science ability, as a salient aspect of science identity, shapes the forms of navigation accessible to them, and thus, the futures they imagine in science. By sharing the complexity of students' sense making and the tensions they express as they negotiate their personal goals, science experiences, and messages they receive from racialized narratives, findings highlight the disproportionate work youth of color in this study do, as well as their resilience to navigate racialized narratives in science. This research sheds light on the experiences of high school students of color at a time in their schooling when they are making decisions about who they can become and the possible futures available to them. Implications from this study promote centering race within a critical, sociocultural, and ecological context when exploring identity construction for youth of color in science. Furthermore, findings underscore the need to create learning experiences that provide opportunities for youth of color to author narratives for their own possibilities of belonging and becoming in science in order to support inclusive pathways.     

The tyranny of surveillance: male teachers and the policing of masculinities in a single sex school

This paper draws on research into male teachers in one single sex high school in the Australian context to highlight how issues of masculinity impact on their pedagogical practices and relationships with boys. The study is situated within the broader international field of research on male teachers, masculinities and schooling in Australia, the UK and the US and provides further knowledge about the gendered dimensions of male teachers’ pedagogical practices in secondary schools. The authors argue for the urgent need to interrogate the impact of masculinities in male teachers’ lives at school, given the call for more male role models to ameliorate the supposed feminizing and emasculating influences of schools on boys’ lives. A particular Foucauldian perspective, which draws on surveillance and its key role in practices of gender subjectification, is used to provide insight into how two male teachers learn to police their masculinities and to fashion pedagogical practices under the normalizing gaze of their male students.     

Identity Politics and the Queering of Art Education: Inclusion and the Confessional Route to Salvation

In this article I discuss the relationship between theories of identity and making practices in secondary art and design. Of particular interest is the way students are invited to explore identities in relation to a sense of self and the extent to which this is informed by schools' concern to make diversity visible through multicultural celebration, thus framing and possibly limiting exploration. It is notable that non‐heternormative sexual identities remain largely invisible in the official curriculum and I examine the disjunction between this absence and their hypervisibilty in the mass media and its culture of confession/exposure. I revisit Michel Foucault's discussion of the history of sexuality as a way to understand the development of confessional discourses in modern culture and to provide an alternative and ambivalent reading of the power relations implicit in work exploring identities by art and design students. Specifically, I look at the position of gay and lesbian students and teachers, and ask whether their sexuality can figure within the injunction ‘explore your identity’. Given the heteronormative culture of schooling, I end by recommending that individuals should be wary of outing themselves in the name of self‐expression but that art teachers could use strategies of distancing to engage students with issues of sexuality and join with others to counter homophobia by queering the curriculum.     

Examining pre-service teachers’ color-blind racial ideology,emotion regulation,and inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race

In this study, we examined the relationship between 159 predominately White pre-service teachers’ color-blind racial attitudes, emotion regulation, and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. Results indicated strong relationships between color-blind racial ideology and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. Specifically, emotion regulation difficulties (suppression strategies) served as a mediator between color-blind racial ideology (unawareness of racial privilege) and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. In addition, emotion regulation difficulties (lack of emotional clarity) served as a moderator between color-blind racial ideology (blatant racial issues) and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. Similarly, emotion regulation difficulties (impulse control difficulties) served as a moderator between color-blind racial ideology (institutional discrimination) and psychological inflexibility with stigmatizing thoughts about race. The study’s overall findings highlight pre-service teachers’ difficulties with regulating their emotions in racial situations as well as how this difficulty in turn influences their ability to change negative thoughts regarding other racial groups. The study has implications for how pre-service teachers regulate racial emotions in the classroom as well as how they may potentially interact with racially diverse students.     

Situating secondary schooling in the transnational social field: contestation and conflict in Greater Toronto Area classrooms

This article situates secondary schooling within the evolving transnational social field. Drawing on 43 interviews with teachers and former students with transnational connections in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Canada, I examine how transnational practices and dispositions fit within existing curricular and pedagogical frameworks in secondary schools. It is suggested that the ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging’ for transnational students are in conflict with the teachers’ views on how students ought to act and feel within classroom settings. When transnational secondary students travel to their sending societies for ongoing periods, the data reveal disconnections at school that threaten the dominant classroom norms. When there is sustained direct contact with multiple countries, including both travel and new modes of communication, this may create knowledge and vivid experiences for transnational youth who are ‘betwixt and between’, but also leads to concerns by teachers about a ‘strategic’ use of Toronto-area schools and fears about ‘dual loyalties’. Finally, many of the transnational youth find their teachers’ assumptions of schooling superiority in the Global North to be sorely misdirected, and perhaps even harmful. These discordances highlight the existence of competing systems of capital within GTA classrooms.     

Frames of Reference: The Impact of Race on Teaching Strategy and Classroom Discussion

In this article, I examine the role of teacher racial identity on teaching strategy and the treatment of race in classroom discussions. I explicate how the pattern of minimizing the negative racial comments made to English language learners played out in participants’ teaching and how it is reflective of socially constructed notions of race and racial discourse. The treatment of racial issues, in this sense, can be seen as a microcosm of larger social, historical, and political factors that shape individuals’ thinking about equity and diversity. I argue that by analyzing these underlying factors in teacher education courses, the unconscious and often subtle ways that stereotypes based on race, culture, or English language proficiency, can be demystified and disrupted.     

The lure of hegemonic masculinity: investigating the dynamics of gender relations in two male elementary school teachers’ lives 1

This paper is based on an investigation into the dynamics of masculinity in two male elementary school teachers’ lives. It draws on a poststructuralist approach to empirical analysis that is informed by Sondergaard who argues for the need to attend to the ‘constitution of social practices and cultural patterns’ through which subjects make sense of their lived experiences. This approach, it is argued, is supported by Convery who stresses the need to ‘sensitively confront’ the identity claims that are inscribed through teacher narratives. In this sense, the author provides an account of the dynamics of masculinity in two male elementary school teachers’ lives, which attend to issues of sexuality and social class in examining how gendered identity management impacts on pedagogical practices and philosophical approaches to teaching. This poststructuralist analytic inquiry, with its emphasis on interrogating essentialized notions of fixed identity, illuminates the contradictory practices of hegemonic masculinity in male elementary school teachers’ lives. Such empirical inquiry, it is further argued, is necessary given the failure of educational policy, in its insistence on the need for more male role models in elementary schools, to deal adequately with the complexities and significance of male teachers’ masculinities.     

‘Being black is like being a soldier in Iraq’: metaphorical expressions of blackness in an urban community

Metaphor and metaphorical expressions are phenomenon of interest in teacher education research, critical race literature, and research on black communicative practices. Only marginal concerted attention has been paid to students’ metaphorical expressions, and what these expressions might tell us about students’ racial identities and lived experiences. This study explores the metaphorical language that nine black youth used to describe what it means to be black in their social and political context. Data collected through the metaphor elicitation prompt, ‘Being black is like …,’ is presented to probe participants’ understandings of race, racial identity, and urban society. Conclusions indicate that abstract or indirect conversations about race may provide teachers and other hearers of students’ metaphors a greater understanding of and empathy toward students’ needs, experiences, and identities.     

Assessment and student participation: ‘choice and voice’ in school principal accounts of schooling territories

Schooling territories are bounded spaces where policies, bodies, practices, and discourses meet and collide. It is well documented in assessment literature that students who are active decision-makers understand their learning processes and have the necessary wherewithal to access support across schooling spaces. These spaces are co-produced through interrelationships, where youth participation is associated with power, voice, democratic citizenship, legal entitlement, empowerment, motivation and self-confidence. Recognising the growing pedagogical emphasis on locating students as responsible for their own learning, we consider how assessment practices constitute enabling and constraining schooling territories. Assessment for learning (AfL) can be linked with emancipatory practices in schooling territories where learner agency is co-produced through socio-material classroom relations. We use principal comments to map a range of interrelated schooling territories as a relational cartography of spatialised practices and student participation in AfL. Mostly, these territories are teacher imagined and defined, constructed through schooling and policy frameworks, and determined through the use of student achievement and student voice data. These conceptualised schooling spaces are interrogated to consider the positionality of students within AfL-related territories. While choice and participation may seem emancipatory, we reveal that AfL practices can serve a rarely acknowledged process of affirming territorial power.     

Schools as racial spaces: understanding and resisting structural racism

Analyzing schools as racial spaces can help researchers examine the role of teachers in the perpetuation of structural racism in schools. Based on ethnographic and autoethnographic work, this article offers examples of schools as racial spaces, spaces where whiteness controlled access. It also highlights four teachers who pursued racial equity in their teaching, and how a structural understanding of race was key to their efforts. It makes the argument that racial spaces analysis can help researchers work with teachers to understand structural racism and to better counter it in school practices.     

Learning and the development of social identities in the subjects Care and Technology

This article discusses the way in which social identities structure the learning processes of students in two subjects in the Dutch secondary school curriculum—Care and Technology. It analyses interviews with 23 students and their teachers with a view to explaining the disappointing results in these subjects in terms of breaking through gender and class‐related preferences and learning outcomes. The subjects Care and Technology refer to social practices with which groups of students identify in different ways. On the other hand, students also appear to make active use of these subjects in their identity development. The authors argue for explicitly combining the notion that learning is peripheral participation in social practices with analyses of the power relationships that structure those practices. Also, the question should be addressed of how the relative autonomy of the school can be used for organizing learning experiences in such a way that the constraints of social position and identity are reduced, and the restrictive character of social identities is challenged.     

Looking Inward: The impact of race,ethnicity, gender,and social class background on teaching sociocultural theory in education

In this paper I examine how and to what extent various elements of my biography—race, ethnicity, gender, age, social class background, and prior personal and professional experiences—influenced my relationships with students in a graduate course examining the impact of race, gender, and social class on education. My lived experiences as an immigrant woman of color in United States society and my prior professional experiences as an urban teacher are shown to have strengthened my expertise and confidence in teaching this course. Nevertheless, experience confirmed my initial concerns that my race, gender, and social class background negatively influenced some students' perceptions of my teaching competence and position of authority in the classroom. The paper concludes with recommendations for teacher education, including encouraging teachers to continuously engage the question of how their biographies shape their pedagogies and relationships with students, an important undertaking as our schooling populations become more racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse. I also recommend that universities continue to recruit faculty who are not only from racial minority backgrounds but also from varied ethnic and social class backgrounds.     

“Who are your Friends?” Complexities in Multicultural Education

In this paper, I explore the experiences of fourth and fifth grade students engaged in Beyond Today, an urban after school program, that aimed to enact a social reconstructionist multicultural curriculum. The program gathered White, Black, and Latino/a youth to explore issues of discrimination and social justice and develop leadership towards social change. This paper focuses on the complex nature of students’ responses to a multicultural curriculum that foregrounded conversations about race and inequity. Students were seen to build ties of friendship across racial lines and develop activist skills of social critique. On other occasions, they maintained borders, distancing themselves from students of different races. After an overall review of the students’ varied reactions to the Beyond Today curriculum, I highlight specific vignettes that show how these tensions can simultaneously emerge within particular incidents. This research can be of use to teachers and teacher educators when envisioning and planning for student responses to multicultural curriculum.     

Teaching the Election with Purpose: Toward a Framework of Racial Media Literacy and [Socio] Political Consciousness When Discussing Elections in the Social Studies Classroom

Infusing content about elections has not been an issue for social studies teachers, but rather contextualizing race discourse in discussions of elections has served as a curricular cessation for social studies teachers. This is especially concerning given that teachers' attempts to remain neutral with regards to race consequently results in a lack of racial awareness and sociopolitical consciousness pertaining to political issues among students. This article advocates for pedagogical frameworks of racial media literacy and (socio)political consciousness to address systemic issues of race as they are discussed in the election. The author argues that students, especially students of color, should be afforded the opportunity to critically interrogate media outlets, messages, and candidates' positioning of race as an effort to promote political consciousness that could potentially impact their immediate or future political decision making. Suggestions for enacting these frameworks are provided within the broader discourse on acquiring knowledge, political disclosure, and inquiry pedagogy.     

Applying White Dialectics: Exploring Whiteness and Racial Identity among White College Athletes

This article seeks to synthesize and apply White racial identity theory and concomitant research to the interaction between athletic and racial identity, specifically as it relates to the experiential variations of how race impacts White athletes within the college sport environment. White dialectics, or the tensions that White Americans experience as dominant social group members, serve as the guiding theoretical framework and provide a theoretical lens through which the experience of White college athletes is examined at each distinct dialectic. Through this article, the application of White dialectics offers a theoretical foundation for developing a better understanding of how White college athletes not only make sense of their racial identity, but also understand their racialized experiences within intercollegiate athletics.     

Using critical race theory to analyze science teachers culturally responsive practices

Culturally responsive science teaching is using knowledge about the culture and life experiences of students to structure learning that is conducive to their needs. Understanding what teachers need to prepare them to be culturally responsive is a matter of continuous debate. As the focus of multicultural education ventures farther away from its roots, advocating the civil rights of historically oppressed groups, concerns about the gravity of racial inequity on schooling continues. How will this shift in focus influence teachers’ capacity to accommodate students’ needs resulting from racial inequities in this society, particularly African American students? What knowledge is essential to their effectiveness? This qualitative study examined the instructional practices of two effective middle school science teachers deemed culturally responsive by their administrator on the basis of classroom observations, students’ responses and standardized assessment results. Both teachers’ classrooms consisted primarily of African American students. Grounded theory was used to analyze the teachers’ beliefs and practices in order to identify existing commonalties. Critical race theory was used to identify whether there was any influence of the students’ racial identities on the teachers’ beliefs and practices. The analysis reveals that the teachers’ beliefs and practices were informed by their critical awareness of social constraints imposed upon their African American students’ identities. These findings communicate the significance of sociocultural awareness to informing the teachers’ instruction, as well as their strategies for managing the varying dynamics occurring in their classrooms. It can be deduced from the findings that an understanding of racial inequities is crucial to the development of sociocultural awareness, and is the foundation for the culturally responsive dispositions and practices of these middle school science teachers.