Conducting research with young Chinese-Australian students in health and physical education and physical activity: epistemology,positionality and methodologies

Research that delves into the sociocultural perspectives of health and physical education and physical activity (HPEPA) in the lives of ethnic minority students in Westernised countries is often conducted by investigators who are Westerners, native English speakers and racially different from the study participants. Limited research is conducted by researchers who have racial and/or linguistic identities similar to those of study participants, and even fewer reports include the reflexivity data of the research process. This paper draws upon my own experience, as a young Hong Kong-Chinese female Australian, of conducting research with Chinese students and their White HPE teachers in Australia. I discuss a number of aspects of the epistemological dilemmas of being an insider and outsider as a researcher, and the practical and methodological issues in recruiting participants and conducting research with them. In addition, reversing the ethnic gaze by focusing on the teachers (i.e. a young Chinese female conducting research with White teachers) can help to illuminate new perspectives on the construction of otherness and positionalities within research. The reflections add to current discourse on problematising HPEPA research in general, particularly when researching the Other. This paper concludes that an intersection of racial, ethnic, class, gender and age identity can and does have some effect on the research process, as the Chinese students raised particular questions to a young, female Chinese researcher, and they were more willing to talk about racial and cultural issues they felt I could relate to.     

‘I just treat them all the same,really’: teachers,whiteness and (anti) racism in physical education

This paper explores physical educators’ perspectives on race and racism as a first step towards disrupting whiteness and supporting the development of antiracist practice. With close links to sport, a practice centrally implicated in the creation and maintenance of racialised bodies and hierarchies, Physical Education (PE) offers an important context for a study of whiteness and racism in education. Using collective biography we examine physical educators’ narrative stories for what they reveal about the operation of whiteness and racism in PE. Teachers draw on narratives from curricula texts which uphold and reinforce notions of the racialised other, thereby reasserting normative, universal white knowledge. Their pedagogy is underpinned by a colour blind approach where race is ‘not seen’, yet essentialist and cultural discourses of race are nevertheless deployed to position particular racialised and gendered bodies as ‘problems’ in PE. Engagement with antiracism is limited to professional rhetoric within pedagogical practice.     

Perpetuation of Whiteness Ideologies in U.S. College Student Discourse

Utilizing discourse from college students who participated in a three-day seminar on systemic racism, intersectionality, and white privilege, this study examines and critiques ideologies within college students’ discourse that are foundational to whiteness. Three ideological discourses emerged before, during, and after the seminar – Liberal Pluralism, Meritocracy, and “Reverse Racism.” The discourses were analysed using Critical Discourse Analysis and findings are presented from the study that include the implications of ideological discourses that perpetuate the pervasiveness of whiteness and white privilege. The paper concludes with implications for communication scholars and educators, most specifically those who teach intercultural communication.     

Economy & Pedagogy: Laboring to Learn in Camden County,North Carolina

This paper explores one interview participant's performances of memory as didactic efforts to resist a diverse range of public memories concerning school segregation and desegregation in rural North Carolina. By exploring Mr. Charlie's narratives, this essay provides critical insight into the articulations between capitalism, education, and white privilege, frayed by local resistant memories and community praxis. Mr. Charlie's memories provide the opportunity to reimagine received traditions of race, education, and equality as marked by alternate forms of economic and social relations. Specifically, he articulates a gray education and gray market, and their place outside of traditional white pedagogy and the capitalist economy. These gray pedagogies and economies present larger implications for the ways race has crossed all of our paths.     

Hip-hop Realness and the White Performer

Hip-hop's imperatives of authenticity are tied to its representations of African-American identity, and white rap artists negotiate their place within hip-hop culture by responding to this African-American model of the authentic. This article examines the strategies used by white artists such as Vanilla Ice, Eminem, and the Beastie Boys to establish their hip-hop legitimacy and to confront rap music's representations of whites as socially privileged and therefore not credible within a music form where credibility is often negotiated through an artist's experiences of social struggle. The authenticating strategies of white artists involve cultural immersion, imitation, and inversion of the rags-to-riches success stories of black rap stars.     

A message for faculty from the present-day movement for black lives

Abstract

The present-day movement for Black lives calls attention to the antiblackness that is supported and reinforced in White America. Antiblackness ostensibly contextualizes what it means to Learn While Black at predominantly White institutions. This article presents a content analysis of the demands that pertain to faculty and faculty work Black students submitted to institutional leaders in the aftermath of Ferguson and the campus rebellion led by Concerned Student 1950 at the University of Missouri. Study findings point to the classroom as a pedagogical site of Black Liberation; that is, interrogating Whiteness. This article concludes with recommendations to help faculty, especially White faculty, in interrogating whiteness and advancing Black Liberation in higher education.     

Reproducing peace? A CRT analysis of Whiteness in the curriculum and teaching at a University of The UN

Peace and conflict studies (PACS) higher education is a blossoming field. Literature (both conceptual and conjectural) and research (theoretical and empirical) has proliferated in recent decades. This paper details case findings from an ethnographic study with university-based PACS educators completed at one University of The United Nations in 2015. The six-month ethnography involved document analysis, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with 25 peace scholars and 108 postgraduate students. Data was thematically coded and analyzed using concepts from critical race/critical Whiteness studies. This paper outlines the study and explores the theme of Whiteness that emerged from data. Findings point toward the cultural reproduction of Whiteness in the faculty, pedagogy, and institution. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications concerning global equity and ‘post-structural violence’ in PACS education, as well as a call for further research into the role of peacebuilding education in broader social change.     

“Why do you make me hate myself?”: Re-teaching Whiteness,abuse, and love in urban teacher education

Teacher educators are constantly trying to improve the field to meet the needs of a growing urban populace. Inclusion of socially just philosophies in the curriculum is indeed essential, yet it can mask the recycling of normalized, oppressive Whiteness. This reflective and theoretical paper employs critical race theory and critical Whiteness studies to deconstruct Whiteness, abuse, and love in teacher education. Using an interdisciplinary and emotion-based approach to understanding Whiteness, this paper examines how denying race during white childhood via a color-blind ideology leaves lasting emotional scars, impressions that perpetuate the institutional silencing of race in teacher education. This “abuse” is projected onto urban students of color and, more broadly, people of color. This paper asserts that until teacher education programs make confronting and exploring Whiteness a priority, they cannot truly love their urban students of color as complete beings and so deny humanity full and just consideration.     

The Emotionality of Whiteness in Physical Education Teacher Education

ABSTRACT

The physical education teacher education (PETE) pipeline makes it clear to historically racially minoritized pre-service teachers the value of White norms and experiences while simultaneously “othering” their cultural knowledge. Using Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, and emotionality as theoretical frameworks, this visual narrative inquiry explored self-identified Black and Latinx pre-service physical education teachers’ (n = 10) stories of a racialized identity within predominantly White PETE programs as well as the emotionality of whiteness for myself as a White researcher and teacher educator. I utilized narrative-based semi-structured and conversational interviews, along with photo-elicitation, as methods of data collection. The results contrast participants’ experiences of normalized racism with my heightened emotions of shock and dismay, shedding light on my own white emotionality toward racism. The critical examination of the emotions of whiteness demonstrated the potential to lead PETE faculty toward deeper reflection as to how whiteness is upheld, but also how they might further work to de-center whiteness within their pedagogies, curricula, and programs.     

Questioning the white body: on applying a phenomenological mode of inquiry to whiteness studies in education

Abstract

The racialized body is of obvious, or at least implicit, concern for the qualitative study of Whiteness in education. Whiteness, as an organizing principle that conditions normative ways of being in society, is predicated upon the raced body as a social signifier. It is curious then, that the body remains under-examined and not treated as a serious analytic. How bodies interact in real time—how educational spaces are brought to life—are left to the analytical wayside in favor of reflective approaches. This paper questions prominent approaches to studying Whiteness in education, and subsequently proposes expanding the methodological repertoire to encompass a phenomenology of racial embodiment as a way to make-meaning of the subtle interactions between bodies unfolding in unique educational places.