Becoming a White antiracist counselor: A framework of identity development

In this constructivist grounded theory study, 12 White mental health counselors committed to antiracism were interviewed to explore their professional identity development. The emergent theoretical model of antiracist counseling identity development is a multifaceted lifelong developmental process that manifests through personal and professional experiences and is enacted within antiracist actions.     

(Re)beginning and becoming: antiracism and professional development with white practicing teachers

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on an educational foundations-based professional development (PD) curriculum of antiracist conscientization we as two teacher educators designed and implemented with eight white practicing teachers in the Midwestern United States. We first articulate our conception of educational foundations and curriculum theory as a framework for our PD. We briefly review literature on other PD on race in the United States, outline our data sources, and describe the pedagogy and curriculum of RaceWork’s Tripartite Model of race-visible and antiracist praxis. We then highlight, through interview data, the significance of group (relational) accountability and collaborative relationships that supported these teachers’ self-designed antiracist interventions in their own unique school contexts during the 2-year PD experience. An ongoing, relationship-based PD model leading to material antiracist changes and practices points to a need for a broader, more holistic, and contextualized conception of antiracist interventions in U.S. public P12 school contexts, but also one grounded in the notion that in a white supremacist society, we (as race-visible white educators) are always becoming antiracist.     

Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Representation in School Programs

This article explores theoretical and pedagogical frameworks for re-evaluating literary curricula and reading practices in contemporary school classrooms. Data from a study of students' responses to reading international literature in a multi-ethnic urban Canadian high school and conversations with South African high school students on their reading preferences ground this discussion of how students and teachers can cross borders constructed within discourses of race, gender, and ethnicity. Drawing on postcolonial literary theory, critical theory, and reader response theories, the article considers the questions, concerns, and dilemmas that emerge when students begin to deconstruct misrepresentations of "others" in literary texts and acknowledge challenges to their perceptions of self.     

Whiteness and social studies teacher education: tensions in the pedagogical task

Utilizing a critical whiteness studies framework, the authors analyzed the experiences of a cohort of predominantly White pre-service social studies teachers discussing race and Whiteness in relation to education. The pre-service teachers resisted identifying White privilege as a form of structural racism, instead preferring individualized understandings of racism. The participants also utilized their personal biographies to accept or reject aspects of race privilege. The authors highlighted three tensions for teacher educators to consider when engaging pre-service teachers in discussions about race privilege, including recognizing the unfamiliar nature of structural thinking, appreciating the limitations of personal experience, and acknowledging the challenges of structural considerations within individual classrooms. The authors’ findings – and the tensions they highlight– depart from previous literature on White teachers and race by paying specific attention to pedagogical issues related to developing a critical racial consciousness in White teachers and by attending to the ways in which Whiteness, as a structural force, limits the ability of White teachers to engage in conversations about race. The authors attempt to trouble the assumption that the pedagogical practices in teacher education adequately create an environment in which White teachers can thoroughly engage in the problematics of race, racism, and Whiteness.     

Pedagogies of strategic empathy: navigating through the emotional complexities of anti-racism in higher education

This paper constructs an argument about the emotionally complicated and compromised learning spaces of teaching about anti-racism in higher education. These are spaces steeped in complex structures of feeling that evoke strong and often discomforting emotions on the part of both teachers and students. In particular, the author theorizes the notion of strategic empathy in the context of students' emotional resistance toward anti-racist work; he examines how strategic empathy can function as a valuable pedagogical tool that opens up affective spaces which might eventually disrupt the emotional roots of troubled knowledge – an admittedly long and difficult task. Undermining the emotional roots of troubled knowledge through strategic empathy ultimately aims at helping students integrate their troubled views into anti-racist and socially just perspectives.     

Friendship Fictions: The Rhetoric of Citizenship in the Liberal Imaginary

This introductory essay makes the case that rhetorical studies as a field and the Quarterly Journal of Speech as the journal of record for that field are racist. Racism need not imply that evildoers in pointy hoods are pulling the strings of the journal and field; indeed, the assumption that racism is rooted in the bad thoughts and deeds of intentional individuals is part of the problem and is further evidence of the field's ignorance on the subject. Drawing inspiration and guidance from Ibram X. Kendi's work on antiracism, and anchoring my analysis in Paula Chakravartty et al.'s “#CommunicationSoWhite,” I make an honest effort to diagnose aspects of rhetoric's racism problem and suggest some of the attitudinal and material shifts that will be necessary to challenge the whiteness of rhetorical studies. An introduction of the remaining essays in this #RhetoricSoWhite forum concludes the introduction.     

Racism and the future of antiracism in education: A critical analysis of the Sewell Report

This article provides an analysis and critique of the education component of the 2021 Sewell Report on Race and Ethnic Disparities. Discussion focuses on the report’s spurious claims to objectivity, the erasure of racism and the inadequacy of its recommendations. It is suggested, however, that despite its many flaws, the Sewell Report poses challenges for those who have traditionally been aligned with antiracism in education. The article concludes by setting out a vision for a new progressive project aimed at advancing racial and cultural justice that, it is suggested, can begin to address these challenges.     

Counselor educators using self as instrument in antiracist teaching

In this autoethnography inquiry, seven counselor educators from diverse intersectionalities discuss how they leverage their selfhood to promote antiracist counselor education. Based on two cycles of pattern coding, the authors identified themes of perceiving, experiencing, creating, and facilitating. Implications for future research and practice are offered.     

Antiracism Education? A Study of an Antiracism Workshop in Finland

In doing antiracism education there is a risk that it can in effect reinforce the very racialisation it is supposed to fight against. This paradox becomes a formidable challenge given the ubiquity of race in contemporary ways of knowing and ways of being for both its subjects and its objects: more so in an era of “racism without race,” a neoliberal attempt to move beyond racism without fully coming to terms with racial histories and their accompanying racialising consequences. This study examines the challenges of doing antiracism education within a multiculturalist framework using the case of KYTKE, a non-governmental organisation project in upper-secondary schools in Finland. We argue that when antiracism education fails to critically examine power relations in established traditions and knowledge or when it does not genuinely prioritise knowledge generated through the creative resistance of racialised groups, it can participate in re-inscribing racialised social relations.     

Safe Spaces or Brave Spaces? Re-Envisioning Practical Theology and Transformative Learning Theory

Abstract

The Loyola Institute for Ministry (LIM) developed a method of practical theology for ministry professionals and religious educators rooted in transformative learning theory to enable students to reflect more intentionally and theologically on their experiences in ministry. This study asks, by teaching students to engage in dialogue through transformative learning practices in safe spaces, are religious educators inhibiting the self-actualization needed to confront white normativity and expose white fragility, thus, advancing rather than dismantling racism with our students in graduate programs in ministry and religious education?