Abstract
We teach in a land-grant university located in an urban setting, but it is not an urban university. Rather than reflecting the cultural and linguistic diversity of the metropolitan area and schools, students who attend the university and enroll in our courses for preservice teachers are predominantly white. This context creates a specific set of challenges related to our work as critical educators. We have found that a critical pedagogy of race with white preservice teachers needs to position them as “responsible” without necessarily positioning them to feel “guilty.” While the challenges of doing this work are complex, in this chapter we share texts and pedagogies we have used to constructively address them.
Our chapter focuses on issues that locate the lived and constructed nature of race at the center of any enactment of critical pedagogy. We have been tested in our efforts to help students understand and work to counteract the institutional, systemic nature of white privilege. Some of our preservice teachers rely on color-blind discourse, often for complex reasons. Others see race as a problem to be solved rather than something they themselves are implicated in or embody. And still other preservice teachers struggle to translate their intellectual knowledge of racism into concrete classroom practices.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Allard, A. & Santoro, N. (2006). Troubling identities: Teacher education students’ constructions of class and ethnicity. Cambridge Journal of Education, 36(1), 115–129.
Beach, R., Thein, A., & Parks, D. (2008). High school students’ competing social worlds: Negotiating identities and allegiances in response to multicultural literature. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Christensen, L. (2000). Reading, writing, and rising up: Teaching about social justice and the power of the written word. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.
Cross, B. (2005). New racism, reformed teacher education, and the same ole’ oppression. Educational Studies, 38(3), 263–274.
Delpit, L. (1995). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: The New Press.
Florio-Ruane, S. (2001). Teacher education and the cultural imagination: Autobiography, conversation, and narrative. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gaine, C. (2001). If it’s not hurting it’s not working: Teaching teachers about “race.” Research Papers in Education, 16(1), 93–113.
Gay, G. & Kirkland, K. (2003). Developing cultural critical consciousness and self reflection in preservice teacher education. Theory into Practice, 42(3), 181–187.
Goodman, J. & Kelly, T. (1988). Out of the mainstream: Issues confronting the male profeminist elementary school teacher. Interchange, 19(2), 1–14.
Grande, S. (2004). Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Greene, S. & Abt-Perkins, D. (2003). Introduction: How can literacy research contribute to racial understanding? In S. Greene & D. Abt-Perkins (Eds.), Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural understanding (pp. 1–31). New York: Teachers College Press.
Gwaltney, J.L. (Ed.). (1980). Drylongso: A self-portrait of black America. New York: Random House.
Heath, S. (1982). Questioning at home and at school: A comparative study. In G. Spindler (Ed.), Doing the ethnography of schooling: Educational anthropology in action. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Hicks, D. (1996). Contextual inquiries: A discourse-oriented study of classroom learning. In D. Hicks (Ed.), Discourse, learning, and schooling (pp. 104–144). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, G. (1999). We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teachers, multiracial schools. New York: Teachers College Press.
Huerta, G. & Flemmer, L. (2005, March). Identity, beliefs, and community: LDS (Mormon) pre-service secondary teacher views about diversity. Intercultural Education, 16(1), 1–14.
Ignatiev, N. & Garvey, J. (Eds.) (1996).Race traitor. New York: Routledge
Kress, G. (1993). Against arbitrariness: The social production of the sign as a foundational issue in critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 169–191.
LeCompte, K. & McCray, A. (2002). Complex conversations with teacher candidates: Perspectives of whiteness and culturally responsive teaching. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 4(1), 25–35.
Lewis, C. (2004). New directions in critical discourse analysis. Keynote Address. CDA Language Education Conference. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN.
Lewis, C., Ketter, J., & Fabos, B. (2001). Reading race in a rural context. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(3), 317–350.
Lipsitz, G. (1995). The possessive investment in whiteness: Racialized social democracy and the “White” problem in American studies. American Quarterly, 47(3), 369–387.
McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, 49(2), 31–36.
Milner, H.M. (2006). Preservice teachers’ learning about cultural and racial diversity: Implications for urban education. Urban Education, 41(4), 343–375.
Moje, E.B. & Lewis, C. (2007). Examining opportunities to learn literacy: The role of critical sociocultural literacy research. In C. Lewis, P. Enciso, & E. Moje (Eds.), Identity, agency, and power: Reframing sociocultural research on literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Murrell, P.C., Jr., (1993). Afrocentric immersion: Academic and personal development of African American males in public schools. In T. Perry & J. W. Fraser (Eds.), Freedom’s plow: Teaching in the multicultural classroom (pp. 231–260). New York: Routledge.
Sleeter, C. (1993). How white teachers construct race. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity and representation in education (pp. 157–171). New York: Routledge.
Solomon, R.P., Portelli, J., Daniel, B., & Campbell, A. (2005, July). The discourse of denial: How white teacher candidates construct race, racism, and “white privilege.” Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 8(2), 147–169.
Thandeka, A. (1999). Learning to be white. New York: Continuum.
Trainor, J. (2005). “My ancestors didn’t own slaves”: Understanding White talk about race. Research in the Teaching of English, 40(2), 140–167.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Flynn, J.E., Lensmire, T.J., Lewis, C. (2009). A Critical Pedagogy of Race in Teacher Education: Response and Responsibility. In: Groenke, S.L., Hatch, J.A. (eds) Critical Pedagogy and Teacher Education in the Neoliberal Era. Explorations of Educational Purpose, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9588-7_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9588-7_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-9587-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-9588-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)