Confronting Racism in Teacher Education

Counternarratives of Critical Practice

Bree Picower, Rita Kohli, Bree Picower, Rita Kohli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317226383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Confronting Racism in Teacher Education aims to transform systematic and persistent racism through in-depth analyses of racial justice struggles and strategies in teacher education. By bringing together counternarratives of critical teacher educators, the editors of this volume present key insights from both individual and collective experiences of advancing racial justice. Written for teacher educators, higher education administrators, policy makers, and others concerned with issues of race, the book is comprised of four parts that each represent a distinct perspective on the struggle for racial justice: contributors reflect on their experiences working as educators of Color to transform the culture of predominately White institutions, navigating the challenges of whiteness within teacher education, building transformational bridges within classrooms, and training current and inservice teachers through concrete models of racial justice. By bringing together these often individualized experiences, Confronting Racism in Teacher Education reveals larger patterns that emerge of institutional racism in teacher education, and the strategies that can inspire resistance.

1 Introduction

Bree Picower and Rita Kohli

We have been friends and colleagues for years. Having taught in the same school district, lived in several of the same cities, and worked as teacher educators committed to racial justice in urban public schools, we share many experiences, ideologies, and the same community. Simultaneously, our identities have also positioned our entry to this work differently: Bree – a White Jewish New Yorker with a commitment to antiracist work and teacher organizing – has often facilitated the racial analysis development of White teachers, and Rita – a second generation South Asian immigrant, local to California – has focused much of her work on the development and retention of racial justice oriented teachers of Color. These similarities and differences in our professional lives as teacher educators have kept us close as we attempt to navigate, challenge, and transform systemic oppression through our grassroots work with teachers and our respective programs.

One day, several years ago, we were talking on the phone. Bree had been at her institution for several years. Rita was in her second year in a tenure track job and had just come off of maternity leave to the duties of teaching the “diversity” class. We enter toward the end of the call:¹

RITA: Do you have a few more minutes? I’d love to talk something through about work with you.

BREE: Sure, what’s up?

RITA: I’m teaching a class in a new program in our college that is not social justice focused at all. It’s their last semester before becoming teachers, and the students came to me without much of a structural or racial analysis of schools. I know some students are interested and connected to the material, particularly the students of Color, but there are others who are treating my class like a last hurdle for their degree. I’m struggling in particular with two White male students who are good friends. One of the students responds to me sarcastically in class and last week he yelled at me because he didn’t like his grade on a paper. The other student tried to watch a basketball game on his laptop in the middle of another student’s facilitation – with the sound ON!!!! They are so resistant to critical content and they are co-opting the class.

BREE: That’s outrageous! I’m so sorry that’s happening. Their behavior is really crossing a line. I wonder if they would try and get away with that with a White professor? Have you tried getting institutional support?

RITA: I know! Can you imagine? They are going to be someone’s teacher in just a few months… I do feel it’s racialized and gendered, but I also don’t know how to intervene. When I brought it up to my chair she told me there was nothing she could do. We’re reminded a lot that we are down on enrollment and need to keep our students happy. In our last faculty meeting, students were actually referred to as “clients,” like we’re a business that sells teaching degrees to anyone that will buy. I feel so unsupported in holding high and critical expectations for prospective teachers.

BREE: Teacher education is a cash cow for so many universities. Since enrollment is dropping, there is a lot of pressure on us to accept everyone who applies, even if they don’t necessarily represent the kind of social justice educator we say we are looking for. It’s so frustrating when my students’ incoming beliefs are so far from where they need to be as future educators of children of Color. They do grow some, but we have such little time with them before they graduate – it just kills me that some of them are going to be in classrooms with real children, potentially my friends’ children, when they have so much further to go.

RITA: I think about that all the time, especially now that I’m a mom. If teacher candidates are our clients, who are K-12 students in that logic? Who are my children in that logic? It feels like Black and Brown children are just afterthoughts.

BREE: Exactly.

RITA: I didn’t know you struggled with these issues too; it’s so helpful to know that this isn’t just me – that I’m not just alone in experiencing this.

BREE: I don’t think it’s exactly the same degree given that I’m White and you’re a woman of Color, but I do think all of us doing this race work in teacher ed. are going through it in some way.

This conversation continued as we shared strategies and ideas on how we engage in racial justice work in our programs. As we learned from one another, we felt less isolated. Some of that discourse showed the different ways we approach the work from our varying positionalities. A large part of our discussion also helped to illuminate systematic and persistent racism (including neoliberal racism) that is upheld in teacher education. It became clear to us that change is not possible when we individualize our stories; instead transformation rests upon our collective and institutional analyses of racial justice struggles and strategies in teacher education. In this book, we aim to do just that. By bringing together counternarratives of critical teacher educators we want readers to hear, connect to, and learn from the nuances of individual experiences in the struggle for racial justice in teacher education, but also to see the broader institutional analysis that comes from a collective read of racialized systemic patterns.

Permanence of Racism

Race is a social construct that changes over time. Although it is often (mis)understood as just marking difference, Omi and Winant (1994) defined race as, “an unstable and ‘decentered’ complex of social meanings constantly being transformed by political struggle” (p. 55). For example, during the era of Americanization schools where Mexican Americans were forcibly sent to shed their language and culture, the label “Mexican” appeared on the 1930 census as a racial category for the first time. On the last census in 2010, the term Mexican only appeared as a specific ethnic marker collapsed under Hispanic (U.S. Census Bureau, 2016), signifying how racial categories are socially constructed and politically driven.

Race is most often used to create or sustain hierarchies of power and dominance, and has consistently been used to include and exclude certain groups from equal participation, resources, and human rights. Thus, it is impossible to disentangle race and racism – a structure of dominance built upon essentialist categories of race (Omi & Winant, 1994). As Fredrick Douglass spoke about racism in 1881,

In nearly every department of American life [Black Americans] are confronted by this insidious influence. It fills the air. It meets them at the workshop and factory, when they apply for work. It meets them at the church, at the hotel, at the ballot-box, and worst of all, it meets them in the jury-box … [the Black American] has ceased to be a slave of an individual, but has in some sense become the slave of society.

(Douglass in Feagin, 2014, p. 9)

Describing both the permanent and shifting natures of racism in the U.S., Douglass articulated racism as systemic.

Over a century later, scholars of critical race theory purported that racism is a permanent fixture in U.S. institutions. Legal scholar Cheryl Harris (1993) argued that our nation’s laws were constructed to protect White property interests starting with the seizure of indigenous land and the appropriation of the bodies and labor of enslaved people. Thus, embedded in our current laws and institutions is an inherent protection of assets associated with whiteness. Harris contended that Whites have a stake in upholding whiteness because it maintains the current social order which has actual material benefits, “Whiteness is an aspect of racial identity surely, but it is much more; it remains a concept based on relations of power, a social construct predicated on white dominance and Black subordination” (p. 1,761). As she pointed out, antiblackness is a tool used to uphold whiteness and White supremacy, and this oppressive racial practice shapes U.S. life and the racism that all people of Color experience.

From the recent lack of indictments of police officers who have killed unarmed Black civilians in cities across the nation to the hate crime murders of churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, we see the persistence of antiblackness and racial violence in our current society. Organizing efforts by movements such as Black Lives Matter are heightening public awareness of this racism and calling for a challenge to systems of oppression, yet things have far to shift institutionally.

As a U.S. institution, schools serve to uphold whiteness (Dumas, 2016; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995). Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) argued that schools are designed to serve White interests through disparate resources and opportunities. From the de jure segregation of the past to de facto segregation today, inequalities in school funding have consistently provided students of Color overcrowded, underresourced educational opportunities compared to their White peers (Oakes, Rogers, & Silver, 2004; Anyon, 2005). From threats of lynching during integration (Beals, 1995), to school police, pushout, and criminalization in schools today (Kim, Losen, & Hewitt, 2010), students of Color have consistently received a message of inferiority and marginalization within schools. Standard curriculum and traditional pedagogy have been equally noted to lack the history, perspectives, and values of minoritized communities throughout the trajectory of U.S. schools (Woodson, 1933; Loewen, 2008).

Confronted with racism in education, there is also a tradition of resistance (Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2002), where critical individuals and collectives have always pushed for change. Key education scholars have built upon critical race frameworks to deconstruct the ways that schools, fraught with institutionalized racism, affirm the racial status quo (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano, 1997; Solórzano, Ceja, & Yosso, 2000; Parker & Lynn, 2002; Dixson & Rousseau, 2006). These and other race scholars have illuminated how institutional culpability is often masked by ideologies, policies, and practices of deficit thinking (Valencia & Solórzano, 1997; Valencia, 2012); the ignoring of race or racial difference (Bonilla-Silva, 2010),² and meritocracy – the belief that success is always the product of individual merit (Au, 2015), leaving racism in schools untouched but often invisibilized. Students, community members, and teachers have organized, marched, and posed demands for decades in the name of educational equity and racial justice (Briscoe & Khalifa, 2015; Berta-Ávila, Revilla, & Figueroa, 2011; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2002; Stovall, 2013), as well as collectivized against injustices such as the school to prison pipeline (Ayers, Dohrn, & Ayers, 2001), privatization (Fabricant & Fine, 2013; Lipman, 2011), and high-stakes testing (Au, 2010; 2015).

This book aims to understand the ways in which critical teacher educators experience, confront, and resist racism in teacher education. By collectivizing often individualized experiences, larger patterns emerge of how teacher education as an institution contributes to the permanence of racism, as well as strategies of resistance that can inspire and embolden other teacher educators working to confront racism in their settings.

Context of Teacher Education

Teacher education does not exist in a vacuum; rather it reflects and perpetuates the system of White supremacy and economic inequity written about above. Teacher education is not immune to the rapidly changing forces of privatization advancing on K-12 education; in fact there has been a proliferation of external, top-down school reform efforts in K-12 public education (Kumashiro, 2012; Lipman, 2011; Ravitch, 2013). External evaluations such as those of the National Council of Teacher Quality, standards such as those of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation, and outside accountability measures such as Education Teacher Performance Assessment (edTPA) are a major part of the rapidly shifting landscape of teacher education (Dover & Schultz, 2016; Picower & Marshall, in press).

These neoliberal reforms both advance the current economic and racial order (Picower & Mayorga, 2015) while simultaneously creating barriers for the role that teacher education can play in advancing racial justice. For instance, under No Child Left Behind, teacher quality was narrowly defined (Cochran-Smith et al., 2009; Sleeter, 2008) in ways that removed a mandate on education schools to prepare candidates around root causes of inequity (Landorf & Nevin, 2007). In fact, in 2006, NCATE, the nation’s largest organization accrediting teacher education programs removed social justice from its standards used to evaluate teacher education programs (Wilson, 2007). Such reforms put pressure on schools of education to move aw...