Countering Complacency With Radical Reflection: Supporting White Teachers in the Enactment of Critical Multicultural Praxis

Introduction

Vocal. Affirming. Perceptive. Sensitive. Committed. Authentic. In writing this piece, these descriptors rose to the surface for us as coauthors in reflecting on the characteristics of our most impactful teachers. As female educational professionals—one White, and one Black—whose overall experiences with public schooling were divergent along racial lines, we have come to believe in the truism that teachers are among the most important individuals in the lives of youth in both academic and intrapersonal domains.

Research supports our contention that the student–teacher relationship is a highly salient one; for example, through high-quality relationships, students and teachers develop mutual trust and positive affect that support increased learning and self-regulation (Pianta et al., 2003), greater school engagement (Martin & Collie, 2019), and enhanced self-knowledge and psychological functioning (Deci & Ryan, 2012; Wentzel, 2009). Furthermore, important scholarship on teacher education suggests that teachers who are truly dedicated to mentoring and guiding their students can have a dramatic impact on their futures, even when they face barriers related to poverty and other social ills (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Nieto, 2003).

A decade ago, during the first term of the Obama presidency, Duncan-Andrade (2009) argued for the primacy of the student–teacher relationship in urban school settings, in particular; specifically, that supporting urban teachers in their ability to stand in solidarity with students through deep and caring relationships, and nurturing in them a radical hope for the future, must be foremost among equity-based reform efforts. The potential for teachers to serve as beacons of hope within the landscape of urban schools, many of which have been classified as demoralizing spaces where racialized and class-based notions of urban students permeate the school’s institutional culture (see Payne, 2010), as well as chronically under-resourced (see Anyon, 2014), seems all the more urgent to us in our present sociopolitical context.

At present, the notion of teaching as a public service aimed at the promotion of equitable and responsive education is threatened by private sector logics such as competitive markets and high-stakes accountability, especially in urban school districts (Anderson & Cohen, 2015), while divisive, racialized, and xenophobic rhetoric is part of our national discourse, arguably fomented and legitimized by our current presidency (Costello, 2016; Turner & Figueroa, 2019). What does this mean for our urban teachers? Are they more well-positioned or inspired to enact such hope now than they were 10 years ago, or are they even less so?

Pondering such a question requires an understanding of the complexity that surrounds urban teaching and the urban school context, wherein lies an unavoidable and seemingly intractable reality: the continued and stark racial disparity between teachers and students in urban classrooms (Emdin, 2017). Although numerous studies suggest that students benefit from having teachers of their same race throughout their K–12 education (see Cherng & Halpin, 2016; Downer et al., 2016; Egalite et al., 2015), this happens much less frequently for students of color as compared with White students, if it happens at all. Despite the increasing prevalence of students of color in U.S. classrooms, especially in urban schools that have become majority-minority as a result of the resegregation of public schools over the last three decades (Orfield et al., 2016), national surveys reveal that the teaching profession remains largely White; as reflected in the 2015–2016 National Teacher and Principal Survey, 80% of all public school teachers were non-Hispanic White, 9% Hispanic, 7% non-Hispanic Black, and 7% non-Hispanic Asian (Taie & Goldring, 2017).

The racial dichotomy between students and teachers in the classroom is not likely to change in the near future as most teacher education programs continue to train overwhelmingly White students and have not made concerted efforts to attract more racially diverse students (Goings & Bianco, 2016; Sleeter & Milner, 2011). In addition, the extent to which teacher preparation programs adequately prepare undergraduate (again, mostly White) students to be effective teachers in urban learning environments has been highly contested (see Cochran-Smith et al., 2014; Haberman, 1995), and found to be lacking.

Despite an expressed commitment to educational equity across schools of education in the United States, most teacher education programs are grounded in an ideology of color-blindness, where race is deemed insignificant to one’s life experiences and opportunities based upon the presumption that all individuals are “equal” (Bonilla-Silva, 2018), and are reflective of what Sleeter (2017) calls “White sensibilities.” This includes a pervasive Eurocentric and White-dominated curriculum, where content related to racial or cultural diversity is relegated to a few “multicultural” courses that merely provide a celebration of difference, as opposed to an analysis of systemic oppression and structural inequality that is required for equity-based teaching (Gorski, 2016). Instead, a narrow focus on curricular methods, content, and child developmental knowledge are thought to equip prospective teachers with a set of universal, culture-free skills that apply to all students (Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Milner, 2013). Moreover, in the last decade, we have seen an increasing reliance on “fast track” teacher education programs such as Teach for America (TFA) that offer scripted curricular “guidance” in place of preservice teachers’ sustained experiences in urban classroom settings, as well as the use of recruitment strategies at elite, majority-White institutions aimed at finding the “best” teacher candidates (Milner & Howard, 2013).

For these reasons, a focus on White teachers in K–12 schools is an urgent national imperative for many reasons, not the least of which is the extent to which they can effectively teach students of color in the classroom. Although there is some research that suggests that White teachers can be successful teachers of racial and ethnically diverse students (see Ullucci, 2011), studies in the last decade continue to document their resistance to talking about race in the classroom (see Crowley & Smith, 2015), compounded by what we argue here is a profound sense of complacency among White teachers regarding the implementation of culturally affirming practices with students of color.

For example, in her extensive fieldwork in both racially segregated and more diverse schools, Delpit (2012) has uncovered two persistent issues that undermine White teachers’ potential in this area: their ambivalence to learning about the cultural backgrounds and contexts of their students, and the presence of an uncritical racial consciousness whereby they consider themselves culturally and racially neutral “saviors” of children of color. This work illustrates key dimensions of teachers’ complacency. We argue that such complacency runs counter to the development of any sort of multicultural competence among practicing White teachers who teach in urban schools and, especially, that it undermines their ability to enact and transmit any of the aforementioned radical hope that is necessary for school reform efforts aimed at creating safe and equitable schools for all the nation’s children and youth.

Toward this end, our first goal in this conceptual review article is to contribute meaningful, research-based insights on what we see as a need for radically reflective practices that are necessary for the constitution of effective educational praxis for White teachers who teach in urban classrooms of mostly Black and brown students. We argue that although practice-oriented reflection (e.g., ongoing assessment of pedagogical strategies or effectiveness) may be regularly enacted by teachers (see Durand & Secakusuma, 2019; Harvey et al., 2016), it is very often not sufficiently radical, especially as it regards the dynamic between White teachers and students of color. More specifically, we conceptualize radical reflection as comprised with an informed understanding of whiteness, White privilege, and institutional racism in schools, and the ways that these influence the practice of teaching, as well as a willingness to push past the widely held belief that the delivery of a set of “culture-free” skills and practices to all students (Gay, 2018) is a characteristic of effective classroom pedagogy and relationship-building with students of color. In our view, radically reflective practices are grounded in these key insights.

Radically reflective practices have the potential to move White teachers from a place of complacency, to an active journey toward a radically hopeful teacher pedagogy, where praxis is achieved (Harvey et al., 2016). We use Kemmis and Smith’s (2008) definition of praxis in education to refer to actions or practices that are intentionally informed by theory, and are oriented toward the long-term interests of society. Derived from Greek and Aristotelian writings, the concept of praxis contains both a critical consciousness and a moral commitment to others (Kemmis & Smith, 2008).

To contextualize our notion of radical reflection, we first problematize contemporary, oft-used notions of multicultural education (MCE) by highlighting an essential, yet often missing element in its conceptualization: the need for multicultural teaching to be critical. We provide a brief review of the theoretical framework of Critical Multiculturalism (May & Sleeter, 2010) that has been well articulated in the past two decades—whereby multiculturalism in schools moves beyond a spurious acknowledgment of cultural traditions toward a commitment to more equitable school practices—and contend that it is the theoretical grounding for the promotion of radical reflection among teachers in diverse urban settings. Next, because the student–teacher relationship is paramount to students’ success in these spaces, we briefly review evidence from the research literature on the sociology of education, which highlights potential complexities in the interactions between White teachers and students of color, especially Black and Latinx students who must navigate stereotypic notions of themselves as non-achievers (Steele, 2010)—and illustrates the ways in which a complacent approach to teaching exacerbates this dynamic.

Our second goal in this article is to address an important gap in the literature on White teacher pedagogy, and a persistent weakness in the discourse on Critical Multiculturalism overall: the lack of examples of transformed or emancipated pedagogy and practice (see May & Sleeter, 2010). Consistent with this, in their comprehensive review of White teacher identity literatures in the past decade, Jupp et al. (2016) note that although great gains have been made in understanding the construct and evolution of teachers’ “race evasive” and “race visible” identities, for example, as well as in understanding the complex interplay between racial identity, hegemonic ideology, and interracial (teacher) alliances, studies continue to point to the difficulty of integrating theory to practice. These authors contend that although the conceptual knowledge base around the complexity of White teacher racial and cultural consciousness has grown, scholarship and literature that provides guidance to teachers in translating racial awareness into their actual classroom practice is more lacking. In our view, this amounts to a lack of process-oriented strategies to achieve or enact Critical Multicultural praxis, especially as it regards the urban school context. We speak directly and uniquely to this issue in the final section, where we provide a concrete set of such strategies that we argue are necessary for the constitution of a Critical Multicultural teacher praxis that is both radically reflective and radically hopeful, and where complacency is not an option.

Framing Radical Reflection: Critical Multiculturalism

Critical Multiculturalism seeks to problematize and actively challenge racism and injustice by situating racial inequality within societal-level relations; specifically, by examining the inequitable distribution of resources and power—racial power, in particular (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017; Sleeter & Delgado Bernal, 2004). In critical multiculturalism, whose conceptual roots are grounded in critical pedagogy and the work of the renowned Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the focus is not simply on multiculturalism akin to learning content related to various ethnic and cultural groups or to the reduction of prejudice, but on a critical examination of the ways that various forms of inequality are embedded in social institutions (Banks, 2016). Furthermore, the widely held presumption that laws, institutions, and practices in the United States are racially and culturally neutral would be critically questioned and contested within a critical multicultural perspective, holding that such claims of neutrality serve to both mask and reinforce systems of privilege (Sleeter, 2012).

Despite the fact that traditional MCE grew out of the ferment of the civil rights movement of the 1960s to address the need for educational systems to respond to inequitable opportunities afforded to marginalized groups, and to challenge dominant norms (Banks, 2016), it is still most often conceptualized by schools, teachers, and textbooks as a superficial celebration of difference (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017). Sensoy and DiAngelo (2017) note further that this celebratory approach, which often consists of sharing cultural practices, traditions, or foods, is framed within “the ideology of individualism, applied to each unique ethnic group” (p. 142), but is devoid of an examination of unequal power and status between such groups.

Applied to educational settings, traditional MCE appears as racially and culturally inclusive on the surface, yet is not radically reflective insofar as it does not seek to disrupt the hegemonic, largely colorblind discourse that occurs within. For example, in her research on teacher preparation and teaching in urban schools, Dixson (2018) noticed a pervasive reluctance among teachers to engage in any substantive discourse around race and its intersection with identity, as well as the ways in which its institutionalized, structural nature influences the lived experience of both people of color and Whites in the United States. Instead, the discourse consistently favored the promotion of meritocratic notions of achievement and success, while silencing critical questions and analysis of racial and cultural inequality in society.

In sum, a critical multicultural perspective compels educators to reconceptualize MCE in classrooms as more than simply content related to ethnic, racial, and cultural groups (Banks, 2016), in favor of a more intentional, critical focus on the institutional nature of racism, along with engagement in reflexive praxis around issues of power, privilege, and equity that can lead to anti-racist teaching and advocacy. In our view, while radical reflection may well be the impetus for White teachers’ journey toward a critical multicultural pedagogy, this very quickly becomes a mutually constituted process; radical reflection leads to a more critically multicultural stance, while enactment of critical pedagogy inspires the kind of reflection that is decidedly radical. We argue further that a critical multicultural perspective is key to more affirming relationships between White teachers and students of color and, in particular, exposes the problematic nature of the complacent stance assumed by many White teachers in classrooms.

The Schooling of Black and Latinx Students: Complacent and Deficit-Oriented Views as Barriers to Radical Reflection

In a compelling set of studies with both White preservice and practicing teachers, Mazzei (2004, 2008) analyzed empirical silences among White teachers as expressions of both White privilege and color-blindness, operationalized as a lack of consideration for students’ racial or cultural backgrounds in their classroom planning and interactions, as well as an avoidance of race-based discussions. Such practices were justified by teachers as tantamount to being inclusive in the classroom. Such ideologies and practices are common among well-intentioned White teacher educators (Gay, 2018). Yet, the larger literature on teacher practices exposes the embedded content of such complacency.

Research illuminating deficit-oriented beliefs about Black and Latinx students of color, in particular, among White teachers at all levels of preparation, is robust; specifically, studies conducted with teachers in the past few decades suggest that despite obvious variability in their skills and individual predispositions, unexamined racial biases and/or low or negative expectations of students of color with regard to their academic potential are shockingly common (see Gershenson et al., 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2006). For example, Baldwin et al. (2007) found that a majority of White prospective teachers participating in an urban service learning project believed that children of color are difficult to teach or unmotivated toward school.

More recently, Bryan (2017) provided an observational and conceptual analysis of White teachers’ disproportionate targeting of Black males for minor and subjective school disciplinary infractions, and the ways in which such biases and actions become part of White students’ intergenerational socialization about Black males in school and the larger society. Other studies that have examined the pedagogical strategies and expectations of practicing teachers have found that White teachers often direct fewer positive comments to African American and Latinx students, in particular, and rate them as less attentive, mature, and competent than White or Asian students (see meta-analyses by McGrady & Reynolds, 2013; Tenenbaum & Ruck, 2007).

Negative perceptions of Black and Latinx students are also manifested in both the explicit and null curriculum of the classroom and school; for example, teachers often modify or water down the curriculum for such students, in favor of remedial instruction that is devoid of the opportunity for students to apply critical thinking skills to meaningful content (Delpit, 2012; Ladson-Billings, 2009). In addition, negative perceptions of the intellectual capabilities of Black and Latinx students influences tracking and grouping practices, resulting in a lack of access to more rigorous, college preparatory courses (Nieto & Bode, 2011).

As the research above illustrates, we argue that the conventional ethos that frames the education of Black and Latinx students is heavily mired in the “deficit syndrome,” whereby the focus is on what students do not know or cannot do, and illustrates the ways in which White teacher perceptions of their life experiences, cultural backgrounds, individual predispositions, or intellectual potential are often decidedly negative. Although most teachers want the best for their students, they inherit and internalize deficit-oriented views regarding students of color that exist in the larger society (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017), and the uncritical acceptance of these hegemonic ideologies is yet another manifestation of how White complacency can play out in the classroom. Such complacency must be challenged with insight, intentionality, and radical reflection as a first step in nurturing the supportive, relational context that is necessary for students’ success, and where radical hope can be nurtured.

Radical Reflection as the Impetus for Critical Multicultural Praxis: Recommendations for Teachers

A set goal of a critical multicultural approach is to interrupt the status quo by educating people to identify, name, and challenge the norms that keep inequitable practices in place. In educational settings, we have argued here that critical multiculturalism serves as both the ideological foundation for a more radical teacher pedagogy, as well as a practice of consciousness-raising among White teachers. Toward this end, we first offer three salient manifestations of radically reflective practices that we consider integral in moving White teachers from a place of complacency around issues of race, diversity, and equity, and in interrogating deficit-oriented thinking about students’ potential. When enacted with authenticity and intention, such reflections can facilitate the kinds of critical multicultural praxis required to stand in solidarity with students of color in urban schools. We conclude our discussion with two compelling examples of such praxis that we consider fundamental to this endeavor.

Conclusion

Education is crucial to sustainable growth and success in our increasingly globalized world, and all students must have legitimate access to high-quality educational experiences that engage, challenge, and inspire them. At the beginning of this essay, we posed the question of whether teachers in the United States are more aptly positioned to inspire a radical hope for the future in students now, as compared with a decade ago. There are no easy answers to this question.

As noted by Darling-Hammond (2017), however, the divisive, xenophobic political climate that currently exists in the United States affords a direct opportunity to bring anti-racist, multicultural teaching to the fore. From this view, radical hope has the potential to prevail against despair in urban school settings in this moment in time, in particular. As such, it is imperative for educational leaders to focus on the support and development of critical multicultural praxis to equip what is still a largely White teaching force with the skills and resources they need to promote high academic achievement among all students, and where urban school settings become crucibles of radical hope. Indeed, this is consistent with the ideals of a democratic society, where all individuals have the right to be educated well, and where teachers and schools do not simply indoctrinate, but empower. White teacher complacency cannot be an option if we are serious about these goals. Teachers who are committed to radical reflection and the enactment of critical multicultural praxis can act as pivotal sources of resilience for youth of color, so that their utmost potential can be realized and celebrated.