Race-Visible Teacher Education: A Review of the Literature From 2002 to 2018

Abstract

In this review of the literature, we draw on critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and critical pedagogy to examine teacher educators’ race-visible efforts in preservice teacher education and inservice teacher professional development. Our review specifically centers on race and racism in teacher education because race is often silenced or largely unaddressed in teacher education programs and teacher professional learning. Through a systematic search of electronic databases and a hand search of journals in this research area, we located 39 peer-reviewed articles published at the intersection of race, white teachers, and teacher education. Findings reveal the kinds of race-visible instructional practices used by teacher educators to scaffold race consciousness as well as larger themes teacher educators and education researchers encounter in their work related to race with preservice and inservice educators. We conclude with a discussion of our findings and offer future directions for continued research and practice.

Keywords

race teacher education critical race theory critical whiteness studies

Justice-oriented teacher educators have long held that teacher education and professional development programs that ignore the role of whiteness in the maintenance of oppressive systems perpetuate unjust practices that harm students of color while elevating white identities in the curriculum and within school communities. Teacher educators who seek to dismantle racial injustice in schooling and the larger society often undertake race-visible pedagogical practices, particularly the use of critical race pedagogies, with white teachers and teacher candidates (e.g., Pollock et al., 2010; Sleeter, 2017; Ullucci, 2012). The purpose of this article is to present a review of the literature examining race-visible teacher education spanning a period between 2002 and 2018. We draw from studies of antiracist preservice teacher education and inservice teacher professional development efforts, with a focus on those practices that call upon preservice teachers (PSTs) and inservice teachers (ISTs) to reflect on the pervasive influences of white supremacy and the normalization of white identity on teacher praxis.

We focus our review on race-visible teacher education specifically, rather than “diversity” or “multicultural” education, for two reasons. First, this focus reflects a long-standing concern in U.S. teacher preparation over the tendency for diversity curricula to overgeneralize dimensions of difference and to skirt issues of race, which hold a particularly charged position in U.S. public dialogue (Milner, 2017; Sleeter, 2017). Quite frequently, diversity education encompasses a wide range of social issues and identity groups, and may include cursory explorations of race, ethnicity, culture and religion, and dis/ability (Sleeter, 2017). Annamma and Winn (2019) have cited the need for social justice in teacher education to assume an intersectional perspective that simultaneously recognizes the central position of race in any discussion of justice issues in education. Intersectionality must not be used “to supplant or suppress issues of race and racism but is instead used as a theoretical tool and pedagogical stance to reaffirm that race and racism matter, as do interlocking oppressions” (p. 332). The legacies of American slavery and Jim Crow, the violent displacement of Indigenous Peoples, historically legalized educational and labor discrimination against immigrant groups, and current political conversations about immigration in the United States make race a uniquely sensitive, often difficult, yet crucially important topic for many teachers and teacher educators (Milner, 2017). The great silence that seems to surround topics of race in schools belies the tremendous presence that race has in our public discourse (Pollock, 2004). Ladson-Billings (2018) describes race as a “sense-making concept” (p. 103) that suffuses U.S. life. Students are confronted daily with news of heightened polarization, racist rhetoric, and fear-based discrimination that characterize the current political environment. Teacher educators must accept the imperative of antiracist teacher education and the race-visible work it entails. We were interested specifically in studies that address challenges and affordances of teacher education in which race is a central topic.

Second, our focus on race-visible teacher education is relevant because of the decreasing visibility of racial difference in U.S. schools. The U.S. student population has become increasingly segregated, reflecting both residential patterns and a series of legal decisions and policy changes that effectively dilute school integration policies (Rosiek & Kinslow, 2016). In schools with majority students of color, students are still more likely than not to be taught by mostly white teachers. Educational research on a predominantly white, female, and monolingual English-speaking teaching force has revealed the ways that the implicit biases of teachers and school leaders can disadvantage students of color in U.S. schools (Sleeter, 2001). This review is guided by two central questions:

Research Question 1: What instructional practices do teacher educators employ to make race visible with preservice and inservice teachers?

Research Question 2: What does the literature reveal about the implementation and impact of race-visible efforts with preservice teachers and inservice teachers’ professional learning?

Positioning Ourselves in This Work

This literature review project was prompted by both personal and professional interests. I (Katie) am white, and struggled as both a student and a high school teacher to talk about race and racism without feeling flustered and unsure. I doubted the legitimacy of my knowledge. By reading I began to understand that in most of my familiar contexts my whiteness allowed me to ignore systemic racism, the advantages that white supremacy confers on my identity, and my role in sustaining or opposing it. I saw that my ignorance about racism made me timid and ill-equipped when trying to teach about race, much to my students’ detriment. In the predominantly white communities in which I have always lived and taught, I watched as topics touching on issues of race, including well-publicized national and local news events, seemed always to provoke discomfort and avoidance. My interest in race-visible education, and teacher education specifically, began with a desire to understand the nature and origin of that discomfort.

I (Elyse) am biracial, Asian and white and grew up in a racially diverse community. My interests in equity stem from my own racial upbringing and observations of inequitable school practices affecting students of color. When I was an elementary school teacher, I watched as the same students, often Black males, were sent to the office and suspended for what their teachers perceived as defiant behavior. As a novice kindergarten teacher, I remained silent when mid-way into the school year the kindergarten team was ordered by administration to separate and track children by reading ability. As five- and six-year-olds shuffled to their new teacher for reading instruction, I could not help but notice that those “low” reading groups were disproportionately composed of students of color, English Learners, and students with disabilities. Witnessing such disturbing practices engendered my interest in race in the context of teaching and learning. In 2013, I relocated to New Hampshire for a faculty position in one of the whitest states in the United States. This shift in context has changed how I think about and approach my work with white educators who either currently teach or will likely go on to teach in mostly white suburban and rural communities.

Through these experiences and others, we became interested in how teacher educators approach issues of race in their teaching practice and in the issues associated with undertaking antiracist pedagogies with white teachers working in mostly white school communities.

Theoretical Framework

We position our review at the intersection of critical race theory (CRT) and critical whiteness studies (CWS). We apply these concepts to support an examination of antiracist teacher education efforts grounded in race-conscious analyses of social power, in which teacher educators lead PSTs and ISTs to interrogate implicit beliefs in white superiority that pervade oppressive educational practices.

CRT

CRT originated in the field of legal studies and secured attention in the field of education in the mid-1990s. According to Delgado and Stefancic (2012), among its many principles CRT holds that racism is a normal condition of society rather than a rarity. Because of its omnipresence, racism is mostly unacknowledged and thus difficult to address except in its most egregious forms. Because white dominance has historically conferred enormous advantages on white groups, these same groups may perceive beliefs or actions that acknowledge, challenge, or work to dismantle racialized structures of power as personally costly. Ladson-Billings and Tate (1995) use CRT to theorize educational inequity by drawing attention to the continued salience of race in the context of schooling. In education scholarship, CRT sheds light on how systems of schooling transmit racist ideologies through instructional practices, school climate, and “the official school curriculum” which CRT contends is “a culturally specific artifact designed to maintain a White supremacist master script” (Ladson-Billings, 1998, p. 18). CRT also illuminates how schooling reproduces racial inequality through school discipline policies and enforcement, student grouping practices such as tracking, and public policy surrounding school choice (Delgado and Stefancic, 2012).

Sleeter (2017) shows how the CRT tenets of interest convergence, presumptions of neutrality and colorblindness, and experiential knowledge are useful for theorizing whiteness in teacher education. Bell’s (1980) principle of interest convergence argues that Black advancement only happens when it coincides with white interests. Sleeter (2017) shows interest convergence at work in teacher education, wherein many programs claim to adopt a justice-oriented stance, yet do so in incremental or symbolic ways such as adding a multicultural education course to the curriculum or by hiring a professor of color to the faculty, while otherwise preserving programs “defined by White interests” and curricula reflecting white sensibilities (p. 158). In addition, given that teacher education faculty are largely white, the curriculum and entry requirements of most teacher education and certification programs that claim to be neutral often reinforce Eurocentric knowledge. Furthermore, CRT centers the experiential knowledge of people of color through counterstories that question majoritarian narratives about race and racism. Counterstories, “or those stories that document the persistence of racism and other forms of subordination, voices from the margins, become the voices of authority in the researching and relating of [people of color’s] experiences” (Martinez, 2014, p. 65). This tenet of CRT regards the life experiences of people of color as legitimate and critical to understanding racial subordination (Yosso, 2013). In the context of teacher education, respecting experiential knowledge entails openness to a more encompassing definition of educational expertise (Sleeter, 2017).

CWS

As a related field of inquiry, CWS engages directly with questions of how cultural and discursive processes center whiteness and reproduce white dominance. Nakayama and Krizek (1995) identify six strategies in what they term a “strategic rhetoric of whiteness” (p. 298). These include, among others, the tendency for everyday language to conjoin whiteness with dominance, to define “white” as an absence of race in relation to other racial definitions, and to naturalize whiteness by obscuring the history that produced “white” as a racial definition while avoiding issues of power.

One commonplace concept in academic study of whiteness is the notion of white privilege (Berchini, 2017; Jupp et al., 2016; McIntosh, 1988), or the idea that white people benefit from a host of unearned advantages by virtue of a set of physical features that hold undue social value. Critics of white privilege pedagogies are concerned that this focus on white privilege has led to a confessional framework (Lensmire et al., 2013) and have pointed out that such approaches cast white people as passive, unintentional beneficiaries of unequal conditions, and do not sufficiently emphasize the agentic role that white people play in producing and maintaining white supremacy through individual beliefs, social practices, and political advocacy (Berchini, 2017). In this way, Leonardo (2004) points out, “Whites have been able to develop discourses of anti-racism in the face of their unearned advantages” (p. 140).

The conception of the white individual as blameless in the perpetuation of white supremacy has also been critiqued in the specific context of antiracist scholarship. Howard (2004) writes that much work in CWS is “built upon faulty understandings, which left unchallenged, may become racist in their effects—re-inscribing white dominance in the very domains that purport to challenge it” (p. 64). Studying racism with a view toward the oppressor is important because it “returns the racially dominant gaze” (p. 66). However, though pioneered by African American scholars of the early to mid-20th century (Jupp et al., 2016), the study of whiteness, Howard (2004) argues, has increasingly become “the domain of racially dominant scholars” (p. 67) and host to projects that misconstrue principles of CRT and critical antiracism by overemphasizing class diversity, for instance, and casting white racism and white-skin privilege as entirely individualized conditions. On the contrary, Howard writes,

Only the habit of White privilege could allow any White body, antiracist or otherwise, to feel that s/he can, at will, easily shake off the manner in which one’s body is taken up by a white supremacist system when people of color have been struggling to do so for centuries. (p. 74)

In considering the complex project of antiracist education with white teachers, we cannot ignore the ways that possessing a white racial identity positions white teachers and teacher educators to believe that proclaiming an antiracist orientation signals a commitment to justice, despite the myriad ways that we all continue to act within and be acted upon by a white supremacist system.

Jupp and colleagues (2016) have articulated a field of inquiry, white teacher identity studies, which focuses on a need to prepare and “conscientize” an as-yet predominantly white teaching force “for teaching across understandings of race, class, culture, language, and other identity differences in increasingly diverse public schools” (p. 1152). In their review of white teacher identity scholarship they identify race-evasion by white teachers as a dominant theme of an earlier “first wave” of studies in this area. While this theme persists in scholarship of a current “second wave,” they note the emergence of white PSTs and ISTs who recognize and wrestle with race and whiteness in their students and themselves. These race-visible white teacher identity studies differ from studies characterizing the first wave by relying on purposive samples of white educators who demonstrate varying degrees of race-visible conscientization. The themes within the field’s second wave include, among others, the limitations of white identity development stage models, the development of cultural competence and a willingness to learn, and programmatic changes to curriculum and pedagogies that engender changes in educators’ professional identity development. Jupp et al.’s (2016) review highlights new emphases on the nuances and complexities of race-visible teacher identities and argues for research that goes beyond essentializing white educators, asserting that “White racial identities are multifarious messes of thought and feeling, and . . . resistance to antiracist and social justice efforts is not always a straightforward defense of White privilege” (Lensmire, 2012, p. 170).

Lowenstein (2009) has noted that many approaches to multicultural education have assumed that white teacher candidates are almost universally lacking in their cultural awareness and hampered by their whiteness in their capacity to learn. Such a lens, Lowenstein argues, locates deficits within teacher candidates while ignoring institutional and community factors that sustain the “Whiteness of teacher education” (Sleeter, 2017). Matias (2016) has argued that whiteness must be critically examined in pedagogies that “go beyond celebrating the racial epiphanies of Whites who have become racially aware” (p. 69). Berchini (2017) similarly argues that CWS, while holding promise as a means of confronting inequality and the pernicious aspects of White identity, may be counterproductive if it fails to move beyond recognitions of unearned privilege or confessions by White participants. Contrary to their aims, these “White privilege pedagogies” (p. 463), Berchini argues, open a space for White students to defensively individuate their identities and personal roles in racialized dynamics of power and avoid identifying as members of a group that has actively oppressed other groups throughout history. Berchini calls on antiracist teacher educators to enact pedagogies that connect knowledge of personal privilege with understandings of whiteness in relation to institutional power, “encouraging learning about, and engaging with, the ways by which Whites are collectively implicated in structural injustice” (p. 472). Teacher educators ought to expect their students’ confusion and discomfort as an inevitable part of the fight for racial justice and a fuller humanity (Casey et al., 2018).

Review Method

We reviewed peer-reviewed articles published between 2002 and 2018 that specifically examined the preparation of White PSTs and ISTs. We narrowed our search to 16 years and began our search with 2002 to extend Sleeter’s seminal 2001 JTE literature review, which found that very little research actually examined the instructional practices that prepare educators for culturally diverse schools.

To locate high-quality empirical and descriptive peer-reviewed articles, we used a three-phase process: searching, reviewing, and sorting. We began by searching two of the most common and comprehensive databases, Educational Resource Information Center (ERIC) and Journal Storage (JSTOR), within the 16-year timeframe. We narrowed our search using the terms “race,” “white teachers,” “preservice,” “inservice,” and “professional development,” and “prepar*,” which captured the words “prepare,” “preparing,” and “preparation.” The searching phase also included a hand search of articles in Race, Ethnicity, and Education, Urban Education, and Equity and Excellence in Education because they are prominent journals that publish research focused at intersections of race, whiteness, and teacher education. We read the title and abstract of each article and discussed whether the article fit our search criteria. Consistent with our theoretical framework, we excluded articles that did not have an explicit focus on race. In total, our search yielded 39 articles.

The second phase of the project involved reviewing all documents and gathering information from each publication including article type (empirical, reflective/descriptive, or conceptual), research question(s), purpose, theoretical framework, methodology, information about participants and context, and major findings. With our RQs in mind, we met biweekly to discuss our overall observations about the questions and purposes, methods, and findings that characterized the literature of this period, as well as any emerging themes in the implementation and impact of race-visible teacher education with PSTs and ISTs. The sorting phase involved separating literature into larger themes based on each piece’s central contribution.

Findings

Across the 39 articles that addressed antiracist efforts in teacher education, 28 were empirical, eight were reflective/descriptive, and three were conceptual in nature. More than 70% of the articles focused on educating PSTs to work in racially diverse settings, and the remaining articles examined the learning of ISTs, administrators and guidance counselors. Course assignments such as reflection papers, online discussions, and culminating projects were the most commonly collected data source. The second most common data collection method involved interviewing participants. Surveys and questionnaires were the least common data source. Across the empirical publications, researchers mostly examined a specific course or experience.

Our synthesis of findings is divided into two conceptually overlapping sections. First, we describe how teacher educators operationalize antiracist education. What are the instructional practices that they draw on, and how do they attempt to make race visible? In the second part of our findings, we delve into what the literature revealed about teacher educators’ experiences practicing as antiracist educators, their aims and concerns as they implemented race-visible efforts, and impacts they observed in their education students.

Teacher Educators’ Instructional Practices in Race-Visible Teacher Education

The articles we found often drew on CRT, CWS, and critical pedagogy to analyze teacher educators’ race-visible instructional practices. Teacher educators incorporated literature, art, and various multimedia in their attempts to disrupt students’ tacit understandings about race. Coupled with showing their students such material, they used additional practices such as autobiography/autoethnography, race-reflective writing, digital storytelling, and experiential components to elicit critical reflection. Several scholars deliberately selected literature that explored the American experience through narratives of Black and Latinx lives. By examining race through story, teacher educators led PSTs to reconsider their prior understanding of American literature and recognize the relative absence of texts by Black and Latinx authors in English classrooms (e.g., Glenn, 2015; Katsarou, 2009). For both Glenn and Katsarou, one of the purposes of including such works was to historicize American experiences that are often left out of the literary canon.

Articles also described the use of multimedia as a main instructional practice in antiracist teaching. Critical analysis of documentary series, toy commercials, and social media forums fostered reflection and dialogue as PSTs worked to deconstruct social categories including race, social class, and sexual orientation (Bryant et al., 2015; Matias & Mackey, 2016). By exploring racial themes in foreign films, PSTs examined unfamiliar cultural contexts (and in turn their own cultural contexts) to uncover common racial stereotypes in popular media, recognize their own racial assumptions, and shift from emotional discomfort to action (de Freitas & McAuley, 2008). When crafted as a “brave space” where race talk was centered, a museum workshop for educators used art and artifacts to prompt transformative learning about the historical foundations of race and racism (Flanagan, 2017, p. 26). These studies revealed ways that teacher educators used various media artifacts to introduce “troubling knowledge,” or “knowledge that is disruptive, discomforting, and problematizing,” (Kumashiro, 2009, p. 9) that helped PSTs and ISTs critically examine their own cultures.

Race-reflective writing emerged as one of the most common pedagogical practices with PSTs and ISTs. Teacher educators used race-reflective writing coupled with dialogue to encourage examinations of whiteness and social position (Milner, 2003). Online discussions about personal experiences with interracial contact or connection, recollections of racial incidents, and reflections on the role of race in teacher–student interactions melded features of reflective journaling and dialogue (Christian & Zippay, 2012). The use of course journals promoted analysis of “everyday issues of race, opportunity, and diversity” in the preparatory education of PSTs, school leaders and personnel (Pollock et al., 2016, p. 634).

Specific genres of race-reflective writing emerged in the literature, including autobiography, autoethnography, and critical family history. In the context of study on race and racialized experiences, these variations on life writing link understanding of the self to broader cultural patterns (Denshire, 2014; Sleeter, 2015). Pennington’s (2007) autoethnographic study of racial constructions of self and student identity revealed a persistent “savior” mentality in teacher education that echoes King’s (1997) concept of dysconscious racism, a form of racism that “tacitly accepts dominant White norms” (p. 128). Ullucci (2012) used story, particularly autobiography, to help white PSTs understand themselves as racial beings, recognize how their race has benefited them, and identify moments when their race has marginalized them.

Of all the instructional practices, the least common we found were the use of digital storytelling and critical family history exercises. Digital storytelling is the practice of using digital tools to share one’s story with others publicly online. Matias and Mackey (2016) analyzed PSTs’ use of digital tools to narrate their lives in ways that engaged them emotionally as they problematized the normativity of whiteness and deconstructed their own white racial identities. Sleeter (2011) explored how white PSTs began to reconceptualize their role in systemic oppression by examining their family heritage stories in the context of white colonialism by seeking census data, oral histories, and documents to correct “hero” ancestor stories. Sleeter’s work argues that family history exercises must be culturally and historically contextualized to be useful in antiracist education, or they risk perpetuating myths of meritocracy.

Taken together, our review of the literature finds that teacher educators use various instructional practices in their attempt to make race visible, ranging from race-reflective writing assignments, digital storytelling, and locating historical documents for critical family history exercises. The practices examined in these studies targeted concepts of white race-evasion, white privilege, and PSTs’ and ISTs’ understanding of the historical and social meanings of whiteness.

Themes in Teacher Educators’ Race-Visible Efforts

Five themes arose from accounts of race-visible education with PSTs and ISTs: (a) PSTs and ISTs adhered to ideas of meritocracy to explain racial inequality, (b) PSTs and ISTs avoided race talk while embracing ideas of cultural difference or other markers of identity, (c) teacher educators drew attention to the importance of acknowledging the “emotional burden” of race, (d) white professors were distrusted, and professors of color discredited or threatened, when they challenged white dominance, and (e) a few teacher educators observed PSTs and ISTs grappling with whiteness in complex ways and acknowledging real-world difficulties in doing antiracist work. We found that a single article almost always had more than one purpose, theme, or key finding. Given this, we organize these works not as representative of only one theme, but as one of its main contributions to race-visible teacher education efforts.

Although we synthesize themes across the literature over the last 16 years, we want to make clear that not all of the articles portray white PSTs and ISTs as a monolithic group who evade race talk through silence, defensiveness, and anger. A small number of studies emphasize a “pedagogy of responsibility” (Berchini, 2017) that extends beyond examinations of unequal advantages to refocus on structural racism and white teachers’ tacit participation in racist systems. This is important to note, and we conclude our findings section with those few studies that lead PSTs and ISTs to pay attention to the structural origins of white dominance and the investment of white people as a group in sustaining those structures (Berchini, 2017; Lensmire et al., 2013).

PSTs and ISTs Adhered to Ideas of Meritocracy to Explain Racial Inequity

The dominant narrative about success in U.S. society is one that prioritizes hard work and skill. Given this, many of the PSTs and ISTs adopted a “bootstraps narrative” and espoused this belief as a way to explain racial inequity (e.g., Hill-Jackson, 2007; Sleeter, 2011; Solomon et al., 2005).

Canadian scholars Solomon et al. (2005) analyzed PSTs’ written responses to Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” to explore the strategies they used to avoid addressing whiteness. Participants in the study “positioned themselves within liberalist notions of social movement” (Solomon et al., 2005, p. 160), and they saw the success of a particular person or group as solely connected to their individual efforts or lack thereof. The authors describe participants having a kind of “emotional paralysis” (p. 157) in their written reflections due to the cognitive dissonance that left them feeling vulnerable and angry. The feeling of being personally attacked by McIntosh and the article hindered white PSTs from examining larger historical contexts that have led to systemic oppression.

CRT can help elucidate how colorblind racism is obscured by myths of meritocracy—beliefs that societies’ institutions will fairly award power and privilege to individuals who exhibit exceptional talents or valued attributes such as perseverance. Such beliefs contradict the social funding of race (Ladson-Billings, 2018) and deny the persistence of vast inequalities by appealing to abstract notions of equal opportunity, personal choice, and individualism (Bonilla-Silva, 2014).

PSTs and ISTs Avoided Race Talk While Embracing Ideas of Cultural Difference or Other Markers of Identity

Many of the articles in our search showed that, in addition to adhering to ideas of meritocracy to explain racial inequality, PSTs and ISTs evaded discussions about race and racism, and were more likely to acknowledge other markers of identity as reasons for oppression (Crowley, 2016; Ullucci, 2012; Vaught & Castagno, 2008; Young, 2016). As mentioned earlier, Ullucci (2012) issued an autobiography assignment for PSTs to reflect on their racialized identities and how particular life experiences may have shaped their histories and understandings about race. PSTs’ stories demonstrated that vaguely described characteristics of “culture” dominated discussions among most of the white-identified students; at times, descriptions of “culture” appeared to muddy discussions in which race had relevance. Although a few PSTs did elaborate on how being white shaped their lives, many of them perpetuated colorblind ideology and believed being white did not matter.

Vaught and Castagno (2008) drew from two separate ethnographic studies to examine what teacher beliefs reveal about the structural dimensions of racial inequity. The two studies were conducted following district-wide professional development trainings “aimed at increasing racial, ethnic, and cultural awareness among teachers and administrators in hopes of alleviating the achievement gap” (p. 97) partly in response to media publicity and pressure to address racial discrepancies in achievement. The researchers found that administrators and teachers used class and cultural mismatch in place of specific references to race to explain significant disparities in achievement. Pointing to cultural misunderstandings rather than racism enabled the educators to deflect evidence of unequal power in such relationships. Considering the tenet of CRT that holds that challenges to the legitimacy of the racial order necessarily present a threat to white dominance (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012), the “anything but race” arguments (Bonilla-Silva, 2014, p. 110) revealed in these studies—accepted as reasonable by discussion participants—can be understood as defenses against any such challenges (Picower, 2009).

Teacher Educators Drew Attention to the Importance of Acknowledging the “Emotional Burden” of Race

As hooks (1994) reminds us, an engaged pedagogy recognizes that the work of antiracism must include a person’s entire being—mind, body, and spirit. Certainly, this includes one’s emotions in the study of racism and whiteness. Six articles bring attention to the emotions that impact teaching and learning for racial justice (Coles-Ritchie & Smith, 2017; Flanagan, 2017; Jett & Cross, 2016; Matias & Grosland, 2016; Matias & Mackey, 2016; Ohito, 2016).

Ohito (2016) encouraged white PSTs to recognize how their embodied whiteness affected their teaching and their students’ learning experiences. The study used several data sources including students’ autobiographical essays, surveys and feedback forms, audio recordings of class discussions, reflective and analytical memos, entries in the researcher’s journal, written analyses of participants’ projects, and interviews with participants to help explore the viscerally felt discomfort associated with antiracist teaching and learning. In the course, “emotionally evocative” (p. 458) literature was used to deepen education students’ critical emotional consciousness. In addition, Ohito homed in on bodily sensations experienced by class members and instructor during a racial “hot spot” when a white male student read aloud a passage that contained a racial slur. The findings from Ohito’s study underscore the value of accepting discomfort during such hot spots, and how those moments can expose our physical and psychological responses to racialized language, assisting white PSTs as they “make meaning of the contours of racial oppression by noticing and listening to the interactions between our bodies and emotions” (p. 459).

In two studies by Matias and colleagues (Matias & Grosland, 2016; Matias & Mackey, 2016) teacher educators drew on critical whiteness scholarship to help students acknowledge emotionality. Matias and Mackey’s (2016) reflective article described how the use of critical whiteness pedagogies facilitated the PSTs’ self-recognition of their emotions, and how these were explored deeply through the use of digital storytelling. In a later paper, Matias and Grosland (2016) conducted a qualitative analysis of digital stories that came from the first course of an urban teacher preparation program. Guided by CRT, CWS, and critical emotion studies, the authors reflected on the messages of each digital story and how they contributed to deconstructing whiteness. They found that digital stories have the potential to end emotional distancing, debunk colorblindness, and help PSTs engage with their emotions and take part in sharing the burden of race. Like previous scholars who have explored the emotional dimensions of critical race work (Applebaum, 2010; Matias, 2016; Winans, 2012), the authors of these studies contend that understanding emotion is central to understanding how racism is experienced and why it is often defended or denied.

White Professors Were Distrusted, and Professors of Color Discredited or Threatened, for Challenging White Dominance

Articles under this theme drew attention to students expressing suspicion and doubt about their white professors and beliefs that their professors of color are simply unqualified to teach (Amobi, 2007; Evans-Winters & Hoff, 2011; Gillespie et al., 2002; Han & Leonard, 2017; Jett & Cross, 2016; Juárez & Hayes, 2015). Gillespie et al. (2002) drew on class discussions and meetings with white female students during office hours to understand the students’ responses to topics of race and white privilege. The instructors’ accounts included students’ questioning their legitimacy to teach about race, students’ impulse to disconnect once they felt as though they were being implicated in a larger system of white supremacy, and instructors’ difficulties in reengaging students following those disconnections. Students accused their white female instructors of “white bashing” (p. 237) and expressed frustration and feelings of betrayal when they learned that their instructors did not share the same essentialist racial attitudes or colorblind positions. It seemed the students had expected sympathetic viewpoints from their instructors based on their shared identities as white women.

African American teacher educators Evans-Winters and Hoff (2011) conducted a content analysis of their end-of-semester course evaluations to demonstrate students’ resistance to race-conscious education and defense of whiteness through silence in the classroom and the retaliatory use of course evaluations. Comments in course evaluations revealed enduring racial stereotypes, portraying the instructors as racist against white people, unskilled, and unprofessional. Evans-Winters and Hoff connect this observation to research suggesting that social media and other online settings propagate racist ideology and verbal aggression. PSTs’ comments demonstrated that evaluations can be weaponized by students wishing to speak against antiracist philosophies.

Juárez and Hayes (2015) used counter-storytelling through joint and individual reflections, discussions, and analysis of historical sources. In their analysis, they describe a phenomenon they term “academic lynching” and its role in maintaining white supremacy in academe. Teacher educator Malcolm, a fictitious Black male character invoked to portray actual events in the counter-story, received a “helping committee of senior faculty members assigned to assist him in learning to speak less angrily and more acceptably to Whites” (p. 323). A faculty committee was assigned to place Malcolm’s body under surveillance to ensure that he speaks more softly to avoid offending white students and faculty members. Using a conceptual framework of “domestic terrorism,” the authors explain how the academic lynching of Malcolm illustrates a process that ensures “the continued failure of multicultural teacher preparation” (p. 323).

An article by Jett and Cross (2016) describes narrative reflections in teaching a diversity course at a large urban research university in the southeast United States. Cross, a white woman, recounts the difficulty she experienced creating an environment in which classmates could speak about race. Nervous about her authority to teach about race, she often maintained her silence during classroom discussions about race and believed that her omissions negatively impacted classroom dynamics. For example, when a Black student in the course was assigned Cross as her intern supervisor, she requested a new supervisor, citing that her previous experiences in Cross’s course made her feel singled out and unsupported. If the field is committed to supporting PSTs of color, teacher educators must attend to the ways that their own discomfort or avoidance can create or intensify the emotional burdens of those they teach.

Some Studies Observed PSTs and ISTs Grappling With Whiteness in Complex Ways and Acknowledging Real-World Difficulties in Doing Antiracist Work

Berchini (2017) and others argue that “when studies focus primarily if not exclusively on teachers’ personal characteristics (by way of reactions to anti-racist and/or multicultural curriculum, beliefs about racism, experiences with racialized privilege, etc.)” (p. 467), it conceals the structural origins of white privilege. Such a narrow framing gives in to a discourse of binaries (e.g., good/bad, racist/not racist) that Applebaum (2010), citing Leonardo (2004), cautions against because they allow white individuals to retreat from interrogating their assumed innocence in structural racism. In this subsection of the findings, we draw attention to studies that resist these binaries, describing how participants grappled with white privilege and structural racism, describing educators at various points in the development of a critical race praxis.

Two early examples are provided by Marx and Pennington (2003) and Marx (2004). The coauthors of the former study described their efforts to make race, and specifically whiteness, visible to the white PSTs they were responsible for supervising during fieldwork. Pennington recounted how openly discussing with her PSTs how she came to understand her own white racism allowed the PSTs to open up to discussing how their whiteness infused their experiences with students and families, positioned them as outsiders in the predominantly Latinx school community, and impacted their sense of efficacy. While supervising white, monolingual English-speaking PSTs working in a tutoring center for English Learners, Marx used interview transcripts and CRT analysis to reflect back to the PSTs the language they used to describe their students. Over time, the PSTs came to recognize the racism and deficit thinking embedded in their discourse.

Crowley’s (2016) qualitative critical case study in an urban teacher education program unpacks instances in which the PSTs explored, rather than resisted race-visible pedagogies to reveal complexities in white PST identities. Some PSTs demonstrated “transgressive White racial knowledge” while others displayed “negotiated White racial knowledge.” In demonstrating transgressive white racial knowledge, PSTs challenged dominant discourses in ways that marginalized them from their white community. Examples of this included challenging deficit-based thinking and white normality. But some PSTs evinced negotiated white racial knowledge, meaning they recognized the need to discuss race but expressed concerns over talking about race in practice. Participants Maria and Litzy’s hesitations to talk about issues of race were prime examples. Crowley writes,

Both teachers highlighted the need for safety in race conversations and alluded to the fragility of White people when they discuss race. Neither individual suggested race conversations should not occur, but they struggled with how they would navigate those interactions with students. (p. 1026)

Crowley argues that while some might view Maria and Litzy’s vacillation as an indication of lacking commitment, their hesitations can be interpreted as a real and natural part of teacher learning. Crowley’s findings are significant because they contrast followership and a rush to acceptance in antiracist education with a more tentative response, suggesting that such critical reflection may be necessary to sustain antiracist thinking and practice.

In another study, Pollock and colleagues (2010) drew data from fieldnotes and individual journal entries of 33 PSTs in a course called Everyday Antiracism. The authors describe three core tensions that arose repeatedly during the course. First, some PSTs argued that course material was too concrete, yet some stated that the material was too abstract and did not focus enough on concrete action in classrooms. The second tension involved questioning the potential of everyday individual actions to dismantle structural racism; that is, PSTs held different beliefs about themselves as individual change agents within an unequal system. The third tension PSTs raised was the need to work on their own understanding of race and racism before they could even consider thinking about racism in professional settings. Those PSTs who committed to continue engaging with tensions between professional and personal concerns tended to embrace the unfinishedness to pursue both sides of these tensions in the ongoing journey of challenging racial inequity in schools and in their lives (Pollock et al., 2010).

We highlight studies by these researchers because they illustrate how some educators engage with rather than resist grappling with whiteness. These articles show how teacher educators expose white complicity and encourage a kind of moral responsibility that “does not focus on guilt but instead emphasizes uncertainty, vulnerability and vigilance” (Applebaum, 2010, p. 5). In other words, they move beyond what Berchini (2017) calls a “pedagogy of dismantling students” (p. 463) that risks becoming mired in white PSTs’ and ISTs’ defensiveness and resistance.

Discussion

Thandeka’s (2001) work on how white identities are constructed is useful to analyze the broader landscape of race-visible teaching and teacher education. She draws on psychoanalytic theory and historical work on whiteness to contend that white identities are constructed out of a racialized form of abuse by white adults toward white children. In early development, a child does not recognize constructed racial boundaries and social hierarchies. Over time a white child implicitly learns from other whites that crossing racial lines (e.g., inviting Black friends to a birthday party, dating a person of a different race) is inappropriate, and if that child continues to pursue relationships with people of color, then adult support and love may be lost. In turn, the white child (who becomes the white adult) experiences the feeling of confusion, of doing something “wrong,” and risks being ostracized by family and their white community. According to Thandeka, developing a white racial identity damages the white psyche and comes with social and emotional costs.

Casey et al. (2018) note that this loss and suffering among whites must not to be equated with the dehumanization of people of color. In fact, the burden of this damage to the white psyche is borne by people of color, as Matias (2016) documents how a “dominant narrative of white pain” (p. 12) comes to supersede the lived pain of those injured by white aggression. Nevertheless, Thandeka (2001) argues, white people’s desires for solidarity and fulfilling lives are hindered because of white supremacy. Casey and colleagues look to Jansen’s (2009) scholarship on brokenness to mobilize white people to work in service to antiracist projects. Jansen’s position is consistent with earlier Black scholars who argued that living in a white supremacist world dehumanizes and breaks all of us (including white people), and that this brokenness secludes us from a more fully human reality. From this standpoint, Casey and colleagues (2018) write, the “moral political obligation” of white people, including teachers and teacher educators,

Is to listen, to learn as much as we can, and to respond in ways that signal our genuine commitment to more fully understanding the ways we can grow in our resistance to white supremacy, rather than hiding in the shadow of our relative privilege. (p. 98)

The literature reveals how efforts to make race visible are conceived and enacted by teacher educators and received by PSTs and ISTs. It suggests that opportunities for disruptive self-reflection can be part of repairing our humanity, but that they also bring emotional and sometimes even professional risks.

Our review highlights that teacher educators of color risk their careers and lives speaking out against and teaching about racism (Evans-Winters & Hoff, 2011; Han & Leonard, 2017; Juárez & Hayes, 2015). Complaints to authority figures and negative instructor evaluations are ways that professors of color experience both hypervisibility and exclusion. Matias (2016) documents the crushing effect that white “hegemonic emotional domination” (p. 69) can have in discussions about race and racism in classes and speaking engagements. She observes a cultural tendency to attend to the emotional comfort of white individuals and groups. In scenarios in which critical race pedagogies are employed by faculty of color, the white students’ pain in confronting their racism is prioritized over the emotional and career wellbeing of their professors. Stated simply, white supremacy protects white scholars in antiracism work while endangering faculty of color.

The articles included in this review document responses from white participants that skirt issues of race, or worse, reinforces racial stereotypes (Crowley, 2016; Ullucci, 2012; Vaught & Castagno, 2008; Young, 2016). This finding accords with the findings of other researchers that U.S. teachers often avoid the topic of race, opting instead for a more innocuous focus on culture when “celebrating diversity” (Bettez, 2017). Multiple scholars (Aveling, 2006; de Freitas & McAuley, 2008; Flanagan, 2017; Matias & Grosland, 2016; Matias & Mackey, 2016; Ohito, 2016) discuss the need to counteract this effect by leading teachers and PSTs to experience a “pedagogy of discomfort” (Boler, 1999). By emphasizing discomfort specifically, these recommendations seem to contrast somewhat with calls by previous scholars for teacher educators to provide room for students to “safely self-interrogate” (Scott & Mumford, 2007, p. 54) their complicity with racism. The review also surfaces beginning writings on the emotional burden of teacher educators who engage in this work and whose own racial identities become relevant in their students’ acceptance or rejection of race-visible pedagogies (Coles-Ritchie & Smith, 2017; Matias & Grosland, 2016; Matias & Mackey, 2016; Ohito, 2016). By recentering the emotional work of antiracist education, the approaches advocated by several of the authors begin to address the absence of emotionality and the lived experiences of racism and oppression for which earlier renditions of critical pedagogy have been called into question (Berchini, 2017).

Approaches to teaching about race and racism consistently employed exercises in self-reflection, likely because antiracist education with white teachers presumes a gap in understanding about lived experiences with racial oppression. In the studies reviewed, teacher educators employed various methods aimed at bringing critical awareness of their own racialized perspectives to PSTs and ISTs. We find instructional practices of teacher educators such as autobiography, autoethnography, and race-reflective journaling. We also find critiques of these practices as potentially reinforcing of myths of meritocracy. The use of literature, art, and media for analysis rendered everyday instances of racism and racialized oppression more visible for white participants. Here we see evidence of the confrontative aspects of critical pedagogies inspired by CRT and CWS as teacher educators engage white educators in reflecting on the constructs and meanings of race.

While several of the reflective techniques used by teacher educators were interpreted as inspiring awakenings of race-consciousness (Marx, 2004; Marx & Pennington, 2003; Matias & Grosland, 2016; Matias & Mackey, 2016; Pennington, 2007; Ullucci, 2012), others had more ambiguous or even counterproductive outcomes, including disputes about the feasibility of teaching about race (Pollock et al., 2016), defensive resistance to messages about white privilege and white racism (de Freitas & McAuley, 2008), and predictions that new knowledge—no matter how readily it was embraced—would not influence teaching practice (Bryant et al., 2015). In her 1998 essay, Ladson-Billings notes a stubborn disconnect between awareness of race and racism and a commitment to transform pedagogical practice to enact antiracism, and cautions that CRT in education risks becoming circumscribed to the realm of research where it will “continue to generate scholarly papers and debate, and never penetrate the classrooms and daily experiences of students of color” (p. 22). The studies reviewed here show that teacher educators working with white PSTs and ISTs continue to struggle with grounding theoretical concepts of antiracist education in the realities of school life in ways that impact teacher praxis.

To combat this, we suggest that white teacher educators devoted to antiracist education attend to their own dysconscious racism (King, 1997) by becoming politically clear about the enduring history of unequal power relations—clear about the how injustice is often reproduced and maintained in schools, and committed to dismantling injustice in their spheres of influence (Bartolomé, 2009; Hambacher & Bondy, 2016). Citing Tuck’s (2009) concept of “damage centered research,” Carter Andrews and colleagues (2019) have observed the tendency of teacher educators to employ “damage centered pedagogies” that exploit the school stories of historically marginalized peoples in an attempt to cultivate a social justice or advocacy orientation in white PSTs. They warn that such approaches risk further othering those whose stories are being used and may reinforce deficit views by constantly centering stories of pain or oppression. By contrast, politically clear teacher educators recognize that they must work to develop their own racial literacy so that they are better able to critically examine racism and model teaching practices that enable PSTs to discuss, examine, and engage in antiracist action (Sealey-Ruiz & Greene, 2015). Carter Andrews et al. (2019) describe a “humanizing” pedagogy in teacher education as one that demands teacher educators turn their gaze inward and away from reductive, “dehumanizing” stories, engaging instead in critical self-reflection about their own beliefs and how those are rooted in various forms of systemic oppression. Teacher educators can lead PSTs and ISTs in discarding assumptions about students’ powerlessness so that they may recognize and foster students’ capacity for collective praxis (Carter Andrews et al., 2018). Teacher educators must be vigilant in examining how their socialization into whiteness shapes syllabi, coursework, and their depictions of young people’s lives, histories, and agency.

Faced with knowledge of seemingly insurmountable racial injustice in which they are implicated, white educators in these studies responded with skepticism, discouragement, and at times aggressive resistance. Berchini’s alternative—a pedagogy of responsibility which “connect[s] the personal to the systemic” (p. 472)—is supported by the findings of Matias and Grosland (2016), which suggest that employing CWS in combination with CRT may afford ways of understanding this and other dilemmas of the white imagination in the preparation of white PSTs. CWS provides insight into why some PSTs’ and ISTs’ descriptions of their white identities may be laced with guilt and a sense of paralysis as they come to understand the insidiousness of racial inequality in schooling, and why some reassert hegemonic whiteness through rhetorical evasion (Picower, 2009).

Future Research

We find that the intended audience for race-visible teacher education is typically a PST who is white and will be working in a racially diverse school community. Indeed, approximately 70% of the articles in this review focused on preparing white PSTs to work with students of color. Many arguments in favor of race-visible and/or multicultural education for teachers are based in the notion of a “demographic imperative,” defined as a perceived “disjunction between the sociocultural characteristics and previous experiences of the typical teacher candidate and those of many of our K-12 students” (Lowenstein, 2009, p. 166). Whiteness is understood to function as a “limiting characteristic” that impedes teachers’ abilities to relate to their students of color in important ways, often producing destructive misjudgments of students and their home cultures (Marx, 2004). However, the necessity and particular complexities of preparing white teachers to address race and racism in predominantly white school communities remains largely unstudied. CRT reminds us that whiteness as a racial construct remains invisible wherever whiteness is taken to be a norm (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012); it is a common assumption that understanding issues of race in education has little application in mostly white schools.

However, white school contexts in which white students have (mostly or only) white teachers and (mostly or only) white classmates are common, and in such contexts teachers must be prepared to educate their students about race if white racism is to be combatted and white racial silence overcome. Casey and colleagues (2018) have argued that, “the primary work of white people seeking antiracism ought to be in their/our white communities, with other white people” (p. 97). While antiracism education at the K-12 and professional levels is undoubtedly occurring in some predominately white school communities, such projects represented a small number of studies revealed in our search. As a result, we know little about the efficacy of antiracist teacher education enacted by white people in predominantly white school communities. Expanded research into approaches to race-visible education with white teachers working in predominantly white school contexts would further illuminate how teacher educators conceive of their obligations in preparing white teachers to consider issues of race in such contexts, how they enact race-visible education, and the potential for such approaches to influence teacher practice.

Finally, we find that despite what we view as a need for ongoing race-visible teacher education for practicing teachers, most research into race-visible teacher education focuses on PSTs. The timing of antiracist work during the crucial period of teacher preparation is logical, as it aims to prepare teachers to enter the classroom with a critical knowledge of their own biases and the school practices that perpetuate racism. This concern has given rise to a robust literature addressing issues of racial and multicultural literacy in teacher preparation programs, and a somewhat less plentiful body of writing on inservice professional development. However, advantages come from exploring these topics as a practicing teacher, when one can draw on classroom experiences from years in the field. Inservice teacher education for antiracism differs from preservice teacher education, in which the classroom dilemmas often must be explored as hypotheticals. Kohli’s (2018) recent research with veteran teachers of color cited critical professional development (CPD) as a powerful tool for developing educators as “politically-aware individuals who have a stake in teaching and transforming society” (Kohli et al., 2015, p. 9). Although the participants in Kohli’s work are teachers of color, the goals of CPD are also relevant for white teachers committed to antiracist teaching in mostly white communities. Additional research into race-visible teacher education with practicing teachers, in the form of professional development, could generate a more nuanced understanding of how the experiences, concerns, and beliefs of teachers with respect to race differ at different stages in their careers.

Conclusion

Race-visible teacher education is necessary to make salient issues of racism that pervade life in U.S. schools. Indeed, we heed Berchini’s (2017) call for a critical approach that moves beyond simplistic white privilege pedagogies to grapple with complex and at times paradoxical aspects of race-visible teacher education. We draw from CRT and CWS to contribute to an understanding of the complexity associated with enacting antiracist teacher education with white educators, while highlighting the risk that analyses of whiteness in teacher education that do not attend to both the individual and structural aspects of power and oppression can recenter whiteness (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) and implicitly legitimize white dominance.

The literature on race-visible teacher education of the last decade suggests that teacher educators continue to face the problems of race talk evasion, colorblind racism, and even retaliation that were highlighted in the studies that characterized early research on white teacher identity. However, the research also evinces a movement in teacher education toward bringing both individual and structural factors into view. By doing so, we may foster richer understandings of race, racism, and white identity among those learning to teach.

Supplemental Material

Race-visible_teacher_education_supplemental_file_FINAL.R2_1 – Supplemental material for Race-Visible Teacher Education: A Review of the Literature From 2002 to 2018

Supplemental material, Race-visible_teacher_education_supplemental_file_FINAL.R2_1 for Race-Visible Teacher Education: A Review of the Literature From 2002 to 2018 by Elyse Hambacher and Katherine Ginn in Journal of Teacher Education

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Elyse Hambacher

Author Biographies

Elyse Hambacher is an associate professor of Education at the University of New Hampshire. Her research examines the development of educators’ critical social justice literacy and how teaching for social justice is operationalized in education settings. She has authored publications in the International Journal of Qualitative Research in Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Equity & Excellence in Education. Before working in higher education, Elyse was a kindergarten and fourth grade teacher in Miami and also taught in Kumamoto, Japan.

Katherine Ginn is a doctoral candidate in education at the University of New Hampshire specializing in Children, Youth, and Communities. Her research interests include critical teacher education, teacher identity, and equity issues in family-school relations. She has worked as a special education teacher in northern New England for the past 16 years.

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