Unraveling the Threads of White Teachers’ Conceptions of Caring

Abstract

This study explored two White inservice teachers’ understandings of Whiteness in relation to privilege and caring. A yearlong professional development set of courses used a multimodal construction of three significant course experiences designed to reposition Whiteness and illuminate White teachers’ predisposition to care for their students in ways aligned with their own conceptions of caring.

Keywords

elementary school race teacher education White teachers

In my classroom one of the things I did was try to help my kids change so they would fit in the system better, but that wasn’t really the right route to go.

Hayden

Before, when you’re in the denial stage, where you’re just denying that there’s anything wrong with you—you’re thinking—I love my students . . . I don’t see color. I love them all the same.

Victoria

Purpose

The purpose of this article is to examine the events that led up to Hayden and Victoria, two White elementary teachers, coming to understand how their White racial identities influenced their teaching of children of color during a yearlong series of three courses. Using reflective interviews after the courses ended, we drew on Hayden and Victoria’s identification of the most salient course experiences to explore how three of these significant components of the courses, (a privilege checklist, the use of counternarratives, and a privilege walk activity) shaped and influenced their learning about Whiteness and caring. We use a conceptual framework based on three notions, (a) Critical White Studies (CWS; Frankenberg, 1997; Gillborn, 2005; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998; Kubota & Lin, 2006), (b) caring (Noddings, 1984/2003), and (c) multimodal communication (Kress &VanLeuwen, 2001) as a lens to explore how the coursework facilitated Hayden’s and Victoria’s learning about race and caring. We begin by defining White privilege in relation to caring, we then provide examples and an analysis of three key events identified by the teachers as significant in their learning, and we conclude with a call for White teachers to recognize their racialized notions of caring.

White Teachers: White Privilege and Caring

Our focus on race rests on defining Whiteness as socially constructed based on skin color (Mahoney, 1997b). We concentrate on critiquing Whiteness using Critical White Studies (CWS), which presents a view of race that focuses on Whiteness in various ways (see Delgado & Stefancic, 1997). For this study, we highlight the examination of Whiteness as form of privilege (Delgado, 1997; Frankenberg, 1997; Fredrickson, 2002; Kincheloe & Steinberg, 1998; Kivel, 1996; McIntosh, 1997; Wildman & Davis, 1997). Taking a critical perspective on Whiteness acknowledges White privilege as a larger part of civilizational, societal, institutional, and individual racism expressed both overtly and covertly (Scheurich & Young, 1997). We particularly focus on White racism as unacknowledged White privilege, similar to color blindness (Ullucci & Battey, 2011). McIntosh connects White privilege to racism as she distinguishes between overt racism and the more covert expressions of racism stating, “. . . I did not see myself as a racist because I was taught to recognize racism only in individual acts of meanness by members of my group, never in invisible systems conferring unsought racial dominance on my group from birth . . .” (McIntosh, 1997, p. 298). A critical component of CWS includes the understanding that cognizant participation in the dominant White culture (Wildman, 1997) should include realizing and seeking to ameliorate the systemic institutional and individual denial of privileges to people of color. One particular aspect of White, unacknowledged privilege is the inherent avoidance, by Whites, of naming their Whiteness, especially within course settings (Case & Hemmings, 2005; Yep, 2007). “White people’s conscious racialization of others does not necessarily lead to a conscious racialization of the white self . . . whiteness makes itself invisible precisely by asserting its normalcy, its transparency, in contrast with the marking of others” (Frankenberg, 1997, p. 6). Due to the common practice of “marking” people of color, bringing Whites to understand and name their White positioning in society requires an understanding of White identity.

Due to the introductory nature of our work with the White teachers and their positioning in relation to their students of color, we exposed them to only one type of White identity model (Helms, 1990) for two reasons: (a) The teachers mentioned a book (Howard, 1999) they read in a previous course that detailed Helms’ work and (b) they read chapters from the Helms book in the course. White identity models such as Helm’s (1990) and Hardiman (2001) do have shortcomings (Rowe, Bennett, & Atkinson, 1994), such as oversimplifying the nature of identity development, and there are other views that highlight a White consciousness (Miller & Fellows, 2007) perspective that we did not bring to the course to keep the focus simple as we introduced race.

Helms’ (1990) conceptualization of White identity purports that there are two phases of White identity development, abandonment of racism and defining a nonracist White identity. Under the umbrella of each phase, Helms delineates six stages of White identity development. The first phase contains the contact, disintegration, and reintegration stages, while the second phase consists of the pseudoindependent, immersion/emersion and autonomy stages. Each stage is characterized by specific attributes related to the White person’s self-awareness of race in themselves and in others (Helms uses Blacks as her reference point for Whites’ positioning and capitalizes both); the stages are summarized briefly as follows:

Contact: “limited interracial social or occupational interactions with Blacks.” (p. 57)

Disintegration: “conscious, though conflicted, acknowledgement of one’s Whiteness.” (p. 58)

Reintegration: “consciously acknowledges a White identity . . . accepts the belief in White racial superiority . . . deliberate removal of oneself and/or avoidance of . . . Black people . . .” (p. 60)

Pseudoindependence: “begins to acknowledge the responsibility of Whites for racism . . . helps[s] Blacks to change themselves so that they function more like Whites.” (p. 61)

Immersion/Emersion: “changing Black people is no longer the focus . . . the goal of changing White people is salient.” (p. 62)

Autonomy: “internalizing, nurturing, and applying the new definition of Whiteness.” (p. 62)

White teachers teaching in diverse settings are in daily contact with communities of color, which relates to Helms’ (1990) Contact Stage and can remain bound in their own, often unexamined, ways of understanding (Marx, 2008) and caring about their students (Gay, 2000; Valenzuela, 1999). These ways of caring can be far removed from the students’ actual experiences and needs yet caring for students in meaningful ways is crucial due to the one-way relationship that can occur between students and teachers (Garza, 2009; Hollingworth, 2009). As Valenzuela found in her study focused on U.S.–Mexican high school student perspectives of teachers’ caring, “It almost seemed, maybe I’m wrong, like the teachers didn’t want to know us, or too much about us . . . what would it mean [for them] to genuinely care for us?”(Valenzuela, 1999, p. 255) Teachers’ positions in schools may place them in the role of determining the relationships they have with students, especially at the elementary school level. The complexity of teacher–student relationships can be viewed in relation to race. As Gay (2000) posits,

rather than build on what the students have in order to make their learning easier and better, the teachers want to correct and compensate for their “cultural deprivations.” This means making ethnically diverse students conform to middle-class, Eurocentric cultural norms. (p. 46)

Linking White privilege to caring, we based the design of our three courses on the premise that White privilege positions White teachers in unexamined caring relationships with students of color. While we realize the dichotomy this construction entails, for the purposes of this article we exclusively examine race in regard to White teachers’ relationships with people of color. Therefore, we label ourselves and the teachers racially using color. There are weaknesses in this construction of race, but for the analytical purposes, we adhere to the ways in which the teachers viewed and described race that aligned with the framing of Whiteness. Other aspects of the coursework such as linguistic diversity and sexual orientation were the focus of other papers (Brock, Pennington, & Ndura, in press). As we designed the series of three courses that Victoria and Hayden took, we sought to disrupt the interpretation and enactment of these every day, unexamined caring relationships.

Theoretical Foundation of the Course Structure: Critical Pedagogy and Social Semiotics

Overall our course design was aligned with conceptions of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2007) and multimodal communication (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001). Keeping in mind Kincheloe’s broad view of critical pedagogy as well as notions of social justice in teacher education we based our course on the following ideas:

Teaching that is inspired by principals of social justice—which is variously referred to as culturally responsive teaching (Gay, 2000; Irvine & Armento, 2001; Villegas & Lucas, 2002), culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1994); teaching against the grain (Cochran-Smith, 1991), teaching to change the work (Oaks & Lipton, 1999), teaching for diversity (Zeichner, 1993), and multicultural education (Banks, 1993; Nieto, 1999; Sleeter & Grant, 2007) is a broad approach to education that aims to have all students reach high levels of learning and to prepare them all for active and full participation in a democracy. (Villegas, 2007, p. 372)

As teacher educators we aligned the critical aspect of our work with those who posit that the examination of race is a necessary part of teacher education concentrated on social justice (Cline & Necochea, 2006; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Cross, 2003; Dee & Henkin, 2002; Dixson & Rousseau, 2005; Garmon, 2004; Hill, 2009; Hyland, 2005; King, Hollins, & Hayman, 1997; Major & Brock, 2003; McBride, Xiang, Wittenburg, & Shen, 2002; Milner, 2003; Spindler, 2000; Swartz, 2003; Titone, 1998; Yost, 1997). To examine whiteness, we used Helms’ stages as others have in teacher education as a process-oriented model which “describes how people grow in terms of their cultural identities or world views, [and] can assist educators in three areas: understanding teachers’ behaviors (including resistance), sequencing course content, and creating conducive learning” (McAllister & Irvine, 2000, p. 5). Building on Helms’ work, we sought to facilitate the teachers’ examination and critique of their White racial identities in relation to typical conceptions of caring as critiqued by Noddings (1984/2000, p. 24), “When we want to be thought of as caring, we often act routinely in a way that may easily secure that credit for us.” Therefore, we brought Noddings’ (1984/2000) examination of caring into our critical analysis of racial caring.

We focused on repositioning the White teachers racially by using social semiotics (Chandler, 2002; Van Leeuwen, 2005) in our course design. Semiotic mediation, within sociocultural theory, refers to the notion that the effective mediation of the use, development, and understanding of signs is an important way to facilitate learning (Wertsch, 1985, 1991, 1996). Van Leeuwen (2005) articulates “a four dimensional processes by which different kinds of semiotic resources are integrated to form multimodal texts and communicative events” (p. 179). These dimensions of multimodal cohesion include rhythm, composition, information linking, and dialogue. We used semiotic resources—such as language, image, music, sound, gesture, and so forth (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2001)—within our courses to construct various meanings, representations, and interpretations of race.

Course design

Julie, Cindy, and Elavie participated in the planning and teaching of the first summer course in 2005. Sessions were conducted on Saturdays throughout May and June with each session lasting 6 hr while the July sessions met online with a final in person meeting in August. Julie and Cindy taught the summer course while Elavie led two Saturday sessions. Cindy and Julie continued on with the students in two additional courses and a research project associated with all three courses. Julie led a fall and spring autoethnography course and Cindy and Julie cotaught a summer 2006 course in Chile. Cindy and Julie were both present for all of the total 135 hr of course contact.

Aligned with the tenets of a multimodal theory of communication (Van Leeuwen, 2005), the three courses were designed to extend over a significant amount of time, between May of 2005 and August of 2006. During these meetings across 15 months, relationships were formed and reformed in various ways by the teachers through their interactions with each other, with us as instructors, as well as with the various guest speakers, multiple texts, films, online discussions, class activities, simulations, and a monthlong stay in Santiago, Chile.

Participants

The courses were optional and open to all teachers in the local school district. All of the teachers were consenting participants in the study as well as the course. A total of 20 teachers participated in the course detailed in this study. Eighteen of the teachers were White, 1 teacher was African American and 1 teacher was Native American. Hayden and Victoria, both White teachers, were selected for this analysis because they attended all three courses including the course taught in Chile.

Research Method

Critical ethnography

Our work drew on critical ethnography (Foley, 2002; Foley & Valenzuela, 2005; Madison, 2005; Trueba, 1999) highlighting Trueba’s (1999) call for the documentation of oppression and empowerment, raising consciousness and reflective awareness, and “reaching a higher level of understanding of the historical, political, sociological, and economic factors supporting the abuse of power and oppression” (p. 593). We developed the three courses and research study with Whiteness as the critical standpoint (Scheurich & Young, 2002). Ethnographic work in education relies on the traditions of anthropology with a focus on observations, description, interpretations, and reliance on primary informants (Spindler & Spindler, 1988/2000). We detail our methods in the following sections.

Critical ethnography: Racial reflexivity

Reflexivity in critical ethnography requires an examination of the researchers’ positioning (Foley, 2002); therefore, we recognize the danger of recentering Whiteness in this study’s focus on two White teachers as taught and interpreted by two White professors in the larger context of the course, which did include an African professor, Elavie, and an African American teacher, Nia who contributed substantially to the course and took on the role of teacher as well. Two other papers in progress focus on their perspectives of the course events. In this analysis, we, Julie and Cindy, critique our privileges as White researchers within the context of a course consisting of mostly White teachers with Scheurich’s (2002) attention to the epistemological nature of Whiteness. The nature of Whites conducting data analysis with other Whites can predispose the discourse to fall into White talk that “serves to insulate white people from examining their/our individual and collective role(s) in the perpetuation of racism” (McIntyre, 1997, p. 45). Therefore we position our work according to Scheurich’s call for Whites seeking to work against racism,

. . . we must always keep in the forefront that we are white racists and we are continuously privileged by white racism . . . [and] we must be profoundly open to criticisms of our White racism from scholars of color and other White anti-racist scholars. (2002, p. 9)

We note that our work is limited to a White interpretation of other Whites and we acknowledge this limitation. We also acknowledge several additional limitations in this study. We did not follow all of the teachers for this analysis, as other examinations of the large group of teachers are currently under way. We elected to study two of the White teachers who attended all three courses and reached significant understandings about race to further understand their learning. We did not follow Hayden and Victoria into their classrooms to observe their interactions with students of color as another paper details their autoethnographic studies of their subsequent classroom work in this area (Pennington & Brock, 2011).

Data collection

The research focus for the study encompassed two areas: (a) What the teachers learned about their White racial identities and caring and (b) How the teachers learned about their White racial identities and caring. As per ethnographic traditions, we relied on observations and fieldnotes (Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) to collect data during the class meetings. All class meetings were attended by both Julie and Cindy who engaged in taking fieldnotes, videotaping class meetings, and interacting with the teachers. Course-related data included video tapes of class meetings, fieldnotes of class meetings, and transcriptions of class videotapes and interviews.

Our second set of data consisted of reflective interviews with the focus participants, Hayden and Victoria. While understanding White privilege is often a goal in teacher education (Dee & Henkin, 2002; Johnson, 2002; McIntyre, 1997; Rich & Cargile, 2004; Solomon, Portelli, Daniel, & Campbell, 2005; Swartz, 2003), the aftermath of such a journey is not always explored. Recognizing our limitations in interpreting the teachers’ experiences (Olesen, 2005, p. 248), we coconstructed the initial interpretation of the data with Hayden and Victoria. The results of those conversations were the reflective interviews conducted in 2006. We created a modified version of Erickson and Shultz’s (1981) viewing sessions whereby Hayden and Victoria were asked to identify their most “significant insights” (Brock et al., 2006) across the courses. These interviews guided our analysis of their understanding of race and demonstrated the ways in which the multimodal structure of the course facilitated their initial learning about race and caring.

Data description, analysis, and interpretation

Adhering to Wolcott’s (1994) notions of description, analysis, and interpretation in qualitative inquiry, we worked through the data using three methods. We detail these three approaches separately but also recognize the integrated and recursive processes each of these points of analysis entails. First we created “descriptive accounts” (Wolcott, 1994) of course events identified by Hayden and Victoria related to their learning about Whiteness by reviewing the videotapes, transcriptions, and their accounts of each event. We used Helms’ (1990) stages of White identity development as both a descriptive typology for understanding their White racial identity and as a set of markers of the teachers’ progression through Helms’ stages as described in the three course events for two reasons. Helms’ (1990) work reflects how Whites view people of color, which relates to how the White teachers viewed the people of color in the course and Helms’ work was read by the classroom teachers and it is described in the Gary Howard (1999) book they read. This analysis is presented first in the data section as vignettes.

The second component of data analysis relied on “the identification of essential features and the systematic description of interrelationships among them” (Wolcott, 1994, p. 12). To describe the evolution of the teachers’ learning across time as it was situated with the use of semiotic resources, we used central tenets of sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978; Wertsch, 1985, 1991, 1996) and social semiotics (Van Leeuwen, 2005) to analyze the course activities and their influence on Hayden and Victoria’s learning. Our analysis using social semiotics, composition, rhythm, information linking, and dialogue followed the initial three-course event analysis and is presented after the vignettes.

Finally, Wolcott’s (1994) conception of interpretation guided the final aspect of data analysis where “theory provides a way to link our [work] . . . to larger issues” (p. 43). Our interpretation used Noddings’ (1984/2003) conceptualization of caring as characterized by an examination of the role “carers” have with the ones being “cared for.” We adapted her work to bring the teachers’ understanding of race into the realm of education for the purpose of connecting race to teacher–student caring relationships. The results of the study are presented as vignettes of three events selected by Hayden and Victoria using a realist perspective (Van Maanen, 1988) followed by excerpts from their reflective interviews conducted in the fall of 2006. The vignettes and interviews are then interpreted using CWS, caring, and multimodal elements. After a brief opening vignette depicting the teachers’ introduction to the courses, we move to an in-depth analysis of three of the most significant events in the courses, the privilege checklist, the counternarratives, and the privilege walk.

Positioning Racial Identities: “We’re Not Going to Just Look at the Children”

First class meeting: May 14, 2005. Hayden and Victoria sit in a circle alongside 18 colleagues on a Saturday morning on the first day of the series of classes. Cindy and Julie introduce the course and the expectations. Cindy, begins, “One of our goals here is to learn together about the topics of race, culture, identity, and language.” Julie, nods adding, “We’re not going to just look at the children we are going to look at ourselves.” The initial course activities revolved around discussions and assignments based on the teachers’ current knowledge about their teaching contexts including their school neighborhood, their students, and their own communities. Throughout these first few course meetings, none of the teachers named their own White racial identities. Initially the teachers saw and named the race of their students the first day of class comfortably according to the institutional terms they were accustomed to using, as one White teacher stated, “I have some Native American, some African American, and some Hispanic, kids.” The teachers’ lack of attention to their own racial identities was reinforced by their undivided attention to the race of their students in class discussions. They also emphasized how much they cared for their students and that they were taking the course to improve instruction for their students. Victoria wrote in one of her early responses,

The greatest success I can fathom is to touch the life of a child so that when they leave my classroom at the end of the year they love learning, and they also feel a little more loved than when they came in.

At this point in the course the teachers overall were demonstrating what Delgado describes as false empathy where you are, “over-confident, so that you can easily harm the intended beneficiary. You are apt to be paternalistic, thinking you know what the other really wants or needs” (Delgado, 1997, p. 614). The White teachers also fit into what Helms (1990) describes as the Contact stage of White identity development whereby they were exposed to other cultures at school and were aware of their Whiteness in relation to people of color but not aware of the privilege their racial identity afforded them. Therefore their comments often reflected their views that their students were in a position of needing their help, a traditional teacher role, yet made complex when White teachers are caring for and at times saving their students of color. The first step in the repositioning of the teachers’ racial identity began with the privilege checklist.

Repositioning White Identity: The Privilege Checklist

June 2005

One month into the course, the teachers sit in their now familiar circle. The teachers have just completed McIntosh’s (1997) privilege checklist. Marking the ways in which their daily lives reflect White privilege, receiving one point for each privilege they experience. One by one they share their interpretations of their numerical scores. Many of the White teachers are discussing their realizations about the privileges they hold such as

I can swear, or dress in second hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the poverty, or the illiteracy of my race . . . When I am told about our national heritage of “civilization,” I am shown that people of my color made it what it is. (McIntosh, 1997, p. 293).

After much discussion by the White teachers, the two Black women in the group, one African and one African American, (Elavie, the professor and Nia, the teacher) share their score of zero with the other teachers. Nia, the only African American teacher states, “My score was zero. I had to go over it four times to make sure that I was being accurate . . . it is very painful.” After a long silence Elavie shares her experiences with the checklist,

Look at [your list] again. One more time. You’re being negative, I hear that a lot. Come on you’re being too negative. Snap out of it. Life is not that bad. I’m giving you a minute to look over the statement again and try to find me a few points. I really really—this is honest—I dislike scoring a zero. I think I have worked very hard.

Hayden turns to another White teacher, Kelly, and whispers, “Look at this one . . .” as she points to number 46. “I can choose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin” (McIntosh, 1997, p. 294). They both point to their arms. A White teacher, Melanie turns to Nia trying to help Nia get a point, “I think Nia you can get a Band-Aid in your color of skin.” Hayden smiles as she looks at Melanie. Kelly adds, “That’s what Hayden was just saying.” Elavie turns to her, “Nia do you accept that point?” Other White teachers add that Nia might have to be in an urban area to find brown Band-Aids. Melanie adds, “Those flexible Band-Aid are the same color or a little darker than me.” Others laugh as Melanie points to the suntanned white skin on her hand. Another teacher adds “Don’t they make clear Band-Aids?” laughter travels around the circle. Nia never responds and the conversation moves on.

Reflective Interview: The Privilege Checklist Revisited

September 2006

A year later, Hayden, Victoria, Cindy, and Julie sit at the reading table in Hayden’s fourth-grade classroom after school. They are discussing the past year and what it meant to them as teachers. Cindy began the reflective interviews stating, “We want to know just what you remember and what was significant about the classes . . . What experiences seemed to have a pretty significant impact on your learning?” Hayden begins,

I think just the way that the class was set up, it was so open that I’m sure a lot of feelings got hurt but that’s kind of part of the growing. [After the course] Nia said to me that something that I said was offensive. It was a comment about Band-Aids. We were talking about White privilege and we had a piece of paper and you had to score yourself, give yourself a one, or a zero if the situations applied to you. And I remember one of them was you can find Band-Aids in your own flesh color. I made the comment that there were Band-Aids that were for Black people. And in the scope of the activity, it was so trivial that it was almost like I was saying . . . . Well, no, everything’s okay because there’s the right color Band-Aids. I don’t think Nia even brought it up then. It was later that she brought it up. I had to really think back and try to figure out what I had said . . . she’s a very strong person and she’s a teacher at our school and so I was already feeling a strong connection with her. I really wanted to get to know her better. I really thought she was an awesome person and so to come from her, someone that I really wanted to get to know better and I had a lot of respect for her and what she was doing, it was just kind of like wow . . . She has a different authority, I think coming from her [as an African American] it’s different because coming from two White women, it’s not as . . .

Victoria interjects,

Because—you [Julie and Cindy] saying it to us—if you had commented to Hayden, that [the Band-Aid comment] might offend somebody who’s African American is different than somebody saying you just offended me because it’s kind of like third person, Hayden could think, oh, you know, I might offend somebody if I said that to them but having actually said that in front of someone who was actually offended, it kind of hits harder.

Hayden adds,

I think there’s a lot of denial still when you are looking at yourself and if you think that you are not racist or that you don’t hold stereotypes, I think it’s hard to break through that and to realize there’s a lot of work that I have to do. When I went into the class I thought when they were offended by certain things, Black people, I thought that they would just throw out the race card. So to have Nia’s stories and for her to just be sitting there and telling you this has happened to me, and that she’s not going to say something just to say it . . . She has no other motives.

Hayden and Victoria’s racial awareness was altered by the Band-Aid interaction. Their understanding of caring about Nia changed as they realized that her offense at the comment was not “throwing out the race card” it was based on her lifetime of oppression which Nia had shared during the course and the Band-Aid was yet another manifestation of a society that did not account for skin colors beyond White. They also explained the importance of having close relationships with other teachers and having a connection with them. These descriptions by Hayden and Victoria represent their movement beyond the Contact Stage (Helms, 1990) of White identity development. They were not simply in distant contact with people of color; they were coworkers with Nia and took an interest in her experiences.

Repositioning White Talk: Counternarratives

June 2005

The teachers watch the video of The Color of Fear (Wah, 1994).The video documents a group of racially diverse males, two White, two African American, two Latino, and two Asian American, discussing race in honest and at times confrontational and emotional ways. The men debate and one pivotal point occurs when one of the White males, David, insists that he is not racist and offers the notion of color blindness to the group, stating,

For years, I’ve said why do these guys have such a problem being a color? Why can’t they just be individuals and go out and make a place for themselves . . . I hear you saying that we Whites don’t allow that—that we keep you down. Why aren’t we just humans?

After many attempts to counter David’s White narrative one African American male, Victor finally breaks through with his perspective and David understands the pervasive nature of racism. Victor begins talking and his voice slowly rises with pain,

. . . racism gets looked at as a person of color’s problem, it’s not. We’re on the receiving end of the problem, but we are not the problem . . . racism is essentially a White problem. There’s a way in which “American,” and “White,” and “human” become synonyms. That “Why can’t we just treat each other as human beings?” to me, when I hear it from a White person, means “Why can’t we all pretend to be White.” I’ll pretend you’re a White person and then you can pretend to be a White person. Why don’t you eat what I eat? Why don’t you drink what I drink? Why don’t you THINK LIKE I THINK?! WHY DON’T YOU FEEL LIKE I FEEL?!

The video ends and the teachers begin to dialogue.

After the video, Hayden speaks to the group about how the film affected her and how observing the David in the video making excuses to cover up his White privilege upset her then she adds turning to look at Nia,

And I wanted to apologize to Nia because earlier I made a comment about Band-Aid and I felt so stupid because that’s such a stupid—[voice cracks] we need a better fix than a brown Band-Aid. [Hayden begins to cry and looks at Nia] I’m sorry. I just wanted one point [for you].

Nia never responds.

Reflective Interview: Counternarratives Revisited

September 2006

A year later, Hayden and Victoria brought up the film and other counternarratives again as a significant event that affected them. Hayden described her thoughts,

I remember the angry White guy [in the film]. That was also the time where I realized that the anger and the distrust and the feelings that Black people in our country have are real and they’re justified. And before, that was something that I just hadn’t come all the way to terms with. And I realized how frustrating that must be, to not feel like you can say you’re being mistreated because people would just say you’re just overanalyzing. You’re just overreacting. That’s what I used to say. That’s what I used to think.

Victoria adds,

Well, partly it was significant to me because some of the things [the White male] said I was thinking, well, that’s not that bad. In the beginning, I was kind of thinking that’s something I might’ve said at one time . . . And then just watching how [the White male] was hurting other people by what he was doing. You realize once you’re seeing it and how you’re affecting these other people, it’s just like Hayden was saying. It might just be one little comment that you make but it is part of a larger picture.

The course meetings included many opportunities to hear from people of color. Nia and Elavie shared their experiences as Black women; another teacher, who was Native American shared her thoughts, and several guest speakers spoke to their ideas about race and schooling. Readings and videos also provided alternate views to the dominant White experiences in the form of counternarratives (Delgado, 1995) or counter stories, “Personal stories or narratives [that] recount an individual’s experiences with various forms of racism and sexism” (Solórzano &Yosso, 2002, p. 32). As Hayden and Victoria note, particular guest speakers communicated with them and the other students in such a way that the students could relate meaningfully and personally to what they were saying. Although there is always an inherent danger in essentializing the Other by inviting in “representatives” of particular groups, the course was deemed an appropriate vehicle for the guest speakers as they provided much needed counternarrative perspectives in our predominately White community and course. This disruption as well as movement beyond typical “master narratives” inherent in educational research (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002) was mentioned several times by Hayden and Victoria.

Hayden continues and begins to discuss the course.

I think it was little pieces of the course [that were significant] throughout the summer before we watched the film but in the film, you really can see just the little, tiny things that people can say and when you add them all up, it’s huge and so maybe the last thing that I say to somebody is just a little comment about Band-Aids but to them, when they’ve had all day of that it breaks you down little by little and then when they snap, I’m thinking you’re being crazy. You’re overreacting. All I said was something about Band-Aids. And so it helped me to see how my comment could be taken the way that it was. I think it just shows you that when you’re mistreated all day long even if it’s just little things, it adds up and it is a big deal and it is something that’s justified if someone’s angry about it.

Victoria reinforced the multiplicity of perspectives and counternarratives that various guest speakers brought to the course, “I think that that a big part of the course was all the different experiences and life stories coming together. Having all those different people makes it hard to say well, this is just one person’s opinion.” While Hayden added in the importance of making personal connections with the guest speakers, “[Understanding came] from those groups of people—the Native American speaker and all those people who came in. It was more personal, the connection to [race] became more personal.” Victoria added,

I think that’s a big part of it . . . You have to have some sort of an emotional buy in where it’s not just a group of White people with a Black teacher who’s telling you, you guys are all wrong. You’re all racist. I don’t know if that worked. I don’t think it worked in the class I took before.

Hayden interjects,

But for me, I was kind of the opposite. My teacher was just a White lady and it was the multicultural class and we read about diversity and that was about it. So [my experience in my undergraduate course] was kind of equally as ineffective because there were no outside voices coming into it.

Victoria: “It makes it hard to say well, this is just one person’s opinion. When you have all these people telling you the same thing, you can’t just let it pass.”

The teachers described how they found the counternarratives to be helpful in repositioning their understanding of others’ experiences and moved them into the Disintegration Stage of White identity development (Helms, 1990) where they were conscious of their Whiteness and recognized their privilege. This is a stage that is marked by conflicting emotions as Whites see the negative role their racial identity plays in society and relationships. In Hayden and Victoria’s case, the authenticity and closeness they felt to the people sharing the counternarratives mattered greatly.

Repositioning White Privilege: The Privilege Walk

June 2005

A line of 16 teachers stands outside in a straight line on the university lawn holding hands. Elavie begins to read directions aloud.

If your ancestors were forced to come to the United States not by choice take one step back . . . if you were ever offered a good job because of your association with a friend or family member take one step forward . . . If you ever tried to change your appearance, mannerisms, or behavior to avoid ridicule take one step back . . . If you studied the culture of your ancestors in elementary school take one step forward.

The teachers follow the directives, heads down, hands in pockets, or arms crossed. Twenty questions later they stand apart. Elavie asks them to look behind them. The only African American teacher, Nia, is pressed back against the fence. The front rows are populated with White teachers. The group walks quietly back to the classroom and the only sounds heard are sobs. Back in the classroom Elavie asks them what they noticed. One White teacher mentions that she didn’t want to leave Nia behind. Nia states, “I noticed how alone I was.” Another White teacher adds, “When I looked back—I knew Nia was back there, but when I looked at how far back she was I thought—the gap was that big.” While another White teacher states, “I already felt that I was disadvantaged but—” The day ended with bouts of silence, tears, and quiet reflection. This was the single most discussed event by all of the teachers.

May 2006

Victoria, absent the day of the walk, wrote her thoughts about the privilege walk in the second course, in her final paper during the spring of 2006.

We were told we were going to watch a video of ourselves during one of the classes we had participated in. My eyes perked up a bit, because I was interested to see how viewpoints had changed since then. I was particularly interested [in the privilege walk] because it was a class that I had missed. A self-proclaimed “turning point” in the eyes of many of the participants . . . It was no surprise to anyone who they would see when they looked back. There was Nia, so far behind that she couldn’t take another step back even if she wanted to. And the funny thing is, she didn’t even bother to look behind her . . . she knew where she stood. That night I started to realize what they meant about White dominance. No matter how bad you had it as a White person, the truth is, being White is enough to put you a step ahead. That was the lesson I took away from that night.

Reflective Interview: The Privilege Walk Revisited

September 2006

Back in her classroom with Victoria, Hayden explained her perception of the privilege walk 1 year later to Cindy and Julie,

I think sometimes the placement of activities is important. If we would’ve done the step forward and back activity [the privilege walk] earlier in the course, I don’t know if it would have the same effect because you don’t know everybody yet. I think when you know them later, you are starting to have that attachment with people and you know them as more than just someone who’s in class with you. I think you have more empathy for each other when you know each other better. So I think it was good that that was later instead of trying to catch attention in the beginning. I know some of those activities; you’re just trying to jar people because if you don’t jar people, they’re not going to get it. You need to have that . . . experience where you are forced to look at things differently but I think it’s good to know each other more.

Victoria interjects,

But I think that without [people of color] you’re just White people talking about being White and there’s not . . . There’s nothing really to grasp . . . So it’s kind of a biased opinion. You don’t have anything to measure by, or other experiences to draw on. I think the experience is a big part of it. Because when you read it in a book, it could be one person out of, you know, a million, that that happened to. But when you’re hearing experiences from people who live where you live, who teach where you teach. Who you would assume would have a very similar life to you. That’s a big difference.

The teachers’ reflections demonstrate their learning about race as they repositioned themselves racially. After understanding their White privilege and moving from removed contact with people of color to closer relationships with Nia and others in the course, they began to see the role Whiteness plays in the perceptions of people of color. This forced them to reposition themselves in critical ways. They were no longer the Whites with good intentions shocked by people of color “throwing the race card” or “overreacting,” they were the Whites who were seeing the larger experiences of people of color in relation to a White society that they were a part of, a White society that could be well intentioned yet sympathetically dismissive, unaware, and silently exclusionary, and at times simply directly oppressive, a White society that placed them ahead of people color as evidenced by the privilege walk. To understand the teachers’ repositioning, we use Van Leeuwen’s (2005) four elements of multimodal cohesion, composition, rhythm, information linking, and dialogue in the following section to detail the role design played in their learning.

Multimodal Analysis

Composition

Composition became an important aspect of the course design due to the multiple activities and diverse group of teachers, instructors, and guest speakers associated with the courses. Hayden and Victoria both described how the spatial arrangement of people, actions, events, and artifacts affected the learning that occurred as a result of the construction of these semiotic texts and communicative events. In his discussion of composition, Van Leeuwen (2005) describes three-dimensional semiotic spaces, “Composition is about arranging elements—people, things, abstract shapes, etc.—in or on a semiotic space—for example, a page, a screen, a canvas, a shelf, a square, a city” (p. 198). For example, the privilege walk used the predetermined construction of race and privilege to bring a third dimension into the activity as the teachers actually inhabited spaces in relation to their racial privilege. Van Leeuwen (2005) argues that

adding the third dimension provides further choices—the choice between placing an element in the front or the back, on the left or the right side, and so on. Each of these sides will of course be itself structured according to a given and new and/or ideal-real and/or centre-margin. (p. 209)

This was clear as the only African American, Nia, was at the back of the class during the activity and the White teachers were in the front providing a visual and spatial dimension to the expression of how privilege in society positions people of different races in relation to each other. As Hayden reiterated, “I think having a diverse group of students is just as important as the professor because had Nia not been in the class . . . I think that would’ve made a big difference.” Therefore, the composition of the course events and the arrangements and racial identities of the participants was crucial.

Rhythm

Rhythm focused our attention on the ways in which communicative events unfolded across time for Hayden and Victoria, specifically the length of the course experience (1 year) and the intervals between activities that allowed time for the teachers to reflect on the activities. Van Leeuwen further states that the rhythmic flow of actions, events, and artifacts across time in multimodal texts and communicative events “plays an indispensable part in getting the message across” (2005, p. 181). With respect to the Band-Aid incident, Hayden made the comment about dark Band-Aids during the summer 2005 class that she had with Nia. At the time, Nia did not respond. However, later in the fall course, Nia did bring up the Band-Aid comment that Hayden had made. She let Hayden know that her comment about dark brown Band-Aids was shortsighted and that dark brown Band-Aids were not an indicator that racism is no longer a problem. Without the unfolding of the Band-Aid event over time, Hayden would not have understood Nia’s point about the insidious nature of racism on a deeper level. It took both prolonged contact across time and dialogue opportunities for Hayden’s understandings to develop. Hayden and Victoria’s reflections were tightly focused on the multimodal cohesion as a vehicle for their understanding of Whiteness. Hayden’s experience relates to Van Leeuwen’s (2005) notion of how rhythm “provides cohesion in texts and communicative events that unfold over time—conversations, storytelling, music, acting, dance, film, television, etc.” (p. 181). The rhythmic unfolding of events across time was crucial for the teachers as they used the time to reflect.

Information linking

Information linking refers to how the various sources and types of information in the courses were connected by the teachers as they engaged in the topic of race making “cognitive links between the items of information in time” (Van Leeuwen, 2005, p. 179). Drawing on the work of Maruyama (1980), Van Leeuwen (2005) focuses specifically on contextual information purporting that “the value of information lies in its relation to its context: information can only be interpreted in the context of other pieces of information and of specific communicative interests and purposes” (p. 219). For Van Leeuwen (2005), information can be linked in various cognitive categories such as causal, temporal, spatial, and logical categories, and the links between information in these different cognitive categories make the items of information “meaningful in relation to one another” (p. 219) such as when Hayden discussed her information linking over time, “I think it was little pieces throughout the summer before we watched the [Color of Fear] . . . when you add them all up, it’s huge.” The juxtaposition of the film (The Color of Fear), her dialogic interactions with others—especially Nia—about the Band-Aid experience, and her explanation of her own identity together illustrate information linking and the power of meaning-filled dialogue (e.g., Hayden crying as she talks to Nia about the brown Band-Aid). Van Leeuwen’s notion of information linking offers an explanation of Hayden’s learning about race across time. Information linking also refers to the “cognitive links between the items of information in time—as well space-based media, for instance the temporal or causal links between words and images in multimodal texts” (Van Leeuwen, 2005, p. 179). As we analyzed the manner in which Hayden linked and analyzed her ideas about the Band-Aid incident across time and space, we noted that Hayden moved from joking about the availability of brown Band-Aids in the summer of 2005 to recognizing the larger point of White privilege as it relates not only to the McIntosh (1997) reading but also the film The Color of Fear and to her colleague Nia’s expressions of her experiences as an African American woman. Victoria discussed the emotional connections she had due to her relationships and connections with the others in the class and the guest speakers as well as comparing them to similar courses she took as an undergraduate. Thus, the deeper understandings that Hayden and Victoria developed about White privilege and Whiteness across time came about because they linked salient ideas and experiences across time, and they rethought their stance on these ideas and experiences as they discussed them with others, which leads us to dialogue.

Dialogue

The continuing dialogue between Hayden, Victoria, and Nia was one way semiotic resources were integrated to create learning through communicative events. The aspect of dialogue central to our work is spoken face-to-face dialogue. Typically, “. . . partners in dialogue synchronize these two streams of events and create a joint rhythm between the speech and movements of each” (Van Leeuwen, 2005, p. 249). Therefore, the privilege checklist demonstrated how dialogue mediated Hayden and Victoria’s understanding of race through the Band-Aid episode and their ongoing dialogue with Nia over time. Hayden and Victoria also discussed the role guest speakers played in the courses is another illustration of Van Leeuwen’s (2005) concept of dialogue; effective dialogic interactions can create meaningful communicative events that inform learning. Individuals engaged in dialogue may be in sync with one another or not; if they are in sync, learning is maximized. We point out the out-of-sync experiences such as the class viewing of the Color of Fear set up as a counternarrative and how watching the misunderstandings about race in the film also maximized learning.

In addition to the multimodal elements that affected Hayden and Victoria’s learning, such as the amount of time the courses covered, the coteaching format, and the use of multiple pedagogical tools used, another important aspect of the course experience mentioned by Hayden and Victoria were their references to caring about the other teachers in the course. Nia was mentioned specifically here, but the teachers also referred to other teachers and caring about their students beyond the three events presented here. There were many references to the guest speakers along with contrasting descriptions of not caring about some previous courses related to the topic of race due to a lack of connection to the other class members and/or the instructors. Victoria stated, “[The class provided] that buildup of becoming emotionally tied to the experience and starting to realize and change . . . I think it’s a willingness to look at yourself” a common need for Whites who recognize the need to move beyond simple denial (Duster, 2001). Hayden and Victoria’s understanding that simply caring was not enough provides a means for translating their conception to a new view of caring relations in their classrooms. As Hayden stated in the reflective interviews,

When I was watching the [Color of Fear] video I wrote, what do we do? At the end [the people in the video] kind of answered it . . . [they stated that] you can help: intervene, validate experiences and take responsibility . . .

We posit that part of taking responsibility is recognizing the role White privilege plays in caring teacher–student relationships. In the following section we detail how White teachers’ caring is related to White privilege and ultimately to their students.

Implications: Repositioning White Privilege and Caring in the Classroom

You look at something that changes your ideas of how it was before . . . If something happens and it changes your ideas and your ideas about kids then that’s something you should run with.

Hayden

Hayden and Victoria learned about White privilege as evidenced by their articulation of how they moved from a lack of awareness of race to the ways in which their White identities affected their relationships and understandings of people of color. Initially, Hayden and Victoria exhibited caring congruent with the Contact stage of White identity development (Helms, 1990) during the Band-Aid discussion. Rather than critiquing their large number of points on the privilege checklist and acknowledging the societal racism reflected in Nia’s lack of points, they tried to care for her by finding a small concession for her. Their avoidance of addressing Whiteness is aligned with McIntyre’s (1997) description of White talk as “derailing the conversation, evading questions, dismissing counterarguments, withdrawing from the discussion, remaining silent, interrupting the speaker and topics, and colluding with each other in creating a ‘culture of niceness’” (p. 46). Many of the early conversations and silences regarding the Band-Aid event could be defined as White talk. Nia’s counternarratives and the films and guest speakers served to disrupt the White talk and moved the teachers into the disintegration stage (Helms, 1990). Their lack of acknowledgment of White privilege, coupled with their caring about Nia in “White” ways, demonstrated their need to help Nia get one point while caring for her in ways they thought appropriate. “A primary message of Caring is that we cannot justify ourselves as carers by claiming ‘we care.’ If the recipients of our care insist that ‘nobody cares,’ caring relations do not exist” (Noddings, 1984/2003, p. xiv). In the case of the privilege walk, Hayden and Victoria both emphasized the care and respect they had for their colleagues and how it was painful to see them, especially Nia in the very back. Yet the teachers were silent about the event until prompted by Elavie. Victoria recalled how she had previously done the same activity as an undergraduate to little effect,

We did [the privilege walk] in Elavie’s class [as undergraduates] but here [in this course] we’re [sitting together every day talking] in a big circle and as an undergraduate you never really get to know anybody. I don’t even think there were any other African American people in there so it didn’t really have the personal connections that I think are important.

Yet even with their personal connection with Nia they withdrew from her. Their behavior is aligned with White identity development during the Disintegration Stage (Helms, 1990) where Whites become uncomfortable and elect to retreat back into White society to avoid people of color. They recognize their privilege and withdraw not sure how to ameliorate their feelings of complicity that occur both in individual acts they may have performed and larger institutional systems they now understand that they benefit from. The development of a positive White identity would move them past concentration on their identity and focus their attention on knowing Nia and supporting her in ways she articulates.

To situate Noddings’ (1984/2003) work on caring in our study of White privilege we focus on considering another’s point of view. Throughout the study the teachers moved through these stages and they used them to analyze and describe their own development 1 year later (Pennington & Brock, 2011). The most obvious result of the coursework for Hayden and Victoria was their understanding of their White privilege. Many of the course activities resulted in Hayden and Victoria experiencing what Helms (1990) describes as the Reintegration stage; in this stage there is a sense of Whites retreating, removing, or avoiding race and racial encounters. Early on in the course activities racial discussions were avoided, for example, in the beginning activities they both named the students’ race but not their own. Although by the middle of the summer course, the significant events as described by Hayen and Victoria did mirror what Helms’ (1990) presents as what is needed to move onto the pseudoindependent stage of White identity development as described below:

It is fairly easy to remain or fixate at the Reintegration stage, particularly if one is relatively passive in one’s expression of it. A personally jarring event is probably necessary for the person to being to abandon this essentially racist identity. Again, the event can be direct or vicarious; it can be caused by painful or insightful encounters with Black or White persons. Changes in the environment racial climate may also trigger transition from the Reintegration stage. (p. 61)

The jarring events from some of the course activities and teacher interactions were key, according to Hayden and Victoria, in repositioning their understanding of race and caring. As Hayden stated, “I know some of those activities; you’re just trying to jar people because if you don’t jar people, they’re not going to get it.”

Now we turn to the relationship of the “one caring” and the “one cared for” where teachers are the “ones caring” and the students are the “ones cared for.” Victoria connected her understanding of counternarratives to her relationships with her students during the reflective interviews.

When you teach at a school where you have a high population of people who aren’t White you start to have that personal connection. The majority of my kids are Hispanic. You have them in the back of your mind and you have their stories that they tell you in the back of your mind, about how they’re mistreated and their families are mistreated and they come to school telling you stories. They’re scared to go to the grocery store because of immigration. You have something in your prior knowledge to connect things to and to realize that it’s not just propaganda.

Victoria’s new translation of her students’ stories reveals her understanding of her positioning as a White teacher. Gay (2000) supports the notion of self-examination in her call for “culturally responsive caring” stating, “If teachers do not know how their own cultural blinders can obstruct educational opportunities for students of color, they cannot locate feasible places, directions, and strategies for changing them” (p. 71). We argue that for White teachers to think about how to care authentically for students of color, two points must be understood, (a) the role unexamined White privilege plays in teacher–student caring relationships, and (b) the need to understand and privilege the needs of the cared for (students of color) over the needs of the one caring (White teachers).

The role unexamined White privilege plays in teacher–student caring relationships.

Teachers are in positions of power in schools. They are expected to make instructional and sometimes personal decisions daily that involve their students. There is an expectation that all teachers care about their students and are admired for their dedication to the students they teach every day. Yet from a Critical White Studies perspective, the institutionalized nature of White teacher–student of color relationships can remain unexamined and ritualistic. As Mahoney states,

White women see ourselves acting as individuals rather than as members of a culture in part because we do not see much of the dominant culture at all. Our own lives are therefore part of a racialized world in ways we do not see. This happens when we interact with people of color thinking we are acting as individuals but are in fact acting as part of White pattern. (1997a, p. 306)

Traditional White patterns of caring can involve Whites benevolently saving people of color by attempting to make them more like themselves without regard for their perspectives, providing them with assistance with things assumed to be needed, or providing silent sympathy as the teachers demonstrated with Nia. A complex notion, White privilege combined with White teachers’ positions of privilege in schools can encourage color-blind caring as teachers can be focused tightly on themselves as the ones caring acting in socially determined ways. Teachers’ positions afford them the power to construct caring relationships in ways they deem appropriate. Victoria explained her color-blind caring perspective, “Before, when you’re in the denial stage, where you’re just denying that there’s anything wrong with you—you’re thinking—I love my students . . . I don’t see color. I love them all the same.” Victoria’s description of her own caring for her students in what she termed as “before” can be described as the first stage of White identity, Contact (Helms, 1990).

The Contact Stage is marked by the White teacher recognizing and being aware of other races, but she does not include any type of reflection or engagement. “. . . [T]he person in the Contact Stage automatically benefits from institutional and cultural racism without necessarily being aware that he or she is doing so” (Helms, 1990, p. 56) as illustrated in Hayden’s statement about making her students fit into the system. In this stage White teachers caring about students of color can be typified by teachers claiming to care about students yet performing acts of caring more aligned with their own perceptions of how to care.

Once White teachers understand that White privilege should be acknowledged and examined within their teacher–student relationships, we then turn to an examination of how teachers should be cognizant of understanding children first. We seek to build on Noddings’ (1984/2003) call for understanding the “cared for” and the possibilities inherent in White teachers assuming an understanding of their students’ needs prior to extending care.

The need to understand and privilege the needs of the cared for (students of color) over the needs of the one caring (White teachers).

Hayden’s statement, “In my classroom one of the things I did was try to help my kids change so they would fit in the system better, but that wasn’t really the right route to go” reflects her repositioning of her notions of how to care for her students. Caring for students of color in ways that served her White view was not always appropriate. As Victoria stated,

I had to come to terms with a lot of my own assumptions and stereotypes that I held. And things that I didn’t even realize that I was doing. I think that was hard because I went into it not thinking there were any problems with how I thought or acted or talked, so for me, that was jolting, to hear that I could offend somebody without even meaning to.

Offending someone without meaning to can occur if teachers are not aware of the needs of their students, as well as affecting student, teacher, and parent relationships. Therefore, Noddings’ focus on the “cared for” applies to teaching.

Caring involves stepping out of one’s own personal frame of reference into the other’s. When we care, we consider the others’ point of view, [her] objective needs, and what [she] expects of us. Our attention, our mental engrossment is on the cared-for, not on ourselves. Our reasons for acting, then, have to do both with the other’s wants and desires and with the objective elements of [her] problematic situation . . . if our minds are on ourselves, however—if we have never really left our own a priori frame of reference—our reasons for acting point back at us and not outward to the cared for. (Noddings, 1984/2003, p. 24)

Ideally the “cared for” (student) determines how caring is manifested in the relationship. This requires the “caring one” (teacher) to recognize the individual needs of the “cared for” (student). In the case of race, this would require White teachers to understand their privilege and their preconceived conceptions of caring and resituate their focus on knowing their students individually and meeting their needs from their perspective, as Hayden and Victoria came to understand people of color’s perspectives through their relationships with Nia and the guest speakers in the course.

Our goal was to disrupt what Noddings (1984/2003) regards as inauthentic caring bound by racial privilege. Based on our analysis across time Hayden and Victoria did come to understand their racial positioning and the role caring plays in racial interaction through the multimodal construction of the course. Their subsequent self-analysis detailed ways they altered their relationships with their students and the parents of their students (Pennington & Brock, 2011). Helms’ (1990) final stage of White identity development, autonomy, can be characterized as movement away from guilt and recognition of Whiteness that welcomes learning about other racial groups and seeks to combat racism. Teachers in this stage are aware of the need to understand their students individually, which matches Noddings (1984/2003) call for authentic caring. Echoed by Valenzuela,

An authentically caring pedagogy would . . . build cultural bridges wherever there are divisions and it would privilege biculturalism . . . [teachers] repositioning as students, rather than as teachers, of culture will invest them with the dispositions and knowledge that they need to have to maximize their effectiveness as both teachers and purveyors of cultural knowledge. (1999, p. 266)

We propose that teacher education attend to and problematize the inherent stance of caring that White teachers bring to their classrooms in ways that open up dialogue and critique to foster Noddings and Valenzuela’s calls for authentic caring.

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.

Bios

Julie L. Pennington is an associate professor of literacy studies.

Cynthia H. Brock is a professor of literacy studies.

Elavie Ndura is a tenured Professor of Education and Academic Program Coordinator of the Multilingual/Multicultural Education program (MME) in the George Mason University’s College of Education and Human Development (CEHD).

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