Norming Suburban

Theoretical Framework

Between 1967 and 1969, Ray Rist (1970, 2000) conducted a study of black teachers of black kindergarteners in a poor elementary school located in what Rist termed the “ghetto.” In this research on the self-fulfilling prophecy, he found that teachers developed criteria that became the marker of expected success for certain students. This marker for success was termed the “normative reference group” (see also Merton, 1957). Each teacher’s normative reference group was the basis for how she assigned students to ability groups, what she presumed their intellectual capability to be, as well as how frequently and in what manner she interacted with them. In Rist’s (2000) study, the teacher marked the students based on her evaluation of the children’s cultural resources.

Resources—cultural and symbolic—are embodied by people and serve to advance their social position or status, and are assigned differing value in various contexts (Bourdieu, 1986; Diamond & Gomez, 2004; Lewis, 2003; Luttrell, 1997). Cultural resources concern knowledge and skills—such as the ability or knowledge of how to behave in the classroom, while symbolic resources concern human markers that distinguish one person from another—such as skin color or language ability (Watson, 2011). When students displayed cultural resources that the teacher valued, these resources became capital. For example, the teacher valued when a student possessed a “high degree of verbalization in standard American English” (Rist, 2000, p. 276). Therefore, this cultural resource of speaking a certain way became cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986, 2000). Those students who possessed this capital were viewed as successful, placed at Table 1, and labeled “fast learners.” Those students who did not posses this capital were marked as unsuccessful and were considered slow and not as intelligent. The status the teacher ascribed her students at Table 1 corresponded with the values, beliefs, and behaviors she was taught as a child and of the people she associated with (Rist, 2000). Consequently, her normative reference group was also coupled with what Bourdieu (1986, 2000) calls habitus—her preferences, attitudes, and dispositions.

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Table 1.

Definitions of Urban From Participants Who Were Asked Explicitly in Interview 1

Name	Phrases and words coded as race	Phrases and words coded as class
Jenny	“lots of cultures represented”
Jill	“kids of color”; “the kids that look like the kids that I grew up with in the suburbs”	Poor, poverty
Josh	“diversity of backgrounds”; “diversity of racial backgrounds”	Economic diversity
Kim	Kids that “don’t’ look like me”
Lacy a	Cultural disadvantage	Financial disadvantage
Leah	“students of color”	Low income
Mara	“racial and ethnic diversity”
Molly	“diversity of cultural background”	“poverty stricken”; diverse SES
Naomi	“racially isolated”; diverse	“intensely poor”

a

Lacy defined urban on her own, without prompting.

In my study, each teacher used middle-class whites, encapsulated in the term, suburban, as the normative reference group. This group is held as the normal group, against which other groups are compared, judged, and subordinated; hence the term, norming suburban. For these teachers, middle-class whites serve as the marker of perceived correct beliefs, values, and behaviors. Similar to Rist’s study, this normative reference group was influenced, in part, by participants’ own experiences, specifically when they were in high school.

Norming suburban is best thought of as the use of perceived cultural and/or symbolic resources of white students and families as a lens through which these participants make sense of teaching in urban schools. Not all of the participants taught in suburban schools. However, all attended suburban schools. So when these teachers refer to suburban schools, students, and families, they are also referring to their own experiences and their personal beliefs. In this manner, similar to the teachers in Rist’s study, norming suburban is also linked to these teachers’ habitus—the preferences, attitudes, and dispositions transmitted to them through their own schooling and family experiences.

In order to norm suburban, more than a comparison must take place. It is not enough to say that teaching in urban schools differs from teaching in suburban schools. One has to posit, either implicitly or explicitly, that teaching in suburban schools is better, and base this belief on the perceived inferiority of urban students. More important, since the teachers in my sample use code words for race, norming suburban involves talking about race without using race labels. Therefore, norming suburban often begins with an implicit step of designating a person or thing (e.g., students or schools) suburban or urban status based primarily on skin color, a symbolic resource. Symbolic capital deals with the markers people set up to distinguish between each other. Skin color is a symbolic resource because it signals certain beliefs about race that help us understand ourselves and shape how we interact with others (Lewis, 2003). And as Omi and Winant (1994) argue, “We expect people to act out their apparent racial identities; indeed we become disoriented when they do not” (p. 59). Thus, the teachers in this sample may be perplexed when a Latino student has parents who are positively involved and may label them an atypical urban student (Watson, 2011).

The teachers in this study norm suburban in three main steps: First they attribute behaviors, values, and beliefs monolithically to all students based on their urbanness and suburbanness. I refer to these behaviors, values, and beliefs as cultural resources. ⁱ Second, teachers assign these cultural resources either a positive or negative value. Third, by juxtaposing one group against another, teachers set up hierarchies between suburban and urban students and families in which suburban is deemed preferred. Thus, the cultural and symbolic resources of suburban students and families become cultural and symbolic capital.

Cultural capital intersects with race, and therefore symbolic capital, in numerous ways. One important way is that in the last four decades, “deficient individual character, or an absence of values and beliefs that enable one to represent the dominant cultural mores, replaced biology as the best explanation for persistent racial differences” (Jones, 1999, p. 466). Thus, teachers may employ a significant linguistic move: They may talk about racial groups while rarely using race words.

In this study, I employ norming suburban as a theoretical framework to examine teachers’ evaluation of perceived cultural resources and when these resources get assigned to urban and suburban students. By determining what these teachers consider cultural and symbolic capital, I seek to understand how they make sense of teaching in urban schools and how they talk about race without using race words.

Study Design

The data for this investigation come from an exploratory study of 16 urban teacher education students. The teachers in this study were from the same graduate-level university teacher education program (TEP) in the eastern United States. I chose this program due to its proximity and that it had an urban focus. This year-long program included a summer teaching assignment in a local school, followed by one semester of coursework and observations at an internship site. In the second semester, participants taught two courses at the same site in which they observed while continuing coursework. The coursework varied greatly depending on each participant’s schedule and course selection. Each student did, however, take content methods courses, teacher research, and a course that focused on social location. Upon the successful completion of their training, students receive a masters of education, and certification in either secondary math, English, science, or social studies.

In late spring, an open call was made to all teaching candidates in this program, inviting them to participate in an exploratory study of the experiences of teachers in an urban-focused program. Of the 60 students in the program, 23 agreed to participate in an interview. I selected 16 of the 23 who volunteered. Those not selected were disqualified because they did not plan to teach the following year, or lived too far away (i.e., other countries, the West Coast), to reasonably be a part of the study. The sample includes two men and fourteen women ranging in age from 23 to 40. One participant, Peggy, is Asian American, while the remaining participants are white American. The majority of the participants self-identified as middle class or above, except Carl who identified as working class, and all attended suburban schools while growing up.

Participants were interviewed 3 times over the course of 1 year for approximately ! hour each, using a semistructured interview protocol. I conducted multiple readings of the transcripts using cultural discourse analysis as an analytic strategy to understand how participants talked about urban teaching. This including students, student needs, physical descriptions, and school structure and organization, among other factors. Cultural discourse analysis reconstructs, from what people say explicitly, the implicit assumptions they have in mind to say it (Quinn, 2005; Seidman, 1998). The theoretical underpinning is that culture “consists in largely invisible understandings that people carry around inside them together with the visible, but always partial and often cryptic, manifestations of these understandings that people produce” (Quinn, 2001, pp. 9-10). The point of analysis, then, is to uncover relationships between aspects of social life—such as power, ideology, gender, class, and race—that language encodes (Chase, 1996; Quinn, 2005). In this regard, the interview becomes a powerful tool of exploration, for of all of “these cultural products,” the things people say offer the “fullest and most decipherable record available” (Quinn, 2001, p. 10). Interviews are also helpful in that they produce longer samples of discourse on a specific topic than what is likely to occur naturally (Quinn, 2001, 2005).

Moving back and forth between coding, analysis, and the literature, I paid particular attention to any evaluations given of students. I used open coding to listen for linguistic cues in participant talk that were references to assumptions/beliefs about urban teaching as well as associations between urban, urbanness, suburban, suburbanness, and any stated conflicts. When participants used urban and suburban, I carefully noted what was being referenced in order to develop codes and themes. For example, participants often used their own experiences as a comparison for what they were experiencing as urban-trained teachers. I used this emic code (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to highlight portions of text where participants made this comparison. By using this code, I was able to discover commonalities across participants and use of comparing, specifically that the majority of these comparisons were negative and that the participants used their suburban experiences as the point of comparison. This, in turn, became a theme and led to a finding of the study.

Urbanness as a Cultural Construct

For the participants in this study, urban teaching primarily means teaching poor students of color. Although only nine participants were asked to explicitly define urban teaching/education, all of the participants consistently connected urban teaching to teaching students of color. For example, participants who were not asked to define urban education volunteered that urban teaching was teaching “racially diverse students” (Ruth), “students that don’t look like me” (Jessie), and having “to deal with the race issue” (Mary). The table below represents responses from the nine participants asked explicitly to define urban teaching/education (see Table 1). When asked explicitly for a definition of urban or urban education, all nine participants (100%) defined urban in racial terms. Six of these nine participants (67%) defined urban in terms of class. The third and fourth components were language diversity (five participants) and lack of resources (four participants). Only two participants named “city.”

In the second interview, we asked each participant: “Would you characterize your school as urban? Why or why not?” Leah’s response below represents a typical reply.

First of all it’s located in City X and it also serves a tremendously diverse student population in terms of, not so diverse in terms of socio-economic status. . . . I think it’s like eighty-four percent free and reduced lunch, but a fair amount of ethnic and racial diversity. I think it’s about like forty-five, probably fifty percent black, forty-five percent Hispanic, and the rest are like a mix of Arab, different Arab groups and a small percentage of white students. It’s pretty mixed. (Leah)

Leah’s reply to whether her school is urban represents the most frequent responses from the participants (see Table 2). They include if the majority of its population is nonwhite (82%), if it is located in a city (65%), has a variety of income levels (41%), and/or has low SES (35%).

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Table 2.

Participant Definitions of What Makes a School Urban

Number of participants	A school is urban if it . . .
14	Has a majority of students of color
11	Is located in a city
7	Has a variety of income levels
6	Has a low-SES (socioeconomic status) population

*

Participants may be in more than one definition category; however, there is no overlap between the last two categories.

Fourteen participants posit that a school is urban in part because of the color of its students. Namely, an urban school has a majority of students of color. Note that in Leah’s response above to “Would you characterize your school as an urban setting?” she states that her school is “diverse” and “pretty mixed.” Yet she says that half the school is black and nearly half is Latino. It is clear that for Leah diverse means primarily students of color. Similar to Leah, in explaining why her school is not urban, Laura uses the same framework of defining urban by the number of students of color: “I would say my school’s suburban but it also has more of that rural student than it ever has of the urban student. . . . like we have very few racial minorities in the classroom.” Here Laura employs a linguistic move of speaking about the race of the students without using explicit race words. It is not until later that she links racial minorities to urban, making her earlier reference clear. Since participants use phrases such as “students of color” or “diverse students” to answer why a school is urban, it is clear that the race of their students—and perhaps how their students are racially different from them—is a central ingredient of the definition of urban.

Class is also an important factor; 76% of the teachers mentioned it in their definitions of urban schools. However, these teachers are not in agreement that urban kids are mostly poor kids; only 6 participants named low-SES (socioeconomic status) as a characteristic of an urban school. Even so, participants frequently named the values many Americans associate with middle-classness, such as valuing education. In addition, African Americans are often viewed as lower class (Ortner, 2006), even though there are clearly many examples that contradict this notion. Given this reality and the fact that black children comprised a large percent of the urban students of these teachers, it can be argued that urban may be equated with poor as well. However, since every participant, in multiple ways throughout the three interviews, mentioned race, it will be forefronted in this study as it was salient for all of the participants.

It is equally important to understand what is meant by suburban. The majority of teachers in my sample define urban in opposition to suburban. Therefore, suburban primarily means white and middle class. I highlight class here because urban was seen as heterogeneous in regard to ethnicity, race (excluding whites), class, and language. Therefore, as its opposite, suburban means homogeneity and lacking diversity in these areas, which also means there is less disagreement over class. It is important to note that the opposite of racial diversity is not white. However, most Americans speak as if white is not a race (Carter, 1997; R. Frankenberg, 1993; G. Howard, 1999), and therefore, white is often spoken in contrary to racial diversity.

Just as these participants stereotype urban students and families, they do so with suburban students and families. For example, a consistent theme throughout all three interviews was the belief that urban parents did not provide enough support for their students, but that suburban parents did. As Mary states, “Sometimes I think in the urban setting you also have to help the parents. . . . You know, you talk to the suburban parents and right away they say, ‘Oh, . . . shall we hire a tutor?’ ‘Do we need additional support of some sort here?’ And that’s a resource that’s thought of right away and implemented, if necessary.”

When these two features of describing teaching are combined, namely, using code words for race and attributing traits to the people that these code words represent, they become a powerful linguistic tool of masking these teachers’ views about the race of their students. This mask both veils their beliefs from themselves as well as from others. When veiling their beliefs from themselves, this mask serves as a “dysconscious” barrier between critical examination of race, racial views, or racial inequity and a critical consciousness about these (King, 1991). As King notes, “it is not an absence of consciousness . . . but an impaired consciousness or distorted way of thinking about race as compared to, for example, critical consciousness” (p. 135). By using urban and suburban, Mary above, for example, allows herself to say that parents of color do not have the skill or resources that white parents have to help their children. This example illustrates how the “biologization of culture” (Bonilla-Silva, 2003) functions in defining urban and urban teaching. Here Mary describes a cultural belief about urban and suburban parents. Since we know that urban students are defined as students of color, and suburban students as white, Mary’s beliefs about race are implicit in her descriptions; she is ascribing behaviors, values, and beliefs on the basis of urbanness or race. Furthermore, since she credits suburban parents for knowing what to do without mentioning other factors such as financial resources (note the role of class here too), or how suburban/urban schools are structured, her views support a naturalistic view of urbanness. It is natural (biological) for suburban parents to be able to support their children. Thus urbanness, and by contrast suburbanness, becomes a cultural construct and reveals these teachers’ beliefs about teaching students of color.

Janet also provides an example of how teachers may speak freely about the differences between students of color and white students without ever mentioning race:

I think that . . . a traditional curriculum . . . doesn’t necessarily bring in the lives of . . . all . . . . kids, but somehow urban kids’ lives are . . . further from the school culture. . . . And whereas . . . suburban or kids from, I mean I have kids at the school that aren’t um that aren’t struggling as much. . . . So they get the school thing. . . . The urban kids don’t. (Janet)

At the time of the interview, Janet was teaching in a school that she defined as urban. In this passage she describes the difference in two kinds of children in her urban classroom. The ones who “aren’t struggling as much” and “get the school thing” are labeled “suburban.” This group is contrasted with “the urban kids” who don’t get the “school thing.” In essence, Janet contrasts students who have the symbolic capital (skin color) and cultural capital (“get the school thing”) of suburban students with the perceived symbolic and cultural resources of students of color. Race is notably absent. Yet, from the previous section, we know that urban primarily means of color. In fact, Janet stated that her school was urban, in part, because of the “incredible amounts of diversity” it had. Therefore, Janet is able to speak about both white students and students of color without mentioning race. Thus, the characterization of suburban and urban goes beyond geography, or whether or not one is located in a city. Here, both suburban and urban represent distinct cultures, implicitly tied to race, and the categorizations and hierarchies inherent in American conceptions of race. For these teachers, the words urban and suburban include race and class and convey the systems of meaning associated with skin color. Suburban becomes a proxy for white, while urban becomes a proxy for non-white.

Norming Suburban: How Teachers Describe Teaching in Urban Schools

The primary way in which these teachers describe teaching in urban schools is through comparing urban teaching and urban students negatively to suburban teaching and suburban students. In this section I will give four examples of norming suburban, including when teachers use their own schooling experiences (recall that all teachers went to “suburban” schools) as the normative reference.

In explaining the cultural differences between urban and suburban students, Molly asserted that suburban students naturally respect their teachers, whereas urban teachers have to “earn” their students’ respect:

I’ve never taught in a suburban school so I don’t know exactly, but I feel like if I were to step in as a white female to a suburban school that was majority white kids, regardless of whether or not I was a great teacher, I would garner some respect just because I am in the role of teacher. And that’s a cultural thing that has been ingrained in kids from a young age. This is the teacher; you respect him or her no matter what. . . . In my [urban] school, it’s more true that respect is earned based on the person. So because I am the teacher is not as meaningful as being a good teacher. (Molly).

The normative reference group for Molly is suburban students. She compares urban students’ level of respect negatively to that of suburban students. Her statement is not simply a comparison, but a judgment. Urban students lack something (automatic respect for teachers) that suburban students do not.

Molly norms suburban first by monolithically attributing beliefs, values, and/or behaviors to suburban students. In this case, she posits that suburban kids are naturally respectful to their teachers. By juxtaposing suburban students against urban students, Molly sets up a hierarchy between the two groups. Thus, the resources of the suburban students become capital.

It is important to note that norming suburban does not mean that teachers do not desire to teach urban students (E. Frankenberg, Taylor, & Merseth, 2010; Groulx, 2001). For example, Molly saw urban teaching as a “socially just” act. And Josh stated, “To me, urban education is the work that needs to be done in education. I have no interest in spending my time working with white students in the suburbs, because they don’t need me.” Clearly Josh desires to teach urban students—even if his motivation for doing so might be seen as paternalistic. However, this desire did not prevent Molly, Josh, and the other participants from comparing urban students negatively to suburban students.

Note also the pairing of white with suburban and the deletion of race words with urban. Molly stated that if she were at a “suburban school that was majority white kids,” she would be respected. In describing what takes place at urban schools, she does not mention race at all. And Josh stated, “white students in the suburbs . . . don’t need me.” For both Molly and Josh, the race of the students sends them signals. For Molly, it is that she will be automatically respected if teaching white students, and for Josh, it is that nonwhite students “need” him.

In explaining the difference between urban and suburban students, Kim normed suburban when she stated,

I think there might be differences in how their lives are lived and what they go home to at the end of the day. Growing up in a suburban environment, like I did, I went home at the end of the day, and I played in the woods, the neighborhood. . . . Most urban kids don’t have much of that. So, in that way, I would say it is very different. . . . I think that just traditionally, when I picture urban versus suburban, I picture urban as more crowded, noisy, or chaotic in general. Whereas I picture suburban [as] more pleasant ideals. . . . On both ends, [these] are incredible stereotypes. But if I think of those two words, that’s what I conjure up. (Kim)

Kim is not simply stating that suburban and urban kids have different lives. She positions suburban kids’ home lives as better by using words such as “crowded, noisy, or chaotic” to describe urban environments and “pleasant” to describe suburban environments. In so doing, she norms suburban. This statement hints at the normative reference group also being teachers’ own experiences. Kim refers to her own childhood environment in thinking about what current students face today. The teachers in this study attended a variety of schools—public, private, same gender—but all named their schools suburban. So even though Jill, below, references her “small private school,” this was seen as an example of suburban schooling—schooling that represented the cultural characteristics opposite of urban:

But the thing that most helped me [prepare to be an urban teacher] was the chance to watch somebody. . . . And I think that she uses a lot of strategies that are very appropriate to teaching in an urban area. . . . ‘Cause I went to a really small private school where things were very regimented and formal and traditional. And so I have a vision that that’s the right way to do education. But watching her I saw a lot of creative ways that you can engage students who aren’t coming from a tradition where education is the most important thing, or they don’t have college-educated parents. So if they are coming out of a setting that is so different from my own I might have to go around those traditional ways of teaching, and I think that’s also how that experience helped me. (Jill)

Coming into the program, Jill had a “vision,” as do most preservice teachers, about the “right way to do education” (see Wideen, Mayer-Smith, & Moon, 1998). In thinking about what pedagogy to employ with urban students, Jill uses her own white, middle-class experiences. Here she norms suburban because she does not simply state her schooling was different but that it was the “right way” to teach. One might find hope in Jill’s comment that her mentor teacher used “creative ways” to engage students. However, too often teaching candidates view good teaching (making the content relevant, using experiential exercises such as role plays, and doing more groupwork) as teaching set aside for students who are marginalized, instead of as good teaching for all learners. Even though this might seem to signal a change in her thinking, it still is a subjugated view of teaching urban students since it is not seen as normal teaching (Watson, 2011).

Jill further norms suburban (i.e., middle-class white) by relegating urban students as deficient: They don’t come from a tradition where education is valued as much as in the culture of suburban students, nor do they have college-educated parents. Both of these are attributes of urban students, given to them based on their urbanness. In this example, Jill demonstrates how participants monolithically ascribe characteristics to groups of students based on their suburbanness or urbanness.

Thus Jill norms suburban by attributing a behavior (less engaged), a value (education is not the most important thing), and a characteristic (do not have college-educated parents) monolithically to all urban students. Conversely, the opposite of these are silently attributed to suburban students, as this response is an explanation of why she is not prepared to teach in urban schools. Second, these perceived cultural resources are labeled negative (at least implicitly). In fact, she contrasts teaching urban kids with the right way to teach. By juxtaposing suburban teaching against urban teaching, a hierarchy is formed where suburban teaching is preferred or esteemed higher than urban teaching.

Mara demonstrates how norming suburban is built on how these teachers view the cultural attributes of racial minorities. Here she assigns urbanness by noting that her practicum prepared her for urban teaching because of the “racial and ethnic diversity” and the many spoken languages. Furthermore, she points to the two schools in TEP that had more white students (River Valley ⁱⁱ and Walker Philips) suggesting that teachers there were not having a similar experience to her urban school and perhaps these schools would not have prepared her for urban teaching:

Students speak like 26 or 28 different languages in the home. Just a lot of racial and ethnic diversity. . . . Just being there everyday was a hugely different experience from people interning at River Valley or at Walker Philips—very, very different. . . . I’m trying to think of something else specifically urban. . . . Just seeing the way that both my mentor teachers interacted with students and interacted with parents. . . . Both of them would talk a lot about calling home and never getting anywhere with that. (Mara)

Given that more than one language is spoken in the home, it makes sense that communication with parents might be difficult. However, Mara does not point to institutional practices that could have helped with this problem (e.g., providing interpreters, information in native languages). Instead, after “trying to think of something else specifically urban,” Mara points to the parents themselves as the problem:

When we [the interns] were meeting with him [the mentor] to kind of plan our class, we had certain ideas about you know, like should parents sign this form. . . . He just kept saying things like, “Don’t set yourself up for failure.” It was kind of a negative spin on parental involvement in the school. But it also was kind of a realistic spin on it because he’s been there for a long time. (Mara)

Even though his description may have been an accurate picture of parent involvement at this particular school, what’s striking is that this made her believe that her experience at the school and, in particular, this experience around parent involvement was “specifically urban” and, therefore, prepared her for urban teaching. In this manner, Mara also norms suburban. First, she monolithically attributes a behavior and value (a certain type of parent involvement) to urban students. Second, she posits this cultural resource as negative—she refers to it as “a [realistic] negative spin on parental involvement” and talks about “calling home and never getting anywhere with that.” Furthermore, as stated earlier, she locates the problem in the parents instead of looking to herself or the school for ways to change the nature of involvement or to see what part of the problem for which they might be responsible. The third move is to set up a hierarchy between suburban teaching and urban teaching by naming this type of parental involvement as “specifically urban.” Thus, this resource (parent behavior/participation) is not valued. The way in which parents behave in suburban schools, then, becomes cultural capital. That this behavior or value is signaled through the racial, ethnic, and language diversity associated with urbanness, makes suburbanness symbolic capital as well.

These four examples demonstrate that the primary way in which these participants describe and make sense of urban teaching is through comparing urban teaching/students to suburban teaching/students. Their references do not simply state differences; rather, they set up hierarchies in which urbanness is juxtaposed negatively against suburbanness. Each participant views suburban students and families as the normative reference group: a marker of perceived correct beliefs, values, and behaviors. Conversely, each participant views urban students and families from a deficit ideology—grossly lacking correct beliefs, values, and behaviors. Essentially these teachers use suburban students and families as a lens through which they try to make sense of urban students and families; in doing so, they subjugate urban and regard suburban as normal. As such, urban teaching is also compared with, judged by, and then subordinated to suburban teaching.

Conclusion and Implications

Recall that for these teachers, urban teaching primarily means teaching students of color. When asked to define urban schools, participants used phrases such as “racially diverse” and “students that don’t look like me.” Yet in the majority of the interviews, participants rarely used race words and instead replaced them with urban and suburban. Since teachers saw urban teaching as teaching poor students of color (and perhaps, more often than not, Latino and black kids), they tended to focus on the perceived deficits or the perceived culture of poor people of color. Thus, urban became a cultural construct. The urban in urban teaching was largely a reference to the racial difference between the majority white teachers and their nonwhite students, as well as the perceived cultural deficits associated with students of color. Clearly these teachers struggled with how to interpret the sociohistorical meanings of race (Dara Hill, 2009).

As this struggle is common among teachers, one place to help them with this struggle is in teacher education programs (Akiba, 2011; Anderson & Stillman, 2010; Kyles & Olafson, 2008). These programs must take care to address possible deficits in teachers. This must take place for all teachers, no matter where they are placed. It was clear that teachers had assumptions both about urban and suburban students that might negatively affect instruction and learning. As Tyrone Howard (2003a) states, “Teachers must be careful to not allow racial classifications of students to be used as rigid and reductive cultural characteristics” (p. 201). Overvaluing suburban students because they are white and middle class is harmful just as undervaluing urban students because they are poor and non-white is harmful. In addition, not using race words such as African American, Asian American, or European American helps teachers speak about race in ways that hide racial beliefs. Teachers need to be encouraged to use race words instead of coded language.

Although there has been extensive research on successfully teaching students of color (see Cochran-Smith et al., 2004; Hollins & Guzman, 2005; King, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1994, 1999, 2000), “very few teacher education programs have successfully tackled the challenging task of preparing teachers to meet the needs of diverse populations” (Watson, Charner-Laird, Kirkpatrick, Szczesiul, & Gordon, 2006, p. 396). One crucial shift would be for teacher education programs (TEP) to begin a process at admissions that identifies candidates’ racial identity development level (Helms, 1992) and use this as a starting point for future conversations and strategic field and course placement. Just as we examine applicant essays and interview responses for glimpses of teaching potential, we need to be on the lookout for candidates who have unhealthy views about social location and its connections to schooling (Watson, 2011). Simultaneously, building a pool or an incoming class of teacher candidates who can push each other in their beliefs about the intersection of race and teaching should be high among our priorities as teacher educators and TEPs (Fairchild et al., 2012; Ullucci & Battey, 2011).

TEPs also need to rethink the courses offered to teaching candidates. I used to think that segregating issues of race into its own class was wrong. I now think differently. Race and other issues of social location deserve a stand-alone course. However, social location also needs to be a thread woven throughout the entire program. Future teachers need a place where grappling with race is the primary course objective (Baszile, 2008; Milner, 2006). And they need to see how grappling with race is integrated throughout every course, such as evaluation and assessment, mathematics methods, or educational psychology (Banks, 2006; King, Hollins, & Hayman, 1997; Ladson-Billings, 1999, 2000). Too often, TEPs have a multicultural education course or teaching diverse populations course and leave it to these instructors to do the work needed. While this can be the starting place and even a returning place for this work, it cannot be the only place. Teaching candidates must learn how conceptions of race, past discrimination, and structured racial inequality mediate all aspects of teaching and learning (Bales & Saffold, 2011).

Furthermore, a central feature of all teacher education programs, no matter whom teachers anticipate teaching, should be work around reducing dysconsciousness: “an uncritical habit of mind (including perceptions, attitudes, assumptions, and beliefs) that justifies inequity and exploitation by accepting the existing order of things as given” (King, 1991, p. 135). This cannot be done without a faculty that is well versed in antiracist pedagogies and is also willing to learn to recognize and eradicate racism in themselves and in their teaching practices (Milner, 2007). Teacher educators themselves need to do as much work in removing or preventing dysconsciousness as their students (Darling-Hammond, 2006; Howey, 2006). This work should be consistent and recurrent.