Considering Antiracism in Student Teacher Placement

Preface

American schools are more racially polarized today than when school desegregation efforts began following the Brown v. Board of Education decision (Orfield, Ee, Frankenberg, & Siegel-Hawley, 2016). In the following vignette, Frank, a music teacher educator considers where to place Judy, a student teacher who needs to live in her parents’ home. He and his colleagues compare the nearby options, East and West High Schools. According to state school reporting data, West and East are wholly different schools. ¹ Though only 4 miles apart, West students are 73.9% White, while East High School’s students are only 20% White. Additionally, in 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against a bank and lending firm located down the street from West High School. The suit was filed after a 2001 audit found that the bank was engaged in redlining (the systematic denial of loans, mortgages, insurance, or other financial services to individuals living within specific geographic areas) in the neighborhoods surrounding East and West High Schools. The effects of redlining persist within this community. At first, East High School is the student teacher’s only viable placement, but East’s reputation as a tumultuous placement concerns the music education faculty. Frank’s colleague, Barb, offers to learn more about other schools in the student teacher’s area. How might an antiracist stance inform this committee’s work by acknowledging continued racial segregation? What might the faculty learn about these schools if they were to expend cursory efforts toward race-centered investigation?

Vignette 1

The music education faculty and student teaching coordinator sat around the conference table. They looked down the list of next spring’s student teachers wondering where they might learn best. As Frank reviewed the list, he noticed that Judy, a sharp, professional candidate, was from Central City. Frank mentioned this to the group and asked, “Judy is from Central? Does she plan to live at home next spring? I know that area and unless she’s ready for one killer commute up to the suburbs, she’ll have to teach in the local districts.”

“Let’s see, I think that there are orchestras at both East and West High School,” Frank’s colleague, Barb, offered.

This would make the decision easy. Student teachers could not work in the high school that they attended, leaving the faculty only one choice.

“So, then . . . I see she went to West. She’ll have to go to East. Frank, do you know the director there?” Barb asked.

Frank thought for a moment. He did not know the director at East; he had done a clinic at the local university last year and had met only the orchestra director from West.

“Well, I don’t know about the orchestra, but I’ve worked with the choir director at East,” suggested the department’s choral specialist. “I was there last fall and that school is a little crazy right now. They are on their sixth principal in six years and the school is under review for failing test scores. I don’t think I’d want someone working with their choirs full-time. The choir teacher was nice enough, but it sounds like a tough school.”

“Shoot,” said Frank. “Those are the only two schools in the area. I think Cornton High is a nice school and right down the road, but I don’t think they have an orchestra.” Central City was 40 minutes from Cornton on a good day and Judy needed to student teach near home.

“Well, I looked up West and they have a new director. She was hired in 2014. That would have been Judy’s first year in college. Since it is a different teacher, maybe we can make an exception here? Judy can work at West during her first placement and in general music at a fabulous elementary school I know of in the area for her second. The teacher there is doing interesting work with African music!” added the student teaching coordinator.

“Oh, great,” said Frank. “Thanks, that should be perfect. How about our next student . . .”

Reflections on Vignette 1

When student teachers from highly segregated areas ask to teach near their homes, what will or can we do for them? It is true that East High School had six principals in 6 years; they had come under media scrutiny for low college readiness rates among graduating seniors. The faculty’s concerns about East High School as a strong student teaching placement may have been valid. However, it should be conspicuous that the faculty never talked directly about the orchestra director at East, the professional who would be most directly responsible for student teacher mentorship if Judy had been placed there. In fact, Frank had never met the orchestra director at East High School; no one at the student teaching placement meeting had.

In this vignette, Judy’s placement at West High School was justified using racialized notions of goodness of fit. Race was never the explicit cause for the faculty’s concern nor an avenue for further investigation, but given the differences in racial demographics between East and West high schools and Central City’s history of illegal redlining practices, race most certainly influenced the group’s conversation. When faced with a dilemma concerning Judy’s placement, the faculty decided to subvert a guideline preventing student teachers from returning to the high schools that they attended. They allowed Judy to return to a school with which she was familiar to work with a teacher that they had not met. The faculty’s perceptions of East High School, influenced as they were by racial demographics and racism-driven disparities between schools, subverted one of the only guidelines for student teacher placement. If the student teacher, Judy, had been from East High School—the school with high principal turnover and the poorer reputation—would the faculty have asked whether West High School was a good fit for her student teaching placement? Would they wonder how Judy, a student literally from “across the tracks,” would be perceived by the cooperating teacher, students, or administration from the city’s more affluent and whiter neighborhood? Music teacher educators cannot simply assume that placing preservice students in “diverse” schools will automatically imbue them with dispositions and strategies for working toward racial justice. Preservice music teachers working in high-needs placements or urban schools or schools that serve minoritized students ² may need culturally responsive mentoring to make sense of their experiences and to develop cultural competence (Abramo, 2015). Nevertheless, the application of CART in this vignette and other cases like it offers opportunities to rethink established practices and institutional norms, which may reinforce White privilege.

Knowledge of and Relationships With Teachers

In the first vignette, the music education faculty’s information about the teachers at West and East were the prime criteria and method for choosing a cooperating teacher. The lack of contact between Frank and the orchestra director at East led the choral specialist to describe the school based on impressions formed during a single visit to the school for a clinic. Very limited knowledge about the orchestra teachers and schools was used to collectively evaluate the relative fit and quality of two potential placements. Furthermore, the faculty did not seek to learn more about East through additional visits or direct contact with the orchestra teacher. I suggest that teacher educators can expand their knowledge of persons in schools where their students may teach and challenge themselves to foster new relationships with teachers in predominantly non-White schools and communities. Teacher educators can look for ways to transcend networks in which school music education is likely immersed. Teacher educators can get to know diverse communities and schools through the same kinds of clinics and visits that they do with mostly White and upper/middle class schools in our states. They can do a better job of asking who they know and locating gaps in their institutions’ professional networks. Furthermore, music teacher educators can explore the racial nature of these gaps and explicitly problematize the ways in which they connect with school teachers and reproduce networks of interpersonal whiteness.

Mapping the Racial Landscape

Frank and his colleagues knew nothing more of the racial landscape in Central City after placing Judy than they did when they began the placement meeting. It should be someone’s responsibility to investigate the sites and communities where student teachers will work and to do so from an antiracist stance. We should know what the racial demographics are in each school that we consider during student teacher placement. We can evaluate these data within our conversations about other environmental considerations that may already be taken into account when placing student teachers (e.g., enrollment, number of ensembles, opportunities for mentoring). To do so may begin to disrupt a traditionally color-blind or even White supremacist process. Once these data are made explicit and clear, teacher educators can address the bearing this information has on student teacher placement by asking power-conscious questions. While racial demographics only begin to describe a school’s racial climate, these data can be place to begin further exploration. Patterns of placement that prioritize predominantly White schools may draw on discourses of convenience, student teacher safety, or beliefs about “excellent” teachers or schools. These explanations may be partial or incomplete stories at best and thinly veiled racist rhetoric at worst; however, even explicit discussions of racial demographics without a considerations of power may do little good, as demonstrated in the next vignette.

Preface

In the next vignette, faculty and staff struggle with different definitions of diversity. At the beginning of the story, Ingrid, a faculty member looks up a school where her student has been placed and reflects on who her student teacher will be working with. But, Luther, a beleaguered social justice advocate, troubles the water. He asks his colleagues to consider the race of the student teacher and the potential placement’s population in their placement decisions. Luther wonders whether his student, a preservice teacher of color, would be treated well by a community that had systematically barred non-White residents from moving in. He asks for White teacher educators to question themselves and to interrogate their intentions.

Vignette 2

Ingrid looked over the list of placement recommendations her field coordinator had made for next year’s student teachers. John, the field coordinator and a retired area music teacher, had given each of the 15 students two placements at schools across the state—a formidable task. After meeting with each preservice educator to learn about their interests and professional goals, John matchmade until the student teachers were situated in learning environments where he suspected they would flourish.

As Ingrid thought through each pairing, her brows furrowed. “Townville . . . where is that?” she asked herself out loud. Flora Williams, a strong junior who had excelled in Ingrid’s wind band methods class, had been placed at Townville High School (THS) and Ingrid had never heard of it before. She opened up her browser and found a small town that appeared relatively isolated. She looked up its music department and saw that the school had a nice-sized marching program and two band directors. Ingrid gave John, the placement coordinator, a call.

“Hey John, I am looking at Flora’s placement for next fall and was wondering who the band directors are at Townville? What do you know about these folks?”

John explained that he had met the directors at a marching band leadership camp that his sons had gone to earlier that year. Ingrid was pleased to hear that John had met the directors in person and that they were on the Band Camp faculty. She moved on to scan the rest of her list as the phone rang.

“I can’t believe this! Did you see where Flora was placed?” Ingrid’s general music colleague, Luther, had said before she could say hello. Luther continued, “I mean, Townville? Does he have any idea what that might be like for her?”

“I was worried, too,” Ingrid said, “but I called John and it sounds like a good program. We’ll explain the situation to her.”

“Explain it to her?” asked Luther. “How are we going to explain sending her to a school where she’ll be the only Black teacher and the only person of color in every class she teaches.”

“Wait, what?!” Ingrid exclaimed.

The two talked on the phone for around an hour. It was true, THS had a student body that was 92% White and a teaching staff that was 99% White. Luther was adamant that this was a poor choice for their program’s only student of color. A poor choice, to say the least. As their discussion continued over the next week, the student teaching coordinator and the dean of the school of music were gradually looped in. Luther explained that it seemed wrong to send Flora to THS. Yet the placement coordinator had established an argument for maintaining Flora’s original placement.

“Luther,” he started, “wasn’t it you who was asking this department to find more diverse placements for our White students? When you ran those statistics on the teaching placements, we agreed that we would send our students to more urban and poor schools.”

Luther was exasperated. “Urban and poor schools? That is not at all what I suggested last year, first of all. And secondly, can’t you see the differences here?”

“No, you said that you wanted student teachers to experience more unfamiliar settings,” John offered. “Honestly, Flora wasn’t even placed here because of that. I just happened to have met the directors this summer. But, how can you have a problem placing a Black student in an all-White school when you wanted our White students to do the same?”

“It’s not the same,” contended Luther. “I asked for schools that would challenge our students’ teaching, not threaten our students themselves.”

“We have been more than accommodating and found plenty of diverse schools.”

“Really, and how diverse is a school where 92% of the students and almost every teacher is White?” Luther asked, starting to get angry.

“The students at THS come from all kinds of socio-economic groups and besides, the school is 92% White, not 100%. Are you going to ignore diversity if it’s not the right diversity? Not enough diversity?” John asked.

Ingrid sat back wondering how they had gotten here. Sure, the last year had been trying as the department scrambled to find more diverse placements. They had done such good work choosing schools and getting to know new teachers. What had happened?

Reflections on Vignette 2

In the second vignette, the faculty consider how the racial demographics at prospective placements may affect their student teacher. Luther is worried that the atmosphere in an almost all-White school will be negative for his student teacher, Flora, a person of color. Luther’s colleagues contest his claim by noting his preference for placing White students in schools that are predominantly non-White. The faculty suggest that Luther is only looking for one type of diversity and subsequently conflate predominantly non-White and “urban” or “poor” schools. Luther’s colleagues point out that a predominantly White school can be diverse in many ways though of course, the same is also true of predominantly non-White schools. In the argument, Luther takes into account the whiteness of music teacher education and layer a complex conversation about privilege and oppression over a conversation about the multiple meanings of diversity. The issues at hand in just this one short vignette and other situations like it illustrate the need for considerations of context and for creating space for complicated dialogue.

Hess (2017) writes, “our field resists [action] due perhaps in part to the overwhelming nature of the systemic inequities embedded in most music education institutions” (p. 26). The interpersonal nature of student teaching placement and the discourses of goodness of fit are both so steeped in whiteness that they may seem immutable. Teachers and teacher educators who have committed themselves to social justice must move from one-dimensional conceptions of color-consciousness to multidimensional understanding of race and racism that is power-conscious as well. Continued action can be taken, and music teacher educators should note that moving from color blindness to color-consciousness is not a linear or simple process.

Considering the Context

In the most heated exchange in the second vignette, John, the placement coordinator asks, “How can you have a problem placing a Black student in an all-White school when you wanted our White students to do the same?” to which Luther responds, “it’s not the same.” At first, John appears to have made an insightful observation about the nature of Luther’s request; Luther is not asking students of color to engage in the same cross-cultural field experiences that he is asking of White students. On the need for unequal responses to unequal privilege, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2018) suggested that “all actors in a racialized society are affected materially (receive benefits or disadvantages) and ideologically by the racial structure” (p. 15) and that these material affects are unequal. As Peggy McIntosh (2012) and other privilege studies scholars have elucidated, White persons overwhelmingly benefit from the effects of a racist society. Luther, an advocate for racial justice, is concerned primarily with disrupting systemic White privilege. When Luther suggests that student of different racial identities have different pedagogical needs, he may be taking into account the many hours that preservice music educators of color spend in predominantly White classrooms, ensembles, and spaces in both secondary and postsecondary education. The power differentials across racial lines should be acknowledged to better counter White supremacist racism in the structures of education.

Asking Out, Consulting

In the exchange between the faculty and administration at the school of music in the second vignette, questions about what kinds of diversity mattered were “asked up.” The faculty were consulted by the placement coordinator and when they appeared to be a disconnect between Ingrid and Luther as to why Becky’s placement might be problematic, they consulted with their colleagues. In the end, the dean was looped into the conversation as the level of institutional challenge escalated. But what did this student teacher want or think? Conversations about a student teacher’s future seem to happen above their head. Student teachers may be consulted predominantly at the beginning of the process, if at all. After an initial consultation with student teachers, decisions on placement are often left to faculty, and later, administrators both on and off campus. When in this process does a student teacher consent to their placements? Is obtaining student consent necessary or productive when placing future teachers? In this vignette, the student teacher was erased from the faculty’s dialogue. Their race came up at the end of the story, but by the time the faculty turned to questions of race, the person who lived that racial identity was forgotten. By applying a power-conscious dimension to conversations about race, one can acknowledge and disrupt dehumanizing discourses.