The purpose of this paper is to consider the experience of a white teacher to attain greater understanding of racial identities, especially whiteness, and reconsider the current…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to consider the experience of a white teacher to attain greater understanding of racial identities, especially whiteness, and reconsider the current understandings of whiteness and whiteness pedagogy. The author argues that notions of whiteness are social constructions, and that reconstructions of conventional understandings of whiteness could provide more nuanced understandings of whiteness that might facilitate more sophisticated considerations of how race and whiteness continue to influence schooling practices.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper uses autoethnography, a version of narrative inquiry, to consider issues related to the intersection of whiteness and education. The author recounts, reflects on and interprets a body of experiential knowledge to illuminate the experience of being a white teacher in both a racially diverse school and one that was more homogeneously white. These experiences are interpreted and placed in the context of scholarly work to frame an argument regarding a more sophisticated conceptualization of whiteness and its position in efforts toward inclusive and mutli-cultural education.
Findings
This paper closes with the argument that whiteness needs to be troubled and understood in more sophisticated ways than a traditional white privilege framework has allowed and accounted for directly in school settings in the USA.
Originality/value
This paper is original and valuable, mostly because it uses narrative to share the unique and complex experience of a white teacher who attempted to account for and consider the presence of whiteness over the 30 years in his career.
This essay uses the author’s experience with teacher evaluation as a point of departure to consider how narrative methods might be used to complicate contemporary trends in…
Abstract
Purpose
This essay uses the author’s experience with teacher evaluation as a point of departure to consider how narrative methods might be used to complicate contemporary trends in teacher evaluation. Ultimately, this piece hopes to contribute to a discussion about how storytelling might be implemented as a model of teacher evaluation that could speak back to instrumentalist or technical practices in schools that undermine the complexity of the teaching profession.
Design/methodology/approach
This piece uses narrative inquiry to consider teacher evaluation.
Findings
This piece uses narrative inquiry to consider more complex implementations of teacher evaluation.
Originality/value
This piece is an original consideration of the potential forms of teacher evaluation.
Details
Keywords
Samuel Jaye Tanner and Christina Berchini
The authors of this paper are both white English education scholars with antiracist agendas. This conceptual manuscript aims – in part – to better understand the backlash both of…
Abstract
Purpose
The authors of this paper are both white English education scholars with antiracist agendas. This conceptual manuscript aims – in part – to better understand the backlash both of them have faced in trying to contribute to antiracist teaching and research in English education.
Design/methodology/approach
This manuscript uses practices of narrative inquiry to tell and interpret stories about the authors’ work.
Findings
The authors hope to critique traditional notions of white resistance in favor of more careful theorizations of whiteness that can be helpful for teachers and scholars in English education and English Language Arts (ELA)with an interest in facilitation antiracist pedagogy.
Originality/value
Ultimately, with this work, the authors hope to provoke readers to consider how work with whiteness is processed by white people, especially in terms of teaching and learning in English education and ELA. They believe the field of English education should begin to discuss this issue.