This study analyzes the ways in which raced consciousness inflects develop ing understandings of cultural responsiveness among preservice teachers whose preparation included responses to imaginative engagement with liter ary texts, interactions in an underresourced school, and exploration of key concepts of culturally responsive pedagogy. The authors analyze how this preparation created spaces that made the diverse and complex understand ings of cultural responsiveness held by teacher candidates and instructors visible and how raced consciousness shaped these understandings. Findings suggest that incorporation of multicultural literary texts, continual interro gation of attitudes toward race and racism, and explicit engagement with raced consciousness fosters learning about how beginning teachers take up cultural responsiveness, given the persistent stereotypes and the raced con sciousness that shape their language and perceptions.A Visibility Project: Learning to See 817 development of cultural competence, which entails learning about, valuing, and bringing into the classroom the cultural resources of students; maintaining high expectations for academic achievement for all students; and adopting a social justice agenda in the classroom. While the literature describes teachers who demonstrate facility with CRP, there is little research on the processes by which preservice teachers develop and demonstrate cultural responsiveness, the fundamental orientation toward teaching that underlies this pedagogy. Promising directions appear in Lazar (2004), who followed a group of interns in a culturally responsive field experience, and Seidl (2007), who showed how prospective teachers explore and personalize cultural and political knowledge.We build on and depart from this work through a close analysis of the ways in which raced consciousness inflects developing understandings of cultural responsiveness. We define raced consciousness as a way of seeing the world through race even when one is not consciously aware of race. Raced consciousness shares some attributes with what J. King (1991) calls dysconscious racism, but while dysconscious racism justifies inequality by accepting the given order, raced consciousness refers to the more pervasive lens that race establishes, even when persons are consciously trying to be antiracist. Without an awareness of raced consciousness, it is easy for instructors and students alike to underconceptualize how beginning teachers encounter and develop understandings of cultural responsiveness, especially as those understandings are inflected by race. 1 This study shows how preservice teachers and we, their White teacher educators, interacted with
This article investigates the ways that White teachers approach issues of race, racism, and White supremacy in White-dominated educational settings. Drawing from data from a yearlong qualitative research study, the article uses discourse analysis, critical studies of Whiteness, and feminist theory to detail 15 rhetorical, behavioral, analytical, and interactional strategies that participants used to insulate themselves from implication in social inequality. The article demonstrates how participation in these strategies stymied attempts at transformative multicultural education and thus functioned to reproduce, rather than challenge, the status quo of educational and social inequality.
Preservice teachers seeking to develop cultural competence can face a struggle fraught with multiple challenges, even when they are committed to culturally relevant pedagogy. This article closely analyzes one White beginning teacher’s negotiations with cultural competence during a lesson in her student teaching semester, then traces how she made sense of that lesson in the weeks and months that followed. Findings indicate that taking on cultural competence posed both cognitive and affective challenges. More specifically, emotional responses to racialized situations, inner conflicts over Whiteness, and the dynamics of the school context combined to mediate the development of cultural competence. This study suggests that teacher educators should focus not only on the achievement of cultural competence but also on the struggle involved in enacting it. By giving more attention to how beginning teachers develop cultural competence, teacher educators will be better prepared to help beginning teachers normalize the fraughtness involved in the struggle.
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