Preparing Teachers to Notice Race in Classrooms: Contextualizing the Competencies of Preservice Teachers With Antiracist Inclinations

Abstract

Race-focused teacher education has centered on changing preservice teachers’ racial beliefs and attitudes. In this article, we build on this work by exploring how preservice teachers identify and address issues of race and racism in the everyday work of teaching and learning. To conceptualize these processes, we propose the theoretical framework of “racial noticing,” which extends the literature on teacher noticing to the consideration of racial phenomena. Using a comparative case study design, this study focuses on three elementary preservice teachers (two identifying as White, one identifying as Black) with antiracist inclinations. Findings show that they demonstrated generally strong competencies with racial noticing during a mathematics methods course, but that contextual factors influenced shifts in racial noticing during student teaching. We argue that race-focused teacher education centered on noticing the impact of race and racism in learning settings can make the practice of antiracist teaching more tractable for preservice teachers.

“We Sort of Dance Around the Race Thing”: Race-Evasiveness in Teacher Education

“…Scholars who draw attention to various forms of raceevasiveness document how this avoidance undermines efforts to address racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2018). Thus, educational research has offered various frameworks for addressing race and racism explicitly, including racial dialogue (Howard, 2004;Tatum, 2007), racial literacy (Guinier, 2004), and racial noticing (Shah & Coles, 2020). Although these frameworks have gained traction in fields such as multicultural teacher education, teacher education for emergent bilinguals has been slower in taking up such race-intentional engagement, likely due to the field's propensity to prioritize examinations of language difference over race (Mitchell, 2013).…”

“…Thus, it remains important not to frame anti-racism as a fixed identity, or a designation an individual "achieves" to somehow permanently transcend racism. Indeed, Shah and Coles (2020) document how understandings of and responses to racism are context-dependent, noting that learning to disrupt racism is a recursive process. A poststructural perspective offers a way forward in this regard by destabilizing binary categories or fixed subject positions such as "she is anti-racist," and instead examines how individuals might engage in both racist and anti-racist discourses across different moments, contexts, or settings.…”

Counteracting Dysconscious Racism and Ableism Through Fieldwork: Applying DisCrit Classroom Ecology in Early Childhood Personnel Preparation

“…For example, Hanline (2010) found that preservice early childhood special educators reflected on their fieldwork in ways that simultaneously espoused and negated family-centered practice (e.g., promoting family engagement as important while depicting families who do not participate in traditional, school-based engagement activities as uninvolved). Shah and Coles (2020) also identified variable transfer of preservice educators’ ability to identify, interpret, and respond to racial phenomena. Although preservice educators identified implicit and explicit racial phenomena during a methods course, their student teaching practices were influenced by context (e.g., perceptions of how sites addressed race) and becoming more narrow (e.g., identifying only explicitly racial phenomena) and less critical (e.g., avoiding recognition of power).…”

Peningkatan Penguatan Pendidikan Karakter Siswa Melalui Pemberdayaan Kompetensi Sosial dan Kepribadian Guru

“…Hal ini perlu dilatihkan dan dikuatkan secara terus menerus agar berimbas kepada siswa yang dididiknya tiap hari di kelas. Karena tanpa dasar karakter yang baik serta tauladan yang minim, maka sulit untuk direalisasikan (Zakaria et al, 2020); (Shah & Coles, 2020).…”