scholarly journals Confronting Race and Colonialism: Experiences and Lessons Learned From Teaching Social Studies

in education ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-39
Author(s):  
Bryan A. B. Smith

Literature on teacher education and encounters with race highlight some of the difficulties that teacher candidates face when they confront their own racialized subjectivities. However, many of these projects focus exclusively on Whiteness studies, explicating how White teacher candidates come to witness their own racialized Whiteness in relation to their epistemological understandings of the world. In this paper, I diverge from this pattern of thought, exploring a subset of the tenets of critical race theory, that of silences and exclusions, pervading my own teaching in a primary/junior social studies methods class and exploring how these structured my lessons. Specifically, I look at how counternarratives, critiques against liberalism, and multiculturalism and encounters with racialized and colonial supremacy were involved in my pedagogical strategies. I conclude by suggesting that although these methods may seem daunting for the primary/junior classroom, they can provide valuable insights for teacher candidate orientations to their own pedagogies.     Keywords: social studies pedagogy; anti-racism in practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-59
Author(s):  
Alice Y. Lee ◽  
Amos J. Lee

Given the overwhelming whiteness of teacher education, we offer a pedagogical approach rooted in critical race theory, and draw on Carter’s (2008) notions of critical race consciousness to: 1) center a critical race perspective in methods-based coursework; and 2) employ critical race theory to analyze the function and role of clinical fieldwork. In this article, we provide examples of how we engage white teacher candidates to preemptively take stock of their own racial journey and biases prior to being responsible for educating students of color. We also focus on the process of selecting clinical placements and assignments. We explicate how current selection criteria for clinical sites and cooperating teachers are undergirded by systems of white supremacy, and problematize the reality of majority white clinical placements. We further provide suggestions for teacher education programs that pay particular attention to the roles and responsibilities of white teacher educators and predominantly white teacher education programs.


2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Vasquez Heilig ◽  
Keffrelyn Brown ◽  
Anthony Brown

In this article, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Keffrelyn Brown, and Anthony Brown offer findings from a close textual analysis of how the Texas social studies standards address race, racism, and communities of color. Using the lens of critical race theory, the authors uncover the sometimes subtle ways that the standards can appear to adequately address race while at the same time marginalizing it—the “illusion of inclusion.” Their study offers insight into the mechanisms of marginalization in standards and a model of how to closely analyze such standards, which, the authors argue, is increasingly important as the standards and accountability movements continue to grow in influence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 209-215
Author(s):  
Sur Sharma

Visual culture attempts to expose that other facet of the world which almost hitherto remains concealed from the majority of the populace. This is because the people across the globe were fed with the visual images that largely went on a par with the interests of the white Europeans. In other words, visual culture views the world from a “subaltern” perspective and challenges the norms set by “a white European Christian male” centric outlook. To put it simply, visual culture studies and interprets the world, which is made up of visual images, from the point of view of marginalized, the suppressed or the disadvantaged. In this connection, the study of visual culture enjoys a close affiliation with feminism and critical race theory.


Author(s):  
Margaret E. Bérci

The chapter outlines a project designed to address the challenges in developing and delivering the Social Studies methods course. The knowledge base represents a symbiotic integration of selected philosophical, theoretical, and methodological ideas. Specifically, it reports on two pilot courses that integrate online, traditional face-to-face, and Web-based formats. The project scaffolds the resulting weave with the Case Study process for Problem-Based Learning. This integration advances teacher education practice and facilitates the development of teacher candidates' democratic understanding of the issues surrounding the teaching and learning of Social Studies. It demonstrates the usefulness of multimodality in Education.


Author(s):  
Tracy L. Weston

This chapter describes the author's work as a teacher educator to establish, sustain, and improve a methods course partnership with a local K-6 school using an integrated school-situated, practice-based model. The model was designed with an aim of improving the coherence of teacher candidates' experiences and learning to better prepare them for the complicated work of equitable teaching. Coherent field-based components in teacher education offer opportunities to mitigate divisions between 1) theory and practice and 2) coursework and fieldwork. The chapter begins with a definition of coherence, describes how this definition of coherence was used to design an elementary literacy/social studies methods course, shares data to evaluate the course from the perspective of the teacher candidates, and describes what candidates learned by participating in the course.


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