“It Doesn’t Matter Who Sees Them”: A Case Study of an Effective White Educator Working in a Multicultural Urban High School

This instrumental case study research identifies the beliefs and behaviors of a highly effective white educator working in a multicultural urban school. By triangulating interviews, classroom observations and the analysis of artifacts provided by the teacher, this study identifies the essential beliefs and behaviors that make a white educator a highly effective practitioner and highly respected educator both within his school site and in the broader school community. The case study identifies that the educator’s ability to create safety, inclusion, consistency, and high expectations in his classroom functioned to connect him to a population of students who do not share his same racial or economic markers. The purpose of this case study is to identify the essential beliefs and behaviors of a white educator working in a multicultural urban high school in order to use his experience and practice as a way to educate and inform white educators seeking to work in diverse schools across the nation.

“Over-zealous Parents, Over-programmed Families”: Asian Americans, Academic Achievement, and White Supremacy

Discussions of white supremacy focus on patterns of whites’ stature over people of color across institutions. When a minority group achieves more than whites, it is not studied through the lens of white supremacy. For example, arguments of white supremacy in K-12 schools focus on the disfranchisement of African Americans and Latinxs. Discussions of high-achieving Asian American students have not been framed as such and, in fact, can be used to argue against the existence of white privilege. This article explains why this conception is false. White supremacy can be active even when people of color achieve more than whites. Drawing from interviews and observations of mostly white educators in Boston suburbs that have a significant presence of Asian American students, I demonstrate that even when Asian Americans outcompete whites in schools, white supremacy is active through two means. First, Asian Americans are applauded in ways that fit a model minority stereotype and frame other groups as not working hard enough. Second and more significantly, Asian Americans encounter anti-Asian stereotypes and are told to assimilate into the model of white educators. This treatment is institutionalized within the school system through educators’ practices and attitudes. These findings somewhat support but mostly contrast the notion of “honorary whiteness,” for they show that high-achieving minorities are not just tools of white supremacy toward other people of color but also targets of it themselves. Understanding how high-achieving minorities experience institutionalized racism demonstrates the far reach of white supremacy.

First Person: H_NGM_N: What one says, and doesn’t say, to white educators

Native American author Lois Beardslee discusses how she has experienced the power differentials that arise from the lack of significant racial integration in the field of education. Beardslee describes how a white teacher reacted when she, while serving as a substitute teacher’s aide, suggested finding a substitute for the game hangman, a game reminiscent of the violent lynchings and executions by hanging experienced within communities of color. Beardslee explores how the pervasive whiteness of education and the defensive reactions of white educators when questioned makes it difficult for teachers and children of color to speak out.

Building Resilient Voices

This chapter discusses social-emotional learning (SEL) in urban schools and the impact of these interventions on student academic achievement, behavior, self-efficacy, and instances of stress and depression. Utilizing Critical Race Theory (CRT) and the White-Savior Industrial Complex, the authors provide a conceptual framework for developing a culturally responsive SEL program for urban youth. Because the teaching demographics in the United States consisting of over 80% white educators, the authors discuss the importance of implementing SEL practices that specifically address racism at the individual and institutional levels.

What Pete Buttigieg—and all White Americans—Need to Understand About Racism

It is essential that educators, particularly white educators, work to understand racial inequality within a prophetic framework, refuse to perpetuate inaccurate and racist images of black and brown youth, and actively deconstruct structural inequalities within the education system. Structural racism, especially that which has been institutionalized within and in perceptions about the education system, is an important issue for the field of education that was recently the central issue of the eye-catching hashtag, #PeteButtigiegisaLyingMF. This Voices opinion piece examines Michael Harriot’s initiation of a conversation about understandings of structural racism with 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, contextualizes this online moment through a theoretical perspective, and provides a call to action for white educators.

RECKONING WITH OUR PRIVILEGES IN THE CYC CLASSROOM

As three white educators working in three different post-secondary contexts, teaching child and youth care (CYC) to diverse undergraduate students, we are interested in exploring the ethical, political, and pedagogical challenges and opportunities of creating learning spaces that can support concrete actions towards decolonizing praxis, social justice, and collective ethics. In order to support each other’s developing praxis, we have recently begun meeting monthly to explore various questions and tensions that exist for us in this work. These meetings have been deeply generative for us in that they have produced a sense of solidary and accountability to each other and our developing pedagogies. This paper attempts to capture some of this experience by sharing three perspectives reflective of the challenges and successes each of us have experienced in our respective institutions.

Critical Social Justice Inquiry Circles: Using Counter-Story as a Counter-Hegemonic Project

This article presents a qualitative dialogic poetic response in the form of a critical social justice inquiry circle and a critical reading of Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds as poetry and as an intentional gesture of listening as activism. This discourse is one of resistance to the acritical/apolitical nature of schooling and to prepare hegemonic/White educators to become culturally responsive (ala Milner) and to devise a new critical methodology, we embark on this radical proposition. Our use of critical social justice inquiry circles using poetic dialogue is inspired by Denzin’s conception of Critical Performance Pedagogy.

I Can’t Be Racist—I Teach in an Urban School, and I’m a Nice White Lady!

This paper examines, through the lens of critical race theory (CRT), beliefs often asserted by self-described,open-minded white educators about their students of color. While these teachers may perceive themselves as liberaland inclusive, their interactions with students of color are shrouded by white privilege which can be disenfranchisingto students of color. By countering these ascribed beliefs with research, theory, and qualitative experiences, theauthors aim to expose how white privilege manifests within the typical classroom and to invite all white educators toexamine their racial attitudes and beliefs. Using CRT, the authors* make recommendations for strategies to developwhite teachers into white allies.

Complicity, responsibility and authorization

Purpose Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and violence. This paper aims to engage the consequences of these shifts for the ways that racism works in university-based classrooms and, more specifically, through the authors’ own teaching as White language and literacy educators. Design/methodology/approach This teacher narrative reconceptualizes moments of racialized violence in the courses, as constructed via circulating discourses of racism. The authors draw attention to the ways that we, as White educators, authorize and are complicit in this violence. Findings This paper explicates a praxis of questioning, developed through efforts to reflect on our complicity in and responsibility for racial violence in our classrooms. The authors offer this praxis of questioning to other White language and literacy teachers as a heuristic for sensemaking with regard to racism in classrooms. Originality/value The authors situate this paper within a broader struggle to engage themselves and other White educators in work for racial justice and invite others to take up this praxis of questioning as an initial step toward examining the authors’ complicity in – and authorization of – discourses of racism.