Mapping Stories: Taking Detours to Challenge Whiteness

IntroductionRace is a social construction that is constituted in our daily experiences. The invisibility of whiteness in society explains how it has become the norm and in doing so makes race a category that excludes white people. Research has shown how pre-service educators, who are mostly white and female, resist the claim that the education system is exclusionary and deny that a problem resides in a discourse of whiteness (Levine-Rasky; Schick). This denial may be problematic because it limits and excludes multiple perspectives and often views diversity as a deficiency. Teachers tend to teach their own discourse, and generally it is a discourse of whiteness and middle-classness. The teacher's role has long been used for passing on or reproducing (consciously and unconsciously) the status quo in the hope of creating productive citizens that live without challenge to traditions and social virtues. Teacher preparation programs often provide lip service to diversity by creating urban field experiences; however what's generally neglected, and is of equal importance, is the opportunity to engage in guided reflection for making sense of their experiences. Without guided reflection, preservice teachers may exit with the same preconceptions about race with which they entered. Consequently, diversity initiatives in teacher preparation programs risk undermining their intended goal of developing culturally and racially inclusive dispositions, and instead, reinforcing racial stereotypes.In this article, I plan to: 1) offer a brief overview of whiteness and why race matters, 2) provide examples of racial literacies and demonstrate the range found in pre-service teachers completing field experiences, and 3) discuss ways self-inquiry is a tool for challenging and negotiating existing discourses and habits of mind. To accomplish this I will incorporate data collected from white undergraduate pre-service teachers before, during, and after field experiences. To analyze the data I will appropriate Judith Butler's assertion that identities are constituted through repetitive exposure to mainstream discourses. I will use her feminist post-structural stance of identity to explore how the pre-service teachers in my study understand race and its implications. The narratives I share demonstrate how critical reflection required participants to map out their assumptions and values. As a result, diverse racial literacies emerged and were used by participants to consider how personal identity shapes professional identity, in particular, how an educator's values mirror the pedagogical decisions of their classroom. This article challenges readers to use these experiences to think about how race matters in their own lives, as well as explore ways schools of education can better prepare pre-service teachers to understand diversity.Conceptualizing RaceTeaching in the United States is predominantly female and it is also disproportionately white. According to the Census Bureau, only 8.4 percent of the entire teaching population in the United States belongs to a race other than white, yet over 40% of the students in schools are of color. The enrollment figures of students of color reaches over 50% in metropolitan areas (Howard). Alarmingly, it was reported in 2004 by the National Collaborative that 40% of schools in the country had NO teachers of color. This lack of racially diverse teachers precludes certain perspectives and experiences that could open new discussions and present new challenges for viewing and thinking about educational discourse. It is important to explore how structures of dominance that reside in Whiteness are organized in schools. Examining mainstream discourses, with their embedded values, can reveal how (White) teacher identity operates in the educational system as a colonizing force for maintaining the status quo. One such example is illustrated in the achievement gap between Whites and people of color.Cultural discontinuity is described by Cairney as the mismatch between the school culture with that of the home experiences of minority students being taught. …