Reading, Writing, and Racism

by Bree Picower

  Part of the challenge with this role is that assessments within traditional teacher education programs mainly measure coursework and student teaching, not dispositions such as anti-racism. A preservice teacher who may enact their Whiteness in the classroom can slip through the cracks by being a straight-A student who behaves with outward respect to authority when needed and meets all the minimum requirements. Within these contexts, teacher educators in typical programs often have little ground to stand upon for wanting to dismiss candidates such as these who may have made an inappropriate comment once or twice but who otherwise checked all the programmatic and academic boxes.

  CREATE STRUCTURES TO COUNSEL STUDENTS OUT

  To ensure they are graduating teachers aligned with their missions, RJPs have developed strategies to document and systematize exit strategies for students who they feel may ultimately do harm to young people. One way they accomplish this is to apply a racial justice lens when using mainstream, race-neutral standards of assessing teaching, such as teacher expectations, classroom management, and lesson instruction. In her work in multiple RJPs, Villarreal has used this strategy when it is clear her candidates have not made progress in their racial literacy and she needs to counsel them. She explains that even when students have technically done the graduate level work, it is “part of my life job [to] figure out how to use these structures to our advantage to do this work through an anti-racist lens.”

  In order to get past the challenge of exiting students who have “done the work,” she looks at state standards through an anti-racist lens, seeing where Whiteness shows up in ways that she can gather as evidence that candidates are not adequately serving all students. “[Racism] shows up as instruction and execution of a lesson, which is tied to high expectations and how they’re interacting in the classroom. That’s where I can actually gather data on things like problematic interactions between White teachers and young Black male students. That is probably what I see the most. And that’s something I can have actual data to utilize.”

  As RJPs gather data, their first strategy is to provide the 360 support described earlier to try to redress the problem. Unfortunately, despite this support, it sometimes becomes clear that the student is unwilling to grow. Through their experiences, RJPs are able to identify particular indicators of resistance. One such indicator is when students are unwilling to reflect or take on the stance of a learner. Villarreal explains that in her lesson observation debriefs with students, she will “start with asking questions, like, ‘What happened here?’ The red flag and the hard stop is when they are blaming everything on the child and not taking any responsibility.”

  The UTEP program addressed this common phenomenon by having explicit expectations and a code of conduct specifically about student dispositions. This allows Kay Fujiyoshi to ask critical questions that provide evidence as to whether the student has potential to advance in their racial literacy. She asks, “‘Are you coming from a place of learning, or are you coming from a place of opposition? Are you taking into consideration what we’re saying to you or are you an externalizer?’ So we’re actually monitoring this in our candidate assessment document . . . things like humility, that has to do with how you’re receiving feedback.” This document is used throughout the candidates’ entire time in the program to track growth or stagnation. As Fujiyoshi concludes, “For some folks, it means getting coached out of the program. . . . It’s kind of a given that you shouldn’t be racist, it’s a given that you shouldn’t just ‘act White’ wherever you go. These are the things that we’re going to be focusing on because that should have been nipped in the bud first year.” Through experience, RJPs understand that ideological transformation is mitigated by certain dispositions and that without evidence of them, some students cannot become the kinds of racial justice educators the RJPs aim to graduate.

  Racial justice leadership is a key support for exiting such students. While traditional programs feel pressure to graduate every student for their statistics, RJP leaders understand the goals of the program and trust those closest to the students. Maloney described the hierarchy of support that we have experienced at Montclair State. She says, “Our deans, department chairs, and the director of the Center of Pedagogy that houses our RJP have supported our program in various ways. When we do have a challenge with a student, [our leadership] immediately respond and want to talk about how they can provide support or how can they support us in exiting the student. They believe us to know this preservice teacher is inflicting harm and trust that that’s the case. That sort of trust is all the way up the pipeline, if you will, the chain of command.” This trust allows the RJP to make the tough decision of exiting a student. This decision is often heartbreaking because for many of our candidates, we are in the position of ending their lifelong dream. But we must remember that, ultimately, it is not our candidates we are accountable to as teacher educators.

  BE ACCOUNTABLE TO CHILDREN OF COLOR

  I remember receiving some marketing materials about fifteen years ago for Bank Street College promoting their teacher education program. I can’t find the original image, but what I recall is a picture of a young teacher being interviewed in front of a panel. What intrigued me about the image was that the panel was not made up of stereotypical principals and administrators but rather by elementary-age children of Color. I carry this visual in my mind to remind myself that as a teacher educator, it might appear that I am accountable to my teacher candidates, but it is to the children they will ultimately serve that my accountability lies. It is my responsibility to the children to ensure their teacher is worthy of them.

  The teacher educators in this chapter take a similar view when they have to make the tough decision to exit candidates from their programs. As Villarreal expressed passionately, thinking of her former students from when she was a teacher and high school administrator in California, “I don’t think that everybody belongs or is worthy to be in front of our babies, and I’m always thinking about my babies in Oakland. I’m not accountable to this [institution]; I feel accountable to the young people in classrooms.”

  Annamarie Francois takes a similar stance with her unwillingness to allow schoolchildren of Color to be guinea pigs for harmcausing teachers. “Ultimately, we’re unafraid of counseling people out. . . . It’s the ones that you think, this candidate is going to further traumatize our young people . . . and if they go into our schools with this kind of deficit mindset, it’s not fair to our young people and it’s not fair to the candidate either.” She recounted a story in which she exited a student and his father, a “muckety-muck” lawyer, called her, cursing. She unapologetically told him, “‘Your responsibility is to your child, and my responsibility is to every child that he potentially would be teaching for his entire career. And I cannot allow that to happen.’ That dad was cursing at me like you would not believe. And I was just like, ‘You can curse me all you want to, but he’s still not gonna finish this. Our kids deserve nothing less.’” This unapologetic allegiance to children of Color is embedded in the mission, philosophy, and structures of the RJPs.

  This chapter explored what this commitment to disrupting Whiteness throughout the program looks like in practice. The final chapter continues this focus on RJPs, but it examines who needs to be at the table to realize such a vision and commitment to racial justice. By focusing on finding and developing the right students and program teams, RJPs not only disrupt Whiteness but also model the kinds of loving and humanizing relationships that move us from disruption to liberation.

  CHAPTER 5

  HUMANIZING RACIAL JUSTICE IN TEACHER EDUCATION

  Do you want sweet poison or do you want bitter medicine? Bitter medicine sucks going down. But sweet poison is just going to kill you in the end. So which one would you rather have?

  —KAY FUJIYOSHI, TEACHER EDUCATOR

  While the last chapter ended with strategies for disrupting Whiteness by counseling certain people out of the field, this chapter focuses on recruiting miss
ion-driven people into it. From students and faculty to mentors, field supervisors, and community-based organizations, nothing is more vital to advancing racial justice in teacher education than ensuring the right people are around the table. This chapter explores how the Racial Justice Programs (RJPs) work to develop like-minded program teams with shared vision and how they recruit students with the most capacity to teach toward anti-racism.

  Gathering all the right people is like assembling essential ingredients, but it isn’t enough—you still have to make the recipe. Racial justice in teacher education is humanizing work that requires critical relationships and individuals willing to hold the emotions that arise out of the work of deep reflection. Author and education scholar Bettina Love proclaims that “we want to do more than survive.” While the introduction and previous four chapters of this book focused on surviving Whiteness, the kinds of relationships developed in the RJPs begin to move teacher education past surviving and invite the possibility of becoming spaces for thriving.

  DEVELOP A PROGRAM TEAM WITH A SHARED MISSION

  RJPs are particular about who needs to be at the table when advancing racial justice in teacher education. They tend to take a team approach and seek to have a say in all the people who interact with their preservice teachers. While that includes faculty and administrators, such as those interviewed for this book, it also includes advisors, field supervisors, adjuncts, classroom mentor teachers, and school leaders. The RJPs work to ensure a shared political analysis amongst the team. Bill Kennedy explained, “There was a recognition early on that [the cohort] could not be taught by a singular person, I think in part to combat the idea that this should be on the back of one person. Also because the person who was doing it originally recognized quickly that he was not prepared to do it by himself as a White person.” The RJPs thought deeply about who should be around the table, in terms of racial identity but also disposition and skills, and therefore dedicated time and resources to hiring, professional development, leadership, and ongoing reflection. This team building was a key component because it ensured that candidates received the kind of 360 support needed to prepare them to advance racial justice in their future classrooms.

  POSITION LEADERSHIP TO HIRE QUALIFIED PROGRAM TEAM MEMBERS COMMITTED TO RACIAL JUSTICE

  Finding the specific and sophisticated skill set for such a wide range of roles is a challenge. It is made easier when leadership at the top understand the racial justice goals of the programs and seek qualified people. As the leadership recognizes who needs to be at the table, systems and hiring can shift to ensure that other critical team members, like mentor teachers, are brought into the program as well. For example, when it was time to hire a new director for the Newark Montclair Urban Teacher Residency Program that housed the RJP programs at my institution, myself and other like-minded colleagues volunteered to be on the hiring committee. This way we could try to ensure that the new director would be (a) a person of Color, (b) a person with demonstrated experience in Newark, and (c) someone with a social justice mindset. Because we also have supportive racial justice leadership from our dean and the director of the Center of Pedagogy, we were able to hire someone who fit the criteria, Kimberly R. Santos. She in turn set off a chain of hires, as well as transitions out, that literally and figuratively changed the face of our field mentors and induction coaches to become almost exclusively women of Color, and predominately Black women.

  Each RJP emphasizes how important it is for them to have control over hiring people with the specific identities, experiences, skills, and perspectives for preparing anti-racist teachers. Recruiting BIPOC is a consistent goal. Christina Villarreal has come to recognize the inherent power in hiring as a tool for advancing racial justice in the programs she has led. “As a director, I have agency around hiring. So who did I hire? If you look at my team of field advisors, it’s nearly all women of Color, with a couple of White women, all of whom demonstrated an explicit commitment to racial justice during the interview process.” Villarreal clarified that this is a shift from the identity of past advisors. “It goes back to the same criteria around admissions: What am I looking for in an application?” While hiring people of Color was a priority, the applicant’s experience and perspective on justice mattered, which moved the hiring beyond tokenism. “I changed the requirements of the advisor position to say ‘has to have explicit experience with and commitment to asset-driven and justice-oriented curriculum and pedagogy.’ I think that actually weeded out a lot of people who would have applied for the same position in past years.”

  For one of the interviewees, gaining hiring privileges was a battle they chose to fight when first taking on leadership in the program. They said, “I want to have fucking hiring privileges. I want to increase the number of critically conscious teachers of Color who are teaching our teachers. I want more queer teachers, and I want to increase the number of teachers who could help all of our teachers grow.” This RJP had attempted to address this dilemma by hiring alumni of Color, but they recognized that while the alumni had the right racial identity, teaching experience, and political analysis, they didn’t yet have the experience to navigate White resistance from students. “They didn’t have the experience to take the emotional labor off of those experiencing the brunt of these biases. So despite being ‘of Color,’ they were still placating even to the comfort level of those who were invested in the existing social system.”

  This reveals how specific the skill set is to advance racial justice in teacher education. RJPs have to consider identity, teaching experience, racial/political consciousness, content area expertise, and the ability to navigate and disrupt Whiteness. For the last criterion, the interviewee described a goal of teacher educators who can “help support multiply marginalized students in those spaces to feel heard, recognized, and seen as experts on their own reality, while at the same time not altogether silencing White students.” They had to jump through a lot of hoops and engage in several political navigations in order to gain the right to make those desired hires. They finished: “Just to be clear, I have the final say on hiring. Which was my way of saying, fuck the way you did it, I’m handling shit now.”

  Annamarie Francois explained that the qualities Center X looks for when staffing their teacher education program are aligned with their racial justice mission and how that mirrors what they also look for in students. “We’re essentially looking for the same thing, but at a higher level. So what we oftentimes say in the Center is that one of our guiding principles is that we need to mirror the diverse, critical thought–carrying, social justice–oriented communities that we seek to create in schools. So that means the Center has to reflect that.” The teacher education courses at Center X are taught by UCLA faculty who have advanced degrees and are considered experts in their field, but that is not enough for them to be automatically selected to teach in the RJP. Francois elucidates: “They play this border-crossing role; they understand the intersection of research and practice, but they also understand what it means to work in low-performing urban schools, because they attended and/or taught in urban public schools, so there’s not a private school teacher mindset on the team. . . . We get to decide who teaches, so we cherry-pick educators whose beliefs and values align with ours and whose research can help inform the way we carry out teacher education.” RJPs understand the importance that every team player has in reframing the ideology of preservice teachers and therefore dedicate the time and resources to ensuring that hires at every level have both the requisite skills as well as a shared dedication to and experience in working toward racial justice.

  In addition to hiring, assistance from leadership involves navigating external entities such as funding and accreditation. Tanya Maloney explained the support from our leadership: “Because they trust that we are doing work that is purposeful and that is good for our students, they support us by continuing to apply for grants to support our work.”

  On top of finding funding, racial justice leadership invo
lves sheltering RJPs from external pressures that could easily derail them. One such pressure is accreditation. Institutions of higher education are bound to both national and state accreditation requirements to demonstrate both legal compliance and adherence to the curricular and program standards required of educator preparation programs. All too often, these standards privilege more technical dimensions of teaching over racial justice components. In her leadership role over Center X, Francois has made a political commitment to defending her program against the ways in which traditional accreditation demands are out of touch with a racial justice framework. In describing her program review experiences, she reflected, “If you don’t understand the language of critical race theory, if you’re not committed to educational justice in the way we think about justice, it’d be hard for you as a reviewer to see how all of those technical aspects of teaching are embedded in our justice-oriented program. The technical takes second seat to why we do things the way we do—cultural relevancy, cultural sustainability. It was really, really hard to explain that.” Fortunately, she believes that thanks to increased dialogue between the accreditation body and teacher educators, the evaluations are starting to become more aligned toward the asset-based approach of RJPs.

  DEVELOP A RACIAL JUSTICE COMMITMENT ACROSS ROLES

  Oftentimes, RJPs struggle to find classroom teachers to serve as mentors who are not only successful teachers with strong content, pedagogical, and relationship skills, but who also advance a racial justice mindset. Efforts to find mentors who are people of Color doesn’t necessarily mean that they have advanced racial justice knowledge. Additionally, typically there is not alignment between the racial justice goals of the programs and the daily demands of the realities of classrooms. Therefore, preservice teachers find themselves growing in terms of their racial analysis from coursework but may find themselves in conflict with their classroom mentors, or they are blocked from implementing the kind of racial justice curriculum assigned within the RJP.