by Bree Picower
Finally, one-on-ones can also support students who are advancing in their racial consciousness and are ready to take on more than the rest of the cohort may be ready for. Pour-Khorshid described a White student who was frustrated in class by her more resistant White peers. “She checked in with me afterward, and after that very long conversation, I feel like she’s just been constantly checking in with me. She’ll ask me for different resources, or she’ll ask me what I think about certain things. I think it’s been really on her mind since she has been exposed, so now she’s able to see it and feel safe enough to talk to me about it.” By building on the trusting relationships fostered in the RJPs, one-on-ones provide a space of differentiated support based on where individual students are within their journeys toward racial justice.
ENGAGE WITH THE COMMUNITY
While all teacher education programs have requirements for students to spend time in the field or schools and communities, traditional efforts often could be described as poverty tourism. Candidates become spectators in urban communities, viewing the pain of poverty and institutional racism, with no analysis of the forces that have looted such communities. This results in reinforcing deficit thinking about urban areas, rather than understanding the assets, resistance, resilience, and heart of such communities. Many students try to avoid teaching in urban schools, and in fact, several interviewees shared stories of undergraduates’ parents who called trying to plead for their child’s safety in an attempt to get them out of an urban placement. When such students are “forced” into these placements without a systemic analysis, they often see the challenges urban communities face as the residents’ own fault. For example, they complain about the condition of the neighborhood without understanding its lack of municipal services. In traditional programs, the university supervisors may share these deficit views and are therefore not positioned to interrupt or transform such conceptualizations.
In contrast, RJPs are intentional about engaging with local communities in ways that are reciprocal and that explicitly address the Four I’s. The UTEP program in Chicago has a robust approach to community engagement in which their candidates spend a great deal of time working in specific grassroots organizations run by and for people of Color. Their goal is for candidates to build relationships with the community organizers and also to understand the history of Chicago. Fujiyoshi asked, “How do we understand the makeup of Chicago when we’re looking at the conditions of schooling? We have to take into consideration the political economy and racial segregation. So we’re working with organizations that have that community knowledge.” It is through these relationships that candidates gain knowledge and reframe institutional and interpersonal racism. Fujiyoshi continues:
I think some students don’t actually ever have connections or relationships with people of Color outside of working in a school . . . where there’s a power dynamic between them and kids of Color. Serving as an intern with a community organization that’s led by people of Color that are from the communities that are also really about self-determination . . . just the tenacity of these organizations, but also their heart, is what really is important for our students to engage with. To be able to see communities in a different way, that these aren’t places that need you to come and fix. There are already people working within these communities that have had a history of working in the community, that have had a history of organizing and community activism that was happening long before you.
Fujiyoshi recognizes that by engaging in these communities, White candidates can reframe some of their missionary tendencies. “Before you come in thinking, ‘I need to come and save this place, these children need me,’ take a step back for a second and see who already is here, what’s already being done, and really think about yourself in terms of your allyship. The philosophy that we hear from our organizations is solidarity, not charity.”
Similarly, Center X structures community engagement into their coursework as an opportunity to develop an assets-based approach that positions people from local communities as experts rather than people in need of help. Francois explains that right from the beginning of coursework, candidates are “walking in a community with elders to talk about the history of the community, they are doing home visits, they’re taking photographs and mapping the assets.” These activities support students to realize they are not the experts. “They’re not making determinations about the neighborhood themselves, they’re asking folks. They’re asking the gas station attendant, the person at the laundromat, ‘Tell me about your neighborhood, tell me about this school. What are your hopes and your dreams for the school?’”
This experience helps candidates recognize the importance of entering a space with humility and with an understanding that they are not the experts. Francois insists that “to identify the wealth and the needs of a community—that has to come from the people who live there.” Because this community engagement happens early in the program, she encourages candidates to “use that information throughout your methods courses and throughout your other courses to inform the formal content that you are learning and to recognize that the problems lie not in the community.” This community engagement element of the RJPs allows students to build relationships and access knowledge that helps them reframe their understandings of all Four I’s.
CONTINUE SUPPORT AFTER GRADUATION
While the RJPs work hard to advance racial justice from admissions to graduation, they recognize that a year or two of teacher education is not enough time to reframe a lifetime of racial socialization while simultaneously preparing someone for the technical aspects of teaching. As such, many of the programs broaden their relationship with their students’ post-graduation into a period referred to as induction, when new teachers are entering the field. Through induction support, which sometimes involves critical professional development sessions or in-classroom mentorship, RJPs are able to extend their racial justice reach. The time spent fostering humanizing relationships and trust early in the program often flourishes as these long-term relationships develop. For example, while there is only one year of the official RJP at University of Chicago, they provide multiple years of induction support, so alumni remain very much part of the daily conversation. Fujiyoshi explains:
I say five years, because at a staff meeting, for instance, we’re still talking about people from three years ago, four years ago, five years ago. So they’re still on our radar, but they’re not officially in our program. We want to hear about our students from our coaches. We want to hear about who’s doing awesome, who is struggling during what and why, and could we have seen that.
By creating coherence between what happened in initial coursework and induction support, the racial justice perspectives taught previously are more likely to find their way into classroom practice. Kennedy explained that at UTEP, candidates are prepared to know that induction coaches are going to be engaging them in critical conversations using a racial justice lens. He says:
This is the lens we’re applying to all the situations that you’re having. We’re going to talk about it and we’re going to connect it back to what you read in that first year, because if those ideas just sit in a folder somewhere and they’re not part of your daily practice, then you’re just going to fall out of routine, especially because you’re going to be socialized into these school environments where that’s just not the case.
As Kennedy alludes, once they are in schools, teachers will be held accountable to innumerable standards, but it is unlikely that racial justice will be one of them.
Francois also works to address this challenge through induction: “We continue to provide them with field support because we know that once they get into these schools, they may not have the leadership that believes in justice the way we do. They’ve been trained to think of race a particular way, and they’re willing to engage in a hard conversation.” Francois recognizes that there may be a disconnect between this training and what happens when they become teachers in a schoo
l that doesn’t share this justice stance. “But then you have a school, and a leader at the school, where it is not okay to stand in that [justice stance], so we continue to work with them through their first year of teaching. We’re in schools. We’re in their classrooms every other week keeping them focused.”
While some of the work is with the new teachers, helping them stay connected to their justice-minded aspirations, other times the work is about preparing the school leadership to understand the teachers’ racial justice lens and practices. Francois explains: “I’m working with the principal to help them understand why this young [teacher] is taking so much time developing community in their classroom. Why is this young [teacher] bringing real-life problems into the classroom? Why do we have the students outside addressing the issues in their community and then looking at it through the lens of content?” The RJPs recognize that it is unfair to throw new anti-racist teachers into the field without extending this lifeline. “I feel like that’s part of our responsibility as teacher educators, that we don’t just prepare them. You gotta support them in arguably the most difficult year, the year outside of teacher preparation.”
Many of the faculty in these RJPs, including myself, are affiliated with local and national social justice education organizations that actively work on issues of racial justice. Across the country, there is a loose network called Teacher Activist Groups made up of local organizations such as Teachers 4 Social Justice in San Francisco; People’s Education Movement in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Chicago; Teachers for Social Justice in Chicago; New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE) in New York City; TAG Philly and TAG Boston; along with national groups such as the Education for Liberation Network. Many of these organizations have racial affinity groups, host annual conferences, and organize around issues such as the school-to-prison pipeline and high-stakes testing, among others.
Because RJP faculty have relationships with such groups, either as members or supporters, they create opportunities within their programs for students to become involved in these networks, allowing them to realize that they are part of something bigger. As a former student of mine once expressed after attending a NYCoRE conference, “Before, if I didn’t like something, I’d go, ‘Well, that sucks,’ and I didn’t realize that other people think it sucks too and we can all get together and do something.” Either by bringing teacher activists in as guest speakers or by having students attend the organizations’ conferences and events, students in RJPs learn that there are other educators outside of their cohort committed to racial justice. As students graduate and become classroom teachers, these organizations become places for them to find co-conspirators and avenues for racial justice activism.
CONCLUSION
Throughout this book, I have emphasized the relationship among the various levels of the Four I’s of Oppression and Advantage. In the opening, I explained that one of the reasons that #CurriculumSoWhite proliferates is because an individual teacher’s problematic understandings of race are amplified through their institutional power. In the following chapters, I argued that a strategy for dismantling #CurriculumSoWhite is actually through the inverse relationship of institutional and individual racism. These two closing chapters about the RJPs demonstrate that through transforming the institution of teacher education, there is opportunity to disrupt individual preservice teachers’ racial ideology prior to their entering the classroom. These teachers will still wield institutional power, but they will do so with reframed understandings of race and with the desire to work toward anti-racism rather than to uphold structures of White supremacy.
In the introduction, I claimed that #CurriculumSoWhite is especially nefarious because rather than operating at just the teacher’s individual level, it maintains Whiteness on all four levels: ideological, institutional, interpersonal, and internalized. By restructuring teacher education to transform teachers’ understandings toward anti-racism, teachers now have the potential to instead disrupt Whiteness at all four levels.
When teacher education programs are structured to interrupt teachers’ mainstream understanding of race, programs are positioned to go beyond just changing the lesson plans aspiring teachers might teach. The RJPs demonstrate that in addition to disrupting curricular Tools of Whiteness, transformations can happen at multiple levels. First, racial justice programs become places with a unified ideology, creating a tight-knit community with a shared mission—along with institutional power—committed to racial justice in schools. Such programs are able to transform the racial consciousness of preservice teachers, both White and people of Color, alongside committed mentors, supervisors, and faculty associated with these programs.
The individual aspiring teachers who attend RJPs have had the opportunity to reframe their racial ideologies to focus on anti-racism. Next, they enter K–12 schools with the commitment and skills to apply their racial justice frame, thus potentially transforming those institutions. Importantly, children in these schools benefit from these anti-racist educators because they will not be subjected to the trauma of #CurriculumSoWhite and will instead be taught in humanizing and culturally sustaining ways.9 Finally, when teachers are able to recognize their Tools of Whiteness and the damage it causes, they can join the families in chapter 1 in pushing back against racist pedagogy, potentially transforming the production of curriculum.
Unfortunately, RJPs are the exception to how teacher education functions, not the rule. Many programs exist with little or superficial attention to racial justice, focusing instead on approaches such as multiculturalism or cultural competence that develop specific pedagogical strategies without transforming underlying foundations of racist ideology. Therefore, many aspiring teachers are not provided the opportunity to transform their socialized understandings of race prior to entering K–12 schools, priming them to inflict egregious acts of curricular violence through their own #CurriculumSoWhite.
But by scaling up and sustaining the practices in RJPs, the broader field of teacher preparation has the potential to become a serious threat to the maintenance of racism in schools. It requires similar efforts in recruiting and developing not just teachers but also teacher educators with the commitment and capacity to work toward anti-racism. But ultimately, by transforming teacher education into spaces dedicated to racial justice, we can have an institutional response that preemptively interrupts the norm of reading, writing, and racism in schools. These RJPs provide a path toward the radical possibilities of what humanizing education can look like in teacher education and in schools.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To me, writing a book feels like submitting a final paper for a course, summing up what I have learned about racism and Whiteness up until the point of publication. As I get ready to turn this particular final in, the ultimate acknowledgement goes to my teachers. I am so grateful for the lessons and mentorship that I have received and continue to receive from the great Bonnie Billups, Carrie Secret, Suzanne Carothers, and Jennifer Robinson. You have shaped my way of being in the world, and I am ever grateful for your generosity, investment, and trust in me. As all great teachers, you helped develop my lens and cleared a path for me to do the work. Thank you.
Writing this particular book involved thorny, ongoing wrestling with my identity and a re-imagining of accountability. Thank you for being on this journey with me and for your unwavering, critical love and sisterhood, Rosa Rivera-McCutchen, Tanya Maloney, Christina Villarreal, and Anne Marie Marshall. I am so grateful for the comradeship and love of Farima Pour-Khorshid, Edward Curammeng, and Carolina Valdez and Naiara.
To say that I am a member of a community of unwavering passion for justice would be an understatement. I am forever grateful to be part of this educational justice family, and this book is only possible because of our shared vision, work, and community. There are many of us, but specific appreciation goes to Lauren Adams and Marylin Zuniga, Denisse Andrade and Seth Radar and Camino, Awo Okaikor Ayree-Price, Wayne Au, Patrick Camangian, Stephanie Cariaga, K
eith Catone and Dulari Tahbildar and Ishaan, Emily Clark and Alanna Howe and Maeve and Tessa, Cyrene Crooms, Cati de los Ríos and Roger Viet Chung and Taiyari and Miguelito, Maddy Fox and Sam Coleman and Rex and Anya, Rosie Frascella and Cristina Marie Hilo and Niki Malaya, Daren Graves, Akiea Gross, Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, Rita Kamani-Renedo, Harper Keenan, Kari Kokka, Kevin Kumashiro, Jamila Lyiscott, Justis Lopez, Ariana Mangual Figueroa and Ben Lerner and Lucía and Marcela, Edwin Mayorga and Jen Lee with Teo and Juju, Oscar Navarro, Thomas Nikundiwe and Carla Shalaby, Natalia Ortiz, Aja Reynolds, Masiel Rodriguez-Vars, Camika Royal, Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz, Tammy Spencer, David Stovall, Monica White, and Karen Zapata.
Becoming part of the Beacon Press family allowed this book to find a home with people who are also committed to racial justice. Thank you Bill and Rick Ayers for bringing me to the front door and for mentoring me throughout my academic career. What a wonderful experience it was to work with my sharp and endlessly patient editor, Rachael Marks. The book became tighter with every round of feedback from Lisa Bethel, Adam Hochschuler, Susan Lumenello, William Waters, Nancy Walser, and Christina Villarreal. Thank you for the careful read and feedback from Robin DiAngelo, Eve Ewing, Carla Shalaby, and Sonia Nieto. I’m incredibly humbled and honored that the brilliant Bettina Love graced this book with a foreword. The latter part of this book has been shaped by experiences and insights from numerous people, and I thank you for sharing your knowledge and experiences: Patrick Camangian, Casey Doyle, AnnaMarie Francois, Sarah Frydlewicz, Kay Fujiyoshi, Tyrone Howard, Bill Kennedy, Tanya Maloney, Farima Pour-Khorshid, and Maria Suto.