You are on page 1of 15

Journal of Teacher Education

http://jte.sagepub.com/ ''But What Can I Do?'': Three Necessary Tensions in Teaching Teachers About Race
Mica Pollock, Sherry Deckman, Meredith Mira and Carla Shalaby Journal of Teacher Education 2010 61: 211 originally published online 29 December 2009 DOI: 10.1177/0022487109354089 The online version of this article can be found at: http://jte.sagepub.com/content/61/3/211

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

On behalf of:

American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE)

Additional services and information for Journal of Teacher Education can be found at: Email Alerts: http://jte.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://jte.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://jte.sagepub.com/content/61/3/211.refs.html

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

But What Can I Do?: Three Necessary Tensions in Teaching Teachers About Race
Mica Pollock1, Sherry Deckman1, Meredith Mira1, and Carla Shalaby1

Journal of Teacher Education 61(3) 211224 2010 American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022487109354089 http://jte.sagepub.com

Abstract A core question of teacher educationWhat can I do?plagues courses on race in particular ways. Teachers struggle for concrete applications of theoretical ideas about race, question the potential for everyday activity to dismantle inequality structures, and wrestle with the need for both professional and personal development on racial issues. In this article, we discuss how these three core tensions surfaced in one race-oriented teacher education course. We demonstrate that the teachers who seemed most invigorated and who expressed feelings of efficacy in serving students of color were those who pledged to continue ongoing inquiry into both sides of each tension. We propose that these three tensions require explicit attention in teacher professional development. Indeed, we suggest that to create inquisitive and efficacious teachers, teacher educators can encourage teachers to keep all three tensions in play for the duration of their careers. Keywords diversity, race, class, gender, teacher education, teacher development

In any course or workshop for teachers on issues of race, someone can be expected to ask a crucial question: But what can I do? The question indicates both a desire for professional development and a frustration with it. At face value, the question What can I do? indicates the fundamental vagueness in our field regarding how we train teachers for diversity. Scholars have offered many important lists of the attitudes, knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to work effectively with a diverse student population (Zeichner, 1992, p. 1; see also Banks et al., 2005; Delpit, 2008; Gndara & Maxwell-Jolly, 2000; Grant & Sleeter, 2007; Irvine, 2003; Nieto, 2000), but a recent review of research conducted for the American Educational Research Association (Hollins & Guzman, 2005) makes clear that each teacher education program still proceeds with its own definition of the task. It is no wonder, then, that educators often express confusion about how exactly they should prepare to teach in a diverse and unequal nation. Regarding preparation for racial diversity and inequality often a core focus of professional development (PD) for diversity (Hollins & Guzman, 2005)this question tends to be asked in three different inflections. Each version of the question raises its own particular tension related to teaching teachers about issues of race: 1. What can I do? Teachers routinely search for concrete, actionable steps they can take in their classrooms and schools, questioning how abstract ideas or theories about racial inequality and difference can help them.

2.

3.

What can I do? Teachers routinely question the power of the individual educator to counteract structural or societal problems of racial and race class inequality via the classroom. What can I do? Each teacher routinely questions his or her own personal readiness to become the type of professional who can successfully engage issues of race and racism in his or her life and classroom practice.

In this article, we discuss how these three core what can I do? tensions surfaced repeatedly, both in real-time conversations and in reflective journal entries, during one teacher education course focused on issues of race. Prior research suggests that effective efforts to prepare teachers for engaging issues of race and inequity specifically assist teachers to grapple with the tensions and dilemmas they encounter in their work (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Gay, 2003). As Zeichner (1992) recommended some years ago, Probably one of the most important things we can do as teacher educators . . . is to use an approach that enables teachers to talk and think together about the various kinds of problems they encounter related to
1

Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA

Corresponding Author: Mica Pollock, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Appian Way, Larsen 506, Cambridge, MA 02138 Email: mica_pollock@gse.harvard.edu

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

212 cultural diversity and how they are addressing them. (p. 22) Still, far less research has ethnographically examined the moment to moment tensions that arise as teachers talk and think during PD for diversity, and particularly during racerelated PD (Ahlquist, 1991; Lin, 2007; Luttrell, 2008). This article explores findings from an ongoing project closely examining the real-time struggles of PD on race. Primarily, we focus on issues of preservice teacher preparation; still, as these issues may also be central to inservice PD, we often use the encompassing term professional development. In the following sections, we first discuss general literature on preparing preservice teachers to serve diverse populations, and then discuss literature related to each specific tension of race-related PD. After this review, we discuss our research setting and methodology, our findings, and our recommendations for teacher educators.

Journal of Teacher Education 61(3) serving students of color, in particular, very important (Delpit, 1995; Gndara & Maxwell-Jolly, 2000; LadsonBillings, 1999, 2008). Second, we know that much preparation for diversity in teacher education particularly isolates discussions of race issues into specific courses or weeks of courses, with both positive effects (conscious focus) and negative effects (cursory treatment and, sometimes, a problematic divorce from other facets of difference; Zeichner, 1992). And a final consistency exists in teacher education on issues of race specificallynamely, that educators encountering PD on race issues often argue particularly heatedly that they are not getting the preparation they believe they need (Ladson-Billings, 2008). We define a teacher prepared to engage issues of race as one who consciously and thoughtfully considers how his or her everyday actions might counteract racial inequality and racist ideas about types of people (Pollock, 2008a). Such inquiry is encapsulated in a foundational practice of everyday antiracism. Philomena Essed (1990) first named everyday racism as the re-creation of structures of racial and ethnic inequality through situated practices normalized in everyday life (see Essed, 2002, p. 180). Michle Lamont (2000a; 2000b) then first adopted the specific phrase everyday antiracism to describe beliefs emphasizing the equal worth of human groups. Simultaneously, Mansbridge and Flaster (2007) coined the term everyday feminism to describe everyday acts against gender inequality. Author 1 (Pollock, 2008a) shares the phrase everyday antiracism to refer to everyday actions challenging racism and racial inequality in the educational domain. The course analyzed here, Everyday Antiracism for Educators, invited inquiry into which actions by a teacher might constitute everyday antiracism. As we propose later in this article, such inquiry can perhaps be extended to educators other everyday struggles with difference and inequality in schools and classrooms (e.g., everyday issues of gender inequality or homophobia). Still, this course focused exclusively on preparing educators to engage race issues in their work. Prior research has touched on each of the three core tensions students came to grapple with throughout that inquiry.

Reviewing the Literature What Can I Do? Ambiguity in What It Means to Prepare Teachers for Diversity
How researchers and educators even define diversity varies widely, but preparing teachers to educate young people of color in the context of an unequal nation is often one core focus of preparation for diversity (Gay, 2003; Hollins & Guzman, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 2008). Most programs seem primarily concerned with so preparing White teachers, though some efforts explicitly focus on preparing teachers of color (Hollins & Guzman, 2005). An even rarer aspect of getting prepared for diversitylearning to understand and respond to a diverse and unequal nation via classrooms of any demographic, including all-White classroomsseems to be a focus in a far smaller subset of teacher education efforts. Preservice preparation on issues of race typically asks teachers to investigate life experiences, to rethink typical explanations for racial inequality, and to counteract possible biases against (or misinformation about) the students and families of color they will serve (Hollins & Guzman, 2005). Teacher educators may increasingly share this generic constructall educators should be prepared for diversity but despite various scholarly efforts to describe necessary preparation, teacher educators share no unified definition of what an educator prepared for diversity actually looks like, how such an educator should get prepared, or how his or her preparation could best be assessed. Grant, Elsbree, and Fondrie (2004) characterized the field as plagued by conceptual confusion (p. 200). Still, some consistencies exist. First, the field seems increasingly united on two basic reasons that an educator must become prepared for diversity: Students are getting more diverse, while the educator force is not (Irvine, 2003; Sleeter, 2007), and students of color are routinely underserved and disserved by schools, making better preparation for

What Can I Do? The Tension of Offering Teachers Both Theories and Concrete Ideas
Much scholarship on preservice teacher education has discussed a tension teachers feel between theoretical and practice-based knowledge. Research has made clear that teachers desire not just new ideas, but concrete and practical suggestions for their work (Fenstermacher, 1994; LadsonBillings, 2008; Schwab, 2004). Researchers of inservice PD also generally express concerns that changing daily educator practice with PD efforts is often the most necessary (and difficult) piece of improving schools (Elmore, Petersen, & McCarthey, 1996). Some researchers imply accordingly that PD efforts are too often focused on changing educators internal beliefs and commitmentstheir ideasrather than focused

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

Pollock et al. more effectively on pinpointing the consequences of . . . instructional practices on real students (Elmore, 2004, p. 95). Regarding both preservice and inservice PD on issues of race in particular, some authors imply that teachers learning big ideas about racism, such as the need to have high expectations for students of color, may need more explicit instruction about how to activate high expectations through actual everyday interactions with students (Cohen, 2008; Ferguson, 2008; Taylor, 2008). Yet such work also indicates that the distinction between ideas and practice is not so clear in the race arena (King, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1999), making the tension an ongoing one rather than one easily resolved. Indeed, some scholars suggest that regarding issues of race in particular, shifting educators beliefs about students, schools, society, and themselves is actually more important than providing concrete things to do in the classroom (Ladson-Billings, 2008). As PD on racialized practice engages racialized beliefs and societal issues, an ongoing perceived tension between ideas and actions carries on in preservice classrooms. This leaves some teachers critiquing race-related PD as a particularly abstract effort that provides too few concrete suggestions of things to do. In PD, teachers themselves generally express a core tension between asking abstract questions about race and desiring concrete answers for classroom use. This is the important tension articulated whenever a teacher asks, But what can I do?

213 (Diamond, 2008; Pollock, 2008b). The tension between the possibilities inherent in individual teaching amid the overwhelming reality of structural inequality particularly plagues courses engaging issues of racial inequality in American life. Both resignation and hope in the face of overwhelming systems of inequity surface each time a teacher asks, What can I do?

What Can I Do? The Tension of Educating Individual Teachers at Various Moments in Their Personal Development
Research suggests that many preservice efforts to prepare educators to teach in diverse settings pursue PD on race issues by asking educators to examine themselves personally in order to raise self-awareness of their racial biases, personal histories, privileges, and identities (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Sleeter & Grant, 2007; Tatum, 2007). Similarly, according to Hollins and Guzman (2005), researchers studying efforts to prepare teachers for diversity predominantly seem to desire, expect, and measure personal changes in a teachers mind (i.e., a reduction in bias; an increase in awareness about privilege) and in a teachers heart (i.e., a decrease in disdain for families of color or an increase in appreciation for urban schools or communities) more often than in the educators observable practice. Far less research seems concerned with measuring what teachers are then able to do professionally for students, and even less research seems to measure actual interactions between teachers and students. As some teacher preparation for diversity highlights the personal at the seeming expense of the professional, teachers struggle to determine the kind of preparation they think they need. Conversely, as the PD effort studied here made clear, highlighting professional development at the seeming expense of personal development can backfire as well. Each tension demands that both sides remain in play.

What Can I Do? The Tension of Educating Individual Teachers to Act Within a Racially Unequal Structure
Some well-known scholars of teacher education ask teachers to think more about racial inequality in American society at large, to examine and rethink their explanations for race class inequality in America, and/or to learn more about students lived experiences in an unequal society (e.g., Gay, 2003; King, 1991; Nieto, 2000; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Simultaneously, teacher education scholars make clear that teachers also need ideas about what they can do individually in the classroom to counteract historical and contemporary structures of racial inequality (Delpit, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Sleeter & Grant, 2007). Teacher effort alone cannot remedy racial inequality (Rothstein, 2004), but research suggests that teachers still need to feel individually efficacious about serving students, particularly students of color, to serve them well (Day, Elliot, & Kington, 2005; Grant, 2006; Johnson & Birkeland, 2003; Ware & Kitsantas, 2007). Research suggests further that more generic consciousness of racial inequality can actually be deadening for both educators and students unless analysis pinpoints concrete ways of counteracting racial inequality (Nieto, 2008; OConnor, 1997; Pollock, 2008b). Indeed, teachers confronted solely with information about structural patterns such as achievement gaps or dropout rates often argue that their everyday activity plays no role in countering such societal patterns

Research Setting
The course studied here, titled Everyday Antiracism for Educators (EAR), was a half-semester course on race, newly required for all 50 teacher candidates in our universitys teacher education program. The candidates had taken another required summer half-course, Race, Class, and Power, designed to prod the candidates to consider those aspects of their social location within an unequal society. The race course feel of EAR (Zeichner, 1992) was obvious to all. To some, this felt like a problematic minimization, while others saw it as a necessary focus; still others thought there was too much race tacked onto the program. Some faculty and students worried that issues of ableism, sexism, or heteronormativity demanded more attention; others contended that basic subject preparation demanded priority. In general, the EAR class consisted predominantly of White women, as is the norm in teacher education. One third were

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

214 men. Of the 51 students enrolled, 11 (22%) chose not to identify a race/ethnicity on institutional paperwork. Seven (14%) identified as African American, 3 (6%) as Asian American, 1 (2%) as other, and the final 29 (57%) as White. The term studied was the inaugural year of the required course. Author 1, M.P., a White professor of race studies and former high school teacher, designed EAR as an opportunity to engage participants experiences from their ongoing practicum in middle and high school classrooms. In the first class meeting, M.P. (hereafter, the professor) stressed that the course was designed to address the first two tensions we explore in this piece: the teachers desire for concrete rather than solely abstract ideas, and the teachers worry that structural inequality makes personal effort against inequality futile. She highlighted that the 70 researchers contributing to the course text, Everyday Antiracism (Pollock, 2008), were asked to go far beyond vague and abstract strategies (such as celebrate diversity or pursue equity) to pinpoint precise recommendations for equitable everyday teacher activity. She also verbally articulated the goal of searching for concrete things to do in her introductory lecture and continued in the second lecture by asking the students to pull out tools from the essays and to try to apply them to [their] own situations. To address directly the tension of the individual educator within an overwhelming structure, the professor introduced the courses first full meeting with a gallop through history that positioned teachers everyday activity within 600 years of history of racial inequality. She then suggested that counteracting and deprogramming oneself from this history was both difficult and the most important thing to work on. In terms of the third tension, between professional and personal development, the professor, who had not yet considered this tension as such, introduced the course itself as less interested in emotional development than intellectual development, and she suggested that the class was less about uncovering students personal racism than considering how racist ideas in the world at large get programmed into individuals and activated in peoples behavior. The professors intention was to supplement more typical efforts in the field that prioritize teachers personal development of new beliefs and attitudes over pinpointing things to do in the classroom. Since she had conducted prior research on educators defensive reactions to accusations of racism (Pollock, 2008b), she also wanted to lessen students possible defensiveness. Still, her framing of the course as interested in professional rather than personal development had many participants calling for the latter.

Journal of Teacher Education 61(3) as an ongoing interaction in which people struggle in real time to discuss issues of difference and inequality. As a research team, we reasoned that since the PD effort was itself a real-time conversation (Kegan & Lahey, 2002), it was essential to study that effort in detail in real time rather than attempting only to evaluate its effects after the fact. Accordingly, 10 fieldworkers (including authors S.D., M.M., and C.S., who identify as biracial [African American and White], White, and Arab American women, respectively) studied the entire course experience as participant observers. Students in the course were made aware that the course text was in draft form and that their feedback on the essays was welcome. The syllabus also actively framed the course as an experiment in PD on race. Students were made explicitly aware that the 10 doctoral students were acting as participantobservers in both the full-class and small-group discussions with the express goal of figuring out, with the professor, how best to inquire into issues of race during preservice teacher education. All students were asked to sign permission slips to approve this self-study; those who did not want to participate were allowed to opt out of having a doctoral student in their small group. Only two chose this option. We told students verbally and via the course syllabus that our research team wanted to understand two core questions for education: (1) What are the skills educators need in order to successfully negotiate the racial issues and situations they encounter? and (2) how might PD experiences on issues of race and diversity, such as this course, be improved? Students also were asked to analyze the course weekly, by responding in their journals to the following questions: 1. 2. 3. In the conversations just had as a small group and as a large group, what was said and possibly not said? Which ideas seemed to cause particular agreement or particular disagreement? What were some seeming emotional snags, some intellectual snags?

Method
Much research on preservice teacher education for diversity measures improvement on the researchers preferred measures post facto rather than studying the learning experience

All students took the course pass-fail. The professor stressed that the point of the journal assignmentwhich could be submitted anonymously, if students chosewas serious inquiry and self-preparation rather than pleasing the professor with right answers. The professor also suggested that by analyzing the pros and cons of course discourse themselves, students would prepare themselves for future conversations with colleagues. Finally, students were told that at the end of the course, they would have the choice to share or not share their journals (anonymously) for our teams research. With the permission of the students, the 10 fieldworkers typed field notes throughout the module (keeping all participants anonymous) while participating in both full- and small-group interactions. At the end of the course, as advertised, all students were asked whether they might allow their journals to be used anonymously as data. We used a numbering system to track agreements; 33 students agreed.

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

Pollock et al. The interpersonal difficulty of studying ones own course in real time was offset by the research benefit of being there both to experience and examine the ongoing conversations in detail. We also contend that including students in analyzing their own preparation for diversity was a pedagogical benefit to students. While the research project may have made students especially critical of how conversations were progressing (or for some, particularly self-conscious about those conversations), the method also prompted them to articulate their struggles with PD on race particularly clearly, both for themselves and for us.

215 urged students to go meta whenever they wanted to comment verbally on the running conversations of the full class meetings, so verbal discourse sometimes evaluated the course itself. That so many students actively struggled with the same three core tensions, both in their private journals and in realtime class conversations, even in a course designed to alleviate such tensions, suggested the salience of these tensions for participants. It also suggested that PD on race perhaps cannot alleviate these tensions but rather should explicitly identify them and prepare educators to navigate and to grapple with them. We now turn to discussing how each of these three core tensions arose in the discourse of our participants.

Data Analysis
Students grappled with the course during brief statements verbalized in the large- and small-group discussions, but they did so in far more depth in their journals. Group discussions were taken up with conversation about weekly essays and real-world situations experienced by participants more than by discussion of students reactions to the course. Further, norms of verbal race talk meant that many participants remained colormute in public (Pollock, 2004a). In contrast, students often wrote at length about their reactions to the course. For that reason, the majority of our analysis focuses on data from the journals, using key in-class moments to support our claims. Collectively, our research team read all 33 anonymous journals. When possible, participants who self-identified in discussions or journals as being a member of a certain racial group or gender, or as teaching a particular subject, will be described as such and have been given pseudonyms; others are defined by the numbers we assigned to all anonymous journals. As we do not have demographic data for the writers of all the journals we examined, we will not attempt to make any claims related to those factors. While we recognize the slight distancing effect of our limited descriptors, we use them because of the added understanding that a teachers self-identified background characteristics can afford readers and to show how the trends we observed were pervasive across different demographic groups. We have omitted particular demographic details in some cases in order to mask any speakers who could otherwise be identified individually. Using techniques of discourse analysis, we analyzed educators verbal (class time) and written (journal) discourse, coding the data for repeated words, references, and themes (Charmaz, 2006; Lofland & Lofland, 1995). As our coding became more focused, we began to see core tensions engaged repeatedly in students discourse (Luttrell, 2000; Pollock, 2004b; Willig, 2001). In this analysis, we also paid special attention to students metapragmatic reactions (Silverstein, 1981) to the ongoing conversation as an interaction; that is, we analyzed their talk about talking, which had been invited by the journal assignment, as described above. The professor also

Findings Tension 1:What Can I Do?


The professor first organized the course around fishbowl discussions in which students workshopped real-world student teaching dilemmas related to the suggestions made by authors in the course text. Despite this pedagogical attempt to organize the course around applying scholarship to practice, the tension between abstract and concrete ideas simmered in the first weeks of the course. Participants argued both that some articles did not seem concrete enough and that some articles seemed too concrete for intelligent people accustomed to thinking big thoughts; some participants seemed frustrated with the attempt to pinpoint specific things to do. By Week 6 of the 7-week course, a White student, Cyndi, argued in the full class session that countering racism is more organic than creating these rulesits gotta be organic in your own self. The real issue is what you believe underneath it all. You cant just read some rules. . . Developing the 10 rules of antiracism is ludicrous. In Week 5, the professor noted in an e-mail to the research team that she was noticing that students seemed frustrated by wanting to talk on different levels ranging from the very concrete to the abstract. Perhaps, she wrote, Educators can be offered general principles for antiracism that can be carried around in ones head; more specific tactics for antiracism that can be tried in any given situation; and super-specific solutions for specific situations that arise in real-life practice. Ive offered them the first two things with the EAR essays and my prompts for discussing them in class. But in asking them to debate real-world scenarios, Ive also asked them to come up with the third thing [particular everyday solutions]. . . . My sense is that they want me to tell them the right answer to the third thingbut I actually do not have that right answer.

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

216 After a lively e-mail exchange with the research team, the professor proposed an explicit inquiry model in which teachers could both name big, abstract ideas and pinpoint concrete, everyday acts for their own classrooms. She came back to class explicitly encouraging conversations to occur on these three levels, which she described on a handout. She later built this inquiry model into the book itself: The level of principle: big ideas about antiracist teaching and the pursuit of equal opportunity. The level of strategy: general actions that seem compelling or not compelling for classroom use. The level of try tomorrow: specific solutions that seem to hold potential for a specific classroom or school at a given time, depending on the local setting and its specific personalities and dynamics. The professor also suggested that students pull out gold nugget ideas from their own conversations at each of the levelsthat is, that they literally name particularly helpful ideas for future use. One of the first class conversations using this inquiry model concerned an essay by Dorinda Carter (2008) related to racial spotlighting, or moments when teachers or classmates force students to represent their purported group in discussions. In the full-group conversation, two class participantsKaren, a self-labeled African American woman, and Rebecca, a self-labeled Jewish womanidentified a principle: [Rebecca]: I think theres a difference between speaking as a group member and speaking for the group. [Professor]: Is one better? [Rebecca]: Yeah, speaking as a member of a group. [Karen]: I agreealways acknowledge that you cant speak for everyone. . . . A teacher can say, no one is expected to speak for the community. The gold nugget principle named by the class became, People can speak as race group members if they wish, but no one should be forced to speak for a group. Carters essay itself suggested a strategy: Teachers should try not to spotlight students based on their race group membership. After some discussion, students then suggested various acts that they as individuals could try tomorrow, depending on the specific individuals, dynamics, and curricula in play in their classrooms. For example, one student planned to purposefully invite reactions from all of her students if particular students were possibly feeling spotlighted. For some, the newly offered framework and suggestion to search for gold nugget ideas at multiple levels successfully presented an opportunity both to think broadly and to generate concrete takeaways for use in their classrooms. In Week 5 of class, in response to a member of his small group saying that the issues [discussed in EAR] were not relevant to her current teaching experience, one participant,

Journal of Teacher Education 61(3) Devon, who described himself as a Black man, wrote in his journal, I am just urging colleagues to find a way to connect to antiracist work, reflect on practice and extract some nuggets from the text and discussions. If we all do this we can begin to become more conscious educators and thoughtful colleagues. For this participant, and others like him, there was a clear benefit both to reflecting on and thinking about issues of antiracist pedagogy abstractly, and pinpointing useful tactics at the concrete, try-tomorrow level of his own practice. Elsewhere in his journal, Devon described an essay by Carol Mukhopadhyay (2008) that proposed that educators question the category Caucasian, because to many listeners it connotes (incorrectly) that race categories are biological. He described how he was both beginning to analyze and become critical on the topic and struggling to incorporate and pinpoint specific tweaks to his everyday practice: I have many reactions to Mukhopadhyays Getting Rid of the Word Caucasian. Immediately after reading the article, I wondered how I might incorporate this work into my everyday practice. I asked myself, What does this mean for my students? I think this question is still lingering; however, I have begun to think about how our use of language conveys messages about our beliefs and knowledge. I think Mukhopadhyays message is a great place to begin a discussion around the power of languagea discussion that moves students to a place where they can begin to analyze and become critical of their, as well as their peers, use of language. Participant 3, who did not describe himself or herself in racial or gender terms, suggested another version of the concrete versus abstract tension. This participant referenced an essay by Samuel Lucas (2008) arguing that teachers should inquire into students individual lived experiences rather than use abstract notions about a racial group to determine how students should be treated. Participant 3 noted the need to both look at macro issues related to race and generate micro action steps with the real potential for change: Within the series of articles that we read, by far the one that has been most thought provoking for me is Samuel Lucass Constructing Colorblind Classrooms. I was initially drawn to it by the audacity of the title, but after I had read it, the idea of really looking at racial inequities at a macro level and focusing on the individual at a micro level really resonated with me. Doing either one of those is not going to make a whole lot of difference, but taking both of the approaches hand in hand has the real potential for change. Thus, for these participants, big ideas culled from the essays and course formed the foundation for continuing to develop

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

Pollock et al. concrete strategies for their classrooms. With both sides of the tension in play, ideas at first not practice-oriented or micro enough could continue to spark ideas for everyday use. The optimistic approach both Participant 3 and Devon expressedholding onto the tension between abstract principles and concrete strategieswas, however, not consistent among participants. Some resolved the tension in an either or rather than a bothand manner, typically by expressing in frustration that they would have preferred to focus more exclusively on concrete strategies to use in their classrooms (see also Ladson-Billings, 2008). The sentiment expressed by Participant 12, a White history teacher who did not identify gender, was repeated throughout the journals: Overall, I was hoping for some more concrete strategies that are more doable for a 1st- or 2nd-year classroom teacher. Some claimed that theoretical discussion was a poor use of time in the endeavor of addressing racism in U.S. classrooms. Participant 20, for example, wrote: I dont feel that this class fulfilled all its potential. . . . [The professor] tried to make the class more practical by having conversations focus on the specific situations we could do tomorrow, but the idea didnt come until the third-to-last class, and again was dropped often for more theoretical situations. Jane, a White woman, expressed similar concerns: If we are serious about moving our more disadvantaged students towards higher levels of achievement, we need to move beyond understanding and high expectations and embracing structuralism [sic] and move towards improving our instructional strategies, organization, time management and classroom management. . . . In my opinion, too many of the readings were aimed at the academic and not enough at the practitioner. The above quote from Janes journal also illustrates how some participants in the course positioned academic versus practitioner knowledge, or suggested a perceived disconnect between thinking about and doing. Both were versions of the what can I do? tension. In Week 5 of the course, the class was generating lists of harmful and helpful strategies to use in confronting racially charged scenarios in their practice. One White man, Richard, punctuated a class discussion by pointing dramatically at the board and saying of the list on the helpful side, [Everything listed] is about thinking or remaining conscious, but not about actions to take. When such comments dichotomized theory and practice, some students chose the latter rather than the former and refused ideas that were about thinking. In two separate journal entries spaced one week apart, another White student, Tim, critiqued Carters essay on spotlighting for failing to pinpoint concrete ways of

217 taking action against spotlighting. He argued first that the essay, while interesting . . . did not address how as a teacher I can help students to not feel that way, and that is what I am most interested in. In contrast, some participants argued that the essays were too concrete and failed to prompt deep thinking. In a discussion of the utility of distilling concrete try-tomorrows and strategies from the readings, a White female student said, Were trying to define the un-definable. . . . It has to do with the whole moment. . . . In this whole room, we could never agree on what to boil it down to. And some participants argued that even boiling down big ideas to to-dos would not actually change practice. During this same class discussion, another participant asked the group, [How does boiling down these ideas] change actions on a daily basis? Some participants vacillated endlessly between calling for more concrete strategies and calling for more focus on abstract principles. In fact, those who left the course seemingly most invigorated (according to the excitement audible in their journals) explicitly wrote of wanting more of each. For example, Tina, a self-identified White woman, wrote of the Lucas article: Im not sure how to transfer this understanding to my classroom. How could I focus on actual practices and lived experiences in terms of culture and power? What would that look like in the classroom? I love the idea, but I dont know really what it would mean to do that. I can definitely interact with a student in an exploratory mannerthat seems like the most concrete advice in this article. But I want more. I want to know how to do thishow to not inflict disadvantage or assume advantage. Overall, participants grappled with a perceived tension between theories, worldviews, and ideas, on one hand, and concrete, moment-to-moment strategies, and actions, on the other. While some, in frustration, stated a clear preference for the concrete to the exclusion of the abstract, those who left writing most excitedly of wanting more described their ongoing commitment to acquiring both.

Tension 2:What Can I Do?


Never before has it been clearer that I am fighting a system, and never before has that system seemed so overwhelming. Should I be empowering my students in some significant way? Should I be explicitly decrying and struggling against the larger system that we are all a part of? If I should be, I am not sure how to go about it. John, a White teacher The second core tension in the courses effort to prepare teachers to engage issues of race was the need to acknowledge

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

218 structural systems of inequality while managing to salvage each individual teachers hopeful belief that he or she could (and must) be an agent of change in the context of such inequity. The course and course text asked educators to personally address inequality of opportunity in the context of an already unequal educational system; both framed moment-to-moment, ordinary classroom acts as having the potential to help dismantle large, oppressive structures. Still, this tension between individual and structural change arose repeatedly throughout the course. In full-class discussion during the fourth week of the course, a member of the research team, a White woman, offered a hypothetical quandary she had read about. In it, babies were falling off a cliff while adults scrambled to decide whether they should catch the babies from down below or identify and tackle the force pushing them off in the first place. In response to the question of which adult response was preferred, the professor explicitly answered, Both! Throughout the rest of the course, students continued to reference this poignant analogy for the individualstructural tension. Notably, the data collected from participants suggest that throughout the course, those teachers who seemed to feel most inspired and potentially efficacious were those most committed to living permanently in the middle of this tension. Many others, however, posed structural or systemic problems against everyday acts and decided the former had to trump the latter. Specifically, participants privately framing the individualstructural tension as an eitheror proposition typically emphasized all they perceived they could not do in the face of structural inequities, understood to be seemingly beyond their control. This sense of futility was typified in the comment by Eugene, a self-identified Black man who wrote in his final journal entry, Race exists, prejudices exist, and they are not going anywhere. Some teachers who spoke of being overwhelmed by racial inequality called antiracism itself an overwhelming and impossible extra effort by individuals. Those teachers who adopted this eitheror stance argued explicitly, at times, that all they could do in the face of teachings overwhelming demands in an unequal structure was simply to be a basically good teacher of students of color, a task they framed as somehow separate from being an antiracist teacher who combated systemic inequality on a daily basis. Shannon, a White science teacher, wrote that her baseline goal in an overwhelming world was just to make sure students were no worse off than before she taught them: I had been thinking about this; why do I teach? . . . I cant be a mom for every parentless child, a friend for all social outcasts, a role model for all women in science. Im not going to turn every student into a biologist, or even get every student to pass my class (the latter of which has hit me of late). My baseline goal is to do no harm to my students. I dont want anyone to leave my

Journal of Teacher Education 61(3) classroom worse off than beforefeeling more spotlighted or ignored, stupid, or unsafe than when they came into my class. In a similar vein, John, the White teacher quoted above, wrote that after confronting the struggles of real teaching inside an overwhelming system, he had scaled down a pursuit of social justice in society to the primary concern of teaching skills as an individual: When I first began to think about becoming a teacher, it was because I saw a potential bridge between teaching and social justice. Now, I stand every day in front of my students, and my primary concerns are whether I am making sense and whether I can keep the class focused. . . . Right now, I believe my job is to teach my kids physics, to push them to do high schoollevel work, and to somehow give them the skills they need to do it. A part of me believes that this is antiracist work; a part of me only hopes it is. Tension continued to surface in the course over whether just teaching a subject adequately as an individual teacher was enough to make change in a larger system. In one full-class discussion, one member of our research team herself brought back the analogy of the babies and the cliff: All of us are well-wishing with good intentions. I can be in a class and say that Im going to help these kids pass [the state assessment], but is that really being the type of person that stops the babies from falling? That doesnt mean that Im being a good antiracist educator, that Im looking to change and to shift a racist system. Multiple course participants ended their journals by concluding explicitly that in the face of the overwhelming challenges of antiracist teaching in an unequal society and a racist system, they would settle simply for good teaching of basic subject matter. To these students, teaching against racial inequality seemed somehow more than good teaching, and the prospect invited a sense of overwhelming hopelessness and fatigue. Lisa, a White science teacher, wrote of what would be simply enough as an individual teacher: What I am starting to wonder now is what it does actually mean to be an antiracist educator? We keep trying to come up with specific actions to take that will make our classroom better for all of our students, but do we really have to do that? Im wondering whether . . . its enough to simply (yeah, rightsimply) provide each of my students with a safe and fun place to learn. Similarly, Tim, a White history teacher quoted earlier in this article, also wrote of a desire to just pursue teaching and

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

Pollock et al. classroom management as a lesser version of antiracist teaching, and he wrestled explicitly with which to make his priority. While wrestling, however, this teacher refueled himself with a bothand approach and reasoned that antiracism was an aspect of good teaching inside an overwhelming system, not double the work: Another part of the discussion that spoke to me was when one student said that hes just worrying about teaching and classroom management at the moment, and being an actively antiracist educator is a little too much to ask right now. Again, to an extent I agree. I am overwhelmed with lesson planning, discipline issues, students failing, etc., so Im not actively thinking at every moment how I can make my class more antiracist. However, while Im not consciously thinking antiracism all the time, I have found myself to be more aware of racial issues and making more of an attempt for equity in my classroom between myself and the students and among the students themselves. So while I agree that curriculum and teaching is No. 1 on my mind, the antiracist aspect of my teaching is still pertinent, though I may not notice it as much as I should at the moment. Just as those teachers who felt most active (rather than overwhelmed) were those who envisioned that good teaching and antiracist teaching could be the same, those who explicitly envisioned both engaging large racial systems and taking everyday acts as individuals to counteract them seemed to feel most energized, even while they expressed frustration about the daunting need for this simultaneous work. During a class conversation in which teachers discussed the treatment of one Black high school student in a real-life classroom dilemma, Steve, a Black man, explained to his peers that he felt our conversation and analysis overlooked big structures of inequity contributing to racialized classroom dynamics between individuals. He excitedly made an explicit call for dealing with both the large and the daily in his classroom: Large racial structures are missing from the conversation. Im not hearing comments about the racial hierarchy that gets reproduced in our schools and how [it] plays out with this one little Black girl in [the] classroom. Its something I deal with in my class on a daily basis. . . . Were not thinking about these racial structures and their place in our schools. I think about the history of racial oppression and it feels, its just big. Its real big. Teachers calling for this bothand stancefor simultaneously dealing with racial oppression as just big . . . real big and taking acts on a daily basis in the classroom to face such oppression as an individual educatorcould consider antiracist and good teaching as an ongoing merged project and view structural and individual efforts as simultaneous rather than

219 as sequential or extra additions to their basic teaching practice. They reasoned that teachers could seek concrete, actionable, everyday steps as individuals while considering the full context of structures too big for them to solve as individuals. Anna, a White history teacher, concluded in the following way in her journal: I realize that teaching is hard and being a teacher committed to antiracist education is even harder . . . . These everyday acts may seem small, tiny in fact, but the truth is that every little bit helps. Even the smallest act can go a long way. So, I am committed, I will continue to take those small steps, and one day perhaps the world will be a slightly better place because of it. Students taking a more eitheror stance about the possibility of doing antiracist or good teachingor, similarly, about dismantling large racial structures or taking ordinary, everyday acts as individualsspoke instead of what they could not do.

Tension 3:What Can I Do?


After reading course journals, the professor noted that she had least successfully navigated a final tension toward a bothand stance for students: the tension between pursuing necessary personal development and necessary PD on issues of race. As stated earlier, the professor had found in prior research that teachers, made defensive by claims of personal racism, could refuse to analyze the effects of their actions on children (Pollock, 2008b). Accordingly, she purposefully downplayed the need for development on personal racism in her remarks to the group. She told the class that the course explicitly steered away from keeping teachers generically worried about whether they were or were not racist people (particularly people with racist intentions) and sought instead to get teachers counteracting pervasive racist ideas and actions through their activity in the classroom. She noted that the introduction to the course text stated explicitly, This book . . . is not designed to get you to ask, Am I a bad person? Instead, it is designed to get you to ask, Do my everyday acts help promote a more equitable society? Still, this attempt to get students examining pervasive racism rather than personal racism backfired: As the professor did not explicitly invite personal inquiry, many students experienced the struggle for professional inquiry as an attempt to supplant personal inquiry. Students in the course continually expressed (predominantly in their journals) a desire to keep talking about their individual development, not just as professionals trying to workshop things to do in the classroom, but also as people struggling to rid themselves of worldviews and mind-sets they had developed through personal experience. Crucially, numerous participants responding to the eitheror framing presented by the professor argued repeatedly that they had to do personal developmental work before they

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

220 could develop any professional tactics for classroom use. With the tension between personal development and professional development submerged in the course rather than explicitly addressed beyond the opening day, many students spoke in their journals about what they could not do: they argued that they could not develop as professionals until they developed as people. Tina, a White English teacher, suggested that her worldview would need to change before she would be able to implement micro changes within her classroom: The readings for this class gave me a lot to grapple with and think about in my own work. The most valuable ones for me, however, at least foundationally speaking, were those that identified mind-sets that I was participating in without being aware of it. . . . My conclusion is that if you dont change or challenge your worldview, theres little you can do successfully in the way of micro changes. While she was still willing to grapple with her own work, she contended, there was little [she] could do successfully before undoing her mind-sets. In one journal entry after another, students argued that they had to undergo personal development of some sort before they could undertake professional improvement. Once again, taking an eitheror stance on this core tension had teachers arguing more about what they could not do than what they could. Multiple students expressed concern over their lack of personal readiness to talk about or perform the daily antiracist activities that the course and book proposed. Lauren, a math teacher, wrote, I am always afraid that I will say something stupid and everyone will think that Im a typical White, ignorant teacher, and went on to express that her personal lack of understanding antiracism left her unready to apply at all: I feel like I am not ready for the full implementation stage because I still struggle to understand the racism that I see and the racism that I am told exists. For each class, we were expected to read ideas from educators to help us become antiracist in our practice, summarize what they were suggesting, and predict possible obstacles in implementing these ideas. There seemed to be a rush to an action plan when I still needed to sort out and understand the episode of racism. . . . That leads me to believe that I might still be in an identifying and comprehension stage of understanding antiracism and that I do not really have the understanding yet to apply antiracist strategies. During a full-class debate in the fourth week regarding whether good teaching and antiracist teaching were synonymous, Sharon, a White woman, verbalized that the students in the class were all starting in different places in their development

Journal of Teacher Education 61(3) about race and that she might need to do some personal development before she could pinpoint what I can do: What I feel like is happening is that this class is treated like a blanketalmost like we all are in the same place and like we all have this race consciousness. I found myself at the beginning to be very much excited about the readings and how it made me think of race and my view of the world, but then I realized that it was about what I can do with colleagues and students and Im not sure Im ready to be there. I thought I was coming in to do social justice teaching and I think its actually antiracist teaching, but first I think we all may need to do some personal development. In particular, White students suggested repeatedly that personal development had to come before they could take any antiracist actions. Some argued that coming to terms with what they defined as their White privilege or White guilt had to precede their pursuit to become antiracist educators with specific skills for classroom use. John, the White science teacher, argued that teachers needed to personally deal with their own identity and understanding of these issues before they could play out specific problems and solutions for the classroom: I want to talk about this question of whether . . . people need to connect with racism (and other forms of identity and privilege systems) personally before dealing with the sorts of logistical and practical questions were approaching in this class. Having given it some thought, I strongly feel that they do. People need to form and INTERNALIZE an understanding of race, racism, and identity in order for these suggestions to make sense. Otherwise, its like trying to teach a lesson that you didnt design and dont understand the reasoning behind. Youre bound to overlook or oversimplify something. In contrast, incorporating an understanding of these issues into your view of yourself, others, and the world will naturally start to play out in your classroom because your thought processes have actually changed. At this point, discussion of specific problems and solutions can be useful. Participant 22, a White student who did not identify her or his gender, also argued that the students should have had more personal antiracism development prior to the course so that they would have been more prepared and ready to discuss antiracism in their practice within the course: We all, as teachers, come from very different backgrounds. Some of us are very much used to thinking about and discussing issues of race and racism very openly. Others are very new to it. Some of us have already had years of experience in the classroom as teachers from

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

Pollock et al. which to draw a context for many of these antiracist suggestions; others have very little experience and thus no context. While many argued that the process of developing actions had to halt until personal development was accomplished, once again those who seemed to feel most invigorated and excited about their development as antiracist teachers suggested that they would forever undergo an process of both professional and personal development. Some students articulated this bothand stance explicitly. Tina, the teacher who argued that teacher preparation should include more personal identity work before we grapple with the practical, day-today realities of the classroom, then argued that the real point was perhaps not to do personal work before addressing daily questions, but rather to do both at once: Perhaps, as with many other things, we need to do both at oncewe cant expect the shift-in-worldview work to ever get finished, so we cant wait for that before we find the little changes that add up. However, she added that teachers had to keep working on the worldview as well. Ken, a White man, also framed his professional improvement as an ongoing process that would necessarily involve both personal and professional inquiry in the future. In his journal, he said he planned to work to empower those who the system works against while simultaneously coming to terms with how the system had privileged him as a White male. He spoke of feeling fueled by the fact that there is so much more to know.

221 The preservice teachers in our sample who seemed most invigorated by the course and who expressed the strongest feelings of current and potential efficacy in serving students of color, a key factor in effective service (Day, Elliot, & Kington, 2005; Grant, 2006; Johnson & Birkeland, 2003; Ware & Kitsantas, 2007), were those who also pledged to continue to inquire into both sides of each tension. They indicated that to serve students best, they would consciously pursue both ideas for everyday acts in the classroom and overarching ideas about race and teaching. They would seek both information about dismantling structural and societal inequalities and ideas for everyday acts against such inequalities. And they would pursue both personal development and professional development on issues of race. Although we cannot claim that these teachers were excited primarily because of their bothand stanceand although we also cannot claim that the teachers most committed to ongoing inquiry would in fact serve their students bestprior research would suggest that these teachers would serve their students better than teachers uninspired about their works potential. As Norma Gonzalez (2005) has noted, the notion of a problem suggests something that can be solved once and for all, but the concept of problematica more usefully denotes the ongoing inquiry necessary for teacher education. Other scholars (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 1995; Gay, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 2008; Nieto, 2000) also call for ongoing inquiry into what teachers can do in contexts of racial inequality. Zeichner (1992) argues similarly that learning to be the kind of teacher [prepared for diversity] is probably a career-long process (p. 22). Rather than submerging either side of each tension, thus, PD might best prepare teachers to seek their own ongoing preparation on all three dimensions by naming and engaging these three tensions in so many words and encouraging educators to grapple with them throughout their careers. Indeed, we propose that the three tensions explored here may be necessary tensions that require explicit and ongoing attention in PD. Our larger research teams ongoing investigation suggests that there are more necessary tensions that arise for educators during race-related PD that may require similarly explicit attention. Examples include the tension of presenting oneself as a good person as well as a good teacher (Taylor, 2009), the tension caused by competing moral definitions of good practice (Gordon, 2009), and the tension between emphasizing group experience and emphasizing individuality (Pollock, 2009). After our research pinpointed the ongoing presence of the three what can I do? tensions, the professor addressed them head-on in subsequent iterations of the course. By the beginning of the 3rd year of the course, she had learned to name the three core tensions in the courses first meeting, in an explicit discussion of stuff to expect. Students visibly smiled and relaxed on hearing each tension enunciated. She named each tension multiple times in the ongoing weeks of the course. To engage the first tension throughout the course, the professor added more pointed so how could we apply this? inquiry into all lectures and discussions of the course; to

Discussion and Implications


We propose that the three core tensions of PD on race described above are here to stayand indeed, that they may actually be important to teaching well. Teachers will repeatedly question whether and how they can acquire concrete tools to handle ideas that are too abstract, pinpoint individual acts within structures that are too big, and develop as professionals when personal selves are too unprepared. We propose that PD on issues of race, here of preservice teachers, cannot and should not resolve these tensions in an eitheror fashion. Our data suggest that unless facilitators explicitly encourage both sides of each tension to remain in play during the PD experience, PD on race may prompt simplistic resolution of each challenge. At many moments in this course, teachers stymied by an eitheror stance on these three tensions suggested that they would accept only concrete ideas rather than theories, commit only to individual acts rather than structural change, or demand only personal development before professional improvement was possible (or vice versa in each case). In essence, teachers who resolved these tensions simplistically as eitheror rather than bothand propositions started to ask, What cant I do?

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

222 encourage ongoing grappling with the tension, she repeatedly stated specifically that as teachers they would continue to inquire into how big ideas about race could be put into action. To engage the second tension, she designed a new lecture specifically to clarify how everyday acts are situated within structural inequality. To encourage students to grapple with that tension, she returned repeatedly in course discussions to the question of how and whether everyday acts in individual classrooms could in fact counteract large orders of racial inequality. To engage the third tension, she began to ask teachers to reflect on their personal development weekly in their journals, and she routinely pushed herself to add more large- and small-group discussion opportunities for students to reflect on how the issues in question related to their own personal lives, identities, and experiences. To encourage ongoing inquiry into that tension, she stated often that they were opening up issues that they would continue to grapple with as teachers, both personally and professionally. The professor herself also continues to wrestle privately with how best to include her self in the course and with how best to engage students (including research partners) personally in the mutual task of improving teaching. In the EAR course, all three what can I do? tensions continue to percolate throughout full-class discussions, journal entries, and small-group discussions. Now, however, they are expected by all, noted explicitly, and treated as important, ongoing struggles rather than resolvable eitherors. The voices of our course participants suggest that to equip teachers to keep working in the face of large and looming structures of inequality, teacher educators and other professional developers can encourage teachers ongoing struggle to figure out how to challenge racial inequality through the everyday work of schooling and instructional practice. Indeed, it is possible that fostering a willingness to struggle with core tensions related to racearguably the most fraught aspect of difference and inequality in American society (Guiner & Torres, 2002; West, 1993)could translate to a willingness to also struggle with other core aspects of diversity and inequality in schooling, such as gender, sexuality, and language. Teacher educators acknowledging and addressing the necessary tensions of race may help foster educators ongoing commitment to inquiry regarding various issues of difference and inequity in education. Without a doubt, those teachers who left the course determined to keep inquiring about both sides of the three core race-related tensions described here were those who also described feeling most hopeful, most invigorated, and most potentially efficacious on their students behalf. In his final journal entry, Henry, a White man, summed up this stance of ongoing struggle with questions: Leaving this course, I am left with many questions, both about the relationship of antiracism to my own practice, and about what can or cant be done to deal

Journal of Teacher Education 61(3) with unintentional racism in school. What does it mean to be an antiracist educator? Can my unconscious racial beliefs hurt my students? How can teachers be effectively taught to undo racism in their classes and in their schools? I cannot claim to have answers to these questions. Rather, I would claim that the pursuit of answers may be more important than the answers themselves. At best, perhaps PD on issues of race prompts a desire for ongoing inquiry rather than a frustrated refusal to inquire further. Issues of difference and inequality in American education are indeed an ongoing problematica, not an easily resolvable problem (Gonzalez, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 2008). The teacher excited about such ongoing pursuit of answers regarding what she or he can do daily to serve students equitably in an unequal society is possibly the teacher best prepared for diversity of all. Acknowledgment
The authors are deeply grateful to the members of the Everyday Antiracism Working Group at our institution. Our joint research and ongoing conversations contributed fundamentally to the thinking presented in this piece. We also thank one another, acknowledging the often difficult commitment necessary to grapple together successfully with the deep race issues so central to teaching and learning.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests


The authors declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received some financial support from the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University for the research of this article.

References
Ahlquist, R. (1991). Position and imposition: Power relations in a multicultural foundations class. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 158-169. Banks, J., Cochran-Smith, M., Moll, L., Richert, A., Zeichner, K., & LePage, P. (2005). Teaching diverse learners. In L. DarlingHammond & J. Bransford (Eds.), Preparing teachers for a changing world: What teachers should learn and be able to do (pp. 232-274). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Carter, D. J. (2008). On spotlighting and ignoring racial group members in the classroom. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 230-234). New York: New Press. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Cochran-Smith, M. (1995). Uncertain allies: Understanding the boundaries of race and teaching. Harvard Educational Review, 65(4), 541-570.

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

Pollock et al.
Cohen, G. L. (2008). Providing supportive feedback. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 82-84). New York: New Press. Day, C., Elliot, B., & Kington, A. (2005). Reform, standards and teacher identity: Challenges of sustaining commitment. Teaching & Teacher Education, 21(5), 563-577. Delpit, L. (1995). Other peoples children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York: New Press. Delpit, L. (2008). Lessons from teachers. In W. Ayers, G. LadsonBillings, G. Miche, & P. A. Noguera (Eds.), City kids, city schools: More reports from the front row. New York: New Press. Diamond, J. B. (2008). Focusing on student learning. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 254-256). New York: New Press. Elmore, R. (2004). School reform from the inside out: Policy, practice, and performance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press. Elmore, R. F., Peterson, P. L., & McCarthey, S. J. (1996). Restructuring in the classroom: Teaching, learning, and school organization. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Essed, P. (1990). Everyday racism: Reports from women of two cultures. Claremont, CA: Hunter House. Essed, P. (2002). Everyday racism: A new approach to the study of racism. In P. Essed & D. T. Goldberg (Eds.), Race critical theories: Text and context (pp.176-194). Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell. Fenstermacher, G. D. (1994). The knower and the known: The nature of knowledge in research on teaching. Review of Research in Education, 20, 3-56. Ferguson, R. F. (2008). Helping students of color meet high standards. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 78-81). New York: New Press. Gndara, P., & Maxwell-Jolly, J. (2000). Teaching and Californias future: Preparing teachers for diversity: A dilemma of quality and quantity. Santa Cruz, CA: Linguistic Minority Research Institute, Education Policy Center, University of California Davis, and the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning. Gay, G. (2003). Developing cultural critical consciousness and selfreflection in preservice teacher education. Theory into Practice, 42(3), 181-187. Gonzalez, N. (2005, December). Policy as praxis: Theorizing community funds of knowledge. Paper presented at annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC. Gordon, C. (2009). Whats up with antiracist teaching? How preservice teachers define their responsibilities for serving students in a racially unequal world. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Grant, C. A., & Sleeter, C. E. (2007). Doing multicultural education for achievement and equity. New York: Routledge. Grant, C. A., Elsbree, A. R., & Fondrie, S. (2004). A decade of research on the changing terrain of multicultural education research. In J. A. Banks & C. A. McGee Banks (Eds.), Handbook of research on multicultural education (2nd ed., pp. 184207). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

223
Grant, L. W. (2006). Persistence and self-efficacy: A key to understanding teacher turnover. Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, 72(2), 50-54. Guinier, L., & Torres, G. (2002). The miners canary: Enlisting race, resisting power, transforming democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hollins, E., & Guzman, M. T. (2005). Research on preparing teachers for diverse populations. In M. Cochran-Smith & K. M. Zeichner (Eds.), Studying teacher education: The report of the AERA Panel on Research and Teacher Education (pp. 477-548). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Irvine, J. J. (2003). Educating teachers for diversity: Seeing with the cultural eye. New York: Teachers College Press. Johnson, S. M., & Birkeland, S. (2003). Pursuing a sense of success: New teachers explain their career decisions. American Educational Research Journal 40(3), 581-617. Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2002). How the way we talk can change the way we work: Seven languages for transformation. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. King, J. (1991). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the miseducation of teachers. Journal of Negro Education, 60(2), 133-146. Ladson-Billings, G. (1999). Preparing teachers for diverse student populations: A critical race theory perspective. Review of Research in Education, 24, 211-247. Ladson-Billings, G. (2008). Yes, but how do we do it? Practicing culturally relevant pedagogy. In W. Ayers, G. Ladson-Billings, G. Miche, & P. A. Noguera (Eds.), City kids, city schools: More reports from the front row (pp. 162-177). New York: New Press. Lamont, M. (2000a). The dignity of working men: Morality and the boundaries of race, class, and immigration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lamont, M. (2000b). The rhetoric of racism and anti-racism in France and the United States. In M. Lamont & L. Thevenot (Eds.), Rethinking comparative cultural sociology: Repertoires of evaluation in France and the United States (pp. 25-55). London: Cambridge University Press. Lin, L. J. (2007). (Mis-) Education into American racism. Teachers College Record, 109(7), 1725-1746. Lofland, J., & Lofland, L. (1995). Analyzing social settings: A guide to qualitative observation and analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Lucas, S. R. (2008). Constructing colorblind classrooms. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 62-66). New York: New Press. Luttrell, W. (2000). Good enough methods for ethnographic research. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 499-523. Luttrell, W. (2008). Responding to the N-word. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 274-278). New York: New Press. Mansbridge, J., & Flaster, K. (2007). The cultural politics of everyday discourse: The case of Male Chauvinist. Critical Sociology, 33(4), 627-660.

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

224
Mukhopadhyay, C. (2008). Getting rid of the word Caucasian. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 12-16). New York: New Press. Nieto, S. (2000). Affirming diversity: The sociopolitical context of multicultural education. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Nieto, S. (2000). Placing equity front and center: Some thoughts on transforming teacher education for a new century. Journal of Teacher Education, 51(3), 180-187. Nieto, S. (2008). Nice is not enough: Defining caring for students of color. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 28-31). New York: New Press. OConnor, C. (1997). Dispositions toward (collective) struggle and educational resilience in the inner city: A case analysis of six African-American high school students. American Educational Research Journal, 34(4), 593-629. Pollock, M. (2004a). Colormute: Race talk dilemmas in an American school. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pollock, M. (2004b). Race wrestling: Struggling strategically with race in educational practice and research. American Journal of Education, 111(1), 25-67. Pollock, M. (2008a). Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school. New York: New Press. Pollock, M. (2008b). Because of race: How Americans debate harm and opportunity in our schools. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pollock, M. (2009). Refining race consciousness: Clarifying what antiracist educators think about. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Rothstein, R. (2004). Class and schools: Using social, economic, and educational reform to close the BlackWhite achievement gap. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute. Schwab, J. J. (2004). The practical: A language for curriculum. In D. J. Flinders & S. J. Thornton (Eds.), The curriculum studies reader (pp. 103-118). New York: Routledge. Silverstein, M. (1981). The limits of awareness. Sociolinguistic Working Paper No. 84. Austin, TX: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory. Tatum, B. D. (2007). Can we talk about race? And other conversations in an era of school resegregation. Boston: Beacon Press. Taylor, A. (2008). Teaching and transcending basic skills. In M. Pollock (Ed.), Everyday antiracism: Getting real about race in school (pp. 86-89). New York: New Press.

Journal of Teacher Education 61(3)


Taylor, A. (2009). The good teacher: How the professional gets personal in one group of preservice teachers conversations about race. Unpublished manuscript, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Villegas, A., & Lucas, T. (2002). Educating culturally responsive teachers: A coherent approach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ware, H., & Kitsantas, A. (2007). Teacher and collective efficacy beliefs as predictors of professional commitment. Journal of Educational Research, 100(5), 303-310. West, C. (1993). Race matters. Boston: Beacon Press. Willig, C. (2001). Introducing qualitative research in psychology (pp. 87-105). New York: McGraw Hill. Zeichner, K. M. (1992, September). Educating teachers for cultural diversity. NCRTL Special Report. Est Lansing, MI: National Center for Research on Teacher Learning. (ERIC Document Reproduction Service No. ED359167)

About the Authors


Mica Pollock, an anthropologist of education, studies how people discuss and address everyday issues of diversity and opportunity in education. Her books (Colormute [2004], Because of Race [2008], and the edited Everyday Antiracism [2008]) invite educators to consider optimal ways of addressing race issues in their everyday work. Sherry Deckman is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research interests include how teachers are prepared and supported to work with students from diverse race, class, and gender backgrounds and how difference is negotiated in educational settings. Meredith Mira is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research focuses on the development of sociopolitical awareness among high schoolaged youth who are organizing to improve their communities and their schools. She is currently part of a research team studying six community-based organizations across the United States that are working to reform education. Carla Shalaby is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is interested in how children and their teachers both construct and challenge the meanings of difference in the everyday context of classrooms. She is currently the visiting director of elementary education at Brown University.

Downloaded from jte.sagepub.com at MICHIGAN STATE UNIV LIBRARIES on December 23, 2010

You might also like