In this essay, we argue that teacher education is increasingly marginalizing the relevance of teacher subjectivity and recentering Whiteness, especially in its uptake of practice-based teacher education. Whereas teacher subjectivity has been pushed to the margins of recent conversations about teacher education—and has therefore narrowed our understanding of the ideological and practical affordances and constraints of practice-based teacher education—we show that it must be centered in teacher education and understood as fundamental to all teachers’ embodied practice. We draw from literature exploring critical Whiteness studies, raciolinguistics, poststructural understandings of teacher subjectivity, the experiences of teachers of Color and practice-based teacher education. By showing how a raciolinguicized teacher subjectivity has been marginalized, we simultaneously argue for the centrality of the role of subjectivity in shaping teaching and, therefore, in defining critical dimensions of what and how novice teachers need to learn.

Background Teacher education candidates are in different places in terms of developing their identities and relationships to equity and social justice. Various approaches have been taken within university-based teacher education programs to engage with candidates, wherever they are in this development. One such approach has been engaging or drawing on teachers’ own lenses, especially through challenging and understanding their racialized selves. Purpose This conceptual article examines how race-based caucuses (RBCs) in one teacher education program attempted to shift candidates’ understandings of their racialized selves as related to their teacher identities. Context RBCs were instituted in one elementary teacher education program to help White teacher candidates and candidates of Color construct critical teacher identities. Candidates were asked to participate in caucuses according to the ways they had been racialized within schools. Facilitators who demonstrated a willingness to sit with the work of engaging race and racialization led the caucuses. Observances For the candidates of Color, the “overwhelming presence of Whiteness” in the teacher education program and in the schools required the RBCs to focus on reframing deficit narratives of teachers of Color to an asset-based view of their value and contribution to the teaching profession. The RBC provided space for White teacher candidates to explore the consequences of Whiteness for their future identities as teachers and for the kinds of communities that they could and wanted to cultivate with students. Messiness and challenges abounded in both RBCs. Discussion and Reflections Emotions—and especially emotion labor—were central to RBCs. For teacher candidates of Color, facing one's own oppression was painful but also presented opportunities for them to articulate emotions and experiences in relatively safe spaces. In a different way, the RBCs resulted in significant emotional upheaval for White teacher candidates that shifted into deeper self-reflection and sense of awareness and allyship (for some)— although in a few cases, RBCs led to even deeper resistance. Conclusions Race-based caucusing is a messy and challenging practice that can provide opportunities to reflect constructively on emotions and produce emotional upheaval for teacher candidates. Teacher educators and programs must approach RBCs with an orientation toward hyperreflexivity.

This paper analyzes data from a Participatory Action Research project with four White women teachers who work in U.S. secondary schools that serve predominately students of color. This critical analysis examines the consequences of the White women teachers’ racialized identities for the language practices, language teaching, and racialized language ideologies in their classrooms. In particular, this paper focuses on the teachers’ relationships to teaching their students of color to “code‐switch” to English language practices deemed “standard.” This paper uses the White teachers’ relationships to teaching code‐switching to their students of color as a prism through which to explicate the entangling of race and language in classrooms.

Purpose -Discourses of racism have always circulated within US classrooms and, in the current sociopolitical climate, they move with a renewed sense of legitimacy, entitlement and violence. This paper aims to engage the consequences of these shifts for the ways that racism works in university-based classrooms and, more specifically, through the authors' own teaching as White language and literacy educators.Design/methodology/approach -This teacher narrative reconceptualizes moments of racialized violence in the courses, as constructed via circulating discourses of racism. The authors draw attention to the ways that we, as White educators, authorize and are complicit in this violence.Findings -This paper explicates a praxis of questioning, developed through efforts to reflect on our complicity in and responsibility for racial violence in our classrooms. The authors offer this praxis of questioning to other White language and literacy teachers as a heuristic for sensemaking with regard to racism in classrooms.Originality/value -The authors situate this paper within a broader struggle to engage themselves and other White educators in work for racial justice and invite others to take up this praxis of questioning as an initial step toward examining the authors' complicity inand authorization ofdiscourses of racism.It is the middle of the quarter in a small, graduate-level seminar on adolescent literacies. As usual, the instructor invited students to respond to the day's reading, a study of the literacy practices of Black teenage girls. Alan, a White[1] man in his mid-20s, spoke first: "I was really frustrated by this reading! I don't see myself in it, so frankly I don't have much to say about it. I don't understand why we are reading about the literacies of such a small portion of the population."The instructor, a White woman, paused, uncomfortable in the silence that followed and unsure of what to do next. Holding back tears, Marisol (one of three students of color in the seminar) pushed her chair back and left the room.This scenario is a loose representation of Heather's (the second author's) teaching experience. As White women who teach racially heterogeneous university courses rooted in socio-cultural understandings of language and literacy, this scenario reflects many of the perspectives we have heard from White students in our classes. These perspectives are harmful and perpetuate powerful discourses of racism and racialized violence.In this essay, we explore our complicity in and responsibility for moments of racialized violence that regularly emerge in our classrooms. In focusing on "moments of racialized violence," we examine instances in which White students vocalize experiences, beliefs or feelings that delegitimize people of colors' experiences, knowledge and scholarship concerning racism and recenter White perspectives. While these moments raise a number of important questions for us, as White educators who aspire to anti-racist pedagogies -How might we support our students of ETPC 17,1