Structuring Disruption within University-Based Teacher Education Programs1: Possibilities and Challenges of Race-Based Caucuses

Abstract

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.

ELA as English Language Abolition: Toward a Pedagogy of Communicative Belonging

“…Race-based caucuses, having originated in the field of mental health, are designed as spaces for healing. Varghese et al (2019) applied the concept of race-based caucuses as an opportunity to engage in intrapersonal work collectively, showing that race-based caucuses in teacher education can facilitate much-needed intrapersonal work. Race-based caucuses create conditions in which those of shared racial identities and affinities can understand their own complicity in enacting different types of microaggression-microassaults, microinsults, and/or microinvalidations-toward themselves and others.…”

“…For example, Varghese and colleagues describe white pre‐service teachers exploring their own whiteness intrapersonally, considering consequences of their whiteness to their future teaching and characteristics of the classrooms and communities they wanted to cultivate with students. As typifies intrapersonal processes, emotional labor is at the core of race‐based caucuses, entangled with self‐reflection and self‐awareness (Varghese et al, 2019).…”

Emotional Geographies of Exclusion: Whiteness and Ability in Teacher Education Research

“…This reflexive analytic process requires teacher educators to also contend with the emotional geographies of exclusion of which they are a part and can help teacher educators in identifying how they might disrupt such emotional processes in their everyday interactions. Through race-based caucusing in teacher education contexts (Varghese et al, 2019), researchers and TCs can examine how they have been racialized in relation to ability in and through schools. Interrogating how whiteness and ability as property have been wielded historically and contemporarily (Annamma et al, 2013), researchers and TCs might explicitly connect these harmful realities to their own emotional relationships with ability.…”

Defying “those who cannot, teach” and other stereotypes about teachers: Analyzing the Just Because poems written by ELL teacher candidates

“…There have been ample studies using autobiographies and autoethnographies for teachers’ reaffirmation of identities (Canagarajah, 2020; Park, 2013; Varghese, Daniels, & Park, 2019; Yazan, 2019; Yazan, Canagarajah, & Jain, 2020; Yazan & Lindahl, 2020). Among them, Yazan (2019) explored using autoethnography to investigate language ideologies and identity positions and found that ideological binaries had been destabilized as the participant constructed her teacher identity through narrative (p. 1).…”