Disrupting the best of intentions. towards becoming an anti-oppressive educator: locating and interrogating whiteness in teacher education programs

UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
Erin Brownlee Dell (Creator)
Institution
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
Advisor
Leila Villaverde

Abstract: A purpose of this dissertation is to understand how pre-service teachers locate and problematize their whiteness within teacher education programs. This dissertation studied and attempted to locate these curricular "interventions" by analyzing selected teacher education program curricula, interviewing pre-service education students and their teachers in UNCG ELC 381 and interrogating the researcher's positionality as a white student/scholar/researcher through a critical autoethnography. Employing a feminist and post-formalist framework, the researcher looked for self-reflective practices within teacher education curricula, opportunities to unlearn and examine student intentions, how teacher education programs can construct and facilitate the point of intervention and how these interventions are sustained towards an ongoing critical self-reflective practice. The research revealed limited opportunities for critical self-reflection of white pre-service teachers, thereby maintaining the status quo. Through a deeper examination of "ruptures" within the curriculum and through the critical autoethnography, the researcher proposes a move towards a pedagogy of conocimiento, in the tradition of Gloria AnzaldĂșa, to sustain initial confrontations of whiteness and inform the practice of anti-oppressive educators.

Additional Information

Publication
Dissertation
Language: English
Date: 2014
Keywords
Critical Whiteness, Gloria Anzaldua, Teacher Education, White Privilege
Subjects
Teachers $x Training of $z United States
Teachers, White $z United States
Racism in education $z United States

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