Browsing by Subject "Critical Whiteness"
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Item Stories and Bodies: Reading and Writing White Femininity(2016-07) Coffee, AngelaThe histories and structures that undergird teachers’ positions in schools are deeply entrenched in colonial, racist, patriarchal and classist ways of being. The unique historical and political phenomenon of white women’s overwhelming presence in education has harnessed constructions of white femininity (as caring, innocent, and inherently good) to the colonial project of nation building. Tasked to legitimate and uphold hierarchies of power while remaining subservient to them, white women teachers have been disciplined and produced in particular ways. This contradiction lives in our bodies and through our stories. As a white woman teacher, I use critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2013) to engage with the question: What dangerous histories live in and through my schooled body? My study explores three important episodes in my relationship with teaching and learning and attempts to dynamically foreground different concerns (social class, race, and gender) in considering the entanglement of white femininity within them. This work illuminates the importance of stories and bodies in critical anti-racist work and uses stories as tools in intersectional analysis.Item A Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), theatrical inquiry into whiteness(2014-05) Tanner, Samuel JayeThe project was a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), theatrical investigation into whiteness. During the 2012-2013 school year, nearly 40 mostly white 9th-12th Grade students in a first-ring, suburban high school outside of St. Paul investigated whiteness. They researched whiteness in the fall, wrote a play in the winter, and produced it as the school's spring play.Using YPAR (Appadurai, 2006; Cammarota & Fine, 2008; Guishard, 2009; Morrell 2008) in concert with playbuilding pedagogies (Boal, 1979; Mandell & Wolf, 2003; Norris, 2009; Sawyer, 2003; Zipes, 2004), the students used data they generated in their research to inform their play.This project was designed from a critical whiteness perspective. Instead of using traditional white privilege pedagogy, white high school students participated in a teaching project that both acknowledged privilege and inquired into organizing logics of white supremacy. Students worked towards anti-racist action through the collaborative construction of a theatrical text.This dissertation presents the possibility and limitations of centering whiteness as a category of analysis in a high school context, the nature of sharing power between a high school teacher and a YPAR collective, and the implications of white people using a critical whiteness perspective to make sense of whiteness. It will argue that Thadeka's (1999) theorization of white shame should caution educators to approach whiteness work with nuance and care.