Wrestling with Whiteness: Complexities and Contexts of White Educator Identities
2022-05
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Wrestling with Whiteness: Complexities and Contexts of White Educator Identities
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2022-05
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This study utilizes life history methodology to understand how White teachers develop racial awareness, and in turn, how this contributes to the makings of a White identity. Critical Whiteness Studies frames this work, and demands a nuanced, contextual, and intersectional understanding of how Whiteness functions both individually and systemically. This research advances scholarly understandings of enactments of Whiteness in a critical empirical way that deeply considers the complexities and tensions that White educators feel as they attempt to understand their role in a society that is marked by racism and structural oppression. This study begins by exploring the moments in childhood that delineated racial boundaries for the participants, and I offer insights into how White children begin to conceptualize race. As adults, the participants in this study chose the profession of education, thus exposing themselves to races, languages, cultures, and religions that were different from those in the insulated White world in which they grew up and built a life. For many of these educators, teaching was the first time they had been “exposed to difference.” This exposure complicated their prior notions of race, leading to conflicting and ambivalent feelings as they began to examine their own ideological considerations.
After grounding this study in the development of White racial awareness, I illuminate how situated and selective this awareness is. The educators in this study often made attempts to enact their racial awareness at school, but upon leaving school they either could not or would not enact that same awareness in their everyday lives. Here is where this study becomes especially critical to the field of Comparative and International Development Education (CIDE), as the themes of transracial adoption, sex tourism, immigration, and international volunteer-tourism surface as educators share stories pertaining to their understandings of race, racism, and Whiteness. These narratives demonstrate how local issues have a global resonance, and furthers recent arguments that an examination of Whiteness and its historical legacies of power, colonization, and domination are critical for the field of CIDE.
Finally, the teacher participants in this study share stories of the real and/or perceived social and emotional costs for their understandings of racism and their attempted solidarity with people of Color. As such, this dissertation advances current debates on the cost of racialized awareness to White people. This is an under-researched topic in Critical Whiteness Studies, but it is vitally important as it speaks to the reasons why White people are thwarted in their anti-racist attempts. This also speaks to the costs that are expounded on White people, both by individuals and society at large.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. May 022. Major: Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. Advisor: Roozbeh Shirazi. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 164 pages.
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Deutschman , Megan. (2022). Wrestling with Whiteness: Complexities and Contexts of White Educator Identities. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/241377.
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