A Visibility

American Educational Research
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A Visibility Project: Learning to See How Preservice Teachers Take Up

Culturally Responsive Pedagogy
Anne Ruggles Gere, Jennifer Buehler, Christian Dallavis and Victoria Shaw Haviland
Am Educ Res J 2009 46: 816 originally published online 20 March 2009
DOI: 10.3102/0002831209333182
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American Educational Research Journal

September 2009, Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 816852
DOI: 10.3102/0002831209333182
2009 AERA. http://aerj.aera.net
A Visibility Project: Learning to See How

Preservice Teachers Take Up Culturally
Responsive Pedagogy
Anne Ruggles Gere
University of Michigan
Jennifer Buehler
Saint Louis University
Christian Dallavis
University of Notre Dame
Victoria Shaw Haviland
University of Michigan
This study analyzes the ways in which raced consciousness inflects develop
ing understandings of cultural responsiveness among preservice teachers
whose preparation included responses to imaginative engagement with liter
ary texts, interactions in an underresourced school, and exploration of key
concepts of culturally responsive pedagogy. The authors analyze how this
preparation created spaces that made the diverse and complex understand
ings of cultural responsiveness held by teacher candidates and instructors
visible and how raced consciousness shaped these understandings. Findings
suggest that incorporation of multicultural literary texts, continual interro
gation of attitudes toward race and racism, and explicit engagement with
raced consciousness fosters learning about how beginning teachers take up
cultural responsiveness, given the persistent stereotypes and the raced con
sciousness that shape their language and perceptions.
Keywords: racial identity, teacher education, teacher development, discourse processes, case studies
eacher education in the United States has been responding to the challenge posed by the demographic imperative (Banks & Banks, 1993,
2004; Dilworth, 1992; Nieto, 2000) of an increasingly diverse school populationand a largely White teacher corpsfor more than a decade. The most
widely accepted responses advocate culturally relevant pedagogy or culturally responsive teaching (Brown, 2002; Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994,
2001). Each nuances its terms differently, but all emphasize that teachers who
practice culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP) share common concerns: the
A Visibility Project: Learning to See

development of cultural competence, which entails learning about, valuing,
and bringing into the classroom the cultural resources of students; maintaining high expectations for academic achievement for all students; and adopting a social justice agenda in the classroom. While the literature describes
teachers who demonstrate facility with CRP, there is little research on the
processes by which preservice teachers develop and demonstrate cultural
responsiveness, the fundamental orientation toward teaching that underlies
this pedagogy. Promising directions appear in Lazar (2004), who followed a
group of interns in a culturally responsive field experience, and Seidl (2007),
who showed how prospective teachers explore and personalize cultural and
political knowledge.
We build on and depart from this work through a close analysis of the
ways in which raced consciousness inflects developing understandings of
cultural responsiveness. We define raced consciousness as a way of seeing
the world through race even when one is not consciously aware of race.
Raced consciousness shares some attributes with what J. King (1991) calls
dysconscious racism, but while dysconscious racism justifies inequality by
accepting the given order, raced consciousness refers to the more pervasive
lens that race establishes, even when persons are consciously trying to be
antiracist. Without an awareness of raced consciousness, it is easy for
instructors and students alike to underconceptualize how beginning teachers
encounter and develop understandings of cultural responsiveness, especially
as those understandings are inflected by race.1 This study shows how
preservice teachers and we, their White teacher educators, interacted with
Anne Ruggles Gere is Gertrude Buck Collegiate Professor, professor of education, and professor of English at the University of Michigan, School of Education, 610
E. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109; e-mail: argere@umich.edu. Her research,
which has been funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Spencer
Foundation, focuses on relationships between literacy practices and identity formation, particularly among marginalized populations. She recently published (with
Daniel Berebitsky) Perspectives on Highly Qualified English Teachers in Research
in the Teaching of English (2009).
Jennifer Buehler is an assistant professor of English education at Saint Louis
University, 210 Fitzgerald Hall, 3500 Lindall Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63103; e-mail:
jbuehler@slu.edu. Her research focuses on teacher education and the production of
school culture in urban and underresourced schools.
Christian Dallavis is program director of the Notre Dame Magnificat Schools and
an assistant professor at the Institute for Educational Initiatives at the University of
Notre Dame, 154 IEI Building, Notre Dame, IN 46556; e-mail: Dallavis.1@nd.edu. His
research focuses on culturally responsive teaching and urban Catholic schools.
Victoria Shaw Haviland is coordinator of English education at the University of
Michigan School of Education, 610 E. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109; e-mail:
vhavilan@umich.edu. Her research interests include critical studies of whiteness,
culturally responsive pedagogy, and teacher education. She recently published
Things Get Glossed Over: Rearticulating the Silencing Power of Whiteness in
Education in Journal of Teacher Education (2008).
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Gere et al.
and constructed understandings of cultural responsiveness and how these
negotiations were inflected by the durable raced consciousness of all
participants.
This work strengthens the research base in teacher education and supports educational reform dealing with the complex issues associated with
race and power (Au, 2002; Cochran-Smith, 1995b; Obidah, 2000; Obidah &
Teel, 2001). The guiding questions for the portion of our study reported here
were as follows:

How does the raced consciousness of students impact their views of themselves and others as they seek to develop culturally responsive teaching
stances?
How does raceboth of instructors and studentsinflect responses to and
understandings of the cultural competence dimension of CRP?
In the following sections, we review literatures on race, multicultural literature, and positioning theory, all of which contribute to the theoretical
grounding of our study.
Theoretical Framework
Race
We begin from assumptions informed by critical race theory: that racism
is so ingrained in our nations social and institutional structures as to be
almost invisible, that the experiences of Whites should not be accepted as
normative, and that racism affects every aspect of education (Bell, 2002;
Feagin, 2006). In addition, like Winant (1997), we give no credence to the
view that colorblindness can eradicate racism. As researchers, we aim to
illuminate the ways race and racism shape teacher education, both for
students and instructors (Delgado, 1995). We recognize that this is difficult
because both Whites and people of color too often remain silent about race,
even when they are aware of their own resistance to race talk (CochranSmith, 1995a, 1995b).
Our thinking about raceand the silences that surround itis informed
by the literature of critical studies of Whiteness, which explains how White
identity is shaped by power that is usually ignored or denied (Fine, Weis,
Powell, & Wong, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993; Roediger, 2002). This literature
demonstrates that Whites often have little significant personal contact with
people of color (Frankenberg, 1993), frequently employ discourses of
colorblindness and meritocracy to deny their power (Frankenberg, 2001;
Morrison, 1992; Paley, 1989; Powell, 1997), may set up good Whitebad
White paradigms to suggest that Whites other than themselves are responsible
for White racism (McIntyre, 1997), and may employ White educational
discourses to gloss over issues of race, racism and White supremacy in
ways that reinforce the status quo, even when they have a stated desire to
do the opposite (Haviland, 2008, p. 41).
818

Students of color can be silenced when classes in White-dominated
institutions do little to acknowledge or respect their experiences (Feagin,
Vera, & Imani, 1996). Furthermore, students of color sometimes attempt to
avoid misunderstandings by appearing to be raceless (Fordham, 1988).
African American students in teacher education programs located in
predominantly White universities often feel marginalized, and White students
are frequently unwilling and/or unable to discuss race (Ladson-Billings,
1996; Pleasants, 2003). Critical race theory led us to expect that race would
inflect the ways students understood cultural responsiveness as well as how
we as White instructors engaged with their understandings.
What we did not expect was the extent to which raced consciousness
would influence our presentation of the core elements of CRP. In planning
the Schooling and Society course, we intended to explore all three aspects
of CRPacademic achievement, sociopolitical awareness, and cultural
competencebut we found ourselves focusing on cultural competence to
the exclusion of the other two. Like the teachers studied by Chubbuck
(2004), we participated in a continued enactment of Whiteness by privileging
our perceptions of race, despite our stated intentions.
Approaches to Multicultural Literature
Critical race theorys assertion of the value of using literary narrative
knowledge and story-telling to challenge the existing social construction of
race (Lynn & Parker, 2006, p. 260) led us to use imaginative literature in our
efforts to engage students in explorations of CRP. In particular, we saw the
possibility of finding in imaginative literature what critical race theory calls
counternarrative. We turned to multicultural literature (Colby & Lyon, 2004;
Glazier & Seo, 2005), recognizing, of course, that not everything included in
this category would provide counternarratives to challenge the status quo.
We chose literary selections whose counternarratives represented voices
typically absent from the traditional canon, and we included film, illustrated
narratives, memoir, poetry, and fiction that represented aspects of schooling
for persons from marginalized U.S. populations.
In making our choices, we had to acknowledge that some researchers
have found that multicultural literature helps shape perspectives on race and
culture, while others suggest it generates student resistance. Multicultural
literature can do cultural work (Hines, 1997), it can break ordinary frames of
understanding (Florio-Ruane, 2001), it can help teachers become committed
to more equitable education for students of color (Paccione, 2000), and it
can help readers develop ethical respect for others because it leads them
to adopt the perspectives of literary characters who are very different from
them and, in so doing, begin to appreciate and perhaps even to apply
those perspectives (Smith & Strickland, 2001, p. 138).
In contrast, other researchers have found that students resist multicultural
literature by focusing on themselves rather than on issues raised by the text
(Beach, 1997; Dasenbrock, 1987; Sharpe, Mascia-Lees, & Cohen, 1990;
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Gere et al.
Vanderploeg, 2006). A related problem is that multicultural literature can
foster what Sleeter (1994) describes as literary tourism, affective response
that does not extend beyond passive empathy. Affective responses of this
sort do not enable students to think systematically about difference or to
begin to question and/or change their own views (Boler, 1999).
One explanation for this difference in outcomes lies in the pedagogies
used. Dong (2005), Enciso, Rogers, and Marshall (1997), and Rogers (1997)
suggest that the decontextualized perspective and close reading characteristic
of the approach called New Criticism tends to silence student dialogue and
foster resistance because it focuses on finding meanings in the text, thereby
limiting students engagement with critical life issues raised by multicultural
literature. Reader response (Bleich, 1987; Tompkins, 1980), the most
commonly used pedagogical approach with multicultural literature (J. D.
Marshall, 1998), positions readers as active meaning makers who (re)create
literary texts for themselves, but it can lead students to assume that reflecting
on their own perspectives and experiences is sufficient for developing
genuine understanding of others.
Accordingly, we selected a pedagogy based on positioning theory
because we hoped to evoke both affective and cognitive responses. Our
choice was guided by claims like Bolers (1999) about the powerful
relationship between education and an individuals emotional investments
and by Nussbaums (2001) assertion that emotions are central to knowing.
We also drew on research by Trainor (2005), who demonstrates that emotions
play a key role in the persuasive appeal of racism; therefore, antiracist
pedagogies need to include affective as well as cognitive dimensions.
Student Positioning
One of the challenges of developing cultural responsiveness, especially
for Whites, is seeing others in their own light (Howard, 2006, p. 79), which
means understanding their perspectives, a critical element in the development
of a culturally responsive teaching stance. Positioning theory describes the
ways people use discursive practices to take on various positions and assign
positions to others (Davies & Harre, 1990; Harre & van Lagenhove, 1999).
The study of literature frequently leads students to articulate positions on
issues that extend beyond the classroom and into their social world (Knoeller,
1998; Nystrand, 1997; Wortham, 2001).
Positioning occurs most commonly in face-to-face communication, but
it is also present in writing (Clark & Ivanic, 1997). What position-assigned
students write is embedded in what Harre and van Lagenhove (1999) call
story lines, or predictable dramatic scenes derived from mainstream culture.
Writing in response to a multicultural literary text can reveal some of what
students believe about their position in the world relative to the positions of
others. Raced consciousness inflects those beliefs and, in turn, shapes the
ways students position themselves in response to multicultural literature.
820
Context of the Study

Teachers for Tomorrow (TFT)
Our study was conducted in TFT, a program for prospective secondary
school teachers from multiple disciplines committed to careers in urban and/
or underresourced schools. All TFT students underwent an additional
admissions procedure after they were accepted into the universitys regular
teacher education program and added TFT requirements to the standard
certification courses. As part of their application, TFT students wrote essays
describing their commitments to working in underresourced schools.
In these essays, we saw racially inflected differences. Most White applicants
described themselves as anxious to make a difference in the lives of students
whom they saw as needing guidance and support. One typical statement read,
Too often our urban children seem to be left behind in a White dominated
culture.... I want these students to realize that they do have a voice in society.
Most African American applicants expressed similar commitments but
emphasized their familiarity with underresourced schools. Although they often
portrayed themselves as models for African American students with statements
like I am a product of urban high-need schools and can relate to the students
there. I want to bring to them a positive image as a person who has traveled
the same road they are on now, African American applicants identified with
students in high-need schools in ways that their White peers did not. All of the
applicants, regardless of race, expressed significant emotional investments in
enacting principles of social justice, and these investments found further
expression in their position-assigned writing.
Course Work
TFT requirements included a one-semester Study Group, focused on
consideration of students own identities and the challenges and opportunities
afforded by underresourced schools. During this semester, students also
tutored in TFTs partner school, a Title I high school serving a racially diverse,
working-class community. The next semester, TFT students took Schooling
and Society, an English course that included both cognitive and affective
dimensions. The more cognitively oriented part of the course included reading
texts like Brown (2002), Delpit (1997), Ferguson (2000), and Ladson-Billings
(2001), which introduced concepts central to cultural responsiveness; hearing
the perspectives of guest speakers from our partner school; and conducting a
9-week student-community interaction project in our partner school. The
affective dimension of Schooling and Society included weekly journal writing
as well as reading and responding to multicultural literature texts through
position-taking assignments and accompanying self-reflections. (See Appendix
A for a descriptive list of texts.) Students were required to write in response to
each literary selection, and every assignment asked them to write in creative
genres that Rosaen (2003) describes as participatory spaces where students
can explore aspects of their own often unconscious perceptions.
821
Gere et al.
Because Smith and Strickland (2001) found that students were more
willing to address complex issues like race when they wrote from perspectives
other than their own, our assignments typically asked students to write as
someone older and more experienced than themselves or from a different
racial or socioeconomic background. All positions were embedded in story
lines familiar to students. For example, one assignment asked students to
imagine you are the parent of a student assigned to read this text in class
and write a letter to the teacher explaining your reaction to the text. Another
read, Imagine you are a character in this text. Write a poem about your
experiences and perspectives. (See Appendix B for descriptions of each
assignment.)
The reflective portion of the assignment asked students to explain the
meaning they made of the literary text and how that meaning contributed to
their position taking. Reflective thinking enables movement past dogmatic
assertions or restatements of personal beliefs without consideration of other
positions and evidence (P. M. King & Kitchener, 2004). Because reflective
thinking supports negotiation with complex issues, it can help address
difficult questions about race (Lindsey, Roberts, & Campbell Jones, 2004).
Indeed, students appreciation for diversity is strongly predicted by their
capacity for reflective thinking (Guthrie, King, & Palmer, 2000).
We assumed, then, that examining student positioning in written
responses to multicultural literature, along with written reflections on these
responses, could provide insights into how students of different races enacted
culturally responsive stances as they wrote and talked about urban teaching.
By taking on assigned positions related to literary texts, accessing and
(potentially) modifying the available discursive resources of story lines, and
drawing upon their own emotional investmentsall inherent in positioning
students could make visible to themselves and to their instructors something
about the people they were and the educators they wished to become.
Research Team
The course was cotaught by two members of the research team. Gere, a
professor of English and of education, is the director of TFT. An experienced
middle school and high school teacher, she has held her current faculty position
for nearly 20 years, and she has worked in teacher education throughout her
career. A White woman who is the adoptive mother of children of color, she has
long been concerned about issues of race in both personal and professional
terms. Haviland, a White woman who had recently received her PhD, wrote an
award-winning dissertation on discourses of Whiteness. Before she entered
graduate school, Haviland taught in the Mississippi Teacher Corps as well as in
schools in metropolitan Washington, D.C. During graduate school, she held
several positions in the teacher education program, and she currently holds a
postdoctoral research position and serves as assistant director of TFT. Gere and
Haviland planned the Schooling and Society course together and shared
responsibility for teaching it.
822

The other two members of the research team were also involved in the
Schooling and Society course. Buehler, a White female graduate student in
the Joint PhD Program in English and Education (JPEE), served as TFT
liaison, facilitating communication between the university and the project
partner school. An experienced high school English teacher who worked in
both underresourced and affluent suburban schools before she entered
graduate school, Buehler regularly attended class sessions of Schooling and
Society to share insights from her fieldwork in the partner school, to introduce
school staff members who came to the class as guest speakers, and to write
field notes on each class session. Dallavis, a White male who was, at the time
of the study, a graduate student in JPEE, taught internationally and served as
an administrator in a religiously affiliated national program focused on
providing teachers for high-need urban schools before he entered graduate
school. He coordinated the tutoring program that was part of the project and
served as university supervisor for project participants who did their student
teaching during the 2006 winter term. Although Dallavis did not attend class
regularly, he had interactions with all students in the Schooling and Society
course. All members of the research team thus shared a background of
teaching in middle or high school, had experience with underresourced
schools like our partner school, identified as White and middle to uppermiddle class, and shared a commitment to progressive education.
Methods
Data Collection
We collected extensive data during 4 years of the TFT program. For the
portion of the study represented here, we focused on the 2005-2006 cohort,
which enrolled 12 White students and 3 students of color during the winter
2006 Schools and Society course. We collected program applications, weekly
journal entries, audiotapes, and detailed field notes from 14 three-hour class
sessions, 17 written assignments, and interviews with 4 focal students. Each
aspect of our data corpus is elaborated below.

The TFT application provided personal information, two brief essays about
students commitments and goals, and, for students seeking scholarship
support, a financial statement.
Journal entries began with biweekly entries in the fall 2005 Study Group
and continued with weekly entries during the winter 2006 Schools and
Society course. Prompts asked students to reflect on their learning from
class activities and discussions, to articulate their developing understanding
of CRP, and to reflect on their identities, backgrounds, and ways of seeing
the world.
Written assignments included eight literary position-taking assignments and
reflections, six short essays on the student-community interaction project,
a letter detailing what they learned in the student-community interaction
project, and a final poem that presented the perspectives of their focal student and themselves as beginning teachers.
823
Gere et al.

An hour-long semistructured audiotaped interview with each of 4 focal

students, conducted after the Schooling and Society course ended, focused
on students experiences with course activities and assignments as well as
their experiences tutoring and teaching in our partner school.
Finally, our data corpus was rounded out by informal anecdotes, written as
field notes, about our focal students experiences while student teaching at
our partner school; weekly reflections written by course instructors; and
students anonymous course evaluations.
Data Analysis
We followed C. Marshall and Rossmans (1999) stages in analyzing all
our data: organizing, coding, generating categories, testing emerging
categories, and searching for alternative hypotheses and explanations. All
four research team members read the entire corpus of a given data set before
beginning coding. Each researcher then reread and coded the texts under
consideration, following Strauss and Corbins (1990) open to axial coding
schema. Team members exchanged frequent theoretical memos (Emerson,
Fretz, & Shaw, 1995) on the coding and analysis in progress, which we
circulated and discussed in regular meetings.
Because the theoretical framework of the Schooling and Society course
emphasized positioning and critical race theory, we coded our data to
identify instances when students most clearly positioned themselves and
others in relation to racial identity and racial difference. We collapsed and
grouped codes until we had a set of persistent and unique codes concerning
racial identity, racial self-positioning, and raced consciousness in the
presentation and enactment of cultural responsiveness. In our research
meetings, we sought both confirming and disconfirming evidence for our
hypotheses, and we frequently pushed back on each others analyses. In
short, we found that our pooled judgment (Merriam, 1998, p. 204) enriched
our research processes and led us to a more complex and multifaceted
analysis than any one of us might have conducted independently.
We are keenly aware that our backgrounds as White middle-class
persons with commitments to progressive education shaped the way we
designed TFT and this study. More significantly, our own race and class
positions inevitably shaped the ways we analyzed the data, as we will explain
below. In particular, we found ourselves constructing race-inflected
interpretations of the performances of our students. For example, in one
draft of this article, we described the response of an African American student
to Boondocks as lacking the erudite and progressive diction and style of
the character under discussion. We later realized that our description of the
writing reflected our impatience with a student who interpreted Boondocks
differently. Because this student did not share our reading of Boondocks as
erudite and progressive, we responded by focusing on the limitations we
found in the students writing rather than on his critique of Boondocks.
824

We have also come to realize the extent to which our own raced
consciousnessin particular, our Whitenessimpacted how we presented
CRP to our students. Having taught Schooling and Society for several years
with various changes of focus, we had become convinced that of the three
aspects of CRP described by Ladson-Billings (2006), cultural competence
needed more focus than academic achievement or sociopoliticial
consciousness. Donald, the student we used to remind ourselves of this
focus, was an outspoken and opinionated White student who entered TFT
proclaiming himself as a savior who would, with his intellect, teaching skills,
and character, rescue inner-city youth from poverty, broken homes, and
countless other deficits. His testimony in class often left instructors and other
students dumbfounded, not knowing where to begin to interrogate his
unapologetic mission. By the end of the course, despite public and private
challenging and questioning, Donald remained steadfast in these views and
recommended Dangerous Minds, a film we had shown in order to critique
it, as required viewing for prospective teachers of urban youth.
Because of Donald and others like him, we decided to focus much more
on critical identity work and meaningful interactions with people in urban
and underresourced schools and communities, both foci that we believed
would foster cultural competence. While we knew we would have to limit
activities and discussions related to academic achievement and sociopolticial
consciousness accordingly, we could not stomach the thought of Donald
and others entering urban schools with still-uninterrogated and stereotypical
views of their students and communities believing that they were practicing
cultural responsiveness.
Our analysis of the role of raced consciousness in our students work has
led us to realize that this focus on cultural competence and concomitant
diminishing of other aspects of CRPacademic achievement and sociopolitical
consciousnesswas influenced by our Whiteness. We were persuaded by the
demographic imperative that our White preservice teachers had a lot to learn
to be prepared to teach ever-increasing numbers of students of color. As a
result, we unconsciously continued to emphasize what we felt our White
students needed to learn, thus minimizing topics such as language diversity that
our students of color found compelling, complex, and personally fraught.
While we have made our racial identities and race-inflected responses
to White students and students of color part of the analysis presented here,
we are certain that there are many other instances where we remained
unaware of the ways our raced consciousness shaped our analysis.
Validity
We used several other strategies described by Lincoln and Guba (1985)
to enhance the validity of our analysis. First, we triangulated our data by
drawing from multiple sources, such as class assignments, field notes, class
transcripts, and interviews. Our collaboration included investigator
triangulation (Johnson, 1997), ensuring that four readers examined all the
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Gere et al.
data and brought a variety of perspectives to the work. We also strove to
provide thick description of our practices, our students, and their work so
that readers can understand the basis for our analysis. Finally, we followed
the member-checking process (Krefting, 1991) with the 2 students featured
in our case studies, changing details as they requested.
Case Studies
In order to learn more about how students of different races developed
understandings of cultural responsiveness, we chose 2 focal students out of
4 we followed to present as case studies. In the interest of considering the
experiences of both White students and students of color, our focal students
included Amber and Linda, both White women, along with Maia and
Brent, both African Americans.2 Because of their candor during class
discussions and their willingness to both reveal inner conflicts and challenge
instructors points of view, we selected Amber and Brent for this article.
Amber was a White woman who openly grappled with the influence of
racial stereotypes on her thinking about urban schools and cultural
responsiveness. Brent was an African American man whom we initially read
as resistant to several aspects of our approach to CRP. By selecting these two
students, we could consider both a White student and a student of color in
order to examine how raced consciousness shaped their responses to course
materials, assignments, classmates, and instructors. To construct their cases,
we revisited all the data and coding and chose illustrative examples to
convey the richness and complexity of the focal students experiences as
well as the layers of raced and developing understanding that we brought
as researchers to the analysis process.
Findings
Students written responses to assignments demonstrated that the
processes of encountering and developing understandings of cultural
responsiveness are complex and uneven. Moments of insight and movement
toward new perspectives are accompanied by blind spots and regressive
thinking. In an effort to illustrate the challenges we faced as White instructors
trying to see students understandings of cultural responsiveness, our two
case studies present a longitudinal perspective on each students experiences
and understandings. These cases demonstrate the complexity of seeing,
enacting, and assessing cultural responsiveness for beginning teachers and
for teacher educators, suggesting that raced consciousness is durable and
persistent and thus a more significant influence on students and instructors
alike than teacher educators might expect.
Four themes emerged from our analysis of the cases, each of which
sheds light on the racialized nature of encountering and developing understandings of cultural responsiveness.
826

First, students brought a raced consciousness to TFT, which surfaced in the

ways they positioned themselves in classroom interactions and interviews;
Second, raced consciousness gave students a heightened awareness of how
they were being read racially by others;
Third, raced consciousness shaped students responses to position-taking
assignments and our readings of those assignments; and
Fourth, raced consciousness shaped students processing of cultural
responsiveness.
Our analysis will also show how our own racialized views as White instructors and researchers shaped both TFT and our analysis in this study.
Case Study: Brent
We first encountered Brent, an African American math major, in the
praise of a colleague who worked with him in a tutoring program at our
partner school. She described Brent as a leader in the program, so we were
delighted when he applied to TFT. We were especially pleased for Brent to
join us because his racial identity added to the diversity of our program,
which Ladson-Billings (2001) and others have stressed is crucial for teacher
education, especially in programs focused on teaching students of color.
Brent brought a strongly raced consciousness to TFT. Early on, Brent demonstrated a strong sense of racial identity, particularly in the context of becoming a teacher. In his TFT application, he attributed his decision to become a
teacher to the racial dynamics of his own educational experience:
Throughout high school, I never had a minority teacher and to many
of my peers, this lack of representation gave the impression that
minorities COULD NOT TEACH! From my experience, I felt the need
to explore ways for me to contribute and help engage the next great
minority mind.
Here Brent demonstrated sensitivity to how he and other people of color

are perceived, a critical racial self-awareness that positioned Brent far from
the colorblindness that many of our White students claimed as ideal.3 As we
worked with Brent, we became increasingly aware of how he had developed
and maintained this self-awareness in his life and in our program.
Brent indicated that his racial self-awareness grew from his prior
experiences and his familys attitudes about schooling and race. Brent began
his public school education in an underresourced school district. However,
he transferred for high school to another district that his family believed
would provide better opportunities for higher education. He shared that
although he was pretty decent in [the original districts] schools... my
parents saw the need to challenge higher education for me, to go to a
school... that was better equipped to prepare students for institutions of
higher education.
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Gere et al.
The decision to move from one school district to another was explicitly
inflected by race, as Brent described the move from a predominantly Black
school to a predominantly White school. Brent and his family attributed his
eventual acceptance and enrollment at a competitive, nationally ranked
university to this racialized move, telling us, The testament to my moving
[schools] is my being here, at the university.... Im not sure that opportunity
would have been afforded to me at an urban school.
Raced consciousness heightened Brents awareness of being read by
others. Brent also shared that he was explicitly taught by his family to
consider how race mattered in his interactions, explaining, It was important
for my dad and uncles to tell me how the world was viewing me. Brent
described how he routinely felt his race being read by others in everyday
interactions, explaining that for an African American man at the university,
every day is an interview.
The power of racethat Brents racial identity impacted how he saw
himself, how others saw him, and how he saw others seeing himremained
important to Brent both in and out of the university classroom in the time
we knew him. He was aware of his frequent code switching as he drove
from his apartment in a predominantly African American community toward
the predominantly White university community. He described the feeling of
having to adjust his way of being if he were pulled over by police...
checking out at a Kroger . . . ask[ing] a question of an employee at a
restaurant. He explained that his need to flip the switch had played a
major role in his university experience: Thats the biggest education that Ive
had thus far, is knowing how to operate in different systems.
Brents awareness of how race has real, physical stakes attached to it was
supported by his experiences in communities both inside and outside of the
university. During the student-community interaction project, in which
students were asked to visit establishments in the neighborhood of our partner
school, Brent described an interaction that highlighted his racial oppression.
When he visited Moneyland, a high-interest payday lending establishment,
Brent was, unlike his White peers, treated as a prospective customer. Another
example occurred one evening when Brent missed almost an entire Study
Group meeting because he was picked up and questioned by campus police,
who were looking for a Black suspect. Brents experiences made it clear to
us that his raced consciousness was not just learned; it was lived.
Brent was also sensitive to how White students at our university saw
him as a racial spokesperson, a role he seemed to accept, although with
awareness of its burdens.
I feel like I have the weight of all the Black people... whenever I
open my mouth, I do speak for all Black people here.... I am one
of the few glimpses into the Black male perspective that White students get to see.
828

Brent shared how this awareness shaped his views of others and how those
views shaped his interactions in our classroom: I know when a red flag
is... I know when and where I can have an honest and forthright discussion... I know who the crowd is thats ready to hear.
Raced consciousness shaped Brents responses to assignments in TFT.
Brents position-taking assignments in response to multicultural literature
demonstrated the extent to which his raced consciousness shaped his
response to assignments and his enactment of cultural responsiveness. In
particular, Brents responses demonstrate how the insider status associated
with his raced consciousness led Brent to rely on some stereotypes that we
hoped to minimize through the TFT curriculum. In extensive review of our
students work, we came to realize that all of our students drew upon
stereotypes in many forms and for many conscious and unconscious
purposes. Students used stereotypes awkwardly, in order to demonstrate
increasing recognition and rejection of negative and limiting portrayals of
people of color and as a form of parody to demonstrate more sophisticated
awareness and rejection of such stereotypes. Brents racial identity and our
own White raced consciousness inflected how we responded to Brents use
of stereotypes and complicated our ability to see his raced understandings
of cultural responsiveness.
Brents response to Bambaras The Lesson provides an example. The
Lesson is told in the voice of a young urban African American girl from New
York City who is taken to visit FAO Schwartz with a group of peers by Miss
Moore, a self-designated extracurricular teacher who wants to expose the
children to socioeconomic inequality through the visit to the expensive toy
store. We used this text because Bambara offers a race- and class-based
critique of consumer culture. We also valued the narrators spirited, resistant,
and realistic voice because we felt it could give our students a representation
of how their future students might feel about their own well-intentioned
lessons.
In his response, Brent took the position of a newspaper reporter,
describing the childrens visit to FAO Schwartz as an incentive to change
store policies so that wealthy customers would not feel uncomfortable shopping there. Brents rationale for taking this stance demonstrated both his
facility with code switching and the raced consciousness he brought to
assignments and to the course. As the newspaper reporter, he wrote,
FAO Schwartz is close to establishing new customer policies following a field trip instituted by an inner-city group of students.... Store
representatives felt as if the daily operations of the store may have
been disrupted by the visiting inner-city students who may have
made some store patrons feel reluctant to spend on toys.
In his reflection he described why he made these choices:

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I felt that on an institutional level, we might find that the store would
incorporate new policies so that patrons dont feel bad spending so
much money on toys while others struggle to put food on the
table.... however by applying the changes on an institutional level,
there would be no one person to whom the general public could
direct questions concerning the move.
Brents response demonstrates a racial self-awareness that enabled him to

construct a multifaceted critique. His response shows keen insight and subtle awareness of how race and corporate self-interest impact how various
groups are represented.
Yet in this same savvy piece, Brent presented perspectives that we read
at first as distanced from cultural responsiveness. Still in the position of a
reporter, Brent described an interview with Sylvia and Sugar, two leading
characters in the story. In his reflection, he wrote, Sylvia perpetuated the
inner-city mindset and was a leader in shooting down the importance of
the trip. With inner-city mindset, Brent relied on a stereotype that
perpetuated the negative story line that persons who live in urban centers
lack interest in self-improvement. Brent continued by amplifying this
stereotype with another familiar story line. Mentioning that at one point in
the story, Sylvia steps on Sugars feet to get her to stop talking, Brent wrote,
In the Black community, this crab-barrel effect is often seen as instead of
supporting those talents held by peers, children (and adults) seem to
depredate [sic] the importance of knowledge and skills.
This example demonstrates how the durability and strength of raced
consciousness inflected not only Brents response to the perspective-taking
exercise; it also inflected how we responded to Brents work. Our White
raced consciousness compromised our ability to see or assess the nuances
in how Brent was developing understandings of cultural responsiveness.
Although we acknowledged the stereotype embedded in the phrase innercity mindset, Brents justification of it by linking it with a racial community
and class group of which we are not members made us hesitant to describe
his language as a stereotype, as we would have if a White student had used
it. We repeatedly revisited this piece as we developed a more complex
picture of Brent, and ultimately we came to see Brents use of the stereotype
as a reflection of his raced consciousness and his racially inflected
understanding of cultural responsiveness.
Another of Brents assignments demonstrates our difficulty seeing his
racially inflected understanding of cultural responsiveness as well as the
extent to which Brents raced consciousness continually impacted his processing of class content. When assigned to write a poem in response to
Boondocks, Brent chose to write in the voice of the African American protagonist of the comic strip, second-grade Black nationalist Huey. His poem
read, in part,
830

I do not understand
The culture Im in
Instead of reflecting,
Ill try upsetting
Everyone involved
Without trying to solve
I depict social pollution
Without a solution.
Brents poem stood out in at least two ways. First, he actively resisted
the assignment to write from the position of a character in the text. The Huey
in Boondocks uses a language of humor and progressive politics; it seems
unlikely that Huey would describe himself as not understanding his own
culture. On the contrary, Huey continually offers keen insights into the circumstances of African Americans. Second, in his portrayal of Huey, Brent
challenged the Boondocks character by invoking the stereotype of the ineffective activist and criticizing Hueys inability to do anything more than offer
social critiques.
Reflecting on his poem, Brent implicitly conceded his failure to write as
Huey would, even as he tried to convince himselfor his instructorsthat
he saw things from Hueys perspective:
I tried (I really did) to put all biases aside and write a poem which
reflected not only Hueys curiosity of social circumstance, but also an
ignorance of what to do about the situation he notes. As I revised the
wording, I began to see life through Hueys eyes as a young Black
man who sees injustice, but has no tool, apparatus or stage in which
to appropriately change the structure[s] that be.
Here Brents own critical reading of Huey became clear, along with its
link to Brents stake in a particular kind of African American racial identity.
Huey was unappealing to Brent because, from Brents perspective, Huey
lacked the tools to work for positive change. Brent did not see Hueys humor
as a resource. Rather, he saw it in negative terms, explaining,
As a Black man, sometimes it isnt all that funny to patronize and
ridicule the social (largely racial) problems that are faced on a day to
day basis. In creating a cartoon which pokes fun at the trials and
tribulations of the past, while not really creating a socially-motivated
dilemma either for the characters or the reader to ponder, I almost
disagree with the Boondocks simply on the grounds of intention.
As in his response to The Lesson, Brent expressed solidarity with those

who experience (largely racial)...trials and tribulations and showed impatience with the Huey character, whom he perceived as not offering a substantial response to these difficulties.
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In our initial analysis of Brents writing, we focused on what we saw as
the conservative nature of Brents responses, noting that he did not see
Hueys wit as a tool to work for social change. We contrasted Brents stance
with the more progressive Huey, and we read Brents response as calling
upon his insider status as an African American male in order to resist the
curriculum we had chosen. We had chosen Boondocks for precisely the
same reasons that Brent rejected it; it offers humorous critiques of the ways
White racism shapes interactions, and our assignment focused on portions
of the text that dealt with schooling.
Upon reflection, however, we began to see how our Whiteness led us to
position Brent in ways that allowed us to avoid challenging our choices of
texts and our interpretations of these texts. The White concern for creating a
culture of niceness (McIntyre, 1997, p. 46) and avoiding critique (Gomez,
Allen, & Clinton, 2004) seems to us now to have influenced our early reading
of Brent as a student. For his part, Brent expressed hesitation about challenging
a text we had selected. A sometimes qualifies his point that (largely racial)
problems are not always funny. Similarly, Brent couched his hesitations about
the entire Boondocks text with an almost. His sentence did not make it clear
whether he disagreed with our selection of Boondocks as a class text or
whether he disagreed with McGruders intentions, but either way, he expressed
considerable resistance to the text, even though he softened his statement with
an almost. Brent clearly knew that he was taking a risk by challenging the text
and/or our selection of it, but his racial solidarity with those who offer actual
dilemmas to ponder apparently led him to take that risk.
Raced consciousness shaped Brents processing of cultural responsiveness.
As we unpacked our layers of analysis of Brent, we realized that as his
racially inflected perspectives succeeded with and challenged our assignments,
he also forwarded perspectives on academic achievement, a core tenet of
CRP, that we did not fully explore in class. His opinions on Black English
demonstrate his concerns as well as our failure to recognize how we should
value and interrogate his racially inflected, experience-based views.
In class discussion, instructors drew on linguistics to argue that facility
in Black English should be seen as a resource and that students should be
taught code switching rather than see Black English as wrong. Brent, along
with other students of color, pushed back, testifying to the emotional and
real-world stakes attached to using Black English. As Brent put it, You go
to a teacher and they accept [use of Black English], but then they have that
view of you too. Brents position on Black English reflected more than just
strategic awareness of being read racially in educational institutions; his
response to the use of Black English by other Blacks was visceral. Describing
an experience of listening to a high school girl on the news saying, He be
donatin all the time, Brent said, It was so stressful and I. .. like inside [I
was] like a time bomb!
When revisiting the topic the following week, class instructor Haviland
suggested that the classroom should be a place where the stakes around
832

language use are lower than in a high-stakes job interview. Brent held firm
to his position, arguing that in his experience, the classroom does have high
stakes for students of color:
When youre an educated Black, you have the weight of uneducated
Blacks on you, especially at [the university].... All you have to do is
say, This aint what I turned in and its Marion Barry on crack
again... it sets the race back.
Although both Black and White guest speakers from our partner school
expressed a similar resistance to our take on Black English, we persisted in
viewing Brents position as linguistically unfounded, even as it raised questions about how Whiteness shaped our stance on Black English and academic
achievement and whether stereotype threat (Milner & Hoy, 2003) fueled the
passion with which Brent defended his position.4 Despite their persistent
challenges to the view of Black English we were presenting, we believed that
we had digested and synthesized the appropriate scholarship (cf. Baugh,
2002; Green, 2002; Smitherman, 2006) and concomitantly failed to take up
the ways that the lived experience of people of color complicated the issue
for them compared with us.
On the other hand, one of Brents last assignmentsa poem in two
voicesstood out from those of the other students in the class for its
demonstrations of cultural responsiveness. For this poem, students were to
write from two perspectivestheir own perspective as a beginning teacher
and that of a focal student they had worked with at our partner school over
several weeksabout their past, present, and future. Most of our students
did an adequate job with sharing what they had learned, considering how
their focal student might perceive the world around him or her and
considering some aspects of how their own teacherly identity was impacted
by their own cultures.
Brents poem not only showed that he could imagine his students cultural perspectives but also that he was analyzing his own teacherly persona
through his students perspective, a synthesis that we did not see in other
student writing. In the voice of his student, Brent wrote,
My teacher hates kids. Im still working on my English, so I wont
attempt rhyming. Im just describing a bastard. He gives 50 problems
for homework everyday and expects them done all the time. Just
cause were kids dont mean we dont have anything to do. Yesterday
was the last day of Ramadan and I had crap to do. He leads, but
doesnt listen. He cares, but is unaware. He cant teach math.
This ability to imagine the critique a student might have of him shows Brent
internalizing his students perspective and recognizing the impact that he,
Brent-the-teacher, could have on a student. Brents heightened racial selfawareness enabled him to imagine a similarly critical and race-conscious
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view from a students perspective. His self-critique through the students
perspective shows that Brent had an awareness of some of his own blind
spots and limitations, key indicators of cultural responsiveness and key predictors of Brents potential to enact it in the classroom.
Case Study: Amber
Like Brent, Amber also demonstrated a commitment to urban teaching
as a tutor in our partner school prior to joining TFT. A White social studies
major, Ambers vocal and passionate dedication to education as social justice, as seen in her application to TFT, was typical of many well-meaning
White students we worked with:
I want to teach in an urban/high need school because I want to help
make a difference in students lives who truly need it. I feel that every
student has the potential to be successful, they just need to be shown
how to be.
Ambers uncritical, unqualified desire to make a difference in the lives

of students who did not share her privileges placed her in a familiar White
savior story line that we sought to complicate so White students could see
the impact of race on their worldviews and interactions. Many of Ambers
early contributions to class discussion, coupled with her embrace of films
like Dangerous Minds as part of her inspiration for teaching, conveyed what
we characterized as a colorblind consciousness in White students.
Revisiting the layers of our analysis, however, and interrogating the role
that Whiteness played in our view of Amber led us to construct a more
complex portrait. The colorblind stance we saw in her and other White
students masked a strongly raced consciousness that largely eluded us
because it was not accompanied by explicit racial self-awareness.
Amber brought a strongly raced consciousness to TFT. Amber downplayed
her racial identity and experiences with racism in several early TFT activities.
During the Circles of Ourselves exercise in the second meeting of Study
Group,5 Amber described her most salient identities as employee, friend,
student-athlete, resident of a particular location, and family member, leaving
out her Whiteness and social class in favor of the relationships and activities
that defined her. Looking back on her experience as a student in a newly
desegregated high school, Amber noted that she and her non-White
classmates were either too scared or too stubborn to get to know each
other, attributing the resultant racial self-segregation not to racism but to the
fact that neither group had been around the other very often. Neither group
associated with the other or knew anything about the other.
While the self-positioning that students engaged in during activities like
these allowed us to assess their critical consciousness as individuals and as a
group, it also had the potential to obscure some of the ways in which students
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were simultaneously grappling with race-based questions. For example,

when Buehler introduced the community in which our partner school was
located, Amber commented that she had heard that [our partner school
community] was bad and wondered if it was predominantly Black.
Attending to the ways students used stereotypes made us aware of the
extent to which apparently nave questions like this revealed a fraughtbut
growingracial self-awareness. Ambers questions and comments about
stereotypes revealed an acute awareness of their pervasiveness and their
power, an awareness integrally linked to her thinking about race. Revisiting
the Circles of Ourselves activity during the third Study Group meeting, class
instructor Haviland asked students what they noticed about the summary
statements, such as Brents, which read, Im a Black man, but Im not
angry. Amber said, We know the stereotypes. When Haviland asked how,
Amber replied, You just know. After a guest speaker commented on our
partner schools reputation and accompanying negative expectations for its
students, Amber wondered in her journal, What is the difference between
a stereotype and the truth?
In questions like these, Amber demonstrated not an uncritical acceptance of stereotypes, as we first thought, but an increasing critical awareness
of the racial subtext beneath them and a desire to incorporate and act on
new information. Sometimes her attempts were awkward. During a discussion of the disproportionate disciplinary action applied to Black males, evident in both the research literature (Ferguson, 2000) and our partner school,
Amber said,
Im having trouble with statistics that say males are punished more. In
psychology we learned that males are more aggressive, so this research
is hard for me to grasp. Its horrible for me to say this as a teacher, but
boys act out more! The teacher is just punishing kids who act out!
As discussion ensued and Haviland argued that teachers are not neutral,
Amber admitted, Ive never seen it this way before.
The following week, when a guest speaker picked up this thread about
racially biased disciplinary practices, Amber asked, What can we do about
this? and twice wondered, How do you know youre being fair? Although
Amber both clung to and pushed back on race-based stereotypes, she also
sought ways to manage them and minimize their power in accordance with
her developing racial self-awareness.
Raced consciousness heightened Ambers awareness of being read by

others. As Amber explored the role that race played in her view of others, she
also showed a growing awareness of the role race played in others view of
her. Following a discussion of Black English, Amber remarked to Buehler after
class that [a Black female teacher at our partner school] always corrects
students, which is different from how if I did it, as a White woman. Several
weeks later, during a discussion of the tongue-in-cheek reference to sensitivity
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training in Boondocks, Amber recalled the number of times guest speakers
had said that students are good at reading teachers, knowing how they feel
about them. Amber then applied this awareness of other peoples perspectives
to a character in Boondocks itself, pointing out a panel where the White girl,
Cindy, claims shes colorblind. I dont think so! Amber laughed.
When Amber began her practicum placement at our partner school the
following fall, her awareness of how she was being read racially by others at
school was more fraught and uncomfortable. Returning to help facilitate a
Study Group meeting for a new TFT cohort, she told the story of an upsetting
incident in which a Black male student had disrespected her. Her cooperating teacher, a Black man, responded by saying that Amber had two strikes
against her: She was White and she was female. These comments bothered
Amber, making her feel that her cooperating teacher was talking down to her
and that he viewed her as insensitive to diversity. She still harbored frustration
about this incident at the end of a full year in his classroom:
I dont think he really knew my attitudes and beliefs... when we first
started.... I felt like he was judging me as this, like, preppy little White
girl that was just coming to this school and had no idea what was going
on, and I felt, I know I was offended by that at the beginning.
By calling attention to her identity as a preppy little White girl in this version of the story, even as she implicitly contested this characterization, Amber
demonstrated the extent to which she had internalized an awareness of the
ways she was being read racially. Another time, she perceived that a recruiter
at the universitys job fair similarly read her racially, questioning her suitability for a job in a Title I school: I guess because Im a young White girl,
I dont know.
Amber found it more difficult to process the ways students at our partner school read her and her actions racially. Recalling an incident in which
a Black student accused her of racism, Amber revealed not only her discomfort at his accusation but also a process of cognitive toggling back and forth
between colorblindness and racial self-awareness as she grappled with the
role race was playing:
I dont, like, discriminate against certain students because of their race
or whatever... maybe its bad that Im not aware of [race in the
classroom], but I feel like, like, okay, this is another reason that I know
that Im aware of it. Um, today actually this happened. My students
were in groups, and its like two different groups raised their hands at
the same time, and I just went to the one that I saw first... and one
of the students was like, Oh yeah, come to the Black kids last. And
I like, and I looked and I was like, What are you talking about?
As Amber sorted through the significance of this event, she demonstrated

how complicated it can be for White teachers to develop a view of themselves
as racially fair and culturally competent while at the same time managing
836

what they have learned about the racial tensions and racial subtexts that so
often exist in urban schools:
I think that he knows that its okay to use the whole, like Black joke
with me because he sees that thats not really the case.... But at the
same time, if hes thinking about that, then, I mean, in some way
he must feel like, maybe overall that the White teachers here do treat
the students like that. But Im hoping that he jokes with me about it
because Im not one of those teachers who does. But Im not sure.
Initially, we positioned Amber as lacking the racial self-awareness that

we saw so clearly in Brent, attributing to her a persistent colorblindness.
While we were well aware of Brents tendency to claim insider status with
Blacks as a racial group, we paid less attention to Ambers desire to distance
herself from other Whites, as she does in the above quote. To be fair, after
2 years in TFT, Amber did still make statements such as I dont even really
pay attention to the whole Black-White thing anymore. But to focus on her
declarations of colorblindness without taking into account the much more
complicated racial grappling that Amber was also engaged in would not
provide an accurate portrait of her raced consciousness.
Raced consciousness shaped Ambers responses to assignments in TFT.
Ambers position-taking assignments in response to multicultural literature
demonstrated the extent to which she continued to grapple with racial
stereotypes as she sought to develop cultural responsiveness. Ambers use of
stereotypes was complicated and inflected by her raced consciousness. In many
of her responses, she, like many of our other students, demonstrated a growing
recognition of stereotypes and testified to her desire to discredit them. These
demonstrations often seemed a bit clumsy and overly simplistic. For example,
when taking on the perspective of an urban parent, our students would
frequently make a point of putting themselves in the position of a hardworking
parent who was very involved with his or her childs life to counter pervasive
and negative stereotypes about parents of students in urban schools. We coded
these attempts as stereotype busters because of the clear and strident efforts
students were making to call attention to their rejection of these limiting
stereotypes.
Initially our analysis focused on the clumsiness and lack of sophistication
in Ambers attempts to discredit stereotypes, along with the tenuousness of
her understandings and commitments. We also noticed instances in which she
unconsciously employed one form of stereotype while at the same time she
explicitly undercut another. Only when we began to construct a more complex
portrait of Ambers emergent racial self-awareness did we begin to understand
the ways that awareness informed the moves she made in position-taking
assignments. Our Whiteness prevented us from seeing beyond the awkwardness
in Ambers attempts, from developing more nuanced readings of Ambers
work, and from deepening our understanding of the challenges she faced as
a White teacher encountering cultural responsiveness.
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In her visual response to Boondocks, Amber placed a clip art image of
a Black teenager in the center of the page, surrounded by images and
phrases representing racial stereotypes in the text. She explained her reasons
for taking on these stereotypes in her reflection:
The pictures depict the stereotypes that are conveyed through out
[sic] the different comics. I have an African American teenager standing there in baggy jeans and a jersey with a shirt that says homies.
I included a marijuana leaf, bottles of alcohol, and a gun mostly
because of the things that principal says to the new students at his
school. They are the first black students at that school so he casually
throws in the fact that guns, alcohol, drugs, and rap music are not
allowed.... All of the clip art pictures depict different stereotypes,
mostly held by White people in the comics. It shows the ignorance
of people who have not been exposed to any diversity.
Implicit in Ambers reflection is the notion that she included these stereotypes in order to dismiss them. However, in a written comment on Ambers
paper, class instructor Gere asked, What do you see as the value of displaying these stereotypes? I dont think its a bad idea, but it would make your
reflection more compelling if you explained.
Geres comments reveal the extent to which we as White instructors
struggled to make sense of the role these stereotypes were playing in White
students thinking. Clearly we experienced some discomfort with papers
such as Ambers, as seen in Geres comment questioning their value while at
the same reassuring Amber that displaying them was not a bad idea. When
we read this assignment against the larger story line of Ambers attempts to
grapple with the racial stereotypes that had informed her life experience,
coupled with her desire to differentiate herself from Whites who accept such
stereotypes, the gestures she made take on more power and importance.
Referring to a comment made by Cindy, the White girl in Boondocks who
proclaims herself to be colorblind, Amber wrote, This quote shows the lack
of diversity the girl has been exposed to. She obviously has not [sic] idea
about racially mixed people or other races. When we consider Ambers
emergent racial self-awareness, it appears that she criticized Cindy in order
to tacitly highlight her own growing racial knowledge and sensitivity.
Ambers earlier response to The Lesson, on the other hand, showed a
more complicated and fraught use of stereotyping as well as a more
ambivalent White racial self-awareness. Writing a letter to the teacher from
the perspective of an urban parent, Amber went to some lengths to discredit
stereotypes about people living in poverty, pushing back against deficit
assumptions about criminality, disinterest in education, and intelligence.
Ambers parent explained that after reading the story in class, her son Jacob
came home from school and asked, Mama, why does everybody think that
all poor people steal? She wrote, Yes, I am poor and I read that story more
than once. Amber took on stereotypes about people in poverty a third time
in her reflection, explaining, Just because she is poor does not mean that
she is stupid. She can read and she can write a professional letter.
838

Yet instead of focusing on the class-based critique of consumer culture
in the story, as Brent did, Amber stated that she focused a lot about the parts
in the story that discuss stealing, writing,
I did this because I think that students of this age in a less advanced
school will not look much further past the context of the story. I mean
that I think that a story like this may just give some students ideas.
Here Amber unwittingly reinforced the stereotypes that urban students cannot think in complex ways and that they are susceptible to the allure of theft.
We cannot know if Amber failed to understand the themes of The Lesson
herself or if she truly thought that stealing was the most important concept
in the story, but her use of stereotypes in this assignment led us to question
her cultural competence and to consider the limited value of students simply
flipping or inverting stereotypes rather than examining and interrogating
them.
Interestingly, Amber introduced race into her letter only when she considered the students in Jacobs class. As Jacobs mother, she wrote,
I see this document as being demeaning to a class of African American,
underprivileged students. It illustrates a very poor use of grammar. It
fulfills the stereotype of underprivileged people being less intelligent.... I think that this story is too advanced for the tenth grade
students in your class. While I can see that there is meaning behind
it concerning opening doors, motivation, and opportunity, I do not
feel that the students can see that deeply into this text.
We remain perplexed by these assertions. We cannot know why Amber

characterized the story as too advanced for Jacob and his peers immediately after critiquing the text for portraying underprivileged people as being
less intelligent. Perhaps her resistance to the text was a way of displaying
her discomfort with its use of Black English, a subject the Schooling and
Society course had not addressed at the time of this assignment. Perhaps her
letter simply displays the limits of her knowledge as a White beginning
teacher with a nascent racial self-awareness. As White instructors, we experienced our own feelings of discomfort when we encountered claims like
these in the writing of our White students. But to take these awkward and
contradictory claims as the measure of Ambers commitment to and understanding of cultural responsiveness would not capture the complexity of her
attempts to become a culturally responsive teacher.
Raced consciousness shaped Ambers processing of cultural respon
siveness. Unlike Brent, who repeatedly attempted to bring our attention back
to issues of academic achievement in discussions of CRP, Amber focused on
issues of cultural competence. In doing this, she resembled us and many of
the White TFT students we followed into our partner school. These students
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frequently struggled to make sense of the role that race played in their
interactions with students of color, seemingly wondering how to be White
and culturally responsive at the same time.
Amber deepened our understanding of this struggle when she explained
the complex and fraught racial negotiations she faced as she moved back
and forth between the racially diverse context of our partner school and the
predominantly White context she experienced at the university. When she
told the story of a racially complicated encounter with a White friend, the
challenges she faced in attempting to manage the stereotypes that surrounded her in the dominant culture came into stark relief:
I was telling a story about one of my students to a friend of mine from
school, and... my friend made a comment about the students name,
because its a, an African American name, kind of a, a very different,
like typi, like, atypi, like, typical like, Black girl name? If you, you
know what I mean. Im being very stereotypical right now. Um, and
my friend laughed about it, and I laughed about it with him....
Looking back, I, I feel bad, its like I was like falling into the, the
stereotyping, and stuff. With him.
Here Amber made clear how profoundly she would have to change her
social interactions to apply culturally responsive principles to her life outside
of teaching. Much like Brent, she was faced with the need to flip the switch
when she left our partner school and reentered her White social networks.
Unlike Brent, however, Amber had little practice with this code switching
and lacked skill in reading the racial subtext in her friends comments. At the
same time she expressed regret over their shared laughter, she defended it
as something that most of her friends, whom she viewed as reasonable,
nonracist Whites, would engage in:
It was kind of one of those, like, things that White people laugh at all
the time.... I feel bad that I laughed with him... but... most of
the people that Im friends with or hang out with... have those same
stereotypes or probably would have reacted the same way. But my
friends arent racist by any means.... Do you know what I mean?...
Those are stereotypes that even like the most, people who are the
most accepting of other cultures, might still go along with. Does that
make sense?
Ambers language in this passage gives away the ambivalence she felt as she
told the story. By asking Buehler, the interviewer, to understand what she meant
and to agree that her words made sense, Amber showed that she was looking
for reassurance that her self-positioning in this story could coincide with a culturally competent stance. Her hesitancyincluding her acknowledgement that her
positions might be contradictoryrevealed her lingering doubt.
Two days later, when Amber happened to run into Buehler at our
partner school, she highlighted the reasons why the racial stakes in her
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interactions were so important. After working closely with a low-achieving,
sometimes disruptive Black male ninth grader from one of her classes for
much of the school year, Amber took him to visit his father in the county jail.
I know I shouldnt have done this, she explained, but the students father
had been in jail for the past 2 weeks. In the midst of a tutoring session, the
student said, My dads in jail. You should take me to see him. Amber
looked online and found the phone number to make an appointment.
During the visit, she sat in the cubicle next to the student as he used a
telephone to talk to his father through a glass divider. Afterwards she took
him to McDonalds.
Amber did not explicitly refer to race as she told this story, and we do
not want to heroicize her actionsin fact, we could read her as being too
willing to cross professional lines in order to ingratiate herself with this
student. We prefer to read her story as implicitly pointing to the raceconscious work Amber had engaged in over the course of her time in TFT.
As a White beginning teacher who had never been inside a correctional
facility before, Amber stretched to demonstrate a form of cultural
responsiveness that extended her beyond her prior life experiences. Raced
consciousness consistently informed her learning, just as it informed one of
her final TFT experiences with a student.
Discussion
This study offers insight into the ways beginning teachers struggle with
cultural responsiveness, even when they are committed to the principles of
CRP. Much of this struggle has remained inaccessible to teacher educators
because of the silence frequently maintained around issues of race. When
students or instructors in teacher education classes use silence to avoid or
resist discussions of race (Henze, Lucas, & Scott, 1998; Ladson-Billings,
1996), the complexity of their views of race remain inaccessible both to
themselves and to their instructors. Discussing the race-based tensions that
accompany attempts to engage in culturally responsive teaching offers both
students and instructors an important opportunity to examine how race
shapes their thinking and why race presents the challenges it does. We need
more of these discussions in teacher education.
The interweaving of identity work, imaginative engagement with literary
texts, interactions in an underresourced school and its community, and
exploration of key concepts of CRP created spaces for beginning teachers to
make visible their diverse and complex understandings of cultural
responsiveness and the extent to which raced consciousness shaped their
understandings. The insights drawn from this study suggest strategies,
described below, that teacher educators might employ to learn more about
how beginning teachers take up cultural responsiveness, given the persistent
stereotypes and the raced consciousness that shape perceptions.
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Gere et al.
The Affordances of Positioning
Literary texts do not often occupy a central place in teacher education
courses, but we were persuaded by studies that showed how the aesthetic
power of literature, particularly, multicultural literature, can enable preservice
teachers to explore and perhaps even change their perspectives on race
(Florio-Ruane, 2001; Hines, 1997; Smith & Strickland, 2001). Our experiences
in traditional literature classes as well as studies of the ways students resist
the counternarratives of multicultural literature, however, convinced us that
students will avoid dealing with their own raced consciousnesseven when
presented with issues of race in literatureunless required to do so. This led
us to create assignments that drew upon positioning theory (Clark & Ivanic,
1997; Harre & van Lagenhove, 1999) by asking students to take up a specific
position in response to literary texts.
We found that the position-taking assignments opened an early and
crucial window into the raced consciousness of beginning teachers and
subsequently led us to a greater awareness of raced consciousness in other
dimensions of the course. Some of the most valuable insights came from
students reflections upon their own position taking. The insights provided
by the combination of position taking and reflection were counterbalanced
by the frequency with which students called upon stereotypes in their
writing. These cognitively frugal and affectively bound combinations of
words (Stangor & Schaller, 1996) took a number of forms, and students often
tried to undercut or dismiss them, particularly as they became more aware
of their own raced consciousness. Still, however, it became clear that
position-taking assignments written in response to multicultural literature
could elicit stereotypical responses to the Other(s) represented in literary
texts (Pickering, 2001)responses that often revealed a good deal about
how students raced consciousness shaped their responses to CRP. While we
abhor stereotypes, we found that surfacing them through literary responses
opened up further opportunities for discussion and interrogation of racially
inflected views of Othersdiscussions we would not have had otherwise.
Valuing Long-Term Processes of Growth
Transformation is a word that appears frequently in the language of
teacher education to describe how preservice teachers become practicing
teachers (Malone, Jones, & Stallings, 2001; McDermott, 2002; Reven,
Cartwright, & Munday, 1997; Romo & Chavez, 2006; Sinclair, Mums, &
Woodward, 2005; Willis, 2001), and the language surrounding CRP is similarly
marked by this term. Nieto (2000) uses transformation to describe the
process of becoming a culturally responsive teacher, writing, Without this
transformation of ourselves, any attempts at developing a multicultural
perspective will be shallow and superficial (p. 338). Similarly, LadsonBillings (2006) frames CRP as a way of being, asserting, I have laid out an
argument for why doing is less important than being. I have argued that
842

practicing culturally relevant pedagogy is one of the ways of being that will
inform doing (p. 41). Ladson-Billings wants prospective teachers to
understand that CRP requires transformative changes in ways of thinking
and being.
We embrace transformation as a goal, and in developing the TFT curriculum, we created experiences to help students do what Nieto (2000)
describes as identity work as well as rethink their social, political, and
historical knowledges. However, our study helps us both to qualify our
understanding of transformation and to recognize that it can be too easy
to declare students transformed, as, for example, Lazar (2004) does. After
quoting a student who writes about confronting people who tell racist
jokes, Lazar explains,
This statement shows Allisons emergence as a culturally sensitive
teacher.... She describes herself as a learner... she takes responsibility for resisting racism. . . . Finally, her last statement in the
excerpt reflects her ability to understand the perspectives of African
Americans by recognizing both their struggles and their resolve to
overcome them. (Lazar, 2004, p. 77)
We could easily extract quotes like Allisons from our data, and if we looked
no further, we could, like Lazar, describe our students transformative emergence as culturally sensitive teacher[s]. We believe that small steps like those
taken by Lazars students are important; however, this study has taught us to
examine and value the more gradual and halting processes by which beginning teachers work toward new understandings of their own perceptions
and blind spots. Furthermore, we ourselves have benefited from the opportunity to identify our own blind spots and lapses with regard to cultural
responsiveness. The processes of confronting our own limitations makes us
more appreciative of the complex and challenging tasks our students face.
We have found, both for ourselves and for our students, that becoming more
aware of the many blind spots that exist for teachers seeking to work in
culturally responsive ways caused us to check for blind spots more often.
Normalizing the idea that culturally responsive work requires ongoing effort
to identify blind spots gave us and our students permission to talk more
explicitly about the challenges of such work and the role of raced consciousness within those challenges.
Illuminating Individual Enactments of Cultural Responsiveness
Some representations of teacher education use a stage-process model to
show how beginning teachers make the transition to the classroom (McDermott,
2002; Paccione, 2000). Such models look at students in the aggregate rather
than as individuals and, more importantly, conceptualize growth as regular
and ongoing. This study found student encounters with cultural responsiveness
to be an irregular process, with insights and understandings expressed on one
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occasion erased by lapses on another and instances of reflective thinking
intermingled with essentializing assumptions. Instead of a smooth arc of
development that could be translated into a stage-process model, we found
highly individualized ragged lines, riddled with varied forms of stereotyping
and inflected with durable raced consciousness.
The ability to trace individual negotiations with cultural responsiveness
can make a significant contribution to understandingand enhancingthe
relationship between teacher education and teacher behavior in the
classroom. As Brouwer and Korthagen (2005) observe, teacher educators
need to understand more about how individuals move through teacher
education, especially beginning teachers who seek positions in underresourced
schools. Achinstein, Ogawa, and Speiglman (2004) suggest that differences
between underresourced and more affluent schools track new teachers into
divergent senses of professionalism, concepts of teaching, and approaches
to pedagogy. Those who take positions in underresourced schools can, in
this view, be socialized to see themselves as lacking professional efficacy, to
conceptualize students as deficient, and to view teaching as a form of test
preparation.
Therefore teacher education needs to consider carefully the ways
student progressor lack thereofis represented and develop strategies for
learning more about individual students. The field also needs to recognize
and learn more about the special challenges that face both instructors and
students who intend to practice CRP. The strategies we have suggested
hereincluding critical incorporation of multicultural literary texts, continual
interrogation of attitudes toward race and racism, and explicit engagement
with the lens of raced consciousnessoffer one route toward learning more
about how beginning teachers meet these challenges.
Recognizing (Again) How Race Matters in Teacher Education
By examining how raced consciousness shaped the ways that students
responded to the concept of CRP, as well as the ways that teacher educators
responded to students and their work, this study makes visible the enormous
influence that race has on both students and instructors in teacher education.
What we came to call raced consciousness shaped relationships to cultural
responsiveness in complex and subtle ways, especially in dealing with issues
surrounding cultural competence, social justice, and academic achievement.
White students, and we ourselves, were preoccupied with cultural
competence, while students of color expressed more concern about academic
achievement. Similarly, race inflected perceptions of social justice. Even
Whites with predispositions toward cultural responsiveness were reluctant
to describe race as a factor in social injustice. They often explained racism,
as Amber did the segregation of her high school, as a benign sort of peer
selection rooted in shared backgrounds, even though they were aware of
Tatums (2003) claim that this kind of peer selection results from structural
844

inequalities. Students of color, however, were often quite willing, as Brent
was, to describe how race limited their options or contributed to various
forms of oppression, like racial profiling.
Teacher education would do well to give more explicit attention to the
racially inflected positions taken by students and instructors. In particular,
instructors need to recognize how their own raced consciousness and that
of students shapes the creation of a curriculum, the construction of
assignments, the responses to assignments, and the stereotypes that may
emerge when beginning teachers seek to demonstrate cultural responsiveness.
As we have discussed, raced consciousness inflected which aspects of CRP
we instructors emphasized, how we viewed and interacted with our students,
and how we have analyzed and presented them here. While we have
attempted to weave these limitations into our analysis, we are certain that
blind spots remain, and we can even locate some of them. For instance,
when we were his instructors, we found Brent to sometimes behave in ways
that seemed unreliable and unforthcoming; it does not seem fair or honest
to leave that out of this analysis, especially as we are more comfortable
critiquing Amber. We continue to struggle with how to read and present
Brent, especially in light of all that we have come to realize about how our
Whiteness impacted our view of him as a student and how we underestimated
him in some significant ways. Making the lens of raced consciousness visible
can help us to recognize the ways in which race shapes understandings of
students and enactments of culturally responsive work. Normalizing this
work as an expected and necessary part of developing a culturally responsive
teaching stance has the potential to lessen the stigma and risk associated
with discussions of race.
Research has little to offer on how beginning teachers of color
experience a teacher education program focused on CRP (Bainer, 1993;
Ladson-Billings, 1996; Montechinos, 2004; Pleasants, 2003). Without more
sustained attention to the needs and experiences of beginning teachers of
color, as well as those of their White peers, the goals of CRP will remain
elusive and the demographic imperative will remain unaddressed.
Fortunately, our analysis shows that it is possible to learn more and offers
the beginning of a research agenda for teacher education. Our study
suggests that position taking can help students make their views visible to
themselves and others, but we need to learn more about which positions
and story lines will be most effective for students of color. We also need to
learn more about how students of color experience multicultural literature,
how they can be helped to interrogate their own raced consciousness, and
how racial and class stratification within racial identity groups can be
negotiated. Teacher education needs to develop such complex and racially
inclusive theories and approaches to CRP because it is raceand its
demographic imperativethat motivates this pedagogy.
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Appendix A
Texts Used
The Lesson (1972). This short story by Toni Cade Bambara is told in the voice
of a young urban African American girl from New York City who is taken to
visit FAO Schwartz with a group of peers by Miss Moore, a self-designated
extracurricular teacher who wants to expose the children to socioeconomic
inequality through the visit to the expensive toy store.
Dangerous Minds (1995). An autobiographical narrative by LouAnn Johnson was
made into this popular Hollywood film. It details Johnsons first year of teaching in an urban school. Johnson, a White former marine, describes the challenges and her ultimate triumph in teaching urban students.
Theme for English B (1951). This poem by Langston Hughes from the Harlem
Renaissance era takes the form of a poetic response to a White instructor who
asks his students to write a page about themselves. Hughes takes on their racial
and cultural differences and challenges the professor to complicate how he
thinks about these issues.
Indian Education (1993). From Sherman Alexies Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight
in Heaven, this chapter presents lessons Alexie learned as a bright American
Indian student on an Indian reservation school. Alexie presents examples of
discrimination and low expectations that made him aware of how his identity
impacted how others saw him.
Hunger of Memory (1981). In this memoir, Richard Rodriguez details his schooling
experiences as a Spanish-speaking student who goes on to graduate school.
Rodriguez details his loss of cultural identity but takes stances against bilingual
education and affirmative action.
Out of Order (2003). A. M. Jenkins takes on learning differences and class-based
social discrimination in this young-adult novel.
Boondocks. Aaron McGruders daily comic strip depicts an urban African American
family (a grandfather and two elementary-age boys) who move to a White
suburb and take on White suburban culture. McGruder uses his characters to
critique White middle-class suburbia and play on stereotypes about Black
culture.
Mad Hot Ballroom (2005). This documentary film depicts several New York City
public elementary schools as they learn and compete in a ballroom dancing
contest.
Appendix B
Position-Taking and Reflection Assignment
Your assignment for this text is Number [one of 17 from the list below].
Complete your assigned response to the text. There is no page minimum, but please
use this assignment to demonstrate that you have read and reflected on the text, and
that you have taken time and care with the assignment.
Then on a separate page, please write a short explanation of why you did the
assignment as you did. If you are taking on another persona in the assignment
(Numbers 15), explain why you imagined the person would respond as he or she
846

did and why you made the choices you did. If you are writing or creating from your
own perspective (Numbers 67), reflect on why you think you responded as you did
to this text and flesh out the response that you created. Please remember to include
details about how you are reading the textthat is, what do you take away from the
text that impacted how you did the assignment?
1. Imagine that you are one of the people represented in the text. Write a poem
as if you were this person. You can simply write a poem that expresses something about who you (as the person in the story) are, or you can write a poem
that somehow responds to one of the situations in this story.
2. Imagine that you are the parent of one of your students (either from this semester or from last semester). You learn that a teacher has presented this text in
your childs class. Write a letter to that teacher about his or her use of this text
in class.
3. Imagine that you are one of your students (either from this semester or from
last semester). You have just read this text. Write an entry in your personal
journal about it.
4. Imagine that you are an investigative news reporter. Write a short newspaper
article, complete with headline, about something that happens in this text.
5. Imagine that you are a teacher in this text. Write a memo to a counselor or
administrator about one of the students in the story. Your memo could express
concerns, offer praise, note something about the student, etc.
6. Be yourself. Reflect on/respond to the text in a poem.
7. Be yourself. Create a visual response to the text.
Notes
We are grateful for helpful readings offered by colleagues including Anne Curzan,
Lesley Rex, Mary Schleppegrell, and Megan Sweeney. We also wish to thank Linda Valli,
the editor who challenged us to complete multiple revisions of this article. She, along with
the anonymous reviewers, raised questions and offered insights that pushed us to rethink
our project in more compelling and nuanced terms. We want to express appreciation to
the U.S. Department of Education for funding that supported our work. Of course, none
of this would have been possible without the cooperation of students who participated in
Teachers for Tomorrow. To them we owe our deepest thanks.
1We understand that race does not exist as a physiological or biological category but
that racialized groups do exist and have consequences (Blum, 2002). We use race to stand
in for this concept.
2Here and in all references to students, we use pseudonyms to protect student
identities.
3We use both racial self-awareness and raced consciousness but with strategic differences. The former refers to conscious awareness of race, while the latter, as described
earlier, describes ways of perceiving through race but not necessarily being aware of
doing so.
4Milner and Hoy (2003) use this definition of stereotype threat: the pressure an
individual faces when he or she may be at risk of confirming negative, self-relevant stereotypes (p. 264).
5This exercisealong with many othersis available online at the Multicultural
Pavilion: http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/activities/circlesofself.html
847
Gere et al.
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Manuscript received June 3, 2007

Revision received December 18, 2008
Accepted December 21, 2008
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American Educational Research

A Visibility Project: Learning to See How Preservice Teachers Take Up

American Educational Research Association

>> Version of Record - Aug 12, 2009

American Educational Research Journal

A Visibility Project: Learning to See How

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

Context of the Study

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

An hour-long semistructured audiotaped interview with each of 4 focal

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

First, students brought a raced consciousness to TFT, which surfaced in the

Here Brent demonstrated sensitivity to how he and other people of color

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

In his reflection he described why he made these choices:

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

Brents response demonstrates a racial self-awareness that enabled him to

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

As in his response to The Lesson, Brent expressed solidarity with those

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

Ambers uncritical, unqualified desire to make a difference in the lives

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

were simultaneously grappling with race-based questions. For example,

Raced consciousness heightened Ambers awareness of being read by

As Amber sorted through the significance of this event, she demonstrated

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

Initially, we positioned Amber as lacking the racial self-awareness that

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

We remain perplexed by these assertions. We cannot know why Amber

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

A Visibility Project: Learning to See

Manuscript received June 3, 2007

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