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2 ‘ LIBRARY
ion Michigan State
" University

 

This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

(Dis)placing and (E)race-ing (Dis)courses:
Thinking about Multiculturalisms and Becoming Teachers

presented by

Megan Leigh Birch

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

Ph.D. degree in Curriculum, Teaching and
Educational Policy

 

 

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(DIS)PLACING AND (E)RACE-ING (DIS)COURSES:
THINKING ABOUT MULTICULTURALISMS AND BECOMING TEACHERS
By

Megan Leigh Birch

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy

2008

ABSTRACT

(DIS)PLACING AND (E)RACE-ING (DIS)COURSES:
THINKING ABOUT MULTICULTURALISMS AND BECOMING TEACHERS

By
Megan Leigh Birch

Teacher education must prepare all teacher candidates with knowledge, skills,
and dispositions to successfully and equitably teach students from all racial, ethnic,
linguistic, geographical, social, economic, gendered, and cultural identities and
communities. How we prepare teachers and what students learn depends on our social
visions and ethical arguments about how the world is or ought to be, as well as our
epistemological understandings of identities and differences and what it means to
teach and learn. Overall, the purpose of this study was to (de)construct a complex
and critical understanding of how pre-service teachers within one teacher education
program orient towards, engage with, interpret, and theorize about diversity and
multicultural education. Yet, because teacher preparation depends in part on the
imaginations and understandings of teacher educators, this is both an account of the
thoughts and experiences of three pre-service English teachers as well as an
examination of one teacher education program as it is envisioned by seven instructors
who teach across courses and disciplinary fields that comprise the program.
Employing critical discourse analysis, the study revealed multiple and hybrid ways of
understanding and thinking about identities, differences, and multicultural education,
in which pre-service teachers and their instructors drew from different aspects of their
identities, experiences, and coursework, and across disciplinary fields, theories and

perspectives. Through the interpretive lens of theories of race and theories of critical

geography, the language and the paradigmatic references of the pre-service teachers
and their instructors can be described as discourses of space and place as well as

racializing and racialized discourses.

C0pyn'ght by
Megan Leigh Birch
2008

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work reflects what I have learned fi'om many teachers--- people who
compelled me to think critically about teachers and students, about schools, about the
world and my place in it. I hope that this work honors their wisdom, encouragement, and
example.

My parents, David and Ruthann Birch, have always been and continue to be my
best and most influential teachers. As parents and as professional educators, they taught
me to value diversity and work against social injustices. They also taught me to see
schools and one’s social and literary imagination as fertile sites for such work.

I am gratefiil to Elizabeth Heilman for all that I learned from her and for her
fi’iendship. Elizabeth has shared valuable insights and critical perspectives which
continue to push my thinking and have sharpened my analytic and interpretative skills. I
have grown to be more self-aware as a scholar because of Elizabeth’s encouragement.
Her commitment to mentoring and to me sustained long distances and extended beyond
my school work to help me think about parenting, balancing workload, and engaging in
enjoyable and meaningful work.

I thank Chris Wheeler for his trust and for his unwavering support of my teaching,
especially for hiring me as a teaching assistant. Teaching TE 250 was not only one of my
favorite experiences as a doctoral student, but it also cultivated the seeds of this study by
strengthening my understanding of the structural constraints that disadvantage many
students, schools, and communities and by repositioning me to think about inequities

from the vantage of a teacher educator.

Thanks, too, to Avner Segall for augmenting my understanding of methodology
and for reminding me to consider the ethical and political implications of not only what
my research presents but also how also how it is (re)presented.

Also, I acknowledge my gratitude to Dorinda Carter for agreeing to serve on my
dissertation committee without having met me in person and for her useful suggestions
for the final revisions of this project.

Finally, my husband, Ben Amsden, supported me in countless and much
appreciated ways including meticulously editing and proofreading my work, providing
smart feedback and needed academic and emotional encouragement throughout my
writing process, and being a terrific parent to our young son. Along with my parents and
my entire family, Ben and Quinn continue to ground me and give meaning to my life

beyond my work.

vi

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

Chapter One - An Introduction 1
Defining Terms ...................................................................................................... 3
Previewing the Organization and Content of the Dissertation ............................... 6

Chapter Two - Mapping Imperatives and Ideologies - 8
Demographic and Conceptual Imperatives ............................................................ 9
Multicultural Pre-service Teacher Education ....................................................... 12
Multiculturalisms ................................................................................................. 1 5

Dimensions and Approaches to Multicultural Education ........................ 16
Ethnic Studies Multiculturalism ............................................................... 19
Liberal Democratic Multiculturalism ....................................................... 2O
Antiracist Multiculturalism ...................................................................... 21
Critical Multiculturalisms ........................................................................ 22
Differential Mode of Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive

Education - A Catalytic Imperative .......................................................... 23

Chapter Three - Method and Methodology 26

Teacher Education at State University ................................................................. 26
Participants ............................................................................................... 28
Data Sources and Collection ................................................................................ 29
Phase One: Open-ended Survey ............................................................... 29
Phase Two: Focus Groups ........................................................................ 30
Phase Three: Semi-structured and Un-structured Interviews ................... 31
Phase Four: Documents, Interviews and Observations ............................ 32
Process of Analysis .............................................................................................. 32
Defining Critical Discourse Analysis ....................................................... 33
Using Critical Discourse Analysis ........................................................... 34
Bricolage in Analysis ............................................................................... 35

How I Used Theories of Critical Geography and Spatiality
in Analysis ................................................................................................ 37
How I Used Theories of Race in Analysis ............................................... 39
Results of Analysis ............................................................................................... 41
Role of Researcher ................................................................................... 41
Validity and Reliability ............................................................................ 43
Title of Dissertation Defined .................................................................... 44
Chapter Five and Six: Using the Same Data Differently ......................... 45
Reading the Dissertation ...................................................................................... 46
Chapter Four - Portraits 47
The Pre-service Teachers ..................................................................................... 47

vii

Ashlee ....................................................................................................... 47

Rachel ....................................................................................................... 52

Kayla ........................................................................................................ 56

The Professors ...................................................................................................... 61

Chris ......................................................................................................... 61

Juliet ......................................................................................................... 63

Brenda ...................................................................................................... 64

Robyn ....................................................................................................... 67

Leslie ........................................................................................................ 68

Heather ..................................................................................................... 71

My Story .............................................................................................................. 72

Readings and Tellings .......................................................................................... 77

Chapter Five - Discourses of Place: Tourism, Cartography, and Travel ................. 78

Critical Geography and Theories of Spatiality ..................................................... 78

Geographies of a Teacher Education Program ..................................................... 79

Tourist Discourse: “Anything different than your world...” ............................... 81
Essentialist Tourist Thinking about Personal Journeys and

Experiences .............................................................................................. 82

(Con)texts and Learning about an Other .................................................. 86

Cartographic Discourses: “Anything that makes someone different than you”...90
Essentialist Cartographic Thinking about Personal Journeys and

 

Experiences. ............................................................................................. 91

Viewpoints and “Education about an Other” ........................................... 94

Seeing and Mapping the World: A Modernist and Structuralist

Project ..................................................................................................... 101
Traveler Discourse: “Pushed Beyond” Your “Comfort Zone” .......................... 102

Anti-essentialist Traveling Thinking About Personal Journeys

and Experiences ...................................................................................... 102

Texts as Tools and Entry Points, Learning that “Transforms

the Self” .................................................................................................. 103
Which Discourse is Best? ................................................................................... 110
Traveling On Towards an Analysis of Race and Power .................................... 111

Chapter Six - Racialized and Racializing Discourses 112

Race Matters ....................................................................................................... 1 12

The Black/ White Binary as a Meta Discousre ...................................... 113

Kayla ...................................................................................................... 116

Whiteness ............................................................................................... 120
Explicit Racialized Discourses ........................................................................... 121

The Discourse of Authenticity and Human Experience: “How

Authentic Can We Be?” ......................................................................... 122

Discourse of Historical Artifact and Popular History: “I am so far
removed” ................................................................................................ 127

viii

 

Discourse of Struggle and Survival: “1 am the victim of the

 

very song of freedom that I sing” ........................................................... 132

The Discourse of Empathy and Understanding: “In the Shoes of Someone

Else” ....................................................................................................... 138

“The Risks of Empathy” ........................................................................ 140

Discourse of Testimony and Wit(h)ness ................................................ 144

Making Use of Theories of Race ........................................................................ 151

Reflective Shift ................................................................................................... 154
Chapter Seven - Act 11: Towards a Discomfortable and Traveling Multicultural

Teacher Education 155

Insights on (Dis)placing and E-raceing (Dis)courses ......................................... 155

Geographic Discourses ....................................................................................... 156

Racialized Discourses ........................................................................................ 157

Multicultural Teacher Education Theory: Discomfortable and Traveling ......... 158

Multicultural Education Theory ......................................................................... 162

Multicultural Teacher Education Practice .......................................................... 163

Multicultural English Education ........................................................................ 166

The Matter of Representation, Limited Interpretation, and Subjectivities ......... 167

Future Research .................................................................................................. 171

(Re)Directions for Me as Scholar and for Teacher Education ........................... 174

Works Cited 176

 

ix

CHAPTER ONE
AN INTRODUCTION

Teacher education must prepare all teacher candidates with knowledge, skills, and
dispositions to successfully and equitably teach students from all racial, ethnic, linguistic,
geographical, social, economic, gendered, and cultural identities and communities. As the
nation’s population continues to shift and unjust social realities endure, teacher education
faces a “demographic imperative” (Banks, and Dilworth, as cited in Cochran-Smith,
2003a; Banks et al., 2005; Ladson-Billings, 1999a). We must also respond to a .
conceptual imperative--- a need to extend multicultural theory into practice (Gay, 2000).
Further, there is a “catalytic” or “performative” imperative and disposition--- an
obligation for teachers to continuously grow and thoughtfully and critically engage as
learners committed to what Kevin Kurnashiro (2000) calls “anti-oppressive education.”1
Our task is complex. How we prepare teachers and what students learn depends on our
social visions and ethical arguments about how the world is or ought to be, as well as our
epistemological understandings of identities and differences and what it means to teach
and learn.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to (de)construct a complex and critical
understanding of how pre-service teachers within one teacher education program orient
towards, engage with, interpret, and theorize about diversity and multicultural education.

Yet, because teacher preparation depends in part on the imaginations and understandings

 

1I use the words “catalytic” and “performative” to speak to a third imperative. In doing so, I draw from the
work of bell books (1994) who describes teaching as a “performative act” in which our work is a “catalyst”
for teachers and learners to become more engaged and work towards social change (p. 11). Shoshana
Felman also refers to teaching as “performative” (cited by Kumashiro, 2000, p. 44). Neither hooks nor
Felman, to my knowledge, write of performative or conceptual imperatives, however. “Catalytic” is also
borrowed from Patti Lather’s notion of “catalytic validity” (cited by Kincheloe and McLaren, 2003, p. 462)
though again, I am using it to talk about teaching and learning.

1

of teacher educators, this was both a study of the thoughts and experiences of three pre-
service English teachers as well as a study of a teacher education program as it is
envisioned by seven instructors who teach across courses and disciplinary fields that
comprise the program broadly. My focus on the social visions, ethical arguments, and
epistemological understandings of pre-service English teachers and their instructors was
directed by four guiding research questions.

0 How do pre-service teachers understand multicultural education?

0 What does it mean to become a multicultural teacher in a language and
literacy teacher education program that infuses ideas and issues related to
diversity throughout its program?

0 How do pre-service teachers think about diversity in a language and literacy
teacher education program that infuses ideas and issues related to diversity
throughout its program?

0 In what spaces and places do pre-service teachers learn about diversity, and
how do these places position students to think and be?

In answering these questions, my aim was not to assess the attitudes or competencies of
pre-service teachers, nor to evaluate the effectiveness of any one course or instructor. My
research did not study the practice or enactment of multicultural pedagogy. My
conclusions do not argue for one best approach or practice. Rather, I sought to expose
and examine ideolbgies-- how teacher candidates think and do not think, how they come
to think, how they struggle to (re)think, or how they resist thinking as they become

teachers within the context of one program.

This study is distinct from, yet related to, much of the scholarship about
multicultural education and multicultural teacher education. As such, it contributes to
existing research. I employed critical discourse analysis to study the language-- including
the paradigmatic references, narrative structure, and metaphors, as well as the grammar
and sentence structure of interview speech, to reveal students’ and instructors’
understandings of identities, differences, and multiculturalisms. As I will elaborate in
chapter two, much of the existing scholarship in the field of multicultural education
conceptualizes different “approaches” (Duane & Smith, 2000) or different “dimensions”
or “levels” (Banks, 2004). Discourses are different than approaches. Approaches or
dimensions of multicultural education are based on analyses of texts, scholarly traditions,
and larger sociological and philosophical theories and they largely imagine what
multicultural education ought to be or could be. While various approaches and
philosophies outlined in existing scholarship certainly inform and are reflected in
students’ and instructors’ understandings and experiences, my study was not rooted in
texts and theoretical camps but instead in the language and in the social, intellectual, and
ethical imaginations of students and instructors. In terms of thinking about diversity and
becoming a teacher, I do not describe what could or should be but what and how
multicultural teacher education is for the three students and their instructors in one
program.

Defining Terms

Many of the terms employed in the research questions and throughout the analysis

and interpretation of my study carry multiple meanings, refer to particular paradigms and

fields of scholarship, or require clarification here in the introduction. For example, I have

alternately and purposefully used terms such as “diversity” as well as “identity,” and
“difference,” or “multicultural education” alongside “multiculturalisms” in a way that
deserves an explanation. It is important and useful to define several key terms.

To situate my work within scholarship that addresses how teacher education
programs prepare teaches to teach all students, my research questions utilize the terms
“multicultural education” and “diversity.” These are commonly used terms in
multicultural theory and practice; however, these terms can conjure particular ideas that I
find problematic. For example, both terms are sometimes evoke or represent neutral
notions of plurality that are void of politics and ethics that consider how identities are
relational or how power privileges some identities more than others. When the “politics
of difference” (Sleeter and McLaren, 1995) is masked, we risk essentializing constructs
of culture, gender, and religion, for example. We also risk constructing “diversity”
around ideas of liberal individualism. To recognize the politics of difference rather than
acritical recognition of “diversity,” I prefer the terms “identity” and “difference” or better
still, “identities” and “differences.” To challenge neutral, essentialized, or individualized
concepts of diversity while situating my work within the current field of multicultural
education, I alternate terms throughout this study.

Similarly, I employ both “multicultural education” and “multiculturalisms.”
Again “multicultural education” is commonly utilized and is helpful in terms of situating
my work within the field, though it can nonetheless be a limiting term. “Multicultural
education” can be narrowly used to refer to a unified or under-theorized practice,
constituted in instructional strategies or curriculum, with disregard for the multiplicity of

ideologies and theories which conceive different versions of multicultural education, or

what Duarte and Smith (2000) call “multiculturalisms.” To contextualize my work while
at the same time troubling the conceptual limitations of the term “multicultural
education” as it can be used, I oscillate between terms throughout the study.

Two other terms, “space” and “place,” warrant a brief introductory explanation.

(I firrther distinguish them in chapter five.) While the term “space” in this study refers to
the program of courses, curricular clubs, families, communities, and work in which
students participate and learn, I shall use the term “place” as Chela Sandovol uses the
geographical metaphor of “topos” to refer conceptual spaces that “delineate the set of
critical points around which individuals and groups seeking to transform oppressive
powers constitute themselves as resistant and oppositional subjects” (cited in Durate &
Smith, 2000, p. 8). That is, it matters not only that students take a particular course
(place) but also how they think, make meaning, and become teachers in and in relation to
a particular course (space).

The terms “think” and “be” refer to the epistemological and ontological questions
of the study, respectively. I use the term “think” to refer to how students construct, talk
about, interpret, and theorize diversity and multicultural education. Again, this study
considered pre-service teachers’ thinking as it was represented through discourses, or
language, including ideological referents. I am interested in understanding what pre-
service teachers know and don’t know, think and don’t think about diversity and
multicultural education. I use the word “be” or more accurately “becoming” to reflect the
continuous self-making process that teaching and learning yields. That is, in addition to
the intellectual processes, our identities are formed in, by, and against teaching and

learning. “Becoming” takes place in what Kumashiro (2000) calls, “a space between

teaching and learning” (p. 46). Megan Boler (1999) describes the way teaching and
learning shapes “how we see ourselves and want to see ourselves” as well a “a
willingness to reconsider and undergo possible transformation of our self identity in
relation to others and to history” (p. 178-179). In this study, I was interested in the ways
pre-service teachers construct and re-construct who and how they can be as teachers as
well as who and how they are in relationship to various identities and differences.
Previewing the Organization and Content of the Dissertation

The chapters that follow depict hybrid understandings and complex ways of
thinking about diversity and becoming a teacher in which pre-service teachers and their
instructors draw fi'om multiple and different aspects of their identities, experiences, and
disciplinary fields, and across theories and perspectives to think about diversity and to
become or help students to become teachers. Towards this depiction, in chapter two, I
review the scholarship of multicultural education and multicultural teacher education, not
as a conceptual frame from which to match student thinking but instead to illustrate a
pool of contexts and theories from which students and teachers borrow and use ideas, and
to contrast the current scholarship, which focuses on approaches, with this study, which
focuses on discourses. In chapter three, I describe the method and methodology of this
study, including how I used critical discourse theory. I also explain how I made use of
theories of race and geography to interpret discourses and student thinking. In chapter
four, I introduce the participants of the study in detail, portraying experiences, families,
coursework, and interests. Chapter five and six, the chapters to which the title of my
dissertation refers, analyze two discourse genres, discourses of geography and discourses

of race, to describe how pre-service teachers and their instructors think about diversity

and multicultural education. Chapter seven concludes the study, noting implications for
multicultural theory, multicultural teacher education research and practice, and for

English Education.

CHAPTER TWO
MAPPING IMPERATIVES AND IDEOLOGIES

Multicultural education is often framed as a necessary and ethical response to one
of several imperatives. These imperatives include “a demographic imperative” (Banks,
and Dilworth, as cited in Cochran-Smith, 20033; Banks etal., 2005; Ladson-Billings,
1999a) to teach increasing diverse student populations and improve inequitable social
conditions, a conceptual imperative for teachers to better bridge theory and practice, and
a catalytic imperative to continuously move towards a more purposeful and socially just
way of knowing and being, and of teaching and learning. How teacher educators respond
to these imperatives and prepare pre-service teachers to employ multicultural pedagogies
depends on our social visions, ethical arguments, and intellectual arguments for how the
world is or ought to be. Our responses are theoretical and practice-based.

Though this study focused on how pre-service teachers think about diversity and
multicultural education, and was rooted in the language and ideologies of pre-service
teachers and their instructors rather than in scholarly traditions or social and
philosophical theories, this chapter reviews the scholarship related to multicultural
education and multicultural teacher education. To contextualize student and instructor
thinking, this chapter surveys the research, theory, and practice through which teacher
education responds to the many imperatives that demand multicultural education. As I
wrote in chapter one, while my study is about the social, intellectual, and ethical
imaginations of students and instructors, various approaches and philosophies outlined in
existing scholarship certainly inform and are reflected in students’ and instructors’

understandings and experiences. Theories constructed by the participants of this study

appropriate aspects of and are positioned by existing scholarship. Furthermore, my
analysis and interpretations as a researcher are situated within and respond to the field of
scholarship even as I utilize theories outside of multicultural education and teacher
education to make sense of participants’ understandings. Finally, the review of the
scholarship in this chapter will distinguish existing work which focuses on “approaches”
and “effectiveness” from the project of this study which focuses on discourses.
Demographic and Conceptual Imperatives

Scholars frequently refer to a “demographic imperative” to note the stark contrast
between the current teaching population that is mostly white, middle-class, and female,
and an increasingly diverse student population. According to the National Center for
Educational Statistics (2007), in 2005, only 17 percent of all public school teachers were
identified as a racial or ethnic minority; yet, in the same year, 42 percent of all
elementary and secondary students were identified as part of a racial or ethnic minority,
an increase from 22 percent in 1972. This increase largely reflects a change in Hispanic
students, a population which grew from 6 percent in 1972 to 20 percent of all students in
2005. The population of Black students increased from 15 percent to 16 percent over the
same years. Asians and Asian-Arnericans comprised 4 percent of the student population
and students who were identified as multi-racial comprised 3 percent of all students
enrolled in public schools in 2005. Further, the number of students who spoke a
language other than English at home increased from 9 percent to 20 percent from 1979 to
2005. There are regional differences across the country with regard to diversity and
homogeneity. Populations of Hispanic students are highest in the Western United States,

where minority enrollments exceed white enrollments, and in the Southern United States.

Overall, as Villegas and Lucas report, demographers predict that students of color will
constitute the statistical majority of all public school children by 2035 and account for 57
percent of all students by 2050 (cited in Cochran-Smith, 2004; cited in Hollins &
Guzman, 2005).

The disproportionate representation of mostly white, middle-class, women in the
teaching force troubles teaching and learning. Research suggests that many teachers do
not have the same cultural capital, references, and experiences as their students (Banks, et
al., 2005; Cruz-Janzen & Taylor, 2004: Heath, 1983; Delpit, 1996; Delpit & Dowdy,
2002). Though teachers from marginalized groups do not necessarily employ culturally
responsive pedagogies (Foster, and Montecinos, cited in Banks, et a1, 2005), there is
evidence suggesting that that “when teachers use knowledge about social, cultural, and
language backgrounds of their students when planning and implementing instruction, the
academic achievement of students can increase” (Banks, et al., 2005, p. 233). Also, the
need to bridge the theory and practice of multicultural education is not only crucial for
schools and communities with diverse populations but also for schools that are racially
and ethnically homogeneous (Banks, 1992, p.21). These conceptual imperatives are
intimately interrelated to the demographic imperatives.

As Etta Hollins and Maria Torres Guzman (2005) note, “it is important to make
clear here that it is not the changing demographic profile of the nation’s school children
in and of itself that is an obstacle to providing high quality schooling for all
children. . ..The problems are with persistent and pernicious disparities that exist” (p.
478). There exists a “demographic divide” (Gay and Howard, cited in Cochran-Smith &

Fries, 2005; also cited by Banks et al., 2005). Differences of race, class and language too

10

often translate into what Jonathan Kozol called “savage inequalities” in terms of
resources, opportunities, and achievement (e. g. Anyon, 1997, Kozol, 1991; 2005; Rose,
1999). According to the National Center for Educational Statistics (2007),

a study of 4th graders indicated that 48 percent of Black, 49 percent of Hispanic, and 36
percent of American Indian students were more likely than White and Asian/Pacific
Islanders to attend schools with the highest measure of poverty (schools with more than
75 percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch). According to statistics
compiled by Hollins and Guzman (2005), test scores and graduation rates are consistently
higher for White students than for Afiican-American, Hispanic and Native-American
students; schools which serve Afiican-American children and poor children have higher
student-teacher ratios and more severe teacher shortages; further, there is a higher
percentage of new, out of field teachers and under-qualified teachers in schools that serve
poor and mostly Afiican-American students.

Students who are poorly served by schools are disadvantaged outside of school as
well. They experience higher rates of poverty, lack of health care, unemployment, higher
rates of infant mortality, higher child and teen death rates, and higher teenage pregnancy
(Annie E. Casey Foundation, Kids Count, 2007). By contrast, research indicates that
those with higher educational achievement have better overall health regardless of
income (N HES, 2007). The social injustice that permeates schooling and society more
broadly requires a “call to action” (Cochran-Smith, 2004, p. 156) on the part of teacher
education to prepare our students to affirmatively and equitably respond to diversity and

to theorize and practice critical, multicultural education.

11

Multicultural Pre-service Teacher Education2

How has teacher education responded to the demographic and conceptual
imperatives that implore multicultural education? Courses and entire programs have
evolved, been revised and restructured, and attention has been paid to needed institutional
change. Research has been conducted to better understand the knowledge, skills and
dispositions necessary to prepare teacher candidates to teach with and towards equity in a
multicultural society.

The need to better prepare teachers to respond to all children can be traced back
almost 40 years. According to Zeichner and Hoeft (1996), a 1969 National Institute for
Advanced Study in Teaching Disadvantaged Youth report, Teachers for the Real World,
charged that teacher candidates were unfamiliar with the backgrounds of poor children,
knew little about their own values and prejudices, lacked skills to perform effectively in
the classroom, and were only prepared to teach kids like themselves (p. 525). By 1972,
the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) first called for
teacher educators to prepare students for diverse populations, and soon after, in 1976, the
National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (N CATE) revised its standards
to call for multicultural teacher education (Banks, et a1, 2005; Goodwin, 1997). In 1992,
however, NCATE reviews indicated that many schools still struggled to meet all the
standards called for by the Council. That is, “although most institutions included
references to multicultural education in the unit’s objectives and mission statement,
NCATE evaluators were often unable to detect where they were implemented in the

program” (Gollnick, cited in Zeichner and Hoeft, 1996, p.526). By 1993, most

 

2 It is beyond the scope of my study to consider teacher education that focuses on in-service teacher
education and professional development.

12

disciplines and many states had included standards that referred to ethnic groups, cultural
diversity, human relations, multicultural education or bilingual education, though many
still question how much progress has been made and how effective multicultural teacher
education can be (Goodwin, 1997; Zeichner & Gore, and Hixson, cited in Melnick and
Zeichner, 1997).

With regard to explicit coursework to prepare teachers for cultural diversity,
teacher education programs evolved in three phases: exclusion, inclusion, and infusion
(Goodwin, 1997, p. 21). The exclusion phase refers to teacher education that does not
include any programmatic effort to prepare teachers for diversity. Today, teacher
education programs socialize pre—service teachers to think about diversity and become
multicultural educators in one of two ways: by segregating one course that focuses on
diversity and multicultural education as content, or by infitsing issues of diversity and
multicultural perspectives throughout all courses (Zeichner & Hoefi, 1996; Melnick and
Zeichner, 1997). Research indicates, though, that the one course model has a “limited
long term impact... on the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of teachers” (Zeichner &
Hoeft, 1996, p.527), and the one course model in which pre-service candidates enroll in a
social foundations course or an isolated diversity course still remains dominant (Cruz-

J anzen & Taylor, 2004).

A plethora of research reflects on and seeks to improve how teacher education
programs prepare students for diversity. Comprehensive reviews of research, such as
Hollins and Guzman’s (2005) Preparing Teachers for Diverse Populations, indicate that
research in the field overwhelmingly tends to focus on attitudes, dispositions, beliefs and

intercultural competencies of pre-service teachers. Further, Christine Sleeter (2001), in

13

her review of research on multicultural teacher education, finds that an abundance of
research focuses on the attitudes of White pre-service students. As Hollins and Guzman
(2005) review, many studies focus on foundations courses or methods courses in which
the researchers are also the instructors of the course (e. g. Cockrell et al, 1999). Many of
these studies assessed the degree to which a course or activity effected “prejudice
reduction” (e.g. Garmon, 1998; McFalls & Cobb-Roberts, 2001). Further, researchers
have studied student resistance (e. g. Cockrell et al, 1999; McFalls & Cobb-Roberts,
2001), student readiness (e. g. Bennett, 1989), and student attitudes (e.g. Gannon, 2004).
Moreover, there are numerous studies that focus on particular programs or learning
experiences (e.g. Bell et al, 2005) or tools such as technology (e.g. Phillion et al, 2005)
that aim to better prepare students to teach in culturally diverse communities.

As a result, numerous scholars have named obstacles, identified the knowledge,
skills, and dispositions, and envisioned the learning experiences needed to better prepare
pre—service candidates. James Banks (2005) suggests that students need to develop
positive attitudes towards cultural groups, knowledge about history, culture, and about
diverse perspectives, understandings of the ways that institutions and popular culture
perpetuate stereotypes, and the skills to apply them to practice with rigor (p.243). In
Powerful Teacher Education, Lessons fiom Exemplary Practice, Linda Darling-
Hammond (2006) similarly identifies five attributes of and for promising multicultural
teacher education programs. They include carefully selected field experiences linked to
discussions and readings; an ecological or sociocultural view of human development that
includes tools for learning about context and turning that context into teaching

knowledge; integrated study, not an isolated course; commitment to social action; and a

14

willingness to struggle with race and class (p. 224). Villegas and Lucus (cited in Banks,
et al, 2005) suggest that programmatic efforts should include guided school and
community visits; service learning in schools and other community organizations; student
studies; and practicum in diverse contexts with teachers who engage in equity pedagogy
(p. 264). In addition to curriculum or program design, Melnick and Zeichner (1997)
suggest that programs should also improve upon the quality of instruction, the quality
faculty qualifications, and the diversity of faculty composition (pp. 24-25).
Multiculturalisms

Multicultural education represents a major response to the demographic
imperatives described above. Yet, the concept and practice of multicultural education is
“confusing and contested” (Duarte & Smith, 2000, p. 2). In their book, Foundational
Perspectives in Multicultural Education, Eduardo Manuel Duarte and Stacy Smith (2000)
denote “multiculturalisms” to refer to the diversity and multiplicity of responses to the
“multicultural condition” and to the social “phenomena surrounding ethnicity, race, and
culture.”

Multiculturalism has to do with how an individual interprets and sees the word

and perceives his/her place in it-- the world being a place characterized by the

“multicultural condition.” In addition, multiculturalism has to do with how one

evaluates this sense of place, for oneself and others, and what one proposes to do

in response to the multicultural condition. (p. 2-3)

There are multiple, converging, and diverging perspectives of multicultural education

each with their own consciousness, language and commitments, and histories3. Further,

 

3 Significantly, Duarte and Smith (2000) identify three characteristics of a perspective: perspectives as
locations, as research communities, and as traditions. As locations, perspectives are “topographies” in the
sense that feminist scholar Chela Sandoval’s referred to them, as modes of “oppositional consciousness” or
conceptual places that “delineate the set of critical points around which individuals and groups seeking to
transform oppressive powers constitute themselves as resistant and oppositional subjects” (Sandoval, cited
in Durate & Smith, 2000, p. 8). As research communities, perspectives are “networks of shared

15

many of the distinctions across multiculturalisms arise from critiques of multicultural
education as it is currently practiced, or at least how it is perceived to be practiced
(Sleeter & Delgado Bemal, 2005). Recognizing multiculturalisms, I will organize the
next section of my literature review related to multicultural education using thefour
foundational perspectives named by Duarte and Smith (2000): Ethnic Studies
Multiculturalism, Liberal Multiculturalism, Anti-Racist Multiculturalism, and Critical
Multiculturalism. I choose these perspectives because they attend to questions of
ideology in a way that is hidden or less explicit in some other mappings. Still, because I
respect and recognize the importance and prominence of the work of leading scholars in
the field, I will briefly review their conceptualizations of multicultural education before
returning to the multiculturalisms named by Duarte and Smith.
Dimensions and Approaches to Multicultural Education

Prominent scholars of the field (e. g. Banks, 2001; 2004, Bennett, 2001, Gay,
2000; Sleeter and Grant, 1989), whose work has been groundbreaking in terms of
establishing, defining, and expanding the field of multicultural education, describe
multicultural education in terms of curriculum, scope, purposes, and conceptualizations.
James Banks (2004), a primary theorist in multicultural education, outlines goals and
maps “dimensions” and “approaches” for practice. For Banks, multicultural education is
“education for freedom” and “an inclusive and cementing movement” (cited in
Lockwood, 1992, pp. 23, 27; see also Reissman, 1994). Banks posits three outcomes of
multicultural education:

(1) Multicultural education helps students realize both academic excellence and
cultural excellence.

 

commitments and terms” (Durate & Smith, 2000, p. 11). As traditions, perspectives are historically
grounded and evolutionary.
l 6

(2) Multicultural education nurtures students’ hearts, as well as their minds, in
(3) ”I’Iileofnlulticultural education process helps students develop positive cultural,
national and global identification.(cited in Lockwood, 1992)
Towards these goals, Banks scopes the field naming five “dimensions” of multicultural
education (2004). The first, content integration, calls for teachers to include multicultural
examples into the existing curriculum. Knowledge construction requires that teachers and
students explore how social, historical, and cultural forces influence dominant paradigms
of knowledge. Prejudice reduction takes up student attitudes and interactions with
people culturally different than themselves. Equity Pedagogy focuses on instructional
strategies and methods to help particular groups of students achieve academically.
Finally, empowering school culture examines the school as an institution and works to
change the structure and culture to become equitable for disadvantaged students.
Sleeter and Grant (1989) and Sleeter (1996) offer five “approaches,” similar to
Banks’ dimensions. They include teaching the culturally different, which is like equity
pedagogy; human relations which is like prejudice reduction and multicultural
competence concerning how students get along; single group studies which is a particular
kind of curriculum reform (like in Women’s Studies or Black History Month) in which
the curriculur focus is on one identity group; multicultural education in which one
negotiates equal opportunity and cultural pluralism, promotes an understanding of
differences and unequal distribution of power, and sees multiple paths towards learning;
and education that is multicultural and social reconstructionist which honors diversity,
functions democratically, analyzes social inequities, and encourages social action.
Other taxonomies speak more to the practice of multicultural education rather

than to the purpose and scope of the field. Sonia Nieto (2002) names “levels of

17

multicultural education support. Nieto describes five levels: monocultural, tolerance,
acceptance, respect, and affirmation, solidarity and critique. Banks (2005) sirrrilarly
articulates four “levels of curriculum reform”: the contributions approach, the additive
approach, the transforrnative approach, and the social action approach. Both Nieto’s and
Banks’ levels describe students might do and what schools might look like if they
employed various approaches. For example, Nieto (2002) depicts schools which
celebrate heroes and holidays (like Chinese New Year or Kwanzaa) as add-ons to
previously established curriculum as “tolerance” model schools, while schools that
restructures entire curriculum to focus on thematic units such as “immigration” and
“individual and collective responsibility” demonstrate a model of “respect” (pp. 11, 13).
Banks makes similar distinctions.

Christine Bennett (2001) reviews research in multicultural education, and in doing
so, she locates twelve “research genres” within “four “clusters.” These clusters serve to
map the field. The first cluster, “curriculum reform,” includes the “genres” of historical
inquiry, inquiries related to texts and instructional materials, as well as curriculum theory.
This “cluster” of research assumes that knowledge is contested and constructed and that
curriculum in schools is Eurocentric and serves racism. The second cluster, “equity
pedagogy,” assumes that all children have unique strengths and can learn when schools
successfully enable students through “cultural socialization.” “Genres” that fall under this
cluster, according to Bennett’s review, include research on school climate, student
achievement, and instructional style. “Multicultural competencies” is the third cluster.
Multicultural competencies rest on the belief that prejudice reduction is needed and

individuals “need not reject their familial worldview and identity to firnction comfortably

l8

in another cultural milieu” (p. 172). “Genres” of research include studies on identity
development, prejudice reduction, and ethnic group culture. Finally, the fourth “cluster”
is the “social equity” cluster. Research focuses on demographics, popular culture, and
social agency. The two premises of this cluster are that “social change is a necessary
condition to bring about equitable education, access, participation and achievement” and
that this kind of change is possible with “basic democratic values” and the “American
Creed” (p. 172).

These taxonomies above are not exhaustive, though they do represent some of the
major conceptions of the field. Embedded in the taxonomies that name outcomes,
approaches, dimensions, levels, and genres of research are various “ways of seeing the
world and one’s place in it” (Duarte & Smith, 2000, p. 2) though they are not always
explicit or clearly visible. For these reasons, it is helpfirl to refer to Duarte and Smith’s
“multiculturalisms” and to situate multicultural education within various theoretical
traditions.

Ethnic Studies Multiculturalism

Ethnic Studies multiculturalism takes root in two historical contexts: the early
twentieth century and the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 19703. These
movements are credited as the beginning of multicultural education (Banks, 2005). The
early Ethnic Studies Movement worked to develop and infuse content about Afiican-
Americans in school curriculum. Scholars like W.E.B. Dubois and CG. Woodson, in the
early 19008, established a consciousness about “curricular hegemony,” the self-esteem of
students from particular groups, and a value for separate institutions (Duarte and Smith,

2000, p. 14-15). In the 19603, multicultural education began as “a scholarly and activist

19

movement to transform schools and their contexts” with an initial focus on including the
culture and history of marginalized groups into school curriculum as a way to “bring
intellectual countemarratives to dominant Eurocentric narratives” (Sleeter & Delgado
Bemal, 2004, p. 240). Duarte and Smith (2000) suggest that these two moments, “when
taken together comprise the tradition that frames current scholarship and activism in the
field” (p. 14). Ethnic studies multiculturalism created Women’s Studies and Afiican
Studies programs at universities and colleges. Ethnic Studies Multiculturalism calls for
equitable access, status and representation in schools and other institutions as well as to
attention to self esteem of students in the face of exclusion and oppression (Duarte and
Smith, 2000, p. 16).
Liberal Democratic Multiculturalism

Liberal Democratic Multiculturalism seeks to balance the basic tenets of what it
means to live in a liberal society-- such as the practice of representative and collective
decision, equal sovereignty, autonomy and individual freedom, and universal political
rights-- with the reality of cultural pluralism. Amy Gutrnann (2000) argues that schools
must integrate multicultural education with civic education.

A multicultural curriculum dedicated to teaching deliberation [that] would

encourage students to respect each other as individuals, regardless of the

accomplishments of their ancestors, and to take different points of view seriously

when talking about politics. (p. 316)
This vision is silent about institutional domination and collective group identities,
defining diversity in terms of individuals with different values (Duarte and Smith, 2000,
p. 21). Because of its faith in democracy and liberty as it exists, the project for Liberal
Democratic Multiculturalism supports equal opportunity within the existing democratic
system.

20

Antiracist Multiculturalism

Anti-racism emerged as an oppositional and activist movement to “undermine the
normal racist order of social relations by problematizing the political and economic
systems that thrive within that society” (Duarte and Smith, 2000, p. 17). It has roots in
early abolitionist movements in Britain and the United States in the 19703 and 19803
when activists in Britain and Canada challenged the acritical stance of mandated
multicultural education that failed to address racism (Sleeter and Delgado Berna], 2004).
Anti-racist education is “part of the larger quest for redistribution of power and economic
resources” (Sleeter cited in Duarte & Smith, 2004). Three main tenets of anti-racist
multiculturalism include opposition to the “hegemonic ideology of monocultural white
supremacy. . .”; the belief that anti-racist opposition can be a starting point for broader
critique against other forms of systematic discrimination; and the goal of “developing
educational programs that are specifically anti-assimilationist” Duarte & Smith, 2000, p.
17).

Some distinguish anti-racist education from multicultural education, seeing the
two as philosophically different. Robin Gritner (2000), for example, distinguishes the
two.

Multicultural education is based on the belief that racism is founded on

misunderstanding and ignorance that leave individuals open to racist

misrepresentation of non-White ways of life and value systems. . ..Antiracist
education on the other hand is based on learnt attitudes of White superiority to

human groups that Europe and North American have historically exploited. (p.

135)

Sleeter and Grant (2004) firrther suggest that one risk of antiracism is that it establishes a
binary opposing multicultural education. They also suggest that anti-racsim can

essentialize race and can subsume other forms of oppression, such as sexism and

21

classism. Sleeter and Delgado Bemal (2004) suggest that the benefits of anti-racist
education include a specific opposition to racism as it challenges racist school structures
like tracking, contextualizes culture within power relations, connects schools and
communities, and problematizes whiteness. Another benefit is that it casts antiracism as
a active stance or a way of engaging, thus recognizing the power of people of all races,
ethnicities, and cultures to oppose racism.
Critical Multiculturalisms
Broadly, critical multiculturalism, including the work of many who may not
consider their work under the label “multicultural education” (Duarte & Smith, 2000),
foregrounds analysis which focuses specifically on power, including the way power
relates to oppression, democracy, white supremacy, racism, colonialism, and social
justice (Ladson-Billings, 2004; Sleeter, 1996; Sleeter & Delgado Bemal, 2004; Sleeter &
McLaren, 1995; Steinberg, 2001; Ovando & McLaren, 2000).4 Further, critical
multiculturalism problematizes theories and practices of multicultural education that do
not interrogate power relations in a serious way. Peter McLaren (2001), for example,
explicates “two claims” which are worth quoting at length.
One [claim] is that multicultural education has largely refused to acknowledge
how imperialism, colonialism, and transnational circulation of capitalism
influences the ways in which many oppressed minority groups cognitively map
democracy in the United States. The other claim is the present focus on diversity
in multicultural education is often misguided because the struggle for ethnic
diversity makes progressive sense only if it can be accompanied by a sustained
analysis of the cultural logics of white supremacy... No task is more urgent for
multicultural and intercultural education today than to re-understand its project as

that of accounting for the exploitation of people of color in materialist, historical
and global terms. . .. Positions on diversity and inclusion are often predicated on

 

4 Early critiques of multicultural education came from neo-conservative scholars (e. g. Hirsch, 1988;
Ravitch, 1990) who feared that multicultural education would foster cultural illiteracy, erase any sense of a
unified American culture, and actually widen the social and economic inequities in the country (Sleeter,
1996; Sleeter & McLaren, 1995).

22

hidden assumptions of assimilation and consensus. . .[and] identity politics are

often predicated on modernist conceptions of negatively defined difference. (p. xi-

xiii)

Critical multiculturalisms share an “ethos of justice” (Heilman, 2005). Yet,
multidisciplinary and eclectic, critical multiculturalisms draw from many theoretical
traditions (e. g. critical pedagogy, critical race theory, antiracist education, feminism,
cultural studies, post-structuralism) which understand power and focus on oppression
differently.

Difl'krential Mode of Consciousness and Anti-Oppressive Education— A Catalytic
Imperative

In my attempt to review the scholarship related to diversity and multicultural
education, I hope to have presented a complicated and conflicted field, to recognize, as
Kevin Kumashiro (2000) does, “an amalgam of approaches” which conceptualize
multicultural education and work against different aspects of oppression. Kumashiro also
names four approaches, only one of which extends beyond Duarte and Smith’s “topos” in
a way that is important to note. He notes: education for the Other, education about an
Other, education that is critical of privileging and Othering, and education that changes
students and society.

The final approach, education that changes students and society, draws on
poststructuralism, which conceptualizes oppression “around notions of discourse and
citation” (Kumashiro, 2000, p.40). That is, poststructuralism points to the way
oppression can originate in the way people talk as well as in the references we allude to

when we story or imagine realities. Oppression, accordingly, occurs because discourses

and citations affect how we “think, feel, act, and interact” (p. 40). This is an important

23

idea for this study which focused on the discourses through which pre-service teachers
and their instructors think about, construct, and imagine identities and differences, as well
as an important connection between the scholarship surveyed in this chapter and the
discourses which are discussed in upcoming chapter. That is, though this is not a study of
approaches or of matching scholarship to the ideas of students, the students and
instructors do construct their ideas within the context of the scholarship discussed herein.
Their visions cite partial and diverging elements of the theories in this chapter as well as
theories that develop from other contexts.

There are additional implications related to Kumashiro’s conceptions that are
worth noting here, which I refer to as a catalytic imperative. First, educators need to see
anti-oppressive education and arguably multicultural education as both a cognitive and a
“performative” process. That is, we must teach students to consider how “the very ways
in which we think and do things can be oppressive,” recognizing that, in doing so, we are
asking students to transform not just what they know but who they are, which is
emotionally and intellectually challenging. Secondly, poststructuralist perspectives do not
privilege one foundational perspective. Duarte and Smith (2000), for example,
borrowing form Chela Sanadovol, do not argue for one perspective. They and suggest
the practice of “differential consciousness” or the idea that one might “shift between”
perspectives (p. 23). Kumashiro extends the idea of shifting more explicitly to argue for
educators to use poststructural perspectives, “to look beyond” educational research, to
firrther situate the multiplicities of oppression and to locate ideas to extend what it might

mean to teach and learn in anti-oppressive ways.

24

This study is situated within multiple imperatives--- demographic, conceptual,
and performative, and studies the ways in which pre-service teachers and their instructors
use and construct theories about diversity and multicultural education. In the next
chapter, I will describe the method and methodology of my project. Chapters four, five,
and six reveal my analysis and interpretations. Chapter seven will conclude the study,
including a discussion of how the literature reviewed herein is different from what my

study found.

25

CHAPTER THREE
METHOD AND METHODOLOGY
Teacher Education at State University

State University is a large, Mid-Atlantic, land-grant institution. Surrounded by
two mountain ranges, the descent into the valley in which State is located juxtaposes cow
fields with a football field in a stadium that seats over 90,000 people and contrasts
economically privileged University neighborhoods with the surrounding working class
towns and rural communities. The buildings’ architectural styles and the neatly
manicured campus represent the school’s long history and deep pride. In addition to the
main campus, there are over 15 branch campuses located throughout the state. Many
students begin their studies at a campus nearer to their home and transfer to the main
campus at the start of their junior year. Branch campuses, a few of which offer full four-
year degrees, can offer a less expensive option for students who can live at home and
defer the steep cost room and board. Because the main campus is large and crowded and
admittance is competitive, branch campuses can also serve as a provisional space for
students who do not gain acceptance to study at the main campus as freshman.

State’s English Education program is a four year undergraduate program in the
College of Education’s Teaching and Learning. Teachers who graduate from State are
highly regarded by many school districts. An NCATE accredited program, State’s
teacher education infuses issues of diversity throughout courses and requirements. That
is, there is no one “diversity” or “multicultural education.” Some potential sites for
discussion of diversity and multicultural education include an introductory course

Education in American Society as well as upper level educational theory and policy

26

courses, the first of which firlfills the requirement that all students at the University take
course focusing on “US. Cultures.” There is also an introductory teaching course,
Education 200, which addresses three questions: Who am I as a learner? What does it
mean to be a teacher? Who might I be as a teacher? These questions may (or may not)
foster conversations related to issues of diversity, though one of the participants in my
study named this class as influential to her thinking. Of note, the questions named herein
are the foci for the introductory course that is offered on the main campus, which only
one participant in this project took. The introductory courses at the branch campuses
have functioned independently and vary dramatically from campus to campus.
Additionally, only one course, an English Education methods class, Adolescent Literature
and Literacy, specifically names “diversity” in its course description.

The College also requires all Teaching and Learning students to complete 80
hours of volunteer or paid educational work. Students must spend half of the 80 hours
with learners whose cultural, social, or ethnic background is different from their own.
Students submit a record of their hours, signed by the coordinator or leader of their
service site, to a staff assistant who simply records the hours. The Department does not
require or formally assist students in reflecting on these experiences.

Further, in addition to the “United States Cultures,” requirement which is fulfilled
for Education majors by the Education theory and policy class, all students at State, as
part of their general education requirements must also take at least one of many three-
credit courses labeled “International Cultures.” There is no requirement that students
choose any particular “International Cultures” course or that the course students directly

apply issues or think about how the course relates to teaching and learning

27

Education majors in elementary and secondary education complete three field
experiences. The first is part of the early introduction to education class. The second
field experience is part of a block of classes for Secondary majors. “The Block,” as it is
colloquially known, is comprised of three interrelated courses--- the field experience, a
discipline-specific methods class, and a large, interdisciplinary course that focuses on
broader pedagogical ideas and questions related to teaching and learning in secondary
schools. Student teaching, which most students take in the second semester of their senior
year, is the final field experience. Though the University has field experiences throughout
the state, the program has named a city and its surrounding suburbs in the Western region
of the State as the English discipline-specific center. There are also two interdisciplinary
cohorts who teach in schools within an hour’s drive from State. Students who teach
within this radius of State complete both their pre-student teaching and student teaching
placement as a “linked experience” at the same school with the same mentor teacher.
Finally, there is an option for a few selected secondary students to student teach in
Sweden or at a boarding school for Native American children in South Dakota. There is
no formal learning experience related to diversity that precedes either out of state field
experience.

Participants

I interviewed both students and instructors. Though I initially surveyed 18 student
members of one English Education course, three students agreed to work with me at
length (as I describe below). These three student participants were seniors in the College
of Education, all majors in the Secondary Education English Education program, two of

the three were in their final semester of coursework before student teaching when the

28

interviews began. Of the three main participants, two of the students began college at a
satellite campus, though not at the same satellite campus. One was an honor student who
began her experience at the main campus. One student came from out of state, two from
in-state. They would student teach in three different locations: one at the discipline
specific center near her home, one in a linked experience near State, and one in Sweden.
I interviewed six instructors---two tenure track assistant professors, one non-tenure track
assistant professor, and three graduate students. Two instructors taught in the
Department of Teaching and Learning, two taught in the English Department, one taught
in the Comparative Literature Department, and one taught in the Afiican and African-
American Studies Department. One taught at a branch campus, and one had moved to a
new university by the time of the interviews.
Data Sources and Collection

I used five sources of data for my study, including a survey, two open-ended
focus groups, interviews with both students and instructors, and student work samples.
The collection was collected during the 2006-2007 school year, mostly in during the fall
semester. There were four phases of data collection.
Phase One: Open-ended Survey

In this first phase, I conducted an open-ended survey with all participating
members of a Fall 2006 English Education methods course, a course which had a co-
requisite field experience (n=18). Using an extensive literature review of current research
about multicultural theory and teacher education as my guide, the survey sought to reveal
how students defined diversity, students’ past experiences with diverse populations, how

students imagined their own classroom and teaching, how students understood the

29

purpose and need for multicultural education, and how students assessed their potential to
become multicultural teachers. Prior to conducting the survey, I met with three English
Education student teachers, fed them pizza and asked them to review my survey for
clarity and accuracy. I also asked them to talk about how they would answer the survey
to determine if participants would interpret the questions as I had intended.

I used the 18 surveys to orient myself to program at State and to formulate more
probing questions for the second phase of the study, the focus group. For example, it was
in these surveys that I first learned that many students had been influenced by a common
course. I invited all 18 members of the class, all of whom took the survey, to participate
in focus groups.

Phase Two: Focus Groups

After the surveys, I formed and conducted focus groups to further probe the issues
above and inquire about tensions, struggles, and absences revealed in the survey data.
Though I had invited all 18 students who had taken the survey to participate, only six
students volunteered to participate in the focus group. I formed two focus groups of three
people each, all white and only one male. Though I identified a topic of discussion based
on the surveys, the participants were encouraged to comment freely in what some call
“guided conversations” (Rubin & Rubin in Bogdan & Biklen, 1998). My hope was to
allow the discourse and meaning of the interviews to be jointly constructed by me and the
participants (Mishler, 1986). I used the discussions of the focus groups to gather insight
about what to pursue later in individual interviews (Bogdan & Biklin, 1998). With

permission of the participants, the focus groups were audio-taped.

30

Phase Three: Semi-structured and Unstructured Interviews

Following the focus groups, I identified students whom I would ask to participate
in three, longer interviews. I asked four of the six students who participated in the focus
group to be interviewed. I had intended to choose participants based upon tensions
revealed in their focus groups and upon an expressed interest in participating further in
the research. All six focus group participants provided these tensions, though I decided
to omit two students when I learned that they were actually graduate students seeking
certification and had not participated in State’s full undergraduate program. Of the four
students I invited to participate in the interviews, three agreed.

I conducted a series of three interviews with each student-- open and in-depth, one
semi-structured and one unstructured interviews (Bernard, 2002; Mishler, 1986; Siedman,
1998). The participants were interviewed separately. The first interview was semi-
structured-- extending and probing topics of discussion from the focus group and survey--
but moved fluidly toward a more unstructured interview as participants initiated threads
for discussion. The second interview focused on mapping out and describing the places
and spaces in which participants learned to think about diversity. The third interview was
be open-ended. My goal in conducting unstructured interviews was to “[get] words to
fly" (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992, p. 63). With permission of the participants, each interview
was audio-taped, transcribed and shared with the participants (each read their own
interview transcript). One participant only participated in two interviews. Fearing she
might quit the study as the demands of student teaching took hold, we agreed that her

second would be longer than the previous hour interview.

31

Phase Four: Documents and Instructor Interviews

Following the first two interviews, I asked the three pre-service teachers
participating in the study to identify two or three instructors who or courses which
“significantly” influenced their thinking about diversity and/or multicultural education.
I allowed the pre-service teachers to define “significant” as they wished, though in
response to their questions for clarification, I did note that “significant” could be positive
or negative. Each student identified two or three instructors. One instructor, an English
Education graduate student, was named by all three participants. In all, I interviewed six
instructors individually. Each interview lasted about an hour. In addition to the
interview itself, some instructors provided me with syllabi or course assignments. Pre-
service teachers also provided me with copies of assignments from these courses.
Though the students were no longer enrolled in the courses they mentioned and I did not
share the students’ names with the instructors, these interviews contextualized the spaces
and places in which students learned and thought about diversity and multicultural
education.

Process of Analysis

This qualitative study used critical discourse analysis to make sense of the
narratives of the pre-service teacher and the instructors (e.g. Fairclough, 1989, Gee, 1999,
Luke, 2008, Wodak & Meyer, 2001) and a theoretical bricolage for interpretation
(Kincheloe, 2005). This section defines each methodology and discusses how I used

each in analysis and interpretation.

32

Defining Critical Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a study of language that regards “language as a social
practice” (Fairclough & Wodak, in Wodak, 2001; F airclough, 1989). Norman Fairclough
(1988) defines discourse as a “process of social interaction” which includes: “the text [as
well as] the process of production, of which the text is produced, and the process of
interpretation, for which the text is a resource” (p. 24). Thomas Popkewitz, cited in
Britzman (1991), defines discourse as “set[ting] the conditions by which events are
interpreted and one’s self as an individual is located in a dynamic world” (p. 17).
Rejecting the notion that language is simply about “exchanging information,” James Gee
(1999) suggests that language has two primary functions: “to scaffold the performance of
social activities. . .and to scaffold human affiliation within cultures and groups” (p.1).
Wodak (2001) explains that as a social practice, discourses are “determined by social
structures... [and by] sets of conventions associated with social institutions” (p. 17).

Critical perspectives of discourse further understand that language is “political”
(Gee, 1999, p.1) and “ideologically shaped by power relations” (Wodak, 2001).
Fairclough (1988) notes, “the whole social order of discourse is put together and held
together as a hidden effect of power” (p. 55) The texts, as products of the Social
processes of language, “are often sights of struggle in that they show traces of differing
discourses and ideologies contending and struggling for dominance” (Wodak, 2001 ,
p.11). Critical discourse analysis, therefore, aims to “demystify discourses by
deciperhering ideologies” by attending “not only the notion of struggles for power. . .but
also the intertextuality and recontextualization of competing discourses” (Wodak, 2001,

p. 10-11).

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Accordingly to F airclough, (1988), there are “three stages” or “dimensions” to
critical discourse analysis: description of the text, interpretation of the relationship
analysis, and explanation of the relationship between the interaction and the social
context. Description analyzes “formal properties of text [which] can be regarded. . .as
traces of the productive process. . .and as clues of the process of interpretation. (p. 24).
During this stage the researcher pays attention to metaphors, grammar and sentence
structure and type, interruptions, passive and active voice, and language. Interpretation
attends to connections between the text as a product and as a resource in that production
of meaning. Interpretation considers three questions:

1. What interpretation are participants giving to the situational and intertextual
contexts?

2. What discourse types are being drawn upon?

3. Are the answers for questions 1 and 2 different for different participants, and do

they change during the course of the interaction? (F airclough, 1988, p. 162)
Finally, the purpose of the explanation stage is to show how discourse is socialized.
Researchers attend to questions about “social determinants,” “ideologies,” and the
“effects” of the socialization process (Fairclough, 1988, p. 166), including the discourses
that were co-constructed by the researcher and the interviewees (Mishler, cited in Elliott,
2005)

Using Critical Discourse Analysis

I used critical discourse analysis throughout the study. There were many layers to
this process. As I began to read and think about the stories in the transcripts, I took notice
of words, metaphors, and ideologies that struck me. The participants’ words sparked

ideas that would eventually lead me to see ideologies and interpretative constructs. For

example, as I will illustrate in chapter five, one pre-service teacher, Ashlee, used the

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language of geography: “over there,” “in the real world,” “out there.” These words and
phrases jumped out at me in the early stages of analysis. At first, I could see the language
as conjuring and connected to geographical images but could not think beyond the
surface to consider how theories of geography and spatiality might prove useful for
understanding how Ashlee was thinking about diversity and multicultural education.
Also, I do not think that Ashlee used the language because she was consciously referring
to theories of geography. Still, considering how Ashlee’s imagery positioned her in
relationship to people and ideas about which she spoke led to me to return to her
language, as well as the language of the other participants to consider paradigmatic
implications and power relations of the interview speech. In this sense, analyzing
discourse meant moving between the language in the interview speech and available
theories for analysis. As I searched through available and useful theories for
interpretation, I re-analyzed the language of instructors’ and students’ and found new and
richer meanings in their discourse.
Bricolage in Analysis

To address and engage the complexities of students thinking and becoming, in
particular the ways that power governs these experiences, and to “rea ” and interpret the
data in multiple and critical ways, I used a bricolage approach for interpretation of my
analysis. The term bricolage derives from Levi Strauss and the French word “bricoleur”
which refers to one who makes “use of tools available to complete a task” (Kincheloe,
2001). Kincheloe (2005) explicates:

[Bricolage] is grounded on an epistemology of complexity. ...The task of the

bricoleur is to attack this complexity uncovering the invisible artifacts of power

and culture and documenting the nature of their influence not only on their
scholarship but also on scholarship in general. In this process, bricoleurs act on

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the concept that theory is not an explanation of nature---it is more an explanation
of our relation to nature. (p. 324)

Bricolage assumes that research can not categorize or explain some real thing or single
truth, but instead assumes that research can uncover, deconstruct, and reveal thoughtful
accounts of truths. The way I used theory in this study is a bricolage, as I made use of
theories that I knew and that made sense to me according to what I could see in the data.
The analysis and interpretation revealed in chapters five and six are only “plausible
readings” (Honan, 2004) a few of many possible versions of what could be told. For
example, choosing to foreground the racialized discourses in chapter six was a deliberate
yet necessarily limited move. In terms of limitations, my focus shifted my attention from
other plausible and important analytic foci which was also supported by my data. For
example, I did not choose to center my discussion on gendered discourses and patriarchy.
I did not directly confront hetero-sexualized identities and homophobia. Further, I did not
focus on nationalized identities and hegemonies. Moreover, the scope of this study
certainly concealed and simplified some of the complexities, variations, and of racial
identities as well as the intersecting and “complex relationships of exploitation and
resistance, grounded in differences of class, gender, and ethnicity, [which] give rise to a
multiplicity of ideological constructions of the racialized “Other.” (Darder & Torres,
2004, p. 46). Therefore, my interpretations reveal not only the pre-service teachers’ and
instructors’ knowing and being but also my own, as the theories used to make sense of
the data in my study reflect the inventory of available theories in my experience and
knowledge.

In research, bricolage makes use of interdisciplinary ways of inquiring,

understanding, analyzing, using, and presenting research. Norm Denzin and Yvonne

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Lincoln (cited in Kincheloe, 2005) outline five dimensions of bricolage: methodological,
theoretical, interpretative, political, and narrative (p. 335). Using interpretative
bricolage I will employ various theoretical positions to interpret discourse. One of the
major interpretive frames I used to construct meaning, which I describe in the next two
sections of this chapter, came from theories of critical geography and spatiality, in
particular feminist perspectives of place and space, and from theories of race. Using
political bricolage I critically examined the various roles that power play in the data I
collect and knowledge I construct. Narrative Bricolage, as critical discourse analysis, I
examined how the stories we tell shape what we know and can become. I studied the
narratives of the pre-service teachers in order to determine how stories, myths,
archetypes, and various plots shape their perceptions about what it means to be
multicultural educators.
How I Used Theories of Critical Geography and Spatiality in Analysis

Critical geography and theories of spatiality (Anzaldua, 1987; Berquist, 2002;
Bhabha, 2005; Blunt & Rose, 1994, de Certeau, 1984, Gregory 1994, Grewal & Kaplan,
1994; Soja 1989, 1996, 2000) offer a useful frame for chapter five which explores
meaning construction about the relationships among space, place, identity and difference.
Generally, theories of human geography differentiate place and space. “Space” means
physical or material space and “place” signifies the meanings and ideas associated with a
space (Tuan, 1977; Relph, 1976). Critical perspectives of geography attend to the role
power plays in inter-connectivity between space and place, and attempts to “transcend the
partitions” between “material spaces” and “metaphoric spaces” (Neil cited in Gregory,

1994, p. 5). “Socially produced and reproduced” (Soja, 1989) through individual

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experiences, and subject to interpretation, “place” is lived, narrated, imagined, theorized,
represented, embodied, and performed. Yet, these “imagined geographies” (Blunt &
Rose, 1994, p. 15) or “landscapes” (Raine, 1996, p. 230) are not neutral, idiosyncratic, or
simple “discursive illusions” (Moya, 1997, p. 127). The relationship between space and
place shape and are often shaped by oppressive and unjust political, economical, cultural,
historical, and social conditions.

I use theories of space and place to analyze pre-service teachers’ discourse—their
language and their paradigmatic references, as the spaces and places constructed through
our speech are recursively tied to identity and difference. We enact our identities through
language, drawing on and constructing particular experienced spaces and conceptual
places that are more and less inclusive and exclusive of certain identities and behaviors.
As we negotiate and create meanings and places, we draw what Gloria Anzaldua (1987)
has famously referred to as “borders”: “Borders are set up to define the places that are
safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a defining line, a narrow strip
along a steep edge”(p. 3). Using this idea, my analysis and interpretation examined how
the language of the pre-service teachers effected borders. Again, because place and space
are not neutral terrains, neither are the constructions of borders or the identities they
define. Identities are born in “fields of struggle” (Helfenbein, 2006, p. 112). Cherrie
Moraga suggests identities are “relational and grounded in historically produced social
facts which constitute social locations” (cited in Moya, 1997, p. 127). Further, as Alison
Blunt and Gillian Rose (1994) suggest, “different epistemological claims about
identity produce different interpretations of space” which means that notions of space,

place and identity are relative and partial rather than “natural” or “universal” (p. 5-6). So,

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as I studied discourse, I looked for the ways in which pre-service teachers respond to and
interpret diversity and multicultural education differently, as well as how they gave
meaning to certain spaces as more and less important, to spaces with different value,
meaning, and function, to spaces with different implications for power and for justice. I
studies how relationships between power and knowledge were inscribed in and by
discourses we use to talk about space, place and identity.

How I Used Theories of Race in Analysis

In chapter six, my analysis turned from theories of spatiality and geography to
theories of race. I borrowed elements of critical race theory, theories of whiteness, and
broader sociological theories of race to interpret the way pre-service teachers’ and their
instructors constructed, imagined, theorized and understood race.

Critical race theory (CRT) offered one theoretical frame through which to
understand how students think about diversity. CRT (Bell, 1987, 1992, 2004; Crenshaw
et al., 1995; Delgado, 2001; Matusuda, et al., 1993) grew out of legal studies. A post-
Civil Rights era body of legal scholarship that the questions and critiques the capacity of
for legal field grounded in liberal democracy to effectively advance racial justice, CRT
recognizes the “permanence of racism” (Bell, 1987) and conceptualizes racism as
“ordinary, not abberrational” (Delgado, 2001). These ideas were helpful in moving my
study away from judging whether or not racism exists and towards how discourses can
racialize and are racialized through teacher education, and how in doing so they enact
power-laden relationships. Also, important to my interpretation of the stories and

language of the pre-service teachers and their instructors, CRT values “countemarratives’

as one way to question or otherwise story perceptions and myths that serve racism. My

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interpretation sought to unearth and recognize such narratives. CRT shares the idea that
racism is systematic with theories of Whiteness and other sociological views of race.
According to Delgado (2001), this “serves to advance the interests of white elites
(materially) and working-class people (psychically)” (p. 7). I used theories of whiteness
to consider my own role in the research as well as how Whiteness mattered in terms
student and instructor thinking. CRT, like critical theories of spatiality and geography, is
further useful because it theorizes racial identity as a socially constructed idea rather than
a fixed biological, cultural, or essential identity. Related to the social construction of
race, my interpretation also referenced theories Whiteness and White privilege, as well as
“differential racialization” as well as the “intersectionality” of identities These theories
were useful as I needed to make sense of the undercurrent of thinking that reified ideas of
racial identities as a Black or White binary. My interpretation aimed to recognize how
notions of race are historically constructed and always shifting and how racial identities
are constructed at the nexus of multiple constructions of identity such as sexuality,
religion, and gender, which shape contested allegiances and interests.

There is an oft invoked Toni Morrison (2004) quotation, which comes from
Beloved: “Definitions [belong] to the definer--- not the defined” (p.225) This quotation
describes how and why I used theories of race to understand how students and instructors
think about diversity and multicultural education. The focus of chapter six marks my
effort to engage with and re-present not only the “findings” or “objects” of this study but
also the “subjectivities” of the definers--- the students, the instructors and me (see also

Monison, 1992, p. 90).

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Results of Analysis
Role of Researcher

When I conducted my study, I worked at State as the Coordinator of Field
Experiences. My job was to place students in schools for pre-student and student
teaching experiences and to serve as the University liaison between students, mentor
teachers, methods instructors, and supervisors. This role afforded me access to the
methods class in which I facilitated the initial survey. It also meant that students who
took the study recognized me, though I had not established an individual relationship
with any one student. Students’ feelings towards me or perhaps the Office of Field
Experiences may have influenced their willingness to participate. Finally, my job at the
time as well as the fact that I had once been a student in the English Education program at
State undoubtedly colored my insight of State’s English program. All of this affected
my analysis the data, affording and limiting what sense is made herein about what it
means to think about diversity and become a teacher within one teacher education
program.

It is also important to note how my race mattered in terms of my role as a
researcher. As a White researcher, there are privileges and responsibilities for which I
must account. In the style of Peggy McIntosh’s (1989) original article on White
privilege, some of the privileges I imagine may have influence my study in some way
include the following.

1. As I stated earlier, I could have chosen to not write about race.

2. At no time during the study did anyone suspect or challenge my research as

being “too much” focused on race or too much about me (though I shared
stories of my work and life experiences with the student participants).

3. The students in the study who identified as White or who claimed to be able to
“appear” White and have experienced some White privilege seemed

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comfortable with me, a White research, as evidenced in their narratives, to

criticize the purpose and practice of multicultural education as much as if not

more than they found use for it.

4. More often than not, colleagues and participants lauded my research t0pic as

important and relevant, rather than marginal.
Further, in my role as a White researcher, thinking about, employing, and constructing
racialized and racializing discourses, I have responsibilities that relate to the way my
analysis was represented in this study. With regard to representation and the ethics of my
research, I must acknowledge the capacity for what Patti Lather calls “epistemic
.violence” (2004). That is, I have tried to recognize that as I wrote about discourses--
geographic and racialized-- I also constructed identities and ideas that may be used by
others to effect particular pedagogies and relationships with students. What, then, are the
responsibilities and the risks of me, a White woman with particular epistemologies and a
history at State, in terms of my power and the way I represent my research? Towards an
ethics or representation that recognizes the construction of ideas and identities, I have
tried to, as Trinh Minh-ha urges in Woman, Native, Other, “to show myself showing
people who show me my own showing” (cited in Madison, 1994, p. 293).] have tried to
try to situate my self in the research to show how I am complicit in conducting and
representing the study. I have included my own story alongside the pre-service teacher
and the instructor “portraits” depicted in chapter four. I have reflected and reacted
openly within the analysis, explicitly using the pronoun “1.” Finally, I have revisited and

reflected further on the responsibilities and risks of my representations of people, and on

racialized and racializing discourses in chapter six.

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Validity and Reliability

Validity and reliability are often of concern to researchers. Traditionally, validity
refers to the “degree to which the scientific explanations of a phenomenon match the
realities of the world” (McMillan & Schurnaker, 1997, p. 404). Related to validity,
triangulation refers to a researcher’s effort to “cross-validate” by comparing different
sources of data, different situations, and different methods (McMillan & Schumaker,
1997, p. 520). Reliability in quantitative research attends to the question of whether “two
researchers independently studying the same setting or subjects will come up with the
same findings,” however, in qualitative research it attends to the fit between what they
record as data and what actually happens in a particular context (Bogdan & Biklen, 1998,
p. 35).

In an effort to reflect critical and post-structural methodologies, my research
attended to issues of reliability somewhat differently. Gergen and Gergen (2000) contend
that “the intelligibility of our accounts of the world derive not from the world itself, but
from our immersion within a tradition of cultural practices. . .. It is from our relationships
within interpretive communities that our constructions of the world derive“(Gergen &
Gergen, 2000, p. 1). Within this view of research and representation, “the warrant for
validity” as well as the warrant for reliability “is lost” (Denzin & Lincoln, cited in Gergen
& Gergen, 2000, p. 2). Researchers can only account for relationships, interpretative
perspectives, and historical cultural, political, and social situatedness.

Therefore, as Gergen and Gergen (2000) outline, my research will consider
“reflexivity” and “multiple voices,” and I will consider “catalytic validity” (Lather cited

in Kincheloe & McLaren, 2003). “Catalytic validity” refers to the degree to which the

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participants were compelled to act or were transformed by as a result of participating in
the study. Towards reflexivity, my work sought to unveil-- to myself, my research
audience and participants-- how I was situated in the research. This means that rather
than seeking some kind of false notion of objectivity, I will not only name but also
engage in my own subj ectivities, such that my subjectivities become part of the research
project. Further, I represent my data through multiple theoretical theories or theoretical
“voices.” The use of bricolage for interpretation will allow for multiple even conflicting
interpretive perspectives to represent the data. My goal of having multiple voices shape
the data and interpretation is supported by unstructured interviews, for example, because
this kind of interview allows space for the participants to direct the study.
Title of Dissertation Defined

The first part of the title of this study, (Dis)placing and (E)race-ing (Dis)courses,
deserves elaboration. First, the word (dis)placing can be read as either a verb or an
adjective. As a verb, it denotes my efforts, as a researcher, to expose, call into question
and to examine with a critical lens the practice of multicultural teacher education at State.
As an adjective, with or without the parentheses, it refers to the way that teaching and
learning positions students using particular social visions and ways of being in the world.
Secondly, the word (e)race-ing can be understood as either the act of constructing notions
of “race” and identities or the act of masking or being blind to how race matters. Thirdly,
the word (dis)courses can be read with or without the parentheses. As “discourses,” it
refers to the how the participants theorize, understand, imagine, or orient themselves
toward diversity and mulitculturalisms. As a “course,” it more literally refers to

formalized units of learning within the teacher education program. All together, the title

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words can be read in several different combinations: placing and racing courses,
displacing and racing courses, placing and erasing discourses, displacing and erasing
discourses. Finally, I wish to note that after I named my study, I came across a similarly
named work, Teresa de Lauretis’, “Displacing Hegemonic Discourses: Reflections on
Feminist Theory in the 19803.” Of note, I have never read this study, though it is cited in
a footnote of Katie King’s (1994) Theory in its Feminist Travels. When I returned to
King’s book, mining for theoretical support for chapter five, I noted the citation. This
kind of unearthing bears witness to the discursive and constructive nature of the
discourses we use and that I wish to expose in this study.
Chapter Five and Six: Using the Same Data Dijfkrently

Using two theoretical frames to interpret my data, chapter six and seven are
distinct yet overlapping. Chapter five presents three “discourses of place” while chapter
six presents five “racializing and racialized discourses.” In some cases, I used the same
data across chapters, not only in chapter five and six but also in chapter four where I
present portraits of the participants. This overlap was deliberate. I have aimed to show,
according to the methodology described above, that there are multiple ways to make
sense of the same research data. Each way of representing research is differently useful,
affording some ways of understanding while masking others. In this sense, using the
same data differently exposes epistemological variation. The distinctions and overlaps in
chapter five and six also reflect matters of validity and my role as a researcher, as
discussed above. As Margery Wolf writes (1992), “no matter what format the
anthropologist/ reporter/writer uses, she eventually takes responsibility for putting down

the words, for converting their possibly fleeting opinions into a text”(p. ll).Thus, using

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the same data twice is a matter of researcher authority which, hopefully, exposes the
constructed nature of meaning.
Reading the Dissertation

There are four chapters that follow this one. Chapter four portrays the participants
and their stories. Chapter five analyzes the discourse of the participants drawing on
theories of Critical Geography and Spatiality to interpret Kayla, Rachel, and Ashlee’s
physical and conceptual journey to State and to examine how they think and become. I
illuminate three discourses of spatiality: travel, cartography, and tourism Chapter six
analyzes how the discourses of the participants racialize or are racialized. In chapter
seven, I argue for teacher education to recognize the emotional and identity shaping
aspects of learning and to employ multiple discourses and theoretical spaces in order to

prepare teachers to teach and learn with diverse learners.

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CHAPTER FOUR
PORTRAITS

In part this study is a story, a narrative about three pre-service teachers and a
teacher education program. This chapter will analyze and represent each participant
descriptively and richly, as a narrative. I will use interpretation and non-academic
language to depict the participants’ stories and personas. The first part of this chapter
will reveal the three students-— Ashlee, Kayla, and Rachel.5 The second part of the
chapter will portray the instructors and professors who were named by the students as
influential to their thinking.

The Pre-service Teachers

Ashlee

A college senior on the brink of student teaching, Ashlee has already established
and presents a very controlled and professional persona. Her neatly-styled, curly and
sandy blonde hair never reveals the stress or demands of the day, as my hair often does.
Because we met in the late afternoon, after Ashlee’s pre-student teaching experience, she
came dressed in her “teacher clothes.” Fitted sweaters, button-up shirts, dress slacks and
heels allude to an almost business—like stance towards teaching, or possibly a hyperbolic
identity shift from student to teacher, or maybe still, a reflection of her host school’s
dress norms. Poised, Ashlee sat across from me, her legs crossed and her posture well
positioned. Sipping on coffee that she had brought with her, she kindly and succinctly

answered my questions.

 

5 The names of all people in this study are pseudonyms.

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Choosing State for its convenience and its strong reputation, Ashlee, an only child
from a tight-knit family, began her college experience at a two-year satellite campus, just
15 minutes from her home, in a small suburb about 25 miles outside of one of the state’s
major cities. She transferred to the main, four-year campus before her junior year. The
large university setting contrasted significantly from Ashlee’s small town and from her
high school, where she graduated with a class of 75 people. Though she speaks fondly of
her experiences at State, Ashlee shares that it was difficult to leave her family and she
planned to return to her home county the semester after we had our conversations. There,
she would student teach in a nearby school district, reunite with her fiancé, who was
already working in the area, and marry in June. Ashlee seeks a teaching job in the region,
and she and her fiancé hope to stay in the area and raise a family.

For Ashlee, a white woman in her early twenties, from a town where 80% of the
population is white and where the word diversity is often used to mean Black people,
State affords new perspectives, an awakening of sorts, and a broader definition of
diversity. About her peers and coming to main campus at State, she elaborates, “I know
people who’ve been here, and who’ve come from other areas say that they don’t think
that this campus is very diverse, but I do because my neighborhood is small.” She makes
sense of her college experiences as they contrast to her prior experiences or those of her
family.

I wouldn’t consider my father to be a racist, but that wasn’t something he grew up

with. So, when he sees where I’m going to school, that’s a lot to him. That’s a lot

for him to take in. for me, to come to the campus, I thought I had a good
background in diversity because my parents didn’t really grow up around that,

and I did. I came here and I was, like, wow, there’s more than just white and
Black people out there.

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Noting that “there’s diversity in the real world,” Ashlee cites “ignorance” and lack of
“awareness” as a key issue in classrooms and in the world more broadly. She hopes to
foster awareness about diversity with future students and family at home.

Self-described as conservative and family-oriented, Ashlee feels her “traditional”
values distinguish her from her peers at school. Unlike her some of her peers, who
challenge sexist images in literature and eschew the need for a boyfriend, Ashlee does not
“do the feminist thing,” and though she believes she does not need a relationship with a
man, she passionately wants to be a wife and a mother. Ashlee does not want “to move
somewhere and teach. . . j ust pick up and move” just to exercise her independence because
she does not want to leave her family. Within her program, she relates most closely with
one peer, a retuming adult student, who has two children and a husband of her own.
Beyond the people in her program or at State, she wonders more broadly: “how many
people are family-oriented anymore?” She believes high divorce rates and child abuse
plague society more today than in the past. Syllogistically, Ashlee relates liberal ideas to
new ideas and a sense of independence, and by contrast, conservative ideas with tradition,
and tradition with family.

Additionally, Ashlee strongly identifies with and finds direction from her faith. At
the time of our conversations, she and her fiance, Kyle, recently started attending a non-
denominational, Christian church back in Ashlee’s home county. She prefers not to call
herself “religious” or use the word “religion” because she feels the origin of the word
means “tied down, restricted.” She speaks, instead, of her relationship with God and her
faith. “Things I consider to be wrong are because The Bible says they are wrong, and

they’ve been called wrong by the higher power that I put my faith in.” Ashlee connects

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her faith to our discussions of diversity and becoming an English teacher by wondering
how she will “balance [her] own beliefs in [her] classroom, in trying to prevent unbiased
views.” In particular, she questions affirrning diverse sexualities in her classes while
remaining true to her own faith-based beliefs against homosexuality. Yet, also connected
to her faith, her appreciation and understanding of literature lead Ashlee to question her
pastor’s stand against the content of The Da Vinci Code. Though she believes the book is
a work of fiction, she explains, “it’s still important for me to know ...so at least I can
understand that [the book’s perspective] and maybe talk to people about that in
someway.”

Ashlee named two courses at State as particularly influential in her thinking and
preparation for becoming a teacher in a multicultural society: English Education 300 and
Comparative Literature 400. English Education 300, the first of two required methods
courses offered to students in Ashlee’s program, and the only class that all the
participants in my study had taken, divided the weeks for the course into different
modules focusing on various topics. Taught by Brenda Parks, an Afiican-American
graduate student in her early fifties and a self-described social activist, the section of the
course Ashlee named focused on multicultural education and lasted about three weeks.
Ashlee cited this class as “the most” she learned about diversity in all her courses.
Remembering her analysis of A Raisin in the Sun, she described the course as focusing on
“what it means to teach it [multicultural education].” She noted that this particular play
and the course more generally taught her that diversity is not just about being from a
different “ethnicity.” “There are class issues as well, which are very important to

multicultural education.” Connecting the lesson illuminated in the play with an earlier

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field experience, which she completed at the satellite campus, and a job mentoring youth
from her church, Ashlee links racial and class differences with deficits, specifically “not
coming from a two-parent home” and other “obstacles some children face just going to
school.” English Education 300 elucidated, for Ashlee, “real” obstacles and difficult
experiences very different from her own experiences, particularly a few texts, like
Lorraine Hansberry’s, which for her served to illuminate struggles and differences.
Comparative Literature 400, according to the course description “examines the
development of literature in Canada, the United States, Spanish America, the Caribbean
area, and Brazil.” Ashlee chose to take the course because it “fit into her schedule,”
though she almost dropped it when she learned it required a long final paper and a fair
amount of reading for her already busy schedule. Taught by Chris Alston, a white
graduate student, appearing to be in his early thirties, the course introduced Ashlee to
texts that she “would have never picked on [her] own.” The course also expanded her
definition of diversity.
It was considered Central American literature and we focused on different writers.
A lot of the books that we had were translations that were written in other
languages. He got them for us in English. I thought that was interesting. I mean,
because, you hear multicultural, like in my Education class, it only presented in
terms of African-American. But then, you have this whole other.
Also, the class offered Ashlee new titles to read and profoundly influenced how she
thought about reading and context: “That was helpful to have the background of the
writers, just the belief system that went behind it, how much symbolism and everything
in those books.” Throughout our conversations, Ashlee describes situations in which texts

could serve to explicate “why” people feel the way they do and experience the situations

they do. In her final paper for the class, in which she explored a journey theme as it

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relates to The Grapes of Wrath and I, T ituba, Black Witch of Salem, the main thesis of her
paper argues that “certain forces, some of which are positive and others which are
extremely negative. . .affect the journeys [the characters] take in these novels.”

In our early conversations, I learned that Ashlee had changed her major three
times, from Accounting to Elementary Education, before deciding on the English
Education option within Secondary Education, a decision based largely on her own
experiences in school: “All my English teachers in high school were wonderful, and I
think those are the best memories I have. . ..I had good relationships with them in the
classroom, and then I would just talk to them after class... They made it fun and their
classes were always really memorable.” Ashlee felt that secondary English was a career
in which she would “fit best.”

Rachel

Rachel captivated me instantly. We met in the early afternoon in my office, and
shared Chinese food, stories, and ideas. Rachel sat across from me, smoothing her
straight and long brown hair behind her ears, or sometimes propping her foot on the
chair, wrapping her arms around her leg and bringing her knee to her body with
flexibility and apparent comfort. Jeans and a simple black sweater, a light blue hooded
sweatshirt and sneakers, or stylish leather slides and a matching chocolate-colored jacket,
Rachel’s attire hinted at the variety of her days’ activities. Extraordinarily reflective and
strikingly attractive, Rachel exhibited a genuinely down-to-earth quality, a keen sense of
the foundations of her personal growth as well as ideas that remained “confusing in her

mind.”

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Rachel’s life had afforded her many privileges and opportunities. An honors
student from an affluent community outside one of the nation’s largest cities located
within the state, Rachel had traveled to Ecuador and to Australia, and, shortly after our
interviews ended, she learned she had been selected to student teach in Sweden the
following fall. The second oldest child and oldest daughter of five siblings, Rachel and
her family frequently read together. She recalls, “We wouldn’t just read [a book] and
close it.” Rather, she remembers interpreting characters and their situations. Her father,
an English instructor at a local community college, once wrote a poem to hang in her
bedroom, which helped her to “get past” her childhood perfectionism. Further, Rachel’s
parents took her to concerts and interactive events designed for children, like an African
drum concert she fondly remembers. “I think that music was really powerful. . .. I
remember different patterns and the beats, and looking at the different clothing styles and
it was really authentic to me.” After Rachel’s parents divorced when she was twelve, her
father moved to a new neighborhood in the city, and her mother eventually remarried and
moved to a small town 10 minutes from State. Referring to her father’s neighborhood, in
particular, Rachel believes she grew to know different communities and people through
his move.

Among Rachel’s most influential experiences, traveling to Ecuador was a “huge
catalyst” for her thinking. The summer after Rachel’s 1 1‘h grade year, she spent a month
in Ecuador, a trip facilitated through Putney Student Travel, a Vermont-based group
whose trips focus on community service, global awareness, language learning, or cultural
exploration. Rachel and 15 other high school students worked with a group of

Ecuadorian citizens in a poor community-- farming, teaching young children, and

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building a store for the community. The trip challenged Rachel’s comfort and
assumptions regarding the age of workers and about how people demonstrate
appreciation. Not knowing Spanish well, she faced obstacles and language barriers. And,
because she traveled the summer after September 11th, she had to resist neighbors and
friends’ concerns and questions about her safety. Still, with the help of the group leaders,
Rachel credits the trip as teaching her to think about how she “judges” experiences based
on her knowledge and her standards, but she shares, “that’s not the way it is everywhere.”

Free-spirited and prudent, a high school student living fully in the moment of her
senior year, Rachel chose to attend State against her initial intentions.

I used to say that I am going as far away as possible. . .I told my parents, I’m

independent. And, I used to say, I’m only going some place warm ...I

actually swore I would never go to State.
Though she had hoped to avoid attending a school that many of her high school
classmates would attend and to find a “cool” school, Rachel could not resist the lure
smaller loan payments, a “good” education, and the promise of an anxiety-free, fun-filled
senior year. She chose to attend State. Rachel is the only participant in the study who
began her college experience at the large, main-campus, never attending a two-year
satellite campus. Many of her experiences at State, in terms of diversity, compare to her
high school experiences and, she believes, mirror society or the “real world.”

Rachel-- who describes herself as white, Jewish but not religious, upper middle or
middle class, and American-«distinguishes what she learned about diversity in her
courses from what she learned in “the setting, the actual... what it’s like [at State].”

During our conversation, she speaks with some skepticism about campus diversity.

There is diversity here. I just saw somewhere in the paper that 11,000 students are
from other places, or something... some statistic that was trying to prove that

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State is, in fact, diverse. But, I think it’s really separated and segregated here. I
guess... it was like that in my high school, not on purpose, but people of similar
races and backgrounds sat together, socialized together, had classes together.

...so many people at State are from [in state] that “diverse” to me has become
being from [out of state]. So, I just don’t... maybe because we’re in [the center of
the state]. Like, the surrounding areas are old-fashioned, in the sense of not being
more accepting from what I’ve experienced, or from what I’ve heard more than
what I’ve experienced. People, I’ve talked to people who have come across racist
faculty members and students. ...For a class, I was randomly questioning people
in the [Student Union], just sitting down with people and engaging them in
conversation. It was to practice my questioning skills for a class, this semester.
My partner and I asked down with a girl, and asked her what her biggest problem
or what concerned her most about State was....She said, as a Black student, her
old advisor. told her that she couldn’t become what she wanted to and he was
extremely racist. I don’t remember the remarks specifically that she said that he
said, but she actually complained and had to get her advisor switched because he
wasn’t confident in her skills or intelligence just because of her race....We had a
conversation with two girls who explained that they thought it was. . .the problem
with State was that it was really segregated. Groups of people were the same, and
different groups stuck together, with only themselves. That was another example,
where they didn’t think that people meshed outside of their cultures or races.

In the case of this inquiry project, like other course projects in which she engages, Rachel
explains, “My partner and I just decided to ask that question. We could have asked
anything.” Though Rachel differentiates what she learned outside of class from what she
learned in class, as she talks, she also frequently blends the two realms.

Rachel named four courses that focused on or taught her about multicultural
education and diversity, two required courses and two electives. She believes that she
learned the most from her electives, elaborating on one course in great detail. African
and African-American Studies 100, The Evolving Status of Blacks in the Twentieth
Century: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, taught by Assistant Professor Robyn Beatty,
appealed to Rachel:

I was initially interested in it because that was my brother’s minor at school, so he

had talked to me about classes like that. ...Then, my boyfiiend took one with a

great professor and told me that I should definitely take it. So, I took that class.. ..
I had a great relationship with my teacher and she was... I really respected her.

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She had great conversations... and she wasn’t one of those “easy A” kind of
teachers.

Rachel applied and extended the concepts and ideas offered in the course to study
“diversity in schools with students, and patterns of learning and patterns of success, and
tracking, and just how students are treated differently because of their race.” She
returned to her home high school to interview students of different races about tracking,
fair treatment, and segregation within the schools.

Teaching attracted Rachel as a little girl, though it took some time before she
settled on the subject or level she would teach. She considered elementary education and
special education, deciding upon English Education and secondary students with a
tentative plan to pursue a master’s degree in special education: “I decided I wanted to
relate to older kids because ...during those years, it’s a big time of exploration. And,
also, I knew that I wanted to work with older kids and help them learn about life and not
just subject matter.” English Education, for Rachel, presents space for “creativity” and
“freedom” to help students examine their values, beliefs, and morals and to “get them to
question things about life and themselves, in terms of how they act towards other people,
how they want to exist in today’s world, and then, gets them to think critically.”

Kayla

Assertive, gregarious and dramatic, Kayla “calls it like she sees it” and “it” is
oftentimes provocative and intriguing. Headbands and ponytails pulled her dark, almost-
black, and curly hair off her face. Kayla often initiated and directed our conversations:
“Have I got a great story for you!” “Wait ‘til Megan hears about this!” Our

conversations spilled outside of our interview sessions, as she once sent me an email

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entitled “a little story” in which she reflected on an incident in her student teaching
placement.
The eldest of two daughters, Kayla believes she was “born into” open-
mindedness, a distinction she reflected upon throughout our conversations.
I always kind of have an edge over people, just because, naturally, I’m not being
snobby, but I ‘m going to be more open-minded, just... like inter-racial
relationships don’t bother me because my mother and father are inter-racial.
Her father, who is Muslim and came to this country from Bahrain in the 19703, and her
mother, who is Jewish and who grew up in Queens, and raised Kayla and her sister,
Ruby, in Queens until Kayla was five and her family moved to Long Island, where they
live today. In New Yor -- described by Kayla as “a melting pot”-- Kayla’s fiiends,
family, neighbors, church and high school include racially, culturally, economically,
religiously, and nationally diverse people. Kayla hopes to begin her teaching career by
returning to Long Island, describing the schools around State as “too homogenous” for
her.
Kayla finds direction and perspective from her church and her immediate family.
I’m not real religious, but I think my religion helped me a lot. . ..We were raised
Unitarian. . .so my religion is very accepting of everybody-- multiracial, religions,
gay.. . .I think that was very important that I was never told, “Oh that person’s
going to Hell for what they believe,” or “That person’s going to Hell because of
what they do.”
Still, loving parents and positive messages do not hide the sharp and disapproving stares
that strangers cast towards her parents’ relationship, nor the acerbic and divisive effect
caused by opposition from extended family and friends. Family is a form of diversity for

Kayla, an identity and a form of difference that can be opposed, judged, and

marginalized. For example, Kayla’s grandfather did not approve of her parents’ marriage

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at first. And, more explicitly, on several occasions, one of Kayla’s aunts, a Born-Again
Christian, adamantly declared that Kayla and her sister would go to Hell because they
hadn’t accepted Jesus as their Savior. These experiences, as Kayla talks about them, only
strengthen Kayla’s sense of self as accepting, non-judgmental, non-discriminatory and
somewhat different than some.

Against the backdrop of her family, her home, and her sense of self, State --
including her campus experiences and her pre-service teaching placement in local
schools-- felt and appeared homogenous and closed-minded-- even racist. Kayla reflects,
“I’ve always been naive... coming to [State] has opened my eyes.” Reflecting on the
communities that surround State and her pre-student teaching experience, which she
completed in the semester we met, she observes that there are “not enough” open-minded
teachers.

As many ignorant people as there are in the world, and as we seem like a really
diverse nation, but there are towns where it’s so closed minded.

She describes an incident in which her mentor teacher laughed at, rather than confronted,
a male student’s sexist comment. She wonders how some of her peers who have not
experienced the kinds of diverse contexts that she has will respond to diversity in their
classrooms.
I think there’s a level of thinking that you have to get to in order to teach
multicultural diversity, and you can’t teach it if you don’t understand it. And a lot
of people don’t understand.
Worse yet, she fears that some of her peers, like a young woman who questions

interracial adoption, might bring racist, and therefore harmful, perspectives to students.

Kayla also cites campus events, describing a recent incident in which a former player

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accused a popular athletic coach of discrimination based on homosexuality as “socially
unjust.”

Despite the certainty and schism with which Kayla presents her understanding of
diversity and related issues like justice, equity, and acceptance, she does not fail to reflect
on her own thinking and actions, at least somewhat. For example, the focus group
allowed Kayla to talk with a White, male classmate, Mike, who describes the
discrimination he experienced based on his socio-economic class. Though Mike
describes an all white community and Kayla confusedly and problematically refers to
“reverse” discrimination, she admits:

I never really thought about that, I guess. And how reverse discrimination gave

him more of an edge to teach because he knows what it felt like to be circled out

as the white hick kid.
Also, reflecting on her budding teacher role and relationships with her students, she
questions her own actions. She grapples with her response to incidents of student
misbehavior, questioning whether she responds to students of color differently than she
responds to white students and wondering specifically whether she and other teachers
ignore students of color more.

Regarding multicultural education and diversity, Kayla notes two courses at State
that have influenced her thinking: English Education 300, the methods class taught in part
by Brenda Parks and English 200, the English class taught by Heather Young. Though
Kayla talks at length about English Education 300, she critiques and even criticizes the

course, which was a mostly negative rather than positive influence for her. Kayla

questions the purpose of the course.

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I don’t even know what it was supposed to be. ...I couldn’t tell you what I learned

in her class, but I could tell you five million stories about how many times her

family has been discriminated against.
Further, she feels the course excluded diverse people and perspectives more than it
included diverse people and perspectives. Through course texts and discussions, which
Kayla reports focused mostly on Afiican-American experiences and perspectives as they
relate to social justice, Kayla perceived a “total disregar ” for her experiences as an
Arab-American, in particular, for her father’s experiences emigrating from Bahrain and
becoming a citizen in the United States. A third problem with the course, for Kayla,
grew from her inability to respond openly, understand, or discuss race issues; instead, she
reported, she could only agree that racism is wrong. Kayla acknowledges that she created
a lesson plan on rethinking Columbus Day in English Education 300, which she found
useful, though she concludes, overall, that the class simply and narrowly defined social
justice and the struggle against racism in the United States as synonymous.

By contrast, English 200, Women Writers, a class Kayla took as a freshman at the
satellite campus, has had an affirmative effect on her thinking. Kayla chose English 200
to fulfill one of the required clusters needed for her program of study. Taught by
Assistant Professor Heather Young,who Kayla describes as “brilliant,” the course
included novels such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and Margaret
Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, among other books, and according to Kayla focused on
“how [the author’s] culture affected how they wrote and the stories they wrote... [and]
how much the author really has an effect on what they write.” For Kayla, who had only

read for pleasure up until taking the class, the course offered a “multicultural

understanding” by illuminating commonalities and differences in the lives of women.

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9

About the class, Kayla qualifies, “not that I’m a feminist--- but the course interested me.’
Though Kayla finds it odd to have learned more about multicultural education outside of
the College of Education than within it, she concludes: English 200 is the “most I learned
about multicultural education, and that was my freshman year.”

Like the other young women in the study, Kayla switched her major two times
before settling on English Education. She began college as an International Business
major, changing after determining that “business is too cutthroat” for her. Next, she
majored in English, abandoning that major because she questioned the financial stability
it would afford without a graduate degree, such as a law degree, a field that doesn’t
interest her. Kayla initially chose Education as a necessary foundation for her dream of
becoming a media specialist, and though now that she now believes she will teach five or
ten years before pursuing her graduate degree, she hardly sees teaching as a childhood
dream or lifetime calling.

When I was younger, all the kids wanted to be astronauts and I wanted to be a

zoologist. Like, I probably didn’t even know what that was. I could never just

be, like I want to be a teacher. . .. I do want to be a teacher now. [Yet] it’s kind of
like, there’s something else. You know? I don’t know why I think that. But
that’s just like with anything that I do. I can’t just be. .. I can’t just be okay with
what I’m doing.
Attractive to her and common to her professional pursuits, the notion that one “can really
impact somebody and make a difference” resonates with Kayla.
The Professors
Chris

A white, male, doctoral student in the Comparative Literature Department, Chris

had taught Comparative Literature 400, Inter-American Literature, as part of his

assistantship a few semesters ago, and he has also taught in language courses in the

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Spanish Department. Seemingly eager to help a fellow graduate student with a
dissertation and somewhat surprised and proud that a former student had mentioned his
class, he quickly agreed to meet with me in my office. A tall man, in his early thirties,
with caramel-colored hair and glasses, Chris accentuated his corduroys and earth-toned
casual style with high quality leather shoes and a belt. He peppered our conversation
with theories and discourse milled from his dissertation...

Chris admitted that he used Comparative Literature 400, a class he describes as
more theme-oriented and less of a survey course, to engage students with some of the
ideas related to his dissertation and his interests in coo-criticism, and specifically how
literature of the Americas “approaches, deals with, and is affected by space, place, and
landscape.” Overall, he had hoped the class would introduce new texts and challenge
students with new ways of thinking. Reading John Steinbeck, Gabriella Marquez,
William Faulkner, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maryse Conde, and Jose Marti, Chris sought to
capture the dialogue and intertextual connections, as well as the idea that writing about a
place and its people not only describes but changes that place. From this perspective
“place” is an idea, an interpretation or mental construct. A place is not simply a physical
space, and literature can deeply influence this interpretation.

The students who took the class surprised Chris. He was struck by the texts that
his students liked and didn’t like. Like Ashlee, most of his students enjoyed I, T ituba,
Black Witch of Salem, which Chris did not expect, though he stated he was “not sure
why” he expected this. Further, Chris learned that the theory he loved challenged students
and sparked some resistance. Finally, though he knew the course included fewer

Comparative Literature and English majors than he had thought it would, and he knew

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some education majors took the course, he did not “pay much attention” to the idea that
some of his students might become high school English teachers.
Juliet

I met Juliet, a doctoral student in the English department, in her office-- one of
about ten, small, L-shaped Plexi-glass partitions tucked like Tetris pieces into a long and
narrow room with dim fluorescent lights. I, along with a few undergraduates with
compositions in need of editing, quietly searched for the location of my appointment.
Juliet was a carefully primped woman with generous amounts of make-up and hair-spray.
She appeared to be in her early thirties and who wore two large diamond rings on her ring
finger. Having spent almost 9 years in graduate school, Juliet had completed her master’s
degree and was now working on her doctorate at State. Juliet had taught English 250, The
American Short Story, a few times, along with several other courses, though her
dissertation and research interests focused on Romantic Literature.

Inspired by her own, self-described “conflicted identity” as the daughter of Cuban
parents, Juliet sought to challenge students’ perceptions of identity. She restructured her
short story course changing its organization by identities--Asian-American, African-
American, for example, to an organization by themes including ghost stories, borders of
sanity, coming of age, generation gaps, and war stories. J uxtaposing Willa Cather with
Tennessee Williams and Bharati Mukherjee served to address the theme, “confronting
death.” In doing so, she hoped to explore a mix of voices, the ways different voices
converse, and in particular, how external and internal subjectivities affect reading and

writing. Further, she hoped to engage civic discourse and “uncomfortable” discussions

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about race more indirectly than the previous course structure through examining the
history of the conversations and ideas presented in short stories.

To address the needs of education majors in her class, Juliet offered students the
option to construct a unit plan in lieu of an essay. When asked what she hopes future
English teachers would take from her class, she responded, “tools” or various ways to
read and understand texts, as well as multicultural texts to add to their library.

Brenda

A doctoral student in English Education, a self-described social activist and
cultural pedagogue, a fifty year old African-American woman, about 5 feet tall and
wearing a black leather jacket and a fabulously textured hat, Brenda Parks met me in my
office. Like the Sankofa Bird6 whose head turns backwards, an influential metaphor
offered to her by a beloved mentor, “Mama Green.” Brenda looks to history to make
sense of the present. She spoke of her struggles to combine academia with her
community work, in particular her interest in literacy and her work at a local church and
Underground Railroad site. Yet, she finds footing, even roots, in narratives, cultural
icons, such as “Malcolm, Martin, and Dubois,” and through collaboration with colleagues
and fiiends both inside and outside the College of Education.

Brenda grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where she recalls a newly integrated

school system, watching her older brothers and sisters being bused. Prior to entering

 

6 The Sankofa is a symbol that traces back to King Adinkera of the Akan people of West Africa.
Etymologically it means “"it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot.” As a metaphor, Sankofa
“teaches us that we must go back to our roots in order to move forward. That is, we should reach back and
gather the best of what our past has to teach us, so that we can achieve our full potential as we move
forward. Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone or been stripped of, can be reclaimed, revived,
preserved and perpetuated. Visually and symbolically "Sankofa" is expressed as a mythic bird that flies
forward while looking backward with an egg (symbolizing the future) in its mouth.”
(http:flwww.duboislc.nctI'SankofaMeaning.html, retrieved May 27, 2008).

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graduate school, she was a parent advocate for diversity awareness and then an
educational advocate for children of color. She stated, “I wake up every morning with
my mind stayed on freedom and my research interests are studying the resistance to
learning and teaching multicultural education.”

Brenda begins her portion of English Education 300, Secondary Language Arts 1,
with Langston Hughes’ “Theme for English B”.

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true.

I wonder if it's that simple?

I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here

to this college on the hill above Harlem.

I am the only colored student in my class.

The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,

Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,

the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:

It's not easy to know what is true for you or me

at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what

I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:

hear you, hear me---we two-«you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me--who?

Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.

I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.

I like a pipe for a Christmas present,

or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.

I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?

Being me, it will not be white.

But it will be

a part of you, instructor.

You are white--

yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.

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That's American.

Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.

But we are, that's true!

As I learn from you,

I guess you learn from me--

although you're older--and white--

and somewhat more free.

This is my page for English B.
(http://w\uv.eecs.harvard.edu/~keitlI/poems/Enulish B.html, retrieved May 27,
2008)

Students then write their own stories towards the course goal of exploring the lens of the
self and expanding their understanding of literature, going beyond the plot to unpack
political, cultural, historical contests as well. Equipped with a book, filled with policies
and historical facts, to situate the literature they read, she laughs endearingly that students
tease her: “Ms. P, what is that book?” Brenda also offers the poem to frame how her
students will think about children in their classrooms. About the poem and her students,
Brenda suggests,

Me being a person of color, teaching usually a class of all white students, maybe a

few minorities here and there, I find that students are uncomfortable when I

say. . .when we look at this poem, what other classroom environments have looked

like this particular poem? And they kind of look at each other. . . ‘cause he says

‘I’m the only colored in the class... Will they acknowledge that this class [is

similar]?
Finally the Hughes poem, like other texts in the course, elucidate a third objective for
Brenda--- the ability to understand how language has power, such as the power evident in
the evolution of labels--- colored, Afro-Amercian, Black, African-American, or the
power that permits certain stories and hides others.

Brenda bears witness to her story: “I am the victim of the very song of freedom

that I sing.” About her teaching, she reflected how a mentor once told her that she

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“preaches” more than she teaches. She strives to embrace rather than commercialize
culture in her classes, though she has asked herself at times, “What kind of teacher do
you want me to be?”

Robyn

I first met Robyn, an Assistant Professor, in the Spring of 2005 in a faculty
learning community focused on multicultural education. Once, we walked back towards
campus together, talking about the merits of working at small, teaching-intensive schools,
which she had done before coming to large and research-intensive State. At State, Robyn,
taught African and African-American Studies. At the time of this study, however, she
had taken a new job at a university in the Midwest and she agreed to be interviewed over
the phone.

Robyn, who is Afiican American, grew up in the Northern Neck area of Virginia,
which she describes as “a very rural, farming, and fishing community.” Her mother was
single after separating from her father when Robyn was around two years old. She went
to segregated schools from the first to the fourth grades. In her sophomore year of high
school, her mother remarried and they moved to Columbia, Maryland, a wealthy and
upper middle class area between Baltimore and Washington, DC.

Robyn credits her African American professors at Syracuse University, where she
received her undergraduate degree, and her African professors at Howard University,
where she earned her master’s degree, as sparking her academic interests. She has
degrees in political science and Afiican Studies and focuses on issues of human rights,
foreign policy and refuges and forced migration, as they relate to Africa. She noted that

her interests in refugees and forced migration were largely the result of an internship that

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she had at the US. Department of State after graduating from Syracuse. Prior to our
interview, Robyn wrote me an email about her course, a general education requirement
taken by students from many departments and majors:

I loved teaching AAAS 100 and I think it is a very valuable course, but I prefer to

teach in my area which is African issues and not African American issues. I still

am not convinced how much the course was supposed to provide diversity and
multicultural perspectives to students because it was American history that
spanned from West Africa to slavery to Reconstruction to WWI, WWII, and the

Civil Rights movement. In other words, I covered topics that should have been

covered in any other American history course.

Though the course is titled Blacks in the Twentieth Century, one of the major goals of the
course, for Robyn, includes “getting to the 20th Century.” This means, examining
contexts and histories prior to the 20'h Century. A second goal aims to expose students to
people and organizations previously unknown to them, revealing the Civil Rights era as
more than Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Rosa Parks, for example. Above all,
Robyn seeks to present Black people in this country and in the world inclusively, not in
isolation. In part, for Robyn, this requires that all students question their background,
learn about themselves--- their community, their background, and examine how their
histories have been connected to Black people.

Though Robyn did not realize that any English Education students had taken her
course, she voiced her hope that future teachers will be inclusive and that they find value
in education from different perspectives, broad base of knowledge, and diversity.

Leslie

An Assistant Professor in the College of Education and a new mother, Leslie

invited me and my son to her home near campus for our interview. We met one

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afternoon, a rainy Friday. We drank herbal tea and intermittently nursed our children as
Leslie elaborated on the philosophical foundations and her vision for Education 200.
Leslie-- in her early forties, a calm, gracious and thoughtful colleague who also earned
her doctorate at State-- appeared, as she often does when I see her on campus, with a
functional pony-tail and an absence of make-up, in jeans.

Leslie, who is White, grew up in Canton, Ohio, where she attended public school
through eighth grade. She then attended a Catholic secondary school. Leslie reflected
that her parents decision to send her to the private school arose out of her parents
“concern” for her safety should she have attended the public high school. About this she
said, “I believe that a measure of racism was infused into their fears and their concerns
that I attend a school outside of my neighborhood.” Leslie attended Miami University of
Ohio, where she earned her degree in Chemistry and General Science Education. At
Miami University of Ohio, Leslie took a sociology of education course which she credits
with introducing her to “conventional sociological constructs such as race, gender,
[and]class” and pushing her to reconsider her “own education and upbringing as well as
the role schools played within society.” Also at Miami of Ohio, Leslie met and took a
class with Henry Giroux, an experience which introduced her to “an array of theorists,
early curriculum studies scholars, and philosophers and social critics.” At the same time,
Leslie’s teaching unearthed questions which troubled her deeply and which would later
compel her to pursue doctoral studies: what is worth knowing?, who decides?, who
benefits and who suffers from what is taught?, what role. does the school play in relation
to society? In the second week of her doctoral work, she attended a talk given by Ivan

lllich. About this experience, she reflected in an email that followed our interview:

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This encounter was life altering. Following this lecture and several others, I
decided to make Illich and his thought the subject of my doctoral dissertation. I
read my way into an assortment of philosophers, philosophers of technology, and
sociologists, while focusing on Jacques Ellul and Illich. Following this reading, I
do not see the world, schools, institutions, technology, education or language in
the same way. Following Illich’s and Wendell Berry’s thought particularly, my
interests now focus on those factors, structures, and forces that intervene, impede,
or diminish a person’s ability to act autonomously, to create common cause with
others, and to be more humane and more fully human.
Though Leslie is formally a teacher educator, she notes that this is a label and role which
creates in me a significant amount of dissonance and distaste for her, as she prefers to see
herself as someone “who is attempting to be more awake and alive, following Illich,
while answering Berry’s question, ‘What can we do for each other?’”

Leslie teaches Education 200, which is listed in the schedule of courses as
Introduction to Field Experiences, and is offered across the state in all of State’s
campuses. Leslie has unofficially renamed her version of the class Unlearning for
Understanding Teaching, a title she feels more clearly represents the founding ideas of
the course. The course strives to uncover the phenomenology of schooling through
“unleaming lessons”-- fear, judgment, labeling, for example. In particular, Leslie pushes
students, who she considers to be “defacto” school successes just because they are at
State, to consider the lived schooling experiences of others, who are not school successes.
She hopes students will see that school is not always positive and will aim, through their
passions and community connections, to do something different. And, she hopes the
course helps students to affirm or challenge whether teaching is the path for them.
Through this frame, students explore three core course questions: Who am I as a learner?

What does it mean to teach? And who might I become as a teacher? Leslie aims for

what she calls “authenticity.” With Parker Palmer’s adage “we teach who we are” as a

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referent, she wonders how real and “in the moment” her conversations and teaching, in
general, can be.
Heather

Heather, an Assistant Professor in the English Department at one of State’s
satellite campuses, spoke with me over the phone. Her pleasant tone assuaged the
awkwardness that the distance or telephone might have posed. We seemed to connect,
both English teachers, both mothers of young children. During our conversation, Heather
reflected that, though she still considers herself a “hard-line” or “militant” feminist,
motherhood has made her “softer around the edges” and strengthened ability to see her
students as other mothers’ children. At 5’ l” and seemingly much younger than her age
of 35 years, her appearance, she says, initially foils students who eventually realize the
rigor of her expectations and her “adamant” instance that students talk in class.

English 200, Women Writers, fulfills a general education requirement and also
counts as one of the required diversity focused courses. Though Heather tells students
that she doesn’t “have an axe to grind” in the course, her objectives are clear: to expose
students to a variety of literature and viewpoints, to confront difficult texts and
uncomfortable subject matter, like sexual violence and slavery, and to attempt to
understand the diverse circumstances in which people live. Further, she finds merit in
exposing students to historical moments about which they know little and in the very real
challenge that some students face in reading and finishing an entire book. Course
readings have included Morrison’s Beloved, Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina,
Atwood’s The Handmaid ’s Tale, Erdrich’s Tracks, Kogawa’s Obasan and Okubo’s

13660. She talks at length about Beloved, in particular, naming it the most important

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novels of the 20th Century. Heather requires students sit with their desks in a circle,
facing their peers. Students read six or seven novels, write eight response papers, sharing
at least one in class, take a mid-term and a final exam. Yet, Heather seems most proud of
a final assignment in which students must design a cover for an anthology, as if all the
novels they have read had been compiled.

Heather believes English teachers, like herself and the English Education majors
in her course, stand to play a huge cultural role in helping students “survive in this world-
-- [to] think, empathize, [and] connect.” Yet, about the future English teachers who take
her class, she hopes that they protect themselves against censorship and conservative
school policies in the local community.

My Story

As a child, my father’s record collection signified the social visions of my family:
Sweet Honey in the Rock, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, The Wailers, Hollie Near, and Billie
Holiday. The content of the lyrics as well as the evenings spent listening to the albums
shaped how I understood the world and my place in it. The idea that not everyone had
the same opportunities and not everyone was treated fairly, as well as the idea that people
who recognized prejudice and inequities could work to change these cOnditions was
threaded throughout the fabric of my family. Significantly, my parents were both public
school teachers who shared stories of their work with me. I knew, for example, that my
mother, who was a special education teacher, worked daily to make it so her students
could participate in “mainstream” settings. Though I did not realize it until later, my
parents, as teachers, also showed me that schools and teaching could be sites in which to

work for social changes and shape social realities for real people.

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My family oriented me to devour the critical traditions and pedagogies that my
undergraduate courses espoused. Reading Savage Inequalities (Kozol, 1991) and Lives
on the Boundary (Rose, 1989), for example, extended and supported my world view as it
applied to schooling. In particular, I remember an influential instructor, a graduate
student who held parties at his apartment, including my twenty-first birthday party.
There, sitting on the couch next to a professionally framed image of a union organizer, a
few friends and I augmented course readings by Henry Giroux and Paulo F reire with
discussions about capitalism and Marxism. Near the end of my undergraduate '
coursework, when I inquired what one of professors meant by “feminist pedagogy,” she
invited to me enroll in her graduate course on the subject. Excited to connect my Women
Studies minor with my Education major, I fell in love with works such as bell
hooks’(1989) Talking Back and Kathleen Weiler’s (1988) Women Teaching for Change.

After graduating, I taught English in Maryland near Washington DC. for eight
school years. I taught in two school districts and three schools; two high schools and
middle school; in urban and suburban neighborhoods; in a predominantly Afiican-
American schools and in schools who serve diverse--- racially, ethnically, linguistically,
internationally, and economically--- students; in schools with sparse resources and
schools with seemingly limitless funds. I remember the barren supply closest with only
for a few sheets of antiquated and yellowed lined paper of one school, as well an entire
room filled with a glut of writers’ notebooks and modeling clay in a second school. I do
not mention my experiences to allude to any inherent characteristics or “types” of

students I taught or their families, nor do I want readers to construct mythical images of

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me, a White teacher, teaching and “liberating” mostly Black and Hispanic kids a la
Dangerous Minds or Freedom Writers.

Instead, I seek to situate my experiences in terms of ideas and ideologies, as well
as privileges. My experiences in two districts did corroborate “savage inequalities” in
terms of spending and opportunities, which supported some of my growing
understandings of disparate conditions of schools in the United States. For example, my
salary increased by thousands of dollars when I transferred from one school district to the
second, and, in turn, caused me to confront the privilege I had to simply decide to
transfer and to move away from the material institutional challenges, knowing that this is
a choice that my students could not make.

In terms of ideas, both districts afforded me new perspectives. In the first district,
professional development opportunities introduced me to multicultural educations, as
well as to theorists such as James Banks and Christine Sleeter whose work was not a
significant piece in my undergraduate learning. In the second school district, in the
middle school, as part of staff development, the entire faculty read Deborah Menkart,
Enid Lee, and Margo Okazawa-Rey (2002) Beyond Heroes and Holidays, 3 text that
employs anti-racist perspectives to provide practice-based examples of multicultural
education. Despite our shared reading of the book, we did not all read, or understand our
work the same way. We didn’t all imagine the same learning experiences and
relationships, though we heard the same words, words that constituted the school’s core
themes: identity, perspective, connections, and responsibility. We had different frames
from which we answered the school’s questions: what does it mean to be a citizen in a

global society?

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My teaching years sparked questions and initiated my graduate work: Was I being
the change agent I set out to be? How, if at all, could I realize my sense of self as a
radical teacher? How could I marry theories and practice? What if, I wondered as Paul
Gorski (2007) asked in a recent article, good intentions were not enough? Most
troubling, how could I understand myself or trust what I had thought to be true if I
struggled to represent these truths through my teaching practices?

As a master’s student, still working in the schools, my work in cuniculum theory
introduced me to scholars within the field of education and beyond. I found new ideas
and new, more complicated languages of “critique” and “possibility” (Giroux, 1983)»
institutional perspectives of Jean Anyon, legal perspectives of Gary Orfield and Derrick
Bell, anti-essential thinking as described by Stephen Jay Gould and Chandra Mohanty,
philosophical perspectives of Cornel West and Maxine Greene. Of course, simply stating
that I read and thought about these theorists does not reveal how I thought about them,
and I am sure that I read a lot that did not stay within my field of thinking. I mention
these scholars, as I mentioned the scholars who marked my undergraduate thinking,
because they mark “entry points” and “lines of flight” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) into of
my thinking and becoming, and accordingly, they direct the interpretative frames of my
study.

As a doctoral student, my experiences as a teaching assistant for an introductory
course, Human Diversity, Power and Opportunity in Social Institutions, expanded my
thinking about diversity and issues related to social justice, as I began to think about these
issues in the context of teacher education. I worked with students who adored the class,

and others who resisted the ideas, such as one student who described the class on his

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course evaluation as “liberal propaganda.” I had to rethink my relationship with students.
Should I work to make them feel safe? Should I push them in uncomfortable ways? At
the time these questions surfaced, my doctoral coursework helped me to think more
critically about social and philosophical theories, specifically structuralism and post-
structuralism. I attended a “brown bag” lunch in which two of my peers pushed me to
consider how a class, such as the one I taught, might look and work differently if it drew
from post-structuralist thought.7

My return to State was serendipitous. My husband had selected State for his own
doctoral work and I had been lucky enough to secure a job coordinating student teaching
placements for secondary education students, some of whom were enrolled in the very
program from which I had graduated 10 years earlier. My return to State afforded me a
unique possibility for study. Just as I had begun to think about issues related to diversity,
social justice, and multicultural education in the context of teacher education, I returned
to the program at which I learned and remembered fondly for how the courses and
concepts shaped me. There, I was disappointed and confused when I learned that State
did not offer, much less require, a course similar to the one I taught during my doctoral
study. I was angered when students and their parents called me to suggest that particular
schools, usually schools with high populations of Black and Hispanic students, often city
schools, were not “safe” or “high quality” student teaching sites. I realized an
“overwhelming presence of whiteness” (Sleeter, 2001) that masked diversity within the
student population and meant that the few conversations about race that I heard occurred

problematically in the “presence of an absence” (Rosenberg,l998).

 

7 1 credit Leslie Burns and Joseph Flynn for this influence on my thinking.

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This study begins at the tension between my memories of attending State--- of
useful and seemingly critical perspectives, and my more recent observations of State-- of
limitations, privilege, and absences. My research, though about pre-service teachers
enrolled at State in 2006-2007, is also about my own thinking and becoming. It begins a
space between “lovely knowledge” and “difficult knowledge” (Britzman & Pitt, 2003).
That is, as Patti Lather (2003) describes, my study begins between knowledge that
“reinforced” what I thought I wanted to find as a teacher educator and “what [I] found,”
experiences which “induce[d] breakdowns in representing experiences” (p.13).

Readings and Tellings
This chapter has used a narrative and descriptive literary style to portray the pre-
service teachers, their instructors, and me as a researcher. Set against this backdrop, the
next chapter will return to the same details of the students’ narratives. I will examine the
places and spaces in which they think and become teachers to uncover not just what
details they choose to tell the stories of their experiences but also how they tell the stories
themselves. In the next chapter, I will retell their story using theories of critical

geography and spatiality.

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CHAPTER FIVE

DISCOURSES OF PLACE:
TOURISM, CARTOGRAPHY, AND TRAVEL

In this chapter I examine the spaces and places in which Ashlee, Kayla, and
Rachel conceptualize diversity and multicultural education and become teachers. Unlike
chapter three, however, which offered portraits of the participants and identified
particular courses, assignments, instructors, and experiences the participants noted as
significant, this chapter considers how the students talk about or narrate their experiences
and stories. In chapter three, I employed critical discourse analysis to study the language-
- including paradigmatic references, narrative structure, and metaphors, as well as the
grammar and sentence structure of the interview speech-- to reveal students’
understandings. In this chapter, drawing on theories of critical geography and spatiality
for interpretation, I represent students in relationship to their understandings and
experiences through three distinct paradigmatic positions: as tourist, as cartographer, and
as traveler.

Critical Geography and Theories of Spatiality

For critical geographers and critical theorists generally, discourses not only
describe the world but have the potential to change and improve the world (Gregory,
1994, p. 10). Some geographers argue that such change is not only possible but indeed a
“moral obligation” of the field (Helfenbein, 2006, p. 113). The language of spatiality,
especially feminist and postcolonial discourses, offers several images or metaphors to
describe sites of existence and potential resistance. Gloria Anzaldua (1987) offers an

image of a “borderland/la fiontera” to describe the “vague undetermined place created by

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the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary [which is in] a constant state of
transition” (p. 3). Anzaldt'ra further employs the image of “la mestiza” to describe one
who struggles at the confluence of the borders and must develop “a tolerance for
contradiction, a tolerance for ambiguity” (p 79). hooks (1990) talks about “choosing the
margin as a space of radical openness” in her book Yearning: Race, Gender and Politics.
Grewal and Kaplan (1994) use the geographical image of “transnational feminist
practices” to explode the dichotomy between previous geographical constructions of First
World/ Third world feminism and to avoid “unified” notions of identity (p. 17). As I
examine the discourses of Ashlee, Kayla, and Rachel, the concept of critical geography
proves useful to locate or situate their narrative structures and their conceptual
understandings of identity and difference.
Geographies of a Teacher Education Program

I thought about the “geographies” of State’s program twice: in proposing this
project and in analyzing the students’ narratives. In proposing this project and writing
the research questions, I used geographical language. I raised questions about how
students get “positioned” as well as the “places” and “spaces” in which they think about
diversity and become teachers. I understood that my project was not simply about
naming courses but more deeply about the epistemologies and ontological stances offered
to and understood by students in the program. I thought about curriculum-- the courses
and the experiences-- as locations that affect students’ becoming and thinking. As
spaces, courses are offered in particular sequences and by specific departments, bound by
semester. They are “mapped” in curriculum guides. Courses are populated by individual

instructors and groups of students. There is a syllabus. There are course readings and

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assignments. As places, courses are conceptual construction sites in which power and
identities shape and are shaped by students’ interpretations and imaginations. Students
and teacher develop relationships in these spaces. I hoped to study the ways in which the
spaces and places in curriculum worked discursively to shape the identities of the pre-
service teachers. The language of geography, thus, framed my study in its initial stages.

I did not realize, however, until I began to analyze the students’ stories, especially
Ashlee’s narrative, that Ashlee, Kayla, and Rachel also evoked images of geography. As
I described in chapter three, the analysis of language that led me to construct an entire
chapter around theories of spatiality and geography was multi-layered. Ashlee’s
metaphors and references to “the real world” and to “there” and “here” served to spark a
dialogue between the discourses evident in the interview speech and the well of available
theories. With language in mind, I searched for a theory to help me understand what the
images and metaphors could mean. With a flame for interpretation, I could re-analyze
and access layers of meaning I had not seen at first.

As Ashlee, Kayla, and Rachel described relationships among space, place,
identity and difference, they used language that positioned them alternatively as tourist,
cartographer, and traveler. A tourist observes difference with an uncritical gaze, seeks
entertainment and comfort, gathers information for awareness, but ultimately retunrs
home. Tomism is “voyeuristic” and a “spectacle” because positionality and power go
unexarnined.8 A cartographer maps borders and boundaries, representing difference in

essentialist terms. A cartographer reads the world with an “illusion of transparency” such

 

8 I use the term “voyeuristic” to describe Ashlee’s position as a student and future teacher in the same way
Elizabeth Ellsworth (1992) uses the term to problematize the position of critical pedagogues who try to
elicit student voice without examining their own voice. Megan Boler (1999) similarly distinguishes

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that “within the spatial realm the known and the transparent are one in the same thing”
(Lefebvre, cited in Blunt & Rose, 1994, p. 5). Power comes from how much of the map
one is privileged to read, though the position of the cartographer is still unexamined. I
use the image of traveler to represent pre-service teachers’ thinking as Michelle Wallace
describes writing. Wallace posits, “writing is traveling from one position to another,
thinking one’s way from one position to another” (cited in Kaplan, 1994, p. 143).9 A
traveler employs a critical gaze, sees and seeks out uncomfortable spaces as
opportunities, continuously rethinks her ideas and repositions herself at once in multiple
locations. Ashlee, Kayla and Rachel all relocated from towns and cities at least three
hours away to attend State. The temporary physical move marked a personal and
conceptual journey as well. This chapter analyzes their thinking.

Tourist Discourse: “Anything different than your world...”

In an early conversation, Ashlee defined multicultural education as “anything
different than your world.” The coordinates of difference implicit in this definition
suggest a simple but disturbing syllogism: Multicultural education is anything different;
difference exists in another world; multicultural education exists in, and is about, another
world. What does it mean to move, negotiate, and learn about an entirely different world?
What can you know or not know, see or not see, about a world that is not your own?
What are the responsibilities associated with seeing another world? How does

multicultural education matter within the bounds of one’s own world? Can one transform,

 

“spectating” from “witnessing” in which spectating is voyeuristic and potentially pleasurable, emphasizing
that what it is easy for us to identify with rather than evoking a critical analysis of power.

9 In addition to Wallace’s use of “travel,” the notion of “traveling theory” is used by Edward Said (cited in
Gregory, 1994) and by Katie King (1994). I first thought about this idea when I took a class with Katie
King at the University of Maryland. In both cases the term is used to relay the situated nature of discourse
and theory. That is, the term “traveling,” as I came to understand it through Katie King, describes the way

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or even conceptualize changing the inequitable social conditions of a world in which she
does not locate herself?
Essentialist Tourist Thinking about Personal Journeys and Experiences

Ashlee had transferred to the main, four-year campus at State before her junior
year. Though she spoke fondly of her experiences at State, she planned to return to her
home county the semester after we had our conversations. There, she would student
teach in a nearby school district, reunite with her fiance, who was already working in the
area, and marry in June. Ashlee sought a teaching job in her home region, and she and her
fiance hoped to stay in the area and raise a family. Ashlee’s physical journey and
intended return to her home region of the state, and more importantly the language she
used to talk about her experiences at State position her as a tourist.

Ashlee drew on her experiences with her family and in her hometown to frame
her reflections about State. In our first meeting, Ashlee distinguished her hometown
from her perceptions of State.

I know people who’ve been [to State], and who have come from other areas say

that they don’t think this campus is very diverse, but I do because in my

neighborhood is very small. I went to a very small high school. I graduated with

75 people. And, it was either you’re White or you’re Black, and that was pretty

much it. I am starting to get the feeling that the school is almost becoming almost

50-50, but it was about 80-20 when I was there. So, I didn’t really get that diverse.

...But I know that where my dad went to school, about a half an hour from where

I went to school, there’s no Black people at all. It is farm country. It is very rural.

I mean that was... I wouldn’t consider my dad to be racist, but that wasn’t

something he grew up with. So, when he sees where I’m going to school, that’s a

lot to him. That’s a lot for him to take in. I mean, for me to come to the campus, I

thought I had a good background in diversity because my parents didn’t really

grow up around that, and I did. I came here, and I’m like, “wow,” there are more
than just White and Black people out there.

 

theory grows out of ever-changing and multiple locations, moments and contexts. As contexts shift and
change, as theorists travel, meanings and ideas are revised and re-imagined.

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As this example shows, Ashlee created two separate spaces, separate worlds. The
“borders” she drew through language and narrative constructed binaries including:
home/school, us/ them, homogeneity/ diversity, not racist/ racist, good background/ bad
background. For Ashlee, diversity was “out there,” beyond her own home experiences.
The narrative positions “very diverse” as opposite to a very small neighborhood, farm
country, and rural areas. She implied that diversity is something for larger towns and
urban areas. Ashlee claimed to once have thought she had a “good background in
diversity” and she retrospectively concludes, “I didn’t really get that diverse.” The word
“background” not only conjures a sense of terrain, a landscape, but it is behind her, or to
her back, and it is not part of her gaze as a tourist.

Ashlee measured and even quantified diversity. Campus was very diverse: “There
are more than just White and Black people out there.” Her background didn’t get “that
diverse.” Her father’s boyhood town had “no diversity.” She noted that her school’s
population was “80-20” and is “becoming 50-50.” Interestingly, these measurements,
demographics of sorts, along with the boundaries she constructed, defined identities as
fixed conceptions associated with one’s world. Therefore, she did not take up the quality
of relationships and fields of power that exist in her town. Like a tourist, Ashlee sees
diversity as “difference,” which meant, to her, strange and new, rather than familiar.
Ashlee dismissed and homogenized racial differences in her own town as ordinary---
“just White and Black people.” By contrast, she was “wowed” by examples of
unfamiliar markers of identities that do not include differences between Blacks and

Whites, examples of difference which she believes she knows well

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Evidence of a tourist discourse existed in portions of Kayla’s narrative as well,
although not as explicitly and immediately evident as it was in Ashlee’s language.
Evidence of Kayla’s “touring” did not emerge in what she said (her language and
metaphors) but rather in how she performed or delivered her narrative. Kayla frequently
talked about her field experience at a high school about 30 minutes away from State. She
completed her pre-student teaching and her student teaching at the same school during
the two semesters our conversations. In our second interview, Kayla initiated the
conversation, stating, “have I got a story for you!” She, then, shared this story from her
field placement, a story that disturbed us both.

Kayla: [My mentor and I] were being filled in on what we missed. There was a
carrot stick fight in the cafeteria. And, I think that the school that I’m at is very
White, not diverse at all actually. Now that I’ve been there everyday, I’ve maybe
seen five or six African American students, maybe fix or six Latino students. So,
the person throwing the carrot sticks happened to be African American. And, the
woman went up to him--- she’s like a resource room teacher--- and she said,
“Randy, I saw you throw the carrot sticks. Please pick them up.” He refused to
pick them up. “It wasn’t me, you’re just saying that ‘cause I’m Black.” So, she
wound up, she was like, “I’m asking you to throw the carrot sticks away.” “Stop
trying to make me act like your slave. I didn’t throw them. Blah, Blah, Blah.” So,
hearing the story, I’m first of all, shocked by it in general, but then the teacher
says the most ridiculous thing that I’ve ever heard, and I was, like, in awe.

Megan: The resource teacher?

Kayla: Yeah, she says to me, well she was like making a joke, I guess, to me and
my mentor teacher. Once you hear it, you’ll know that’s it’s not funny. She goes,
“I don’t know why he brought up the slavery thing. I asked him to pick up carrot
sticks, not cotton.” And I was like... (Kayla silently and dramatically opens her
mouth and eyes widely). I can’t believe that she would even, joking or not, I
don’t care... you don’t. . .even if that’s what you really think, why would you say
that to other people who can know that you think like that when you’re in a
position like the one that you are? I was just in complete awe.

Megan: Did you say anything?

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Kayla: Well, it’s like... it was like my second day. So, it wasn’t really my place.
And, I was just kind of like, (mouths “oh my God”). I didn’t know what to
do. . .so, I was like, wait ‘til Megan hears about this.

Megan: Thank you for saving the story. Did your mentor say anything?
Kayla: He laughed.
Megan: He laughed?

Kayla: Yeah. He thought it was firnny, and then he went off on a tangent: I’m
sick of these kids calling these racial cards. And, apparently because there’s so
few of them, they do it a lot. But, regardless, if they do it a lot, I’m not defending
them because the one kid is kind of extreme about it. But, if they’re doing it a lot,
they have to be provoked by something. You know what I mean? It’s not just
coming out of nowhere. I’m not saying in every situation, because I don’t know
every situation because I don’t know every situation, but I was just in awe. Like
(speaking as the teachers) “I’m sick of this racial...” (Speaking as herself now) if
you were one of five white people anywhere, you’d probably do the same exact
thing. You’d probably be too scared to say it, but that’s the way you’d feel.

Kayla locates herself as a tourist in they way she frames the story and presumes to

align herself with me as a researcher. She begins, “have I got a story for you” (emphasis

added). About the “joke” the teacher told, she says, “once you hear it, you’ll know that’s

it’s not funny.” Then, she concludes “I didn’t know what to do. . .so, I was like, wait ‘til

Megan hears about this.” These remarks are similar to an email, with the subject “a little

story” that she sent to me the summer after our interviews had concluded.

Ooo. .. Also something a little interesting for you. We were talking about the war
in class the other day and in more than one period Iraqi people were referred to as
"towel heads." I again told students not to use that language and that they didn’t
know who was in the room or who they were offending. Many of them replied
saying that "none of us are." Also some of the other students in class reprimanded
students for saying such ignorant things. Just thought I would share!

It’s not the metaphors that Kayla used that revealed a tourism discourse, but her implied

audience—me, that constructed a tourists’ tale to the exotic with binary characters. She

polarized “us” from “them”—the teachers and students at her host school. Introductions

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like “000. . .” and the use of exclamatory statements presented her “stories” as if they
were reports from her tour, almost like gossip, about the dangers of what is out there.

The concluding line in her email--- “Just thought I would share,” for example, seemed to
me like a postcard or photograph. That is, it conveyed a sense a journey and return. Her
stories relayed a sense of exposure: her exposure to new places and her act of exposing
the new place to me. Like Ashlee, who was “wowed” by her journey to State, Kayla is in
“awe” by what she witnessed on her journey.

Kayla and Ashlee’s narratives reveal a lot more than a tourist discourse. In
particular, as I will examine more fully in the next chapters, the conceptual
understandings in these narratives warrant a serious and critical examination of how race
and racism is constructed. Kayla is accurate to assume that I am deeply disturbed by the
teachers’ responses to “the carrot stick incident”--- evoking images of slavery to reify
power over a student, distancing and trivializing racism as an object or “thing,” ignoring
the relationships and realities in school to which the student’s comment might signify.
Yet, Kayla, as a tourist, does not examine her own assumptions. Part of how race does
and does not play into Kayla and Ashlee’s experience has to do with the gaze of a tourist,
always looking beyond and at an “other” world with an essentialist lens but not critically
considering how the “other” reflects and even implicates one’s own world or oneself.

(C on)texts and Learning about an Other

A few years ago, as part of an interview project for a doctoral course, an assistant
professor told me that she believed that one of the greatest “pathologies” that plagued
English classrooms across the country was “the book” (Cushman, personal interview,

Spring 2004). I understood this as a reference to the practice of reading particular novels

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as an object of study, rather than thinking about how the novel was being be interpreted,
or situating the novel or the reader in some context, or using the novel to help (re)think
some idea or way of becoming. This idea has resonated with me. Therefore, I was not
surprised to find, or find myself coming to understand, that the students I interviewed
repeatedly (and, in Ashlee’s case, exclusively) named texts and literature-focused courses
as significant places in which to learn about diversity. For example, as students talked
about real and imagined courses, courses they had taken in high school and college, as
well as courses they envisioned teaching in the fixture, they referenced books. Stories of
learning from books also revealed tourist discourses.

Drawing from her own high school experiences, which she found to be favorable,
she remembered reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a Pulitzer-Prize winning
novel and one of the most commonly read texts in high schools across the United States
(Herz & Gallo, 2005). The novel is set in the mid-19303 in Alabama, and centers around
a court trial in which a White lawyer defends a Black man who is wrongly accused yet
convicted of raping a white woman. (I have emphasized the geographic imagery in
italics.)

Ashlee: To Kill a Mockingbird. We read that. I think that’s a good example of

focusing on a dififerent culture that we weren ’t familiar with in a very suburban

area. Looking at those kinds of things and talking about the culture, even... We

read The Crucible, which I even think of as a multicultural book because it is in a

different time and place. It’s a dijfirent kind of culture. So, I think it’s pretty

broad when you really think about it. I don’t think it deals with ...all with race.

Megan: How do you see The Crucible fitting into your definition of
multiculturalism?

Ashlee: I think just the culture of the time in general. I mean, something that we
really don’t know anything about, that we can’t really place ourselves in that
situation. So, I think that almost anything that’s different from your world can be
considered multicultural education.

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Dealing with racial injustice, the plot of To Kill a Mockingbird could arguably be
relevant to the broad goals of multicultural education. Yet the novel could be taught and
read in a variety of ways, sending very different messages about what it takes to
overcome racial injustice. Ashlee does not talk about how the book was taught, or even
what she learned from the book. In fact, not only does she not talk about injustice or
race, she specifically suggests about multicultural education that she didn’t think
multicultural education “deals with. .. all with race.” Interestingly, Ashlee also included
The Crucible as “multicultural book.” Though I could imagine reading the play through
critical lenses, comparing the novel within contemporary contexts, or raising questions
about the role that Tituba, a Black slave, played in the town’s accusations, this is not how
Ashlee describes the play. Ashlee positioned the novel and the play beyond her own
experiences--- a different time and place, and importantly, a different culture. As a
culture, as when people talk about a culture of poverty, Ashlee hides the issues of
injustice in both texts. She can “tour” difference but doesn’t have to confront how her
own identities are constructed in the differences she sees. In this sense the “tour” or her
gaze is the experience of multicultural education, rather than the experience of thinking
or rethinking. Ashlee fails to, as Toni Morrison (1992) writes, “avert a critical gaze from
a racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and
imaginers, from the served to the serving” (p. 90). She is leaming about an Other, an
another world, not herself or her world.

Ashlee also talked about texts and the importance of contexts in literature courses
from her college courses. In particular, Ashlee talked about Chris Alston’s Comparative

Literature class. She not only talked about Chris’ class, but she also shared a paper she

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wrote in the class. Though I will say more about Chris, the course, and Ashlee’s paper in
chapter seven, elaborating on plausible connections between Ashlee’s reading of I,
Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, a novel read in Chris’ class, and her naming of the The
Crucible as a “multicultural text,” I have, again, emphasized geographical language.

Megan: That happened in your high school classes. Do you think that there were
any other courses--- either within Education or outside the College of Education--
- that were really influential?

Ashlee: I know I talked a lot last time about my Comparative Literature course. It
was on what is considered Central American literature and we focused on
diflerent writers. A lot the books that we had were translations that were written
in other languages. He got them for us in English. I thought that was interesting. I
mean, because, you hear multicultural, like in my Education classes, it was only
presented in terms of African American. But then, you have this whole other, I
remember talking about these Indian tribes, and the way they believed about the
sun and things like that. I just learned a lot.

Megan: Can you think of a specific text from that Comparative Literature class
that you remember learning something?

Ashlee: The one was I, T ituba, Black Witch of Salem. That was interesting. That
was probably my favorite that we did. We also read The Grapes of Wrath, which
I find interesting now, thinking about it. It was just the idea of the journey. That

was pretty much the common thread through the class.

Megan: What did you think you learned in that class?

Ashlee: I was introduced to different texts that I would have never picked up on
my own. He incorporated a lot of history behind the books. He didn’t just ask us
to read them. He would give us a ton of history when we had our discussions and
really try to place us in the context of the book. That was helpful.

Megan: How is that helpful?

Ashlee: Just because we’re not familiar with it. All of those books, half of them, I
had never heard of. We had to read about five novels, and four of them I had
never heard of. So, that was helpful to have the background of writers, just the
belief system that went behind it, how much symbolism and everything was in
those books.

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Ashlee “focuses on” a “whole Other” which she noted that she was “not familiar
with,” again distancing and essentializing people and experiences. Rather than
contextualized readings, Ashlee saw only (con)texts, storied examples of difference. A
tourist discourse situates teaching and learning as “education about an Other”
(Kumashiro, 2000). Kumashiro (2000) identifies two ways of thinking that underpin
notions of “education about Other, ” as well as strengths and weaknesses, all of which are
helpfiil to think about the way Ashlee talks about multicultural education. The first way
of thinking contrasts “Others” to some “norm,” in which “otherness is known only by
inference, and in contrast to the norm and is therefore only partial” (p. 31). Secondly,
partial knowledge is often inaccurate, biased or stereotyped knowledge, and it does not
consider “how the production of deviancy is intimately tied to the very possibility of
nonnalacy” (p. 31).

The narrative about Chris’s class also demonstrated a shift in Ashlee’s language.
She began to reposition herself from tourist to cartographer. She noted that Chris
“incorporated a lot of history behind the books” which I read as evidence that she is
beginning to expand her world, even allowing and enabling herself to see diversity in her
world, albeit from a distance. She notes that Chris tried to “place us in the context of the
book.” She also talks bout the “background of the writers.”

Cartographic Discourses: “Anything that makes someone different than you”

The narratives, particularly Kayla and Ashlee’s stories, also revealed a second
discourse: cartography. The discourses of cartography and tourism are similar yet
distinct in important ways. For example, Kayla defined diversity, in contrast to Ashlee’s

vision of two worlds, as “anything that makes someone different than you.” This quote

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distinguishes the tourist discourse from the cartographic discourse. The discourse of
tourism, as I discussed earlier in this chapter, is about identifying and naming different
worlds, worlds that are fixed and separate, whereas cartography is a project of mapping
identities and differences beyond one self, a world in which identity and difference is not
measured by place but is based on the cartographer’s perspective and understandings of
who one is and where one stands in relationship to other people.
Essentialist Cartographic Thinking about Personal Journeys and Experiences
Like Ashlee, Kayla’s physical journey to State illuminated differences between
her hometown and her college home. Kayla cast her journey, from Queens and Long
Island to State, as one that moved from what she identified as a “melting pot” of race,
ethnicities and cultures to a place that she perceived to be homogenous. She described
her school experiences prior to coming to State.
I grew up... I went to school with a lot of races, so that really helped me. At
school, I was always surrounded by it, I was friends with people, and it was never
really an issue in our school, not that I know of. It wasn’t an issue. I guess where
I lived and who I was surrounded by also affects it. I’ve had Black friends, and
I’ve had Spanish fiiends. And being fiiends with them, the difference in our
cultures is obvious.
Describing how she “grew up,” Kayla used a geographic language to locate how she was
“always surrounded” by diverse people and fiiends. Unlike Ashlee, whose language
situates diversity in an entirely different world, and who does not recognize the diversity
within her own town, Kayla conceptualizes diversity as a matter of identities--- hers and
her friends. In a previous conversation, Kayla had described diversity broadly, as

“anything that makes someone different than you.” For Kayla, differences (like the

cultural differences of her friends) are “obvious” and not “an issue,” which is different

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than Ashlee’s perspectives of her own town, about which she saw no differences even
though her school was racially heterogeneous.

Kayla draws some of the very same boundaries that a tourist discourse effects,
and in doing so, she constructs essentialized notions of “different cultures.” Here the
discourse of cartography is evident in the structure of her narrative, as she moves from
family to family, charting identities and differences.

Kayla: I’ll go to my Spanish fiiends’ house and its noisy, always loud, and I’m
not stereotyping. Her family’s always over, and she has a great relationship with
her parents. Spanish values, you know: good dinner, eat good food, have a close
family. There’s always a lot of people around. So, to go from my environment ,
where its me and my family having dinner at the table to her house and its always
crazy and there’s a million people there, and I might go to another fiiends house
who’s predominantly White. Her mom makes dinner. Her mom cleans. Her morn
makes her father lunch, but they don’t eat together. Her dad gets home fiom
work. He has a beer and sits down to watch T.V. If that happened in my house,
my mom and dad would be divorced.

Megan: What do you mean?

Kayla: My mom is really independent, which is really interesting, because people
have a conception of Middle-Eastem men of being dominating over women, I
guess. That’s so not the case! If anything, not to be cliché, but I guess my mom
wears the pants. What she says goes, and sometimes, we pretend my dad has the
control but kind of just to let him go with it. You know, he will cook dinner. He
will do dishes. He does the laundry. He vacuums. He likes to vacuum; he’s
weird. Yeah. My mom cooks the majority of the time, but that’s not because she
has to. It’s because she gets home earlier than him. But, if she cooks, he does the
dishes, or... so, it’s very interesting to go... especially, my fiiends house who’s
Spanish, like, they don’t deal with that. If you want something, you do it
yourself. You know, I’ll cook and clean if I’m home, but if I’m not home, then
too bad for you. It’s interesting with the different cultures in the different houses.
And then, like, my best friend, her mom’s Betty Crocker. She makes her own
sauce. She spends three days making cookie baskets for everybody at holiday
time. It is typical white family. So, I guess my surroundings really affected me.

Though I was deeply troubled by the broad and grossly uncritical and stereotypical
strokes with which Kayla narrates her story, I am also interested in how she spoke of the
families. As she talked about the different families and houses, which she called different

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“environments,” she effectively categorized and portrayed each “type,” using the
structure of her narrative to map her “surroundings.” Though she was careful to note that
she was not “stereotyping,” (perhaps because the she realized the harm and limitations in
doing so or maybe because she believed the families she described possess some of the
characteristics she portrayed) she storied families according to her vantage of culture,
race, and ethnicity. The structure of her narrative reveals a mapping project constructed
of essentialized and fixed coordinates.

By contrast, Kayla saw complexities in her own family, noting that her dad was
“weird” because he liked to vacuum and because he defied an inaccurate stereotype of
Middle-Eastem men. She suggested that her mother enjoyed cooking, though she was not
forced into doing so. Though she rejected simplistic and uncritical notions of her own
family, her narrative is about her understanding of truth, or about situations and identities
that can be proved or disproved, rather than identities and situations that could have been
constructed or interpreted differently. In this way, her story is both a counter narrative to
what she had elsewhere called “ignorant” understandings of the world as well as a close-
up mapping of her family.

Kayla also employed a cartography discourse to locate and identify herself in the
world. She tells me, “My dad is from Bahrain and my mom grew up in Queens, and
we’re a whole mix of stuff on that side. . .right off the bat is me coming into the world a
little bit more open minded.” She explained further:

Kayla: And my parents are multicultural. So, even though I appear White, or

Italian, or Greek--- whatever. I feel like I always had an edge over people just

because, naturally, I’m--- and I’m not being snobby, but, naturally, I’m am going

to be more open-minded just. . .like inter-racial relationships don’t bother me
because my mother and father are inter-racial. Do you know what I mean? So,

little things like that, I’m more open-minded just because that’s what I was born

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into. ...I’m not real religious, but I think my religion helped me a lot. My dad is

Muslim and my mom is Jewish. So, what were we going to do? So they raised us

Unitarian.
Kayla located herself and attributed “coming into the world” and being “born into” a
family and religions as a factor that fixed her worldview. Open-minded, in a sense,
seemed like a vantage point and a signifier of her identity, rather than a way of thinking.

In addition to the survey of family “types,” a feature of Kayla’s narrative which
suggested cartography, Kayla re-enacted conversations and situations by speaking in the
first person, relaying other people’s words. For example, in the story relayed above about
the carrot stick fight, she conveyed:

Randy, I saw you throw the carrot sticks. Please pick them up.” He refused to

pick them up. “It wasn’t me, you’re just saying that ‘cause I’m Black.” So, she

wound up, she was like, “I’m asking you to throw the carrot sticks away.” “Stop

trying to make me act like your slave. I didn’t throw them. Blah, Blah, Blah.
This narrative strategy, again, serves to map her experiences. She comfortably takes on
the language of others, and while I assumed that she could not have possibly retold this
story verbatim, she “essentialized” what the teacher and the students have said,
effectively drawing points and counterpoints on her map of the experience. Further, in
the case of the student, perhaps because she felt his claims were tired or so well charted
that they need not have been re-told, she summarizes the students’ talk “Blah, Blah,
Blah.”
Viewpoints and “Education about an Other”

As a literary term, one that has been part of the curriculum in every school in
which I have taught, is “point of view.” According to M.H. Abrams (1999), this term
“signifies the way a story gets told--- the mode (or modes) established by an author by

means of which the reader is presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and

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events which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction” (p. 231). The National Council
of Teachers of English (N CTE) articulates the following standard:
Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts to build an understanding
of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to
acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the
workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and

nonfiction, classic and contemporary works
(http://wnmvhcte.org/aboIII/over/standards/l l0846.htm, retrieved June 6, 2008)

Therefore, I was not surprised that the students in this study, in particular Kayla and
Ashlee, had appropriated the language of “point of view” into their discussion about
multicultural education. I came to understand, through talking with Kayla and Ashlee, in
particular that language related to viewpoints and contexts is part of the discourse of
cartographies.

Kayla and Ashlee both, again, named texts, in particular novels, as coordinates
from which to map the world. Ashlee connected texts and multicultural education in the
following way.

I just think that’s a good place to start. You have a good opportunity, as an

English teacher, to introduce different kinds of texts, and familiarize your students

with different kinds of cultures. There are a ton of books out there now by authors

of different ethnicities, where, I mean that wasn’t heard of years ago. So, that’s all
you got was the canon. Now, you should be able to incorporate those texts in
your classroom and talk about those other cultures. It’s just an awareness that
needs to be raised. I think an English class is a perfect place to start that because
you’re already supposed to be looking at these different kinds of texts and writing
about them, and sharing your feelings about them.

Megan: Why would you do that (have them read different kinds, of texts)?

Ashlee: I think the awareness is important. I think there’s diversity in the real

world You can’t just. .. I think it would be unfair to my students to show them

one type of text.
In this example, positioning her students as tourists, Ashlee situated herself as a

cartographer. She suggested that she will “introduce different kinds of text and

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“familiarize” students with “different kinds of culture,” and “show them ” texts that are
“out there ” and “in the real world, ” hoping to “incorporate those texts” into their
worldview.

Ashlee still constructed multicultural literature as different from her students,
assuming that her students will be unfamiliar with non-canonical texts and supporting her
stance that multicultural education is about an “Other.” Further, she still uncritically
examined her own vantage in charting what is “out there, ” noting that multicultural texts
are there “now. ” Should we understand “now ” to mean that Ashlee had come to
recognize multicultural texts only recently, thus privileging her knowledge? Elsewhere
in our discussion, demonstrating a discourse of cartography, she suggested that “just
straying away fi'om the typical English works and bringing in diflErent things” would
constitute multicultural education.

Ashlee imagined that she would adjust the texts she would read with students
according to their own background. She talked about Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, a
novel which depicts the lives of and relationships between four Chinese American
daughter and their mothers.

Ashlee: I had to read The Joy Luck Club in one of my classes. I think it was a

women writer’s class. I think that was interesting. Depending on the school I was

in, how much diversity they had, I think that might be interesting to do because,
like I said, I think most people think of multicultural in terms of black and white,

but, I think, introducing a different kind of culture into that might be interesting.

Megan: You just said, “depending on the school, I would be able to teach.” What
would it “depend on”?

Ashlee: If I was teaching in a mostly white school... I guess that it’s something I
would still incorporate no matter what, but I think it would be important to bring
some Afiican American literature as well. Whereas, if I was teaching in a school
like I went to, where that was common place...

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Ashlee suggested that reading “something like that, where they may not be familiar with
that type of culture because it is so foreign to us” constitutes multicultural education.
Once again, Ashlee constructed essentialized identities, ignoring the capacity of reading
to be more than just “interesting,” and casted multicultural education as being about “an
Other.”

Similarly, Kayla described the merits of reading, as she connected her
understandings of the larger goals of language and literacy education with multicultural
education.

I think the biggest thing is for, like, especially reading a book. It’s easy to get a

perspective of someone by reading a book, and as weird as it sounds, as many

ignorant people as there are in the world, and as we seem like a really diverse

nation, but there are towns where it’s so closed-minded. And maybe reading a

book about an African American person is the closest that one person is ever

going to come to meeting them. And, especially being in the schools, I think I

mentioned this in the last talk we had, it’s almost the only way to get to them.

You can teach them about slavery. You can teach them about the Civil Rights

Movement, but reading and actually putting somebody else in the shoes of

someone else and stressing that’s really important to know that and understand it

and don’t judge it, is really important, and I think it’s left out a lot.
A discourse of cartography emerges not only as Kayla suggested that books, like maps,
could direct students to see other perspectives, but also as she used the language of
mapping and cartography to definitively confirm that there are “many ignorant people” in
the world.

In our conversations, Kayla also suggested that newspapers might serve the goals
of multicultural education in ways that novels and works of fiction could not.

I may go through the newspaper, or something, to see what’s happening, where,

and maybe present it to them in that way. This is a novel and sometimes they

think that this isn’t real. So, especially if you’re reading fictional works, it’s not
real. But if you can find something in the newspaper.

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Kayla elaborated a lesson that involved a newspaper, a lesson she had observed at a
school near her home.
I was doing an observation at home. They had New York Times article on
women’s mutilation, and while pointing out another culture and getting them to
understand it, they were also so I don’t want to use the word excited, but thankful
and grateful that that wasn’t happening in ours. .. I think a lot about multicultural
education isn’t just us vs. them but to be unified as Americans, and I don’t think
that’s really done either. And also, to be pointed outwith the whole mutilation
thing, this is normal to them, this is what they do, it’s even--- in some cases, an
honor and you have to understand that you might not like it. It might seem
disgusting to us, but they don’t have the technology we have. They don’t have the
resources we have, and to them it means something different and it’s important
for students to understand that. And, I think, probably the best way to do it is
with real articles or real things that are going on because then it’s not just like,
oh, this person wrote this book about something that could happen, it’s, like, oh
this really did happen and this really is going on. I think non-fiction is a really
good tool to use for multicultural education.
The language and the ideology in Kayla’s narrative relied on cartography once again.
First, she describes the idea that there is a real and knowable world that she sought to
map out or “present” to students by identifying “what” and “where” current events
occurred reflects a discourse of cartography. The teacher whom Kayla observed “pointed
out” another culture in order for her students to “understand” it. Understanding, as a
project of cartography, is a practice of identification, including identification of
differences, no matter how uncritically and decontextualized one’s individual or cultural
understandings or reactions (e. g. outrage at genital mutilation) might be. Consider how
Kayla dismissed multicultural education about “us and them” in favor of practices that
presented a “unified” America, by which I assumed she meant the United States. Yet,
she drew borders between “us” and “them” by making sweeping generalizations about

“Other” “cultures.” She can only explain and understand mutilation as a cultural

difference. She does not question mutilation as a practice of power or the privileged

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position from which she gazes at the practice. Furthermore, by unifying “America” she
fails to look critically at power and privilege in this county. The ideologies implied by
the discourse of cartography do not require her to do so.

As learners, Kayla and Ashlee also utilize a discourse of cartography. In the
following passage, Kayla reflects upon her most influential and positive experience
related to diversity and multicultural education:

Kayla: We read A Handmaid’s Tale, which is just, like, English literature. We
read Beloved, which is Afiican American. We read Tracks, which is Native
American. We read... I can’t what we read from Spanish... There were like four
or five of them. I think what made it so good was that they all had the same basis.
They were all women. And, it was interesting that, even though they had one
common thing going though them, how their cultures really affected how they
wrote and the stories that they wrote. I felt was that was the most obviously
pointed out thing that I’ve seen. You know, they had all the commonalities, but
the white woman wrote about prostitution and the black woman wrote about
struggling for her family, and the Native-American woman wrote about how it
was really important for her not to do anything to disgrace her family, and how
heritage was really important. I think that, through those books, it almost spoke
to what was important in that culture and what stood out in that culture. I don’t
know if it was a woman writers course---not that I’m a feminist--- I thought that
was interesting. Or it was just it was so easy to see what was important to each
one of them And, she might have picked very extreme... but that’s why it was
effective. We didn’t just start reading. We did some pre-reading stuff, like “This
is so and so. . .she came from here, and this is how she started writing.”

Megan: About the authors?

Kayla: Right. This is what influenced her writing. Knowing that when you went
into reading it, you could see how much the author really has an effect on what
they write, which I don’t think you really take into account when you read
something. You’re reading it for enjoyment, for the story, for pleasure. You don’t
really think about how the author’s life affected what they wrote. At least, I
didn’t up until that point. I think that was the most interesting thing. And, I took
a slave literature class. That was really interesting too, but... what was named... I
didn’t get a lot of perceptions. It was just like slaves. It was interesting to read. I
am glad that I took it because it was insightful, but it was slave literature and
that’s all we were going to read. So, I feel like, if you put a bunch of stuff
together and make it into something that I have a multicultural understanding of,
but as far as one class as a whole teaching multiculturalism, I would have to say
it’s the woman writers.

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Kayla began this narrative by orienting me, mapping out for me, the texts and
authors that the class had read. The titles and authors, like the families in her
neighborhood, fit well with the coordinates of Kayla’s understanding. “Heritage,” she
notes, and “what stood out in that culture” was very important to the course. Though the
books had focused on various forms of struggle, rooted in political and economic
injustices, Kayla did not note power, nor did she note the importance of the novel
politically or aesthetically, or how the novels might resonate with life or change her or
society more broadly. To Kayla, the novels simply and effectively charted different lived
experienced, experiences which she would add to her map. In this way, the books
mirrored earlier maps she had charted based on families in her neighborhood.
Cartography permitted Kayla to ignore power relations in which she might have to
rewrite how she sees and locates herself. For this reason, she did not enjoy the slave
narrative class, as she felt and saw only “one” static and fixed perspective. Nor was she
willing to identify herself as a feminist, as this would require her to consider patriarchies
in her own world.

Cartography, then, is about charting. Cartographers consider marginalized voices
only when they do not disrupt their map. Ashlee describes:

If you can understand how someone else believes, then maybe that would say,

‘okay that just reaffinns to me that what I think is on the right track’ or it might

say, ‘you know maybe they have a point, and maybe I can adjust my way of

thinking a little more’ So it’s almost leaming from each other. Even if it’s not a

belief that you’re going to take on your own, you can still understand where
people are coming fiom.

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A discourse of cartography reveals a critical ideology concerning balance and
objectivity, which, Ashlee suggested, requires teachers to “take the middle ground”
because, she said, “there’s a difference between sharing views and pushing opinions.”
Seeing and Mapping the World: A Modernist and Structuralist Project

I came to understand cartography and tourism discourses as sharing many of the
same qualities. Largely, the similarities have to do with their shared view of the world,
knowledge, and truth. Discourses of both tourism and cartography, employing modernist
worldviews and an “objectivist outlook” (Grenz, 1996, p. 40), presume that the world is
knowable and that people are “rational, unified beings” who are “fully conscious of [our]
intentions” (Omer, 1992. p. 84). Therefore, teaching and learning about an Other, for
example, either as a tourist or a cartographer, is a unproblematic mapping project in
which one can read novels, for example, to identify and organize various cultures. Grenz
(1996) explains:

Assertions are either true or false, and we can determine whether they are true or

false by comparing them to the world... operating on objectivist assumptions, the

realist defines truth as the correspondence between our assertions and the

objective world about which they are made. (p. 41)

Further, as we encounter what is “out there” in the “real world,” we see from fixed
vantage points that do not account for multiple interpretations or social constructions of
reality. For this reason, the discourses of tourism and cartography are not introspective
and do not give reason to rethink one’s own ideas or sense of truth. Lastly, both tourism

and cartography rest on the assumption that rational people will use their knowledge for

some greater good.

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Traveler Discourse: “Pushed Beyond” Your “Comfort Zone”

At the end of one of our conversations, after the tape recorder had been turned off
and as Rachel was heading toward the door, she turned to me and reflected: “I don’t think
people want to think that much.” The comment, as I understood it, referred to her
assessment that not all students who enroll at State push themselves beyond their
“comfort zone.” Rachel’s statement revealed a kind of thinking that I came to understand
as the discourse of travel. That is, Rachel’s narrative represented what Kevin Kumashiro
(2001) describes not as a movement to “a better place” but an ongoing process of
becoming and “moving.”

Anti-essentialist Traveling Thinking about Personal Journeys and Experiences

Rachel, an honors student, had started college at State’s main campus at the start
of her freshman year. Growing up, with her four siblings and her parents, in an affluent
suburb of a large in-state city, both her mother and her father had both relocated to
different communities by her college years. After her parents’ divorce, her father had
moved to a racially and ethnically diverse city neighborhood in which Rachel had spent
significant time, and more recently, after Rachel had graduated from high school, her
mother had remanied and moved to a small town only 10 minutes aWay from State. Her
physical and conceptual journey differed from Ashlee and Kayla’s experiences and
thinking. I came to understand Rachel’s narrative as a discourse of traveling.

Rachel reflected on diversity at State:

Rachel: I mean, I guess. . .there is diversity here. I just saw somewhere in the

paper that 11,000 students are from other places, or something... some statistic

that was trying to prove that State is in fact diverse. But, I think it’s really
separated and segregated here. I guess... it was like that in my high school, not

on purpose but people of similar races and backgrounds sat together, socialized
together, had classes together. Here we’re not tracked in classes, so I don’t see

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that as much. But, I do look around my classes and I think we’re all the same. I

think when I am meeting new people and finding out where there from, and I am

surprised that it is New Jersey or New York, over Pennsylvania, and that there’s

some sort of problem with that.

Megan: What do you mean?

Rachel: I am so used to... so many people at State are from [in-state] that

“diverse” to me has become being from [out of state]. So, I just don’t... maybe

because we’re in the center of the state. Like the surrounding areas are old

fashioned in the sense of not being more accepting from what I’ve experienced, or

from what I’ve heard more than what I’ve experienced. People, I’ve talked to

people who have come across racist faculty members and students.
To understand Rachel’s discourse as that of travel requires attention to the vantage point
through which she describes her experiences as well as the understandings she reveals.
Rachel’s speech moved fluidly between descriptions of State and realizations about her
high school. She avoided binaries, as seeing the segregation at State allowed her view
similar and dissimilar social and institutional patterns in her own community. Her
language, “I think” and “I guess,” as well as” maybe because” and “from what I’ve
heard” suggested a sense of subjectivity and emerging thinking rather than references to
objective truths. Rachel also conceptualized shifting and socially constructed notions of
diversity. She understood new markers of identity and difference, in which diversity “has
become being from [out of state].” She implicitly questioned the statistics which “[tried]
to prove” that State was diverse.
Texts as Tools and Entry Points, Learning that “Transforms the Self ’

Rachel credited her father, who had left the business world to become an author
and an English instructor at a local college, for her love and way of reading literature.

She fondly reflected that she “had been around” literature “since [she] was little.”

I think it was probably something that was a focus starting when I was a little
girl... poetry and things like that. So, I guess that it’s maybe some of it is just

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in me. My dad, more than my mom, is It’s been an interest. So, I learned to

talk about books that way. When I was little and we would read books together, it

wouldn’t just be read it and close it. It would be... that’s sort of how I grew up:

thinking about characters and books. So, I think I just got some of that from my

dad. He taught me to, sort of, think of English that way.
Unlike Ashlee, who positioned herself as a tourist and talked about “focusing” on
literature, Rachel’s conceptualizations seem different than Ashlee’s ideas. Ashlee focused
on books and plots, windows to different world, but Rachel focuses on thinking. Unlike
Kayla who talked about being “surrounded” by diversity, Rachel talks about having
“been around” literature. Her position is fluid, almost floating, whereas Kayla’s was
fixed. Rachel grew up “thinking about characters and books” which is different than
saying that one has been exposed or become aware of particular “cultures” as depicted in
particular texts.

Rachel elaborated how she had learned to “think of English” and “talk about

books:”

Megan: Can you think of a specific book or a specific memory of when [you
remember reading] with your dad, or with anyone else?

Rachel: Yeah. ...well. . .I can’t think of a specific book right now. I just know
that, maybe in the second or third grade, I I’ve always been a perfectionist and
so I’ve always struggled with that even when I was a little girl. To help me to get
through that and passed that, my dad wrote me a poem to hang in my room. I can
still picture the poem, and I know the poem. And that kind of taught me about
poetry and to use it in terms of expression.
Not only does Rachel’s language, “to get through that” and “passed that,” suggest
movement, which I understand as travel, it suggests a struggle and requires “laboring”
(Kumashiro, 2001, p.42) over ideas as well as one’s relationship to those ideas. The
poem her dad wrote sought to challenge and transform Rachel’s identity as a

perfectionist. Further, as this memory reveals, Rachel “uses” literature. She comes to

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literature to “express” something about herself. Using literature as a tool, rather than a
window or fixed coordinate of one’s identity, distinguishes a traveling notion of reading
from as a tourist or a cartographic notion of reading.

Rachel continued to find poetry a useful tool through which to see anew. She
remembered how a poem in her high school literary journal shaped her thinking.

I remember in high school. I never thought about it really and I never really

noticed how segregated, in a sense, my school was in terms of, if you walked into

the cafeteria during my lunch period, you saw the Asian-American students sitting
in the same tables on the same side, and you saw white students and you saw
black students, and they stayed together, and it looked segregated. Then, also, in

our auditorium, for any football game or basketball game, there really was a

White side and a Black side. I never thought about it, until one year, in 11th

grade, a student published a poem, a Black student who I was fiiendly with

published a poem in our student literary journal, and it was about that. That was
the first time I thought of it, and then I really thought about it. I definitely
realized it, and looking back, I realized it.

The experience of using a poem, a book, a course, or a project as an entry point to
“realize” something about oneself is a pattern that describes the paths Rachel had traveled
as well as the ways she imagined reading with her students. Rachel talked about two
lessons she had crafted based on adolescent novels she had read in her methods class.
First, she talked about Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind by Suzanne Fischer Staples, a
coming of age novel about a young girl living along the border of Pakistan and India.
She doesn’t spend much time talking about the culture or the plot of the book, which
centers around an arranged marriage, though she reflects on what it could mean for her
students to read the novel.

I based my “fake” unit plan on was Shabanu. That was about a different culture.

So, I used that book. I guess I would just try to incorporate books like that... that

express views from lots of different places and also books that try to help people

reflect on themselves. But, I think you can take books, even ones that aren’t that
enjoyable to students, and draw that out. So I think it can be done with most

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books, but I would want to teach books that get students even thinking about their
own views and cultures, and then other views and cultures.

Similarly, Rachel talks about a lesson she created based on Cynthia Voight’s
Homecoming, in which, she told me, “a major theme in it is fmding--- staying together as
a family.”

There’s four siblings and they stay together as a family throughout the book.
That’s what’s most important to them. . .. One of my lessons was more about
family about in general. Just helping students define what is family, and how
important is family, why is it important, what makes it important, their specific
family: Maybe helping them to see relationships with family members because
you often fight with your family, but maybe and assignment like that can help you
learn that — what’s there forever. Things like that. I also did, with that same thing,
a lesson on home, and so it was — I called it “What Is Home to You?” They
created a piece of art, like a collage, or a poem, or a painting — anything that they
created that represents to them personally what home means. Just to show that
everybody has this different sense of home, and for them to identify more their
thoughts and beliefs and learn about themselves and what other people might
think. Also, with lessons like that, I think its important to have them present, just
so you can see that wow, we all have the same assignment, but all of us think of
these things differently. Things like that.

The discourse of travel is not in the words or images in this narrative but in the concepts
and theories that lie beneath Rachel’s purpose. She asks the students in her class to do
with novels what Clifford Geertz (1973) suggests for ethnography. In The Interpretation
of Cultures, Geertz argues for ethnographic research to “make the strange familiar” and
“the familiar strange.” That is, she is asking her would-be students to think about the
meanings (not the objects) in their life and beyond--- as related and yet new.

Rachel articulated her vision for teaching and learning English in secondary
schools:

I wouldn’t say to teach values because everybody can have their own values,

morals, and beliefs but to help students find them in themselves and to define

themselves in terms of what they believe about other people. Just like general life

views. What else? Just different... get them to question things about life and
about themselves, in terms of how they want to act towards other people, how

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they want to exist in today’s world, and, then, also to get them to think critically.
Because I think there are a lot of things about the media, for example, that,
without school or without taking a step back and realizing how we’re being
conditioned to think, you can get really sucked into it. In that way, teach them
about those types of things too.
There is a difference between critical thinking, which focuses on logic, and critical
perspectives, which focus on power (Burbules & Berk, 1999). While it is not exactly
clear which one Rachel referred to here, she fashions her students as travelers through her
discourse, orienting students to see the world through a critical lens. Using this lens, they
think about how students want to “exist in the world” and how they want to “act towards
other people.” She also asks them to “take a step back” to realize “how they are being
conditioned to think.” “Stepping back” and choosing particular ways to act and be in the
world are fluid concepts, which I believe represents a traveler discourse.
Rachel also talked about the aspects of English Education about which she was less
certain:
If you look up what it means to be literate, or what it originally meant to be
literate--- you would maybe find something simple like being able to read and
write. But one of my classes... we had to define a much more — like that’s not
what literate is anymore kind of thing. Literate now — everyone can have their
own definition of literacy and what it is to be literate. That’s what it is still - I
remember that, and I remember writing paragraphs about it. I guess it’s confusing
in my head because I don’t think there is a set - I think it depends where you are
and what you’re examining, in terms of what it means it means to be literate and
what literacy is — I guess that’s why.
She also shared questions about English more broadly. “One of her big questions” had to
do with the scope and purpose of English Education and what English ought to do. She
“thought about it in terms of education” overall and not just English. Her “questions”

which remain “confusing in her head” suggest current “lines of flight” (Deleuze &

Guattari, 1980) in her current travels.

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Rachel also talked about one significant and transformative experience, a trip she
took to Ecuador in the summer of 2002. Rachel called her trip a “catalyst” to her
thinking.

Rachel: A lot of where I actually I learned this stuff or where I started thinking
that was that I spent a summer in Ecuador doing a program... I think it was after
11‘h grade maybe. That was the first time. I lived with 15 other people who were
on the program with me and we lived at a couple’s home in Ecuador. We worked
in a really poor community with a group of people from Ecuador, and we helped
them with very aspects, like with their farming, education, and we helped them to
build a store for their... they eat guinea pigs... for their guinea pigs. I remember
all of us, the people I was working with, were getting upset because we were
helping them and putting in all these hours everyday and we didn’t feel that they
were appreciative of us. We told our group leader that they don’t act like their
thankful of us everyday, and we’re putting in all this work. And they [the group
leaders] had to explain that in their culture that that is just not the way that they
act everyday. They don’t overly praise people for the work that they’re doing.
They’re appreciative but it’s not accepted. It’s just not the way... they’re much
more work oriented, like 80 year old men were working us. In our culture, 80
year old men don’t really work hard labor at all. Things like that, little kids, the
age of 5 were lifting bricks and rocks with us. That was a huge experience in
terms of I’m judging this on what I know, but that’s not the way it is everywhere.

Megan: What was the program?

Rachel: It was a volunteer program. It was through Putney Student Travel. You
could sign up and you could go... there were programs all over the world. You
spent a month in a community, helping the community to do something, and it
changed depending on where you went. So, I was in Ecuador and we had those
three projects, but the main thing was that we built a store... sort of like Habitat
for Humanity idea. Then, on the weekends, we would travel and get to see
different places. We had two leaders who spoke Spanish, but were from the US.
and helped us get around.

M: Did you choose Ecuador?

Rachel: I think that they had a couple places that I chose from and it ended up that
some were filled up, so I got Ecuador, but I don’t remember having a set first
choice.

Megan: That’s neat.

Rachel: Yeah, it was really cool. I always forget that that was actually a huge
catalyst I was like “wow, that’s my standard.” Because at the end of the

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experience, when it was all over, they were so thankful and crying, and we were,
“wow, this is coming out of nowhere.” But that’s just because their culture is
different.

Rachel: I think a lot of it is just being, having an experience because—at least for
me it was having an experience with another culture or about another culture.
And, then, having someone—I think, yeah, having someone point out to me that
that’s what I was doing. And then. . ..

Megan: Pointing out? The “that” being. . . that you were judging or that you
weren’t judging?

Rachel: That I was-«That I was using my standards to evaluate the behavior’s of
another culture. It was in Ecuador. That was the first time that someone --
because I was with 20 other Americans and we were really taken aback by their
way of communicating with us and we were insulted. And, then, we were with a
leader who helped us to understand that that is the just--- it’s just a different way
of communicating and they don’t--- and in our culture it might be insulting and in
theirs it’s respectful. So, it took someone pointing that out to me and I guess
that’s what I see is a large part of teaching. Because you don’t really need to be
with--- you can do that even just reading and reacting to something. And then just
having someone constantly reminding you that that’s what you’re doing in your
head if there are, I mean, maybe some people never do judge based on that. I
think that that’s where, that’s what it might take.
In addition to the physical journey, Rachel’s travels included the chance to discover her
own standards. Unlike Ashlee who had been wowed by diversity, or Kayla who had been
“awed” by closed-mindedness, Rachel was “wowed” to recognize her own ways of
knowing and being in the word. The experience, like the experience of reading poetry,
transformed her prejudices and perceptions of the people and the culture she had
experienced. Someone had to “point out” her standards. She learned from messages that
“come out of nowhere.”
In contrast to her trip to Ecuador, Rachel critiqued some of the practices she
experienced State. Though she found Robyn Beatty’s Africa, African American studies
class helpful, as I will describe in more detail in the next chapter, about other courses

Rachel reflected, “Though there are some classes that have good intentions. . ..I haven’t

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been pushed outside of my comfort zone, or really pushed out of my comfort zone. The
program [does not] get future teachers to really uncover their own beliefs.” She notes,

I think that it’s really important to push people out of their comfort zone. I think

that it has to be in the context of a comfortable environment, if that makes any

sense. In one of my things I talked about - because I realized that after Ecuador

and I read through my journal and that was a lot about what I had written about. I

wrote that I feel that that experience prepared me for other experiences that

required me to leave my comfort zone and try something new. I think that with
students, that’s what pushing the boundaries and — I think that you can ask people
to leave their comfort zones, make them feel uncomfortable, if they know that
they are in a safe environment.
The image of “being pushed out” of a “zone,” is a metaphor of movement and fluidity
that signifies a discourse of travel.
Which discourse is best?

It may seem, through the representations of the discourses in this chapter, that
there is an implied hierarchy, or that the discourse of travel is somehow “better” than the
touring or cartographic discourses. It is important to note, however, that each discourse is
differently useful and each holds particular possibilities and limitations. For example,
there is safety in touring that might move pre-service teachers to consider new
perspectives about which they could not otherwise think. This new thinking might
eventually lead them to alternate discourses. Or, cartographic discourses can be useful to
teacher educators as we affirm our students’ experiences and push them to construct new
ideas and new ways of being. Cartographic discourses can also help teacher educators
learn frOm the stories and experiences of our students, as well as chart our own
experiences with critical intention, as any writing or thinking we do is always somewhat

cartographic. The discourse of travel, on the other hand, could be limiting if one’s travels

allowed them to pass over considerations of particular kinds of oppression and identities,

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such as the racializing discourses explained in the next chapter, or if travel became an
escape route rather than a mode of accountability and responsible response to the world.
What matters is that teacher educators recognize different positions and discourses from
which students use to think about the ideas in our classes. We must not only recognize
discourses, but name them and speak about them, and push ourselves and our students to
think about how each helps or limits one’s thinking.
Traveling On Towards an Analysis of Race and Power

As I have illuminated, the discourses of tourism, cartography, and travel reveal
different conceptual understandings of identities and differences as well as
understandings of teaching and leaming. Each discourse limits and affords what it is
possible to think, know, and become. In this way, discourses are constructive as well as
reflective. What is possible (or not possible) is not only a matter of positioning; however
it is also a matter of power. For example, notions of race--- including whiteness and
racism, permeate the narratives of this chapter. In the next chapter, I will analyze how

analyze how Ashlee, Kayla, and Rachel talk about race and power specifically.

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CHAPTER SIX:

RACIALIZED AND RACIALIZING DISCOURSES

This chapter explores how the pre-service teachers and university instructors who
participated in this study think about and imagine (or do not think about and do not
imagine) diversity and multicultural education in terms of race. I utilize critical discourse
analysis, as I did in chapter five, to study the language, including paradigmatic
references, narrative structure, and metaphors, as well as the grammar and sentence
structure of the interview speech to reveal student and instructor understandings. I begin
this chapter with an overview of relevant social and philosophical theories related to
constructions of race. As part of this overview, I discuss the importance of a deliberate
focus on race as well the tendencies towards and limitations of Black/White binaries
which operate as a feature of a broad meta-discourse aboutrace and identity. I use data
from my research, speech and language from my participants, to depict such tendencies.
Also, as part of my overview, I discuss the problem of whiteness. Drawing on these
ideas, I then name five distinct discourses that emerged through analysis. These
discourses include a discourse of authenticity and human experience, a discourse of
historical artifact and “popular history, ” a discourse of struggle and survival, a
discourse of empathy and understanding, and a discourse of testimony and wit(h)ness.10

Race Matters

I believe, as Cornel West (1993) and Ruth Frankenberg (1993) have argued, that

“race matters.” Race, in the sense I mean, is a both an idea--- a socialized construct of

 

'0 The names of some of the discourses are applications of ideas and terms identified elsewhere. None are
stated specifically as “discourses of. ...” I provide full references and citations in the upcoming paragraph
where I explain how I understand each discourse.

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racialized identities and differences as well as a sociological position with very real
effects. Anna Stubblefield (2005) writes:
Thinking of race “essential” and hierarchized qualities is a social construction
because there is not natural basis for the essentialist assumptions endorsed by
white people (there are not “stupid” genes or “criminal” genes). Human beings
might have come to think of differences in appearances between people in very
different terms with very different social results. What we have to live with,
however, is what actually happened. every child of color poorly educated by a
white supremacist school system or denied health care in a white supremacist,
capitalist medical system, or suffering from asthma due to the pollution of poor
and primarily nonwhite neighborhoods, or suffering from malnourishment in the
“land of plenty,” or losing her parents at a young age because they lacked a health
care and adequate nutrition-- all of these crimes against humanity have made the
social construction of race more real, more material. (p. 73)
Similarly, in After Race: Racism After Multiculturalism, Darder and Torres (2004),
referring to the riots in Watts of 1965, argue that “the idea of ‘race’ does not matter
outside the process of racialization. . . .[though] the racisms articulated in Los Angeles and
elsewhere in order to naturalize, inferiorize, exclude, and sustain privilege and growing
class inequalitiy, certainly do matter” (p. 46). Understanding the “process of
racialization” is a useful point of entry for this chapter which focuses on discourses that
construct racial identities. Though this chapter focuses on how university instructors and
pre-service teacher talk and think about race, the purpose for such a focus is to confront
the power-laden relationships that teachers have and might have with their students as a
result of their language and ideas.
The Black/ White Binary as a Meta Discourse
In the United States, much of the dialogue about racialized identities and racism
has centered on Blacks and Whites. While the tendency towards binaries is not a
discourse but rather a feature of specific racial discourses, binaries are part of wider

social discourse patterns within this country and can thus be found across multiple

ll3

explicit racial discourses. Some scholars, such as Darder and Torres (2004), have been
critical of such binaries, arguing that binaries fail to address a multiplicity of oppressive
forces, pointing to the way that various “ethnic realities get lost under the racial
umbrella” (Blauner cited in Darder & Torres, p. 36). bell hooks (1995) makes a
comparable point. She complicates binaries and intersects ideas of power by noting, for
example, the capacity for homophobia among Black heterosexuals, patriarchy among
men from all backgrounds, and white supremacy among white feminists, for example.
bell hooks (1995) also writes (citing Elly Burkin’s work in Yours in Struggle: Three
Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism) of a “capability” for anti-Semitic

. “thought and action” in Black communities as well as white-supremacist thought and
action in Jewish communities (p.206). hooks uses the example of Black-Jewish
relationships to argue that race “can subsume allegiances” that might otherwise be made
across differences (p.205). It is also worth saying that the “racial umbrella” can also
masks differences across the lives of people of the same race.

An awareness of and an effort to shift away from binary, essentialized, and
acritical constructions of identities and differences was evident at State. For example,
Heather, an assistant professor who taught an English course on women writers at one of
State’s branch campuses, feared that her effort to require students to read broadly across
identities as well of the sequence of her course readings risked saying to students, “here’s
our book on Latinas and here’s our book on Japanese Americans. . . .” She felt that at
times her class “becomes almost ghettoized” in its presentation of difference. By
contrast, she was proud of a final project in which she required students to design a cover

for an anthology that comprised the literature from the class. She reported receiving

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collages and drawings focusing on common themes across differences such mothers and
daughters, power, or racism. I will say more about say more about this course later,
though it is important to now take notice of a line of dialogue within a course at State
which expanded the notion of diversity--- beyond the binary of Blacks/Whites and
beyond race as the only constitution of diversity.

Also, Ashlee, Kayla, and Rachel all problematized or struggled with the
limitations of seeing diversity in terms of a Black/White binary and each sought to think
beyond them. Consider the excerpts from each woman’s interviews below.

Ashlee: We had a lot of things presented to us. We had some guests telling us

about their experiences and why we should be concemed about multicultural

education. It was mostly focused on African Americans. It didn’t really go
beyond that, which I think it does.

Rachel: When I decided to do my project on the achievement gap, it [highlighted]

differences in students. I realized, then, also, I’m not just going to look at African

American students. You’ve got Asian American students and maybe Hispanic

students. ‘Cause I didn’t want to--- there’s lots of different races, not just those

two [Black and White].

Kayla: I would say that a half an hour, forty-five minutes [of each class] was

spent on social justice, is what she called it, and social justice translates to

everybody’s a bigot or ignorant, or I think social justice encompasses a whole
lot more than race. . .. I think it’s about people, in general, being treated fairly,
and, I don’t know that I even consider--- I mean, obviously race is a part of that,
but I don’t think of race when I think of that.
These three claims reveal a tension, a push and pull between complex understandings of
multiple forms of oppressions and identities and the privilege and power to ignore, resist,
simplify, or conceal a particular and nationally pervasive form of oppression--- racism.
That is, the idea that diversity means more than just race or that race refers to more than

Black and White people is both affording and limiting. It is true to say that race and

racialized identities include and affect Asians and Hispanic people as well as Black and

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White people. Yet, seeking to place race beyond Black and White binaries may limit
one’s ability to see how Black and White relations matter in terms of power and unequal
social realities. To elaborate, I consider Kayla’s experiences in some detail.
Kayla

Kayla presented a complex and anti-essentialist understanding of diversity that
went “beyond race” to include family and religious diversity, countering hegemonic
constructions through her storied experiences.ll About her family, she shared an
experience that happened at the home of a close family fiiend which challenged her
religious identity. I will argue he account of this incident reveals how she thinks about
and resists thinking about racialized identities.

Kayla: When we were young-- me and my sister are one year apart-- she was
probably 12 and I was maybe 11. Every Christmas Eve, we go to my aunt--- one of
those, not your real aunt but your mom’s such good fiiends with them aunt, one of
those. We go to her house. We’ve become so close that her family is our family.
They’re my cousins; we’re all family. They go to midnight mass every year. One
year before midnight mass, my aunt was telling them about Jesus and how if you
don’t believe that Jesus is the son of God and the Savior, then, you’re going to
Hell.

Megan: Telling your parents this?

Kayla: Telling us this. It was supposed to start off as “Let’s talk about the birth of
Jesus because it’s Christmas” and then “Jesus saved us”... And then, my sister
said something kind of like, “I don’t think Jesus saved me.” Unitarians--we could
both be Unitarian and we could both have a completely different belief system.
Because my mom’s Jewish and my dad’s Muslim, we grew up that God is God.
Jesus is the son of God, and he’s a prophet, just like Moses was a prophet, just
like anyone was a prophet. ...So, my sister was like, “I don’t think Jesus saved
me.” My aunt freaked out: “He did, and da, da, da da.” So, little things like that
have happened a lot. Those are the only two that I know of, but I am sure that
there is much more. Even, I don’t think I notice it, but I’m sure it happens, but I
guess it happens. I dated a guy who is Filipino and Puerto Rican. We dated for
three years. When we went out, I even noticed people looking at us weird, and
that’s recent. I am assuming that that happens to my family all the time because

 

” See Elizabeth Heilman (2008) for more on hegemonic constructions of the family.

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my dad is, he doesn’t look Black, but he’s obviously Middle-Eastem and my
mom is obviously White.

This narrative demonstrates that Kayla’s notion of diversity is broad and multifaceted.
She names multiple identities in her story. The experience of attending the Unitarian
church as a person with Jewish and Muslim heritage, suggests that identities, at least
religious identities, are not fixed or unified. Her religious beliefs and practices have been
challenged. She perceives that her parents’ inter-racial relationship has been the object of
strangers’ stares.

In talking about race, however, her language is limited, or perhaps it is that the
language afforded to her is limited and racialized. She struggles for conceptualizations
and a referent language to name the complexities of her identity. That is, she struggles to
break free of the binary of Black/White. Kayla claims, for example, that her mother is
“obviously White” and her father “doesn’t look Black, but he is obviously Middle-
Eastern.” With the language and constructs available to her, she can only qualify her
dad’s racial identity in terms of the Black/White. She names instead his “race” broadly in
terms of a geographic location. Why, I wonder did she qualify her dad’s identity
according to race only to name him beyond the binaries of race? The language of race is
limited but the construct is dominant. Reflecting on her own appearance, she states “I
appear like white or Italian or Greek-- whatever,” and re-imagining a conversation she
had with a student in her pre-service teaching placement, she says:

You don’t know who I am. You know nothing about me. I could have... I could

be Black. Just because I don’t look Black, you don’t know that I’m not Black, or

have a family member that’s Black.
Kayla alludes to what Cornel West calls the “biological and cultural hybridity” of race
(cited in Darder & Torres, 2004, p. 51) as well as her ability to appear or “pass” as White.

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In part, the limitations of the Black/White binary represent a language-concept mismatch.
It limits the language of difference to a racialized language, in which she appears to
struggle either to construct or resist constructions of her identity
Kayla’s “race talk” (Morrison, cited in hooks, 1999, p. 23) is also the product and
producer of a multiplicity of hegemonies, among which white supremacy and anti-
Semitism are two. Reflecting on Brenda Parks’ English education methods class, which
all three students in the study had taken, Kayla claims the class focused “too much” on
African Americans. She remembered:
[Brenda] named some things that would happen to her that weren’t
discriminatory, but they could happen to anybody. And she took that as, “Oh
because I’m Black, this happened to me.” I didn’t really have the right to say,
“It’s not because you’re Black. It could happen to anybody” because I haven’t
lived as a Black person. I don’t know if that’s the truth or not. I just feel like it’s
so-- what’s the word I’m looking for? It’s so one-sided with things like that
because, especially when the oppressed race is teaching the class, like, they do
feel that they have suffered, and they have. I’m Jewish and when I hear about the
Holocaust, it makes me cry, but that’s a little bit different than other things. It’s
almost that there’s not two sides. I’m not saying what Americans did to Afiican-
Americans is right because I know it wasn’t. It’s so extreme that it’s not a
learning process. It’s like, “This is what you should think. . .This is what
happened. The white people did this to the black people. Hate the white people.”
I think it’s very much like that...
Kayla is careful to limit her ethos by noting that “because [she has not] lived as a Black
person. . .,” she does not really “have the right to say” anything. One could understand
her statement as a critical question about one’s ability to truly understand another’s life,
but it can also serve as way to absolve oneself from thinking about her own complicity in
a racist society (Boler, 1999).12 Yet, Kayla speaks from a position of unexarnined

privilege as she continued, “I don’t know if that’s the truth or not.” And further she

directly challenges validity of the Brenda’s perspective, based on her race: “especially

 

'2 I say more about this notion in the upcoming section on the discourses of empathy and understanding.

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when oppressed race teaches the class.” Another way that Kayla challenges the validity
and marginalizes Brenda’s perspectives is by referring to the course throughout her
interviews with me as “Brenda’s class” rather than English Education 300, though she did
refer to Heather Young’s class as both “Women Writers” and “Heather’s class.” In this

sense, Kayla’s utilizes a position of power and privilege to absolve herself of the need to

seriously consider the ideas presented in the course.13

Still, Kayla is not entirely privileged, as she struggles to “make sense” of and
“make a self” (Heilman, 2008) within the Black/ White binary. In terms of resistance and
insight, she names the Holocaust and states “it’s almost that there’s not two sides,” and it
is “a little bit different than other things.” I understand both claims to mean that anti-
Semitic power is different than white supremacy, and that it is difficult to recognize or
conceptualize the Holocaust or anti-Semitism within the structure of the Black-White
binary where the hegemonic force of focus is white supremacy. She continued.

There were five of us, only, in the class. Three were European White, there was
me---Arabic-American, and there was Korean-American. She [Brenda]
acknowledged that we were a different race, but it was almost like, well, “you
haven’t gone through what I’ve gone through. And, there was almost, like, a
total disregard. Especially, for someone who embraces multicultural education
the way that she does, it’s almost like, “You didn’t go through slavery, so you
don’t have a right to be upset about this as I am.” Or, she felt like she had a right,
I think, or... it’s not like what I said was ever put down or anything like that...
but she always had... if I had a story, she always had a story bigger. And I don’t
even know what we were talking about the stories half the time. We were just
talking about, you know, people come from different places. I brought up the fact
that my father came here in the 70’s from Bahrain. It’s a small country in the
Middle East, and he had to take, when I was five or six... I can remember us
waiting, because he went to take his citizenship test. I remember him studying so
hard for it. I had said that the amount of studying that he had to do for that test,
he knew more about America than I knew about America.

 

'3 Kayla also uses the word “Americans” without qualification of country or region.

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Is Kayla challenging the racialized binaries that she perceived in Brenda’s class, a refusal
to objectify an “Other,” a sophisticated critique rooted in her own experiences and
conceptions? Is she appropriating anti-essentialist ideas to mask a power and privilege
to not address, confront, or think about her own racialized constructions of blackness? Or
both? Or something else entirely? This tension and these questions offer a second point
of entry to this chapter.
Whiteness

The notion of whiteness, which grows from critical multiculturalisms as well as
critical race theories, recognizes racialized white identities and asserts that white people,
knowingly or unknowingly, are complicit in and benefit from the power and privilege
afforded by white supremacy and racism (Delgado, 2001; Dyer, 1995; Fine, et al., 1997;
Frankenberg, 1993; Kincheloe, et al., 2000; Morrison, 1992; McIntosh, 1989). The focus
of this chapter represents, in part, what I think is an ethical and performative
responsibility to interrogate whiteness. That is, I see this chapter as a counter response to
the privilege afforded to me, as a white woman, a privilege which would permit me to
ignore or naturalize racialized constructions. Also, I felt this chapter must address
racialized discourses directly because, as the as the pre-service teachers point out, that
there are “lots of different” races which, as the students suggests, “go beyond”
Black/White binary; yet, the binary held a dominant place in student thinking. That is, I
believe the criticism that deconstructs essentialized identities and differences can be
misunderstood or misappropriated to invalidate considerations of how “race matters.”
The remainder of this chapter considers how race mattered in the discourses of the

instructors and pre-service teachers.

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Explicit Racialized Discourses

The instructors and pre-service teachers constructed race through their narratives,
language, and paradigmatic references. Though I imagine that additional racialized
discourses exist—such as a discourse of deficiency or a discourse of a white savior—the
data led me to identify and understand five racialized discourses. These include a
discourse of authenticity and human experience, a discourse of historical artifact and
“popular history, ” a discourse of struggle and survival, a discourse of empathy and
understanding, and a discourse testimony and wit(h)ness. A discourse of authenticity and
human experience avoids specific references to race which means that it may not address
race at all. Still, it includes a critical perspective on the technocratic nature of society
which might implicitly cast racism as one factor that prevents a sense of community and
the ability to be “authentic.” This could be read as a somewhat romantic discourse that
evokes an idealized pre or post racial world. In this discourse, liberation and power are
largely existential and spiritual, though still grounded in institutional constraints, and
grow from a more fully realized human condition. The discourse of historical artifact
and “popular history” fixes race and racism in the past or in iconographic figures. As
such, injustices and struggles, such as slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, are over
and are removed from contemporary accounts of race relations. As a historical artifact,
freedom is the product of progress and liberal democratic ideals. Within the discourse of
struggle and survival, rich with psychological language, one’s racialized identity is the

evolving product of the struggle to bear witness to one’s experiences and claim self-

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defined identity. As Toni Cade Bambara suggests (cited in bell hooks, 1989), struggle
and survival is a revolution that “begins with the self and in the self” (p. 30). Sustained
resistance and activism foster hope and justice. The fourth discourse, a discourse of
empathy and understanding examines differences, including racialized differences, by
attending to the exploitative, oppressive, and dehumanizing realities that shape and are
shaped by various hegemonic forces. As such, injustices and struggles are objects of
study from which we gain perspectives about peoples experiences through understanding,
history, and the effects of power. Lastly, the discourse of testimony and wit(h)ness
refuses to isolate constructions of race or sociological realities of race. In this proactive
discourse people across racial differences have a stake in uncovering stories, to bear
witness to the way race relates to their lives. I elaborate on each discourse more fully
below.
The Discourse of A uthenticity and Human Experience: “How Authentic Can We Be? ”
The first discourse, a discourse of authenticity and human experience, emerged in
my conversation with Leslie Steiner, an assistant professor in the College of Education
who taught a required introductory education course on State’s main campus. The
course, which Leslie had renamed, Unlearning for Understanding Teaching, met once a
week and accompanied field experiences in which students observed rural, urban, and
suburban school settings. Rachel, the only student in this study who had taken this class
on the main campus, and therefore the only student who had taken the class with Leslie,
provided me with Leslie’s name as someone who had influenced her thinking about
multiculturalism. She did not, however, talk much about the course in her interview with

me.

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I met with Leslie at her home. Though we were not friends who socialized outside
of work, we knew each other prior to the interview, had shared some friendly
conversations about the course, and had worked together with some regularity, as it was
my job as the time of the study to coordinate the field experiences that accompanied her
class. Towards the beginning of our interview, Leslie shared her belief, borrowed from
the Parker Palmer adage: “we teach who we are.” She wondered aloud about her own
teaching: “how authentic can I be? How can I be in the moment? What’s real in that
class?”(my emphasis). Situating her class as “radical” and built on a phenomenological
perspective, she hoped to uncover “the experience of schooling.”

I did take a critical approach, though not a critical theory, more some of the 603
radical critics of schooling... and that’s just my own interests and I wanted
students to really understand schooling from a phenomenological perspective, and
we’ve talked about that too. So the experience of schooling. That took me to
the experiences of schooling from the perspective of people different from my
students. That led me to explore well who are my students --- and as you well
know, by and large, they’re white, they’re middle class, and they are fairly
privileged. And I always talk about them as school successes. They’ve climbed
the pyramid, they’ve climbed the ladder, by virtue of the fact that they’re in a
university classroom, they’re, we know that they’re school successes. What I
wanted to do was to ask them to think about schooling, the structures of
schooling, curriculum, the purposes of schooling, the relationship of schooling to
the community, grading and evaluation, always from the perspective of “the
other” whoever they understand the other to be. Predominantly, I define the other
as people who aren’t traditionally school successes. I don’t explicitly say people
of color. I don’t say-- um, lower SES people, families. I simply say, “Whoever is
not you.”

Leslie’s narrative establishes an ethic of “colorblindness.” Leslie eschews labels
and refuses to name “the other.” She “explicitly” does not “say people of color” or
“lower SES people.” Yet, she constructs a powerful binary between school
successes/others by noting that her students “by and large, they’re white, they’re middle

class, and they are fairly privileged.” Her unwillingness to name “others,” nonetheless,

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implicitly constructs the other as “non-whites, non—middle class students, school failures
and students without privilege. By focusing “the structures of schooling, curriculum, the
purposes of schooling, the relationship of schooling to the community, grading and
evaluation, always from the perspective of ‘the Other’” in a class on White students,
without interrogating whiteness specifically, her dialogue is racialized.

To explore the discourse of human experience as it functions in Leslie’s class as a
racializing force, consider an excerpt from the first chapter of the core course text,
Walking on Water by Denick Jensen (2003). The title of this chapter, which not
insignificantly conjures a historically racialized image, is “A Nation of Slaves.”

We live in a culture that is based on‘ the illusion-- and schooling is central to the

creation and perpetuation of that illusion--- that happiness lies outside of us, and

especially in the hands of those who have power. . .. Expected is that we will be
good citizens, good boys and girls all. We won’t question country, God,
capitalism, science, economics, history, the rule of the law, but in all those areas
we will defer to the experts, just as we were taught....None of us, if all goes well,
will ever question how these areas--religion, capitalism, science, history, law---
trick out in our own lives, even as we give our lives away.

Here are some questions I’ve been asking lately: What are the effects of
schooling on creativity? How well does schooling foster uniqueness in each child
who passes through? Does schooling make children happier? For that matter,
does our culture as a whole engender happy children? What does each new child
receive in the exchange for the so many hours for years on end that she or he
gives to the school system? How does school help to make each child who he or
she is? (p. 6-7)

I quote Jensen at length because I think his discourse is tricky to untangle. It is
deceptively uncritical in some ways though critical in others. Like Leslie, who in her
narrative mentioned “structures of schooling” and “privilege” and who organizes her
class around “unlearning lessons”--- fear, labels, conflict, safety and otherness, both

Jensen and Leslie use language that summon notions of power. Leslie’s referents to “the

structures of schooling, curriculum, the purposes of schooling, and the relationship of

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schooling to the community, grading and evaluation” could recall theories of the social
reproduction and structural critique as related to schools (Bowles & Gintis, 1976;
Bourdieu, 1977; Heath, 1983; Willis, 1977; Giroux, 1983). Leslie’s language, which
evokes such theories, seems plausible given that she was influenced by the course she
took with Henry Giroux at Miami University of Ohio. Similarly, Jensen’s language
suggests that we critique “religion, capitalism, science, history, law” is an overt call to
question technocratic and structuralist ideas of power. What could be but may not be
immediately apparent to students in Leslie’s class, and what is necessary in order to
understand the racializing discourse of human experience, is how the language of power
is being used. That is, what constitutes power? Who has it and who doesn’t in terms of
race? How does it operate, where does it come from, and how is it (re)claimed or
enacted?

The idea of power as a structural enactment is entangled in the discourse of
human experience in what Leslie calls “authenticity.” In this sense, power is also an
inner almost spiritual power. It raises questions, as Jensen’s text does, about happiness,
creativity, and one’s true self. Jensen’s question, “What does each new child receive in
the exchange for the so many hours for years on end that she or he gives to the school
system?” and “How does school help to make each child who he or she is?” emphasizes
the individuality and uniqueness of each person over collective or constructed identities.
Therefore all critiques of schooling, when not specifically situated with white supremacy
and racism as a particular kind of power, appear to be about how the institution of

schools fails our humanity.

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The notion of humanity-- rooted in modernist ideas of a knowable, stable, and
authentic self, can foil a consideration of whiteness by assuming a true and shared human
experience. Studying “fear” or “labels” or “privilege” without situating them explicitly
in racialized contexts, for example, conceals how fear, success, or privilege might matter
differently, look differently, or hold different consequences for different people. This
was evident as Leslie reflected on her students trips to an urban and rural school district.

Believing that schooling can be experienced by so many, by any, as anything

other than lovely... frankly the more they can get into [name of city school

district], and to a lesser extent, [name of rural school district], this is reality...

You can’t quantify it, a lot of students suffer.

Her focus on “suffering” and experiences that are “other than lovely,” though a necessary
ethical and humane response to the experiences of students in schools, do not implicate
race-based hegemony related to the suffering or provide analytic tools from which to
differentiate or situate suffering. It does not explicitly suppose that one might suffer in
some ways but thrive in others, or that suffering or thriving might occur equally though
differently in urban, suburban, and rural schools. Responding to inhumanities is
necessary and useful in some ways but not explicit enough to ensure a critique based on
racialized differences.

Before turning my attention to the third discourse, it is important to note that
while Leslie provided the most fully realized example of this discourse, the discourse of
human experience and authenticity was evident in student narratives too. For example,
Kayla shared a story she had heard from a fiiend.

My friend Amy drives to [city school district] everyday. In her car is Dave who is

also [a pre-service English teacher] and this girl Lori, also [English Education].

Amy was reading the paper, and it said--- there’s an ad in the paper and it said

something about White family wanting to adopt child. Amy’s like, “That’s really

weird. why are you specifying that you’re White? If you want a child, it

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shouldn’t matter what color, or if you want a child and you want it that badly,
these things don’t matter.” And, Lori, she was so pissed about this. Lori goes, “I
can kind of see what they’re saying. I wouldn’t really want a Black kid, if I was
going to adopt somebody. Blah, Blah, Blah.” I was just like, what? To know
that girl is going to be a teacher. And the way she explained it, when she further
explained it, she was like, “Yeah you know, I just feel like they would not have
the same values as me.” Amy just fieaked out and she told me that for a while
Lori was really quiet in the car. Because I think she felt dumb. But to know that
somebody like that wants to be a teacher, and Amy said that she wants to teach in
an urban school.
This narrative, too, shows an ethos of romantic “colorblindness” in which she emphasizes
parenting, love, and care as human expressions without consideration for the hegemonic
ideologies of families (Heilman, 2008). As offensive as the deficit-thinking in Lori’s
claim that Black people don’t have the “same values” as Whites is to Kayla (and to me)
Kayla’s insight does not consider the socializing and political effects that a cross-racial
adoption might yield. She does not consider the challenge that segregated neighborhoods
or schools could present to families and minority children in those schools, for example,
nor the politics of privilege that allow White families to adopt children from
disadvantaged families nationally and internationally (see Jeong Trenka et al., 2006). The
discourse of human experience constructs racial identities not by talking about race but
by assuming a sameness that conceals whiteness. As Anna Stubblefield (2005) writes,
“white people who believe that common humanity should be extended from white people
to all people are still establishing themselves as the standard and hence are still engaging
in white supremacist belief and action, however well intended they may be” (p. 74).
Discourse of Historical Artifact and Popular History: “I am so far removed”
When I taught high school in the mid-19903, my students used the phrase “back in
the day” to refer to events, outdated ways of life, and relies from the past. The phrase

“back in the day” is illustrative of one of the discourses that emerged as I talked with the

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pre-service teachers and instructors at State. The pre-service teachers and their University
instructors often constructed racism and multicultural education as historical topics fixed
“back in the day.”

Ashlee imagined a lesson she might teach with future students:

I think even when you bring other cultures into your classroom, if your students

aren’t faced with those different cultures every day, it’s kind of like we’re just

learning about them. If you can have that discussion of, years ago, your school
would have been segregated, and showing them these pictures of the “whites
only” water fountain, and say “this is the way it was.” When I’m going to be
teaching, I’m already so far removed from that movement, I mean, I wasn’t alive
during that movement, they are already even more far removed fiom it. I think
you can absolutely gain from that.
Ashlee conceptualizes a racialized past, a time when society failed to integrate and did
not afford the same rights to all people. Notably she equates “different cultures” with
race, as evident in her choice to elucidate school segregation as an example of a different
culture. Doing so relies on and reconstructs a dualism of Black and White, and positions
injustices as something that happened in the past. She imagines relating injustices to her
students’ lives by showing them how “years ago, your school would have been
segregated.” Yet, because she historicizes injustices in an isolated way, Ashlee distances
herself and her students from a need for struggle and social activism, relegating injustices
as an artifact to “learn about” but not necessarily do anything about today.

Ashlee recognizes how history shapes contemporary race relations, though she
problematizes holding onto the past, and chooses to emphasize change over continuity.
She explains why she feels so much of what is said about diversity is focused on race,
and in particular on the experiences of Black people.

I think a lot of it has to do with the history of our country. . .for the longest time

being segregated. I think there is still that need to go after that and this is-- why it

happened and this is why - you know, going through that whole Civil Rights

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Movement and everything, just to see how far we’ve come, and I think that’s kind
of what people are stuck on, in a way.

Speaking of “going through that” Civil Rights movement, and noting that people “are
stuck” on historical events, her language emphasizes both the progress and space that
exist beyond racism and struggle (my emphasis). She aligns herself and constructs an
identity around a vision of collective progress: “how far we ’ve come” (my emphasis).
The students in my study also tended to locate ideologies fixedly in historical
eras. Kayla, for example, reflects on her grandparents.
I think my grandfather is old-fashioned. My mom tells me stories of when she
took my dad home. It was, “he’s the N-word,” which I don’t say. My
grandparents were old fashioned.
Critical of her grandparents’ language and assumptions about Blacks, Ashlee, too,
reflects:
I think that my grandparents, especially, I mean they grew up in the times when
they were referred to as colored people, and they still say that, and it goes right
through me. . .I just think they have a bad connotation associated with people of
different races, you know? I’ll here a lot of “those colored people are doing this
and that.” And, I’m thinking, there are bad white people too. There are white
people who commit murder, sell drugs, and everything else, so why is that 30
separate from us?
Analogous to the way her imagination of Civil Rights and school integration distances
her from a need to consider how she is complicit in contemporary racialized relations,
fixing racist ideologies in the past prevents her from conceptualizing the multiplicity of
visions, responses, and resistance held by her elders. Fixing ideologies in history
naturalizes racism, and in effect absolves people from re-examining racialized identities
and relationships or engaging in “ongoing labor” (Kumashiro, 2000, p.43) against
injustices. Further, Ashlee concludes with an emphasis on “sameness,” which can be

understood as a “deep emotional investment in the myth of ‘sameness’ even as [her]

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actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as sign of informing who [she thinks she
is]”(hooks, 1995, p. 35).
Rachel similarly places racist ideologies in the past when she describes the
communities in and around State:
The surrounding areas are old fashioned in the sense of not being more accepting
from what I’ve experienced, or from what I’ve heard more than what I’ve
experienced. People, I’ve talked to people who have come across racist faculty
members and students.
Noting that surrounding communities are “old fashioned” compares to Ashlee’s
observation about how people can “get stuck” in the past struggles for justice.
This is an interesting move because “old-fashioned” opposes new ideas, fresh
perspectives, possibly youthful or contemporary views which naturalizes progress. The
idea to be anti-racist is recent. Fixed in history, holding “old-fashioned” beliefs, then, is
a problem of the people who hold the ideas, and an analysis of systemic hegemonies is
solely based in liberal democratic ideologies which suggest that the legal system and
democratic process can account for and correct unjust policies.
In addition to the idea of historical artifact, the notion of “popular history” is
important in this discourse. As, Primo Levi establishes:
What we commonly mean by “understand” coincides with “simplify”: without a
profound simplification the world around us would be infinite, undefined tangle
that would defy our abilitiy to orient ourselves and decide upon our actions. In
short, we are compelled to reduce the knowable to a schema (cited in Boler, 1999,
p.175)
Megan Boler (1999) citing historiographer Jacques Barzun, explicates:
Popular history is the ‘history which lives in the minds of men [sic]’its primary
sources include school textbooks and mass media. The risks of popular history

include that it is (l) discontinuous, and represents historical events as singularities
decontextualized from their complex, ongoing processes; (2) ‘reductive’ and

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oversimplifying; and (3) inevitably partisan, reflecting specific interest groups.(p.
178-179)

The language and narration of both teachers and students infused accounts and
representations of popular history. The narratives in this study were pregnant with
references to popular Black history.l4 Brenda’s story was filled with quick and pointed
references to her icons “Martin, Malcolm, and Dubois.” She further storied her
memories:
I remember being in school and I had a big Afro, and then I guess, I would have
been Afro-American, it was a beautiful Afro, just like Angela Davis. You know, I
said wait a minute now, then I became Afiican-American, because, you know,
when I was a teenager, I can remember James Brown, (singing) “we need soul
power.”
Heather chose to read Beloved, along with excerpts from slave narratives and the film
Amistad, which situated Black experience within the contexts of slavery. Kayla and
Ashlee both imagined teaching the Civil Rights Movement and slavery. Ashlee also
referred to teaching about the Harlem Renaissance, as a potential site of multicultural
education. Each of these examples relies on a popular icon, text, or idea related to Black
history. By contrast, Robyn described a focus that seemed to go against popular history.
The other goal was to get them to understand and learn about different people and
organizations that they had never heard of before. Besides King, Rosa Parks, and
Dubois and Marcus Garvey. Even then, some of them hadn’t, hadn’t really heard
of Dubois or Garvey. So it was to get them to fundamentally understand that it
was more to the Civil Rights movement that the 19503 and the 19603 and more to
that then Rosa Parks and Dr. King.
It is important to note what is not evident in the interview speech. In a sense, it is

not enough to note that students and instructors evoked popular history to racialize

notions of diversity and multicultural education. What matters tremendously is not just

 

'4 The references to history, as with much of the interview speech, were constructed around the
Black/White binary in which Blacks constituted “race.”
1 3 l

what they evoke but how they evoke it—for example, what they say about a figure such
as Malcolm X or Rosa Parks. Decontextualizing Rosa Parks’ resistance by suggesting
that she was just too tired to move to the back of the bus is very different than teaching
about organized, thoughtful, and collective resistance (Kohl, 2005; Neito, 2002). Some
stories take up power relations while others cast figures such as Parks as heroic lone
rangers of Civil Rights. In terms of spaces and places in which students learn about
diversity, at stake is just how students “make sense” of the world but also “make a self”
in the world (Heilman, 2008). That is to say, popular history conceals institutionalized
hegemonies and social constructions of race, crafting iconic images which disconnect
teachers and students to activism and efforts for social justice.

Discourse of Struggle and Survival: “1 am the victim of the very song of freedom that I
sing. ”

A third discourse, one of struggle and survival, dominated the narratives and
language of Brenda Parks. Unlike the four other discourses which I describe and for
which I provide examples from more than one person in the study to illustrate a shared
ideological vision, in this section I will examine the narratives of Brenda Parks
exclusively. This is not to marginalize or trivialize Brenda’s ideas. In fact, it is exactly
because some of the students resisted Brenda’s class, as well as the fact that Brenda’s
class is the only class that all three participants had taken, that I wish to pay careful
attention.

I came to understand Brenda’s discourse as of one of struggle and survival. Her
teaching seemed to embody a Frederick Douglass quote she shared with me: “There is
not progress without struggle.” At once autobiographical, psychoanalytic, dialogical, and

performative, the discourse of struggle and survival is very much like a second discourse

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that I will reveal later in this chapter: the discourse of testimony and wit(h)ness. Yet, the
two discourses are distinct in terms of positioning, power, and who speaks. That is, the
discourse of struggle and survival narrates stories of oppression from the perspectives,
and in the voices, of marginalized people, in Brenda’s case from the perspective and
voice of an Afiican-American woman.” The discourse of struggle and survival can be
understand, through the lens of critical race theory, as a counter-narrative, an account of
one’s experiences that speak against the myths, “norms,” and assumptions that are often
cast as truth. As Brenda said to me early in the interview, “I am the victim of the very
song of freedom that I sing.” The words “victim” and “song of freedom” suggests
struggle and survival. It also matters that Brenda is the teacher, and as such, like all
teachers, she is the (author)ity of the class. She decides what students read, what
projects and lessons they construct, and what ideas warrant study. As is the case with all
teachers, authority is a racializing process.

Brenda’s conversation was autobiographical. She crafted stories that represented
both collective and individual struggles. In the following, she talks about her experience
teaching Langston Hughes’ poem “Theme for English B” with pre-service teachers.

‘Cause he says, ‘I’m the only colored in the class.” And, I’m like, will they
acknowledge that this classroom environment ....? And what I have to do, also,
since it is [English Education], is take a look at the language that’s used in the
poem, and actually say to them, “The language that was used in the poem, what
words were used?” They’ll say, “colored,” and girl... So “what else was going on

in 1951. When was Civil Rights? What was the March on Washington? 1864?

When did we become free as slaves? Then, I’m like, “when was the Civil

Rights?” Ok, so 1864 to 1964, it took a hundred years to get to freedom, and

freedom still isn’t free.” Language... I call it social linguistics... “let’s look at

these different terms,” you know, “instructor... colored, negro white. Let’s
unpack this classroom environment.” That’s why “I used English B,” because I

 

'5 I struggled in my decision to separate or not separate the discourse of struggle and survival from the
discourse of testimony and witness. I am still not convinced that it should not be otherwise. I take this up
further in chapter seven.

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can relate to it. And I said, “but the language though, it kind of bothers me. Now
let’s see. I was born in 1956, meanwhile you see all these dates.” And they’re
looking like, this woman is crazy. She’s looking all over the board. I’m like
“1956, now let’s see. My parents would have been colored, well maybe they were
negro, but that was before Civil Rights. But then I remember being in school and I
had a big Afro, and then I guess, I would have been Afro-American, it was a
beautifirl Afro, just like Angela Davis. You know, I said “Wait a minute now,
then I became African-American, because, you know, when I was a teenager, I
can remember James Brown, (singing)’we need soul power.’ When did I become
Black? The language we use in society socially constructs the labels for people.”
I said, well, “what do you call me? How ‘bout if you call me Mrs. Parks, and
really remember that language has power. ...” The board is completely filled and
their looking like wow... but then they start talking to me because what I did was
eliminate the space between, you don’t know what to call me. “As a person of
color, teaching ‘Theme for English B,’ are you starting to realize why I am doing
this?” But then they feel comfortable to talk to me.

Several features qualify this narrative as a discourse of struggle and survival. First, there
is an autobiographical storyline to the narrative, both a collective and individual story that
is not always, or completely, separate. She juxtaposes a chronology of Civil Rights
legislation and the shifting nature of language with personal references to her parents and
her high school Afro. She includes signifying Black icons such as James Brown and
Angela Davis which seem to mark struggle as well as triumph-- though it is not clear if
she means that they were significant to her individually, to Black people generally and
collectively, or recursively to both. She speaks collectively: “when did we become free as
slaves?”

Understanding Brenda’s narrative as a discourse of struggle and survival,
however, also has to do with how she tells her narrative (not just with what she says). In
her interview, I experience her speech as a kind of “call and response.” Brenda shared
with me that her students have recognized her narrative style of teaching.

Mrs. Parks, you don’t teach you preach. You tell a lot of stories. You have a lot of
cultural icons, mostly Martin, Malcolm, and Dubois.

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Though I am not certain if Brenda’s narrative style constitutes “call and response” as it is
formally understood, or if I accurately understand what Brenda meant by “preach[ing],”
her narrative seemed to invite dialogue. For example, she asked questions through her
narrative that appealed for reflective thought if not active conversation. In fact, the
rhetorical style of her speech made me question my representation-- in terms of
punctuation and quotation marks-- of her language in my transcription. For example, she
asks: “As a person of color, teaching ‘Theme for English B,’ are you starting to realize
why I am doing this?” I was not sure if this question sought an active dialogue with me,
represented what she had said to students, or both. (My transcription uses quotation
marks in such a way that her speech is directed at students.) Her narrative style, that is
not only what she said but how she said it, seemed to represent what bell hooks (1994)
calls a “performative act.”
Teaching is a performative act. And it is in that aspect of our work that offers
space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst
drawing out the unique elements in each classroom. . .teachers are not performers
in the traditional sense in that our work is not meant to be a spectacle. Yet it is
meant to serve as a catalyst that calls everyone to become more active participants
in learning. (p. 11).
In this sense, her narratives are both dialogical and sites of construction, a discourse of
struggle and survival.
The dialogical and constructive nature of her discourse seemed to be self-

reflective and self-directed as well. Part of the discourse of struggle and survival can be

understood as “healing” and “self-recovery” (hooks, 1989, p. 28; 1994, p. 59).16 Brenda

 

'6 I use the terms “healing” and “self-recovery” with some reservation. What is the racializing effect of
naming Brenda’s story as such? I will say more about in chapter six. It should be noted that Brenda
referred to bell hooks’ idea of self-recovery as well as the book in which the notion of “healing” is explore.

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seemed to be, in a sense, constructing herself in her conversation with me. For example,
in follow-up to her student who told her she teaches and preaches, she posed a question.

You know, and I say, does that mean I have a cultural pedagogy because I am a
person of color?

This question seemed directed to Brenda herself. There was a very self-reflective nature
to her discourse. When I asked Brenda, for example, as I had asked all the instructors,
what she saw as the biggest challenge that her students faced by taking her class, she
responded, “I would first, like to identify what my challenges are.” Then she reflected on
in-service workshop that she had conducted for local teachers, for which she used the
film, The Color of Fear (Wah, n.d.). Brenda’s response is noteworthy here, as it relates to
healing and self-recovery.

Brenda: That seminar for the Color of F ear—Whoah.

Megan: That’s a powerful movie.

Brenda: Whoah. But I internalized it. To did I do something wrong? To make

everyone feel so uncomfortable? Was it my handouts? Was it the language? Was

it the content of the film? You know, it’s just, I just felt like maybe my teaching

wasn’t effective because it really, really disrupted, as John (her advisor) would
say “disrupted their schema.”

She also relayed a story about finding a space to combine her various roles--- church
member, writer, teacher, activist. I found this to be self-directed

When a historian said to me this work has to be done in the proper context. I don’t
even know what type of methodology I wanted to frame this in. What would I
call this? Thinking in my way. Well, he said, “Can’t you make it part of your
work?” Well, I’m in [English Education], in [Teaching and Learning], how can I
possibly have a paper or a comp paper on the Underground Railroad. You know,
would it fit? I teach pre-service teachers. Yes, I do multicultural education but
this is going on in my head. Then he said, “but don’t commercialize it. Don’t
exploit it. Embrace it. Teach about the struggle and the sacrifice, and those who
made the commitment and made the sacrifice and risked their lives. Then it
started to be more of a cultural responsibility. And I’m like but I don’t know how

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to do that. Academically, I can learn the process, but you’re telling me there’s a
spirit and a mindset, a consciousness that goes along with it.

The language of struggle and survival are evident in that Brenda distinguishes between
what she can learn to do “academically” compared to what she can do with “the spirit,”
“mindset,” and “consciousness” it will require. She discovers a “cultural responsibility”
that speaks to survival.

Brenda’s narratives situated racial identity as something constructed and to be re-
constructed. Recall how she asked students to consider the relationship between power,
language, and identities, such as the difference between the words “colored” compared to
“Afiican-American.” Drawing on ideologies related to ethnic studies multiculturalism
and as well as critical pedagogy, particularly Paulo Friere, her discourse is a critical one.
She talks about being a “public pedagogue” and a “cultural worker.” She talks about
“cultural activities” with “emancipatory consequences.” Yet, it seemed to me that she
crafted identities-- hers mostly-- in dialectic terms. She said, either reminding me or
herself, “Don’t forget, it has to be liberating otherwise you victimize people.” For a
graduate course she created a curriculum unit called “from victim to victor.” Though
Brenda referenced Homi Bhabha’s “thirdspace” and describes “dis‘sonant” spaces,
language that reflects postcolonial and poststructuralist thinking, and posed questions that
seemed to explode binaries, such as “do you have to be a person of color to be a cultural
worker,” her discourse also suggests that structuralist notions of power and identity
influence her thinking. Yet, she constructed binary terms: victim/victor, emancipate/
victimize, culturally responsible/culturally irresponsible. She was very public about her
own story. Thus, she storied a version, one racialized construct of Black identity which,

when combined with elements of ethnic studies multiculturalism which permeated her

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class, the binaries such as victim to victor, and the fact that she for some students she
may have been the only Black instructor they had at State, whether she intended to or not,
the students in this study reified their racialized constructions of along a Black/White
binary.

The Discourse of Empathy and Understanding: “In the Shoes of Someone Else”

A fourth discourse emerged in the narratives and language of Assistant Professor
Heather Gray as well as in Kayla and Ashlee’s talk about teaching and learning literature.
In Releasing the Imagination, Maxine Greene writes, “literary imagination is what, above
all, makes empathy possible. It is what enables us to cross the empty spaces between
ourselves and those we teachers have called ‘other’ over the years” (cited in Phillion and
He, 2004, p.3). I came to understand much of what the students and Heather shared with
me about literature as a discourse of empathy and understanding. Kayla, for example,
reflects on the merits of literature.

You can teach them about slavery. You can teach them about the Civil Rights

Movement, but reading and actually putting somebody else in the shoes of

someone else and stressing that’s really important to know that and understand it

and don’t judge it, is really important, and I think it’s left out a lot (emphasis
added).
It is through empathy and understanding in which notions of race are constructed.

Heather, who taught Women Writers, an introductory English course at one of
State’s branch campuses, illuminated one of the goals of her course: “to expose [students]
to different points of View and topics they haven’t thought of before.” Kayla, who took
Heather’s class, and described Heather as “brilliant,” echoed:

[She] took a woman from a different cultural standpoint, and that’s how we read.

That was the most I learned about multicultural education, and that was my
freshman year. And that’s the most I learned.

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Ashlee, too, although she never took Heather’s course, demonstrates this discourse as she
talks about the Comparative Literature class she took with Chris Alston.

I was introduced to different texts that I would have never picked up on my own.

He incorporated a lot of history behind the books. He didn’t just ask us to read

them. He would give us a ton of history when we had our discussions and really

try to place us in the context of the book. That was helpful, to have the

background of writers, just the belief system that went behind it.
The ideas of “different cultural standpoint” as well as the words “different points of
view” are illustrative of the gaze and ideological stance of this discourse. This discourse
privileges context and situated understandings, “the history behind the books,” and “the
background of the writers.” Because students are asked to “view topics they haven’t
thought of before,” to read “different texts that [they would] have never picked up on
[their] own,” and to take up “different cultural standpoints,” one’s ability to imagine an
“Other” is inextricably linked to their capacity to empathize.

The titles and authors that students in Heather’s class read represent the “Other.”
Perceiving that the students she “typically” teaches have a dearth of experience reading
diverse perspectives and confronting oppressive and dehumanizing conditions that
marginalized people have suffered and endured, Heather believes that students should
have to “deal with” what she calls “tough subjects.” She asks students to read, imagine,
and “attempt to understand” incest and the rape of a child in Dorothy Allison’s Bastard
Out of Carolina and the treatment of J apanese-Canadians during in WWII in Joy
Kogawa’s Obasan. In reading these novels, she explicitly raised questions about power:
“Who has power and who doesn’t, how does one get power, how does one lose it? How

is possible that power is constantly moving and shifting? How is power connected to

other issues, [and] intertwined with race, class, gender. . .?” Her questions reveal

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multiple notions of power, including power as a possession (e.g. how does one get it) and
power as enacted (e. g. how is possible that power is constantly shifting). The “Other”
was constructed in and situated in particular manifestations of power and struggle, not
only limited to one race or ethnicity yet not ignorant to race. Though this arguably a
critical discourse, there are important limitations to its criticality because the discourse of
empathy and understanding begins with and returns to individual experience. There are
what Boler (1999) calls “risks of empathy.”

“T he Risks of Empathy ”

To further explain how I am came to understand the racializing discourse of
empathy and understanding, Boler’s (1999) work Feeling Power and in particular her
chapter “The Risks of Empathy” is helpful. Boler distinguishes between “passive
empathy” and what she calls “testimonial readings.” Passive empathy, relying on
humanist and democratic ideas, is cultivated through a reader’s attempt to envision and
identify with others’ lives through literature. Yet, because the reader imagines the
characters feelings and actions through the lens of what she would feel or do in the same
situation, passive empathy is more about the reader than the “Other.” Boler suggests that
the main “agent of empathy” is fear, or the degree to which the reader feels vulnerable to
the same kind of suffering.

[Passive empathy] posits the “other” as the secondary object of concern, known

only because of the reader’s fears about her own vulnerabilities. Pity’s first and

second defining corollaries to this positioning of self/ other: the reader is
positioned as a judge, evaluating the other’s experience as “serious/ or trivial” and
as “your fault/ not your fault.” The others’ serious suffering is rewarded by the

reader’s pity, if not blamed on the sufferer’s own actions (p. 159).

Passive action does not require the self-reflection or any social responsibility or social

action on the part of the reader. By contrast, testimonial readings are understandings that

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requires “a self-reflective participation: an awareness of one self as a reader, positioned in
a relative position of power by virtue of safe distance by the mediating text” (p. 166).
Drawing on psychoanalytic theories and what Shoshana Felman calls a “crisis of truth,”
Boler writes “testimony is trauma’s genre.” In other words, testimony recognizes and
seeks to capture the psychological and epistemological ruins of “difficult knowledge”
(Britzman & Pitt, 2003). Testimonial readings cause us to trace our own complicity in
injustices and suffering, as well as require us to respond to similar injustices today.

With this in mind, focusing on “passive empathy” for the remainder of the
discussion on this discourse, I return to Heather who illustrated how she positions
students to empathize, connect, and think, in terms of Toni Monison’s Beloved.

Beloved is the most important novels of the 20th Century because it represents an
author’s attempt to kind of recreate what slavery felt like. When I teach Beloved,
we talk about how slavery forced people, particularly women, into incredibly tight
spaces both psychological and physical. . .and I like to illustrate that by ...bringing
in an excerpt from a slave narrative written by a woman named Harriet Jacobs
who writes about living in basically a garret, an attic, for seven years. It was 9
feet by 7 feet and the tallest point was 3 feet high. It was sloping. So, she
basically couldn’t stand up for seven years and so we talk about how that space is
really representative of slavery and what it does to people, and basically she did
that because her white slave owner was determined to have an affair with her and
she did not want to do so, and she remained in the garret as opposed to going
north so she could be near her children.We talk a lot about the Middle Passage; I
actually show a clip from the film Amistad which is graphic about the Middle
Passage. . . I actually teach the course in a classroom with tiles that are 12 inches
by 12 inches and we talk about how in the Middle Passage, how Afiicans had to
get themselves into a space that size and stay there for six weeks, and I always
have students try to sit in the floor. And so, again, that’s really, really shocking to
them. I want them to think about what it did to people. I want to think about the
horrible decision that Sethe made to kill her child, and at the same time, '
understand why that might be a good decision in the context of the life that she
lived. I guess what I really want to think about is empathy, both for people who
have had horrible things done to them but also in terms of themselves. Can we
get in a position so we can say, “that was really terrible that she killed her child
but I can understand how the institution of slavery, or maybe attempt to
understand,” ‘cause I don’t think we can understand but maybe attempt to
understand how power works and how that can drive people to do really heinous

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acts, I mean when we think of a mother killing their children, that’s something
that mothers, in terms of our definition of a mother, she’s not supposed to do that.

Though she does say that she thinks students should have to “deal with. . .tough subjects,”
Heather’s language when talking about Beloved is suggestive of both “passive” empathy
and a desire for testimonial readings. I will examine “passive” empathy now and return
later to discuss the “testimonial” potential suggested in this narrative.

In her “attempt” to cultivate empathy, Heather juxtaposes visual images with
personal accounts of slavery. She also makes her students “sit on the floor” to physically
“get themselves into a space” in order to imagine what it was like for Africans during the
“Middle Passage.” Like “stepping into ones shoes,” this exercise seems to position
students to confront their own “vulnerabilities” and therefore their “fears” that something
like slavery could happen to them (Boler, 1999, p. 159). Heather effectively asks students
to think about what they might do and think if they lived in conditions similar to Sethe’s.
Further, she claims that experience is “really shocking,” which could work to validate the
“seriousness” of the circumstance and thus evoke empathy. Thirdly, she attempts to get
students “to think about the horrible decision that Sethe made to kill her child, and at the
same time, understand why that might be a good decision in the context of the life that
she lived.” By asking students to situate Sethe’s descision in the grave, de-humanizing,
and pervasive conditions of “institutionalized slavery,” she is asking students to deem
Sethe’s action as “not her fault.” Ultimately, as Boler helps me to see, Heather cast
Sethe’s suffering as “serious,” primarily “not her fault,” and therefore deserving of
passive empathy--- or what Aristotle called “pity” and Martha Nussman calls
“compassion” (referred to in Boler, p. 159). Reading and interpreting, thus, is a privileged

position in which Heather and her students get to decide who deserves empathy or not.

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Kayla incorporated “passive empathy.” In both her depiction of Brenda Parks’
class, described above, and in her reflection of Heather Gray’s class, she used what
Megan Boler calls the judging eye/I. In Brenda’s class, Kayla distanced herself from
Brenda’s instruction because she had “not lived as a Black person.” In this sense, and in
the sense that she thought Brenda’s class was “too much,” she engaged in reading the
course but decided that Brenda and her stories did not deserve her empathy. Heather’s
contrast did. Kayla reflects:

We read A Handmaid ’s Tale, which is just like English literature. We read

Beloved, which is Afiican-American. We read Tracks, which is Native American.

We read... I can’t what we read from Spanish... There were like four or five of

them. I think what made it so good was that they all had the same basis. They

were all women. And, it was interesting that, even though they had one common
thing going though them, how their cultures really affected how they wrote and
the stories that they wrote. I felt was that was the most obviously pointed out
thing that I’ve seen. You know, they had all the commonalities, but the white
woman wrote about prostitution and the Black woman wrote about struggling for
her family, and the Native-American woman wrote about how it was really
important for her not to do anything to disgrace her family, and how heritage was
really important. I think that, through those books, it almost spoke to what was
important in that culture and what stood out in that culture.
In terms of empathy and understanding, Kayla highlights the connections she was able to
make with the texts on the “same basis. . .They were all women.” Further, not only does
she highlight commonalities, she vaguely recalls “what [she] read from Spanish [sic].”
Since their “cultures” (rather than systems of oppression) affected how they wrote, the
women and their stories remained objects of study, rather than sources from which Kayla
might study her situated and situating identities.
Empathy and understanding, a racializing discourse, constructs racial “Others.”

Unlike the discourse of historical artifact and popular memory, empathy and

understanding requires that we think about racism as it is explicitly linked to multiple

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forms of power, rather than something that is over or neatly bound. Unlike the discourse
of Authenticity and Human Experiences, a discourse of empathy and understanding
specifically name identities and study the myriad of situated identities that shape and are
shaped by oppression.
Discourse of Testimony and Wit(h)ness

The fifth and final discourse that surfaced in my study was a discourse of
testimony and wit(h)ness. My understanding of testimony and witnessing draws on the
work of scholars whose understanding of teaching and learning through a post-
structuralist and psychoanalytic lens proves helpful (e. g. Boler, 1999; Britzman, 1998;
Ellsworth, 1997; Felman, 1995; Kumashiro, 2000, Pitt, 2003). I use the term “testimony”
and “witnessing” to refer to a “commitment to rethink [one’s] own assumptions, and to
confront the internal obstacles that are encountered as one’s view is challenged” (Boler,
1999, p. 164). Boler, referring to what Shoshana F elman calls an “imperative to bear
witness,” explains.

As we hear about and witness horrors, what calls for recognition is not “me” and

the possibility of my misfortune, but a recognition of power relations that defines

interactions between reader and text and the conflicts represented within that text.

(p. 164-165).
I have used parentheses to highlight the world “with” in the word “witness” because this
discourse is the only one I discuss in this chapter that does not revolve around a binary---
self/Other, White/Black, or schools/ humanity. Race is a construct which this discourse
explores and seeks to explode.

Assistant Professor Robyn Beatty taught Blacks in the 20'” Century in the African
and Afiican-American Studies Department at State. One of many electives, Rachel
became interested in the class because her brother was an African and African American

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Studies minor at a different university and because her boyfriend had taken Robyn’s
course and recommended her as a professor. Robyn’s description of her class, as well as
Rachel’s narrative reflections, employed a discourse of testimony and wit(h)ness.
Rachel remembered her relationship with Robyn and the rigor of the course, and
in doing so, a discourse of testimony and wit(h)ness appeared.
I had a great relationship with my teacher and she was... I really respected her.
She had great conversations... and she wasn’t one of those “easy A” kind of
teachers. She made me read and do my work. She had these essay tests, so you
really needed to know what you were talking about. So, from that class, she really
got me thinking about diversity and different cultures. Even though it was Afiican
and African-American Studies, it wasn’t just. .. to me it got me thinking about
more. She focused on that, but it got me thinking about diversity in general, just
because I hadn’t really had a class like that.
What interests me here is her use of the language “great relationship” and “great
conversations” as well as the idea that Robyn “wasn’t one of those ‘easy A’ teachers’ and
that “you really had to know what you were talking about.” Rachel’s language creates a
space within the binary of Black/White. It matters not only that Rachel, who is White,
had a “great” relationship with Robyn, who is Black, though this interpersonal connection
is important. It matters, too, how Rachel named her relationship with Robyn. Rachel did
not suggest that Robyn was “fiiendly” or “fim,” though she may have felt that way.
Instead she focused on their relational and dialogical interactions. Moreover, Rachel did
not use her relationship with Robyn to invalidate claims that race matters, to limit racism
to interpersonal problems, nor to claim that racism is over.
Rachel and Robyn’s narratives also created a place within and disrupted the
binary of relevant/ irrelevant information. In the immediate sense, the “great
relationship” as described by Rachel did not subsume the focus of the class or absolve the

need for Rachel to listen to and learn from Robyn. Rachel “really needed to know” the

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history of Blacks in the 20th Century in order to pass the class. More significantly,
however, in terms of exploding the binary between relevant and irrelevant information,
Rachel noted, “though it was African and Afiican-American Studies, it wasn’t just. . .to
me it got me thinking about more.” This claim can be understood as testimony and
wit(h)ness, rather than resistance, when coupled with Robyn’s vision for the course and
Rachel reflection on her course project.

Robyn’s vision contrasted with the ideas represented in some of the discourses
previously described:

One of the goals was to provide, well there were a couple of goals. Even though
the course was called Blacks in the 20th Century, one of the goals was to get
students to get to the Twentieth Century. In other words, I didn’t think they
would get as much out of it, if I just began with the Twentieth Century. So what I
did was, I went back and I looked ahead. What were the struggles of the
Twentieth Century but what was the background of those struggles? So one of the
goals to give an historical overview of what it meant to be an African-American
in this country in the turn of the century. The other goal was to get them to
understand and learn about different people and organizations that they had never
heard of before. Besides King, Rosa Parks, and Dubois and Marcus Garvey. Even
then, some of them hadn’t, hadn’t really heard of Dubois or Garvey. So it was to
get them to fundamentally understand that it was more to the Civil Rights
movement that the 19503 and the 19603, and more to that then Rosa Parks and Dr.
King, but to fundamentally understand who all of the individuals and the
organizations were. And, moreover, it was to be as inclusive whether that mean
with white women or white men, you have to understand that within other
people’s struggles. So, to look at Black people in the Twentieth Century but not to
look at them in isolation because they worked with other people, and to look at
where Black people fit into the global world at that point.

Robyn’s narrative situated her course in African-American history as a course about the
Twentieth Century---across racialized identities and differences, beyond the Twentieth
Century, beyond “popular” history, and within a global context. In this sense, it was not

a history class in which history and struggle “came out of nowhere” (Heilman, 2008).

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In fact, as Rachel and Robyn describe, the course pointedly pushed students to
“go somewhere” very specific--- back to the students’ own lives.
Robyn: They were given a project. They could come up with any topic that they
wanted to as long as it had something to do with looking at Blacks in the
Twentieth Century. And I made it open to them because I wanted to examine
people in their family, people in their community. I wanted them to understand, I
wanted them to really begin to question, their family, I wanted them to question
their background, I wanted them to question their community, and I got all these
really interesting papers from all different types of students, and a lot of them
didn’t know what to write about, they were hesitant, they were confused, and they
didn’t quite get how it related to them. And you got all these papers that they
finally got it. Like one White student, male, wrote about his grandfather serving
in WWII. They interviewed. You know, they would go home and interview their
grandparents. They were like, I didn’t know my grandfather did this... it was
away for them to get to know their grandparents a little better. His grandfather
served in WWII and, of course, in WWII that meant segregated... so he talked to
his grandfather about what it meant to serve in segregation and things like that.
What is important, in terms of understanding the testimonial nature of this assignment, as
well as how this discourse is distinct from some of the others I have discussed, is
Robyn’s acknowledgement of how all students have a relationship to Black history. Yet,
at the same time, through this assignment, Robyn’s act of not simply telling students
about the dialogical nature of race relations, but rather, showing them or helping them to
find out how they are participants in Black history. Importantly, in her recognition of the
situated nature of history, in which I imagine Robyn would recognize and validate
multiple forms of oppression, she does not--- because of the course focus and/or her
ideologies, say to students that “diversity means more than Black people, so you conduct
your research on any aspect of identity and difference.” Nor does she say, “Everyone has

a culture; research yours” in a way that produces vague and uncontextualized projects

which talk acritically about food and holidays.

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In addition, Robyn suggests that she wants students to “examine” and “begin to
question” which are active, rather than static, stances to understanding racialized
differences.

Rachel talks about her project:

Rachel: I definitely related it most to schools because that’s my interest. So, I
immediately started focusing on diversity in schools with students, and patterns of
learning and patterns of success, and tracking, and just how students are treated
differently because of races. So, we had to do a project. I don’t remember the
details, but I know I did, I wrote a paper and did research on how students of
different races were treated by teachers. . .actually, students of different races in
schools... and then I asked... I actually went back to my old high school and
interviewed different students of all different races, saying, “Do you see students
treated differently because of their race?” “Do you get treated differently? What
level classes are you tracked in? Who are the students around you?”
Achievement gap type things.

M: What did you find?

Rachel: My main things were that, definitely, I knew what the school was like
because I went there, but all the students supported the fact that the highest
tracked classes had... the majority were White students. Then, also, Asian-
American students, maybe a few, but they were definitely in the regular and lower
tracked [classes]. I asked the students why they thought the Afiican-American
students didn’t achieve like the other students, and most of the students said that it
was because of home, their home lives. Even the Afiican-American students said
that. I have it and I would show you. It wasn’t the same focus at home--- like
homework and school and grades--- as it was for other types of students of
different races and cultures. Then, I also asked students if they thought teachers
treated kids of different races differently. I remember some of the responses.

One Black kid said that he thought that teachers got on his case and his fiiends’
cases more for their mistakes then other students. He gave the example of, if he
was to speak incorrectly in class and use the wrong verb tense. Then, a teacher
would get on him much faster than a teacher would do that someone else who was
White, is what he said. And, he also said, that if, just because they were louder,
they would get in trouble in the lunch room or out of the classroom much easier
than other students, who were white or Asian-American. Then, another White
student, a male student told me that he thought that teachers were intimidated by
black kids. So, it was kind of a different perspective, and that they [teachers]
didn’t know how to relate to them [Black students]. So, they ended up being
meaner or less personal...

Megan: Did you have a sense of any of this being a student in this school?

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Rachel: I remember in high school, I never really thought about how all my
fiiends were the same type of person, my closest friends. I never thought about it
really and I never really noticed how segregated, in a sense, my school was in
terms of, if you walked into the cafeteria during my lunch period, you saw the
Asian-American students sitting in the same tables on the same side, and you saw
white students and you saw black students, and they stayed together, and it looked
segregated... I definitely realized it, and looking back, I realized it. So, I knew I
wanted ...that project would be interesting to me just because I did have very
clear ideas for how it was for me.
This narrative serves to “bear witness” to her high school and her experience in it. Rich
with the ideologies of the teachers and students, I present this narrative to show two terms
and ideas related to this discourse. First, Rachel’s focus for the project centered around
how Black students were “treated” as opposed to how Blacks were or are. This shifts the
object of study from fixed notion of Black identities (as some of the students in her study
report deficit thinking about Black “homes”) to the processes and responses to racialized
identities in schools. Secondly, Rachel’s reflection represents a transformation in her
thinking from what she “never really thought about” and “did have really clear ideas for
how it was” to a racializing difference she came to realize.

One aspect of “testimonial readings” as described by Shoshana F elman is the
notion of a “crisis of truth” that refers to the emotional and sometimes painful space that
is sparked when one confronts one’s complicity in oppression or challenging some
beloved “truth” can spark in a person (cited in Boler, 1999, and in Kumashiro, 2000). As
a psychoanalytic theory, that means learning is not just cognitive but is also emotional.
The concept of resistance, then, is not only about resisting an instructor or an idea but it is
also about implicating and reworking one’s identity. The question for students is not, as
Robyn’s students asked, “What does this have to do with me?” but more so “What is this

going to do to me?”

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The best examples of resistance and of the emotional effect of teaching and
learning are depicted by Brenda Parks’ reflections on her own teaching. She notices that
students are “uncomfortable” with what she shares with them.

With me being a person of color, teaching usually a class of all White students,

maybe a few minorities here and there, I find that students feel uncomfortable

when I say, when we look at this poem, what other classroom environments have
looked liked this particular poem? And they all kind of sit there and look at each
other.
Whether (or not) Brenda is successful at helping students “recover” a self after struggle is
not the focus of the study nor is it supported by my data as I did not study the enactment
of students’ leaming. Yet, her belief that she is successful, as shown below, reveals a
language to suggest that she conceptualizes teaching and learning through a
psychoanalytic lens.

The board is completely filled and their looking like wow... but then they start

talking to me because what I did was eliminate the space between, you don’t

know what to call me. As a person of color, teaching you theme for English B,

are you starting to realize what I am doing this? But then they feel comfortable

to talk to me.
The “space” about which Brenda talks, as I understand it, is not a lack of knowledge but a
need to confront the power that constructs relationships in the very way we name each
other. Brenda also speaks about “dissonance” and the effect of having “disrupted
someone’s schema” as she talks about an incident that occurred at an in-service workshop
she facilitate with a group of teachers at a local high school.

Brenda: My research is in cultural pedagogy and cultural dissonance when

teaching multicultural education, because I received so much resistance from

inservice teachers when I was teaching multicultural education.

Megan: What kind of resistance?

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Brenda: Apprehension about confronting some of the issues. Some of ht content
that I introduced. You have to really think about what materials what resources
you’re going to use. I did a seminar with the in-service teacher, and I showed the
film, The Color of F ear, and I gave them a handout from bell books, from the text
Teaching to T ransgress [I] the mistake, I didn’t know it was a mistake, of also
giving them the chapter on self-recovery. [The teachers strongly resisted saying]
“I resent having to read an article saying I’m going to have to recover from
something.”
The title of hooks’ piece utilizes the psychological language of “recovery.” Likewise,
the film The Color of F ear, which I have shown to students, addresses race from a
psychological frame. The film represents racism, as the title suggests, as a phobia of
other races, and centers on a therapeutic-like group session in which men of various races
confront their fears and anger. Brenda’s reference to the film as well as hooks’ piece
reveals the “crisis” aspect of what I am calling the discourse of testimony and wit(h)ness.
Making Use of Theories of Race
As I wrote in chapter five, there is no one “right” or “best” discourse. Discourses,
distinct from approaches, mark different ways of orienting, imagining, and theorizing the
way the world is or ought to be as well as our place in it. As discourses come together, as
in a methods course in a teacher education program, discourses can blur together, repel
one another, or be misappropriated. The discourses depicted in this chapter are
differently useful and differently limited. To show the usefulness and limitations of some
discourses presented in this chapter, I make use of multiple theories of race. Some of
these discourses are at the center and others exist at the margins teacher education.
According to the pre-service teachers in the study, the methods class taught by
Brenda Parks was problematic. Kayla was not even sure what it was “supposed to”
teach. Considering critical race theory, in particular the idea of “countemarratives,”

however, the discourse of struggle and survival is a vital and useful tool to becoming a

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teacher and teaching diverse learners. The need to recognize, listen to, and validate
countemarratives that seek to “challenge, displace, or mock” our “preconceptions and
myths” (Delgado, 2001, 42-43) is crucial to seeing teaching and leaming from a new
perspective as well as to developing a critical perspective of the institution in which we
have chosen to participate professionally. Yet, if the discourse of struggle and survival is
not named explicitly or students can not recognize a countemarrative, students may fail to
utilize its importance or even reject its purpose, meaning, and implication.

Though countemarratives, as they are used in CRT, are about the stories of
marginalized people, there is a different application I understand from the discourses
described above. That is, I think Kayla and Rachel’s narratives can serve to remind
teacher educators that pre-service teachers bring a lot of diverse experiences to their
studies. Therefore, the well-told (and well researched) idea that teachers are largely
White women who want to teach in schools like they attended and who are inexperienced
with diverse settings and people is limiting. Combined with another idea from CRT,
intersectionality of multiple identities, or the idea that one’s race, class, gender and sexual
orientation may come together in converging or diverging ways (Delgado, 2001), teacher
education must recognize our students’ multiple identities and differences. To do this,
we must address issues of race explicitly by placing them in the context of power and
privilege—white privilege, for example.

Further, the discourse of human experience is useful though limited in terms its
capacity to grapple directly and explicitly with racial identities or inequities based on
race. Still, the notion that schools and teachers ought to choreograph learning that speaks

to one’s wholeness and humanity is helpful and needed. It is important when thinking

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about diversity that we consider a whole range, or a constellation of similarities and
differences. Notions such as human dignity and compassion, as well as empathy and
understanding, can help teachers focus their commitment and form caring and responsive
relationships with students across differences. In terms of racializing discourses, I
imagine that the discourse of human experience would work well alongside a discourse
of struggle and survival, showing how we must honor our students in dignified ways
while working to hear their stories and addressing injustices. Further, the message that
“we teach who we are” is important to help remind teachers to bring out their
individuality in teaching as well as to highlight what they do not know and bring.

The idea of “interest convergence,” or the notion posited by CRT that racism can
only end when people with power and privilege see a stake or an interest in ending
racism, is somewhat applicable to teacher education and the use of discourses. Naming
multiple discourses and moving in and out of discourses might allow students to find an
interest in projects of social justice. That is, though popular history is limiting for
reasons explained above, it may be useful and interesting to someone who has little
knowledge of Black history. It may spark an interest that would permit someone to listen
more attentively to a discourse of struggle and survival or of testirnony and wit(h)ness.

What matters is that teacher education must offer multiple spaces to establish and
sustain one’s commitment to social justice, including racial justice. This means openly
naming the purpose and context of discourses. It also means talking about the limitations

and usefulness of each discourse.

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Reflective Shift

In this chapter, I have attempted to identify some of the complexities of thinking
and speaking about diversity and multicultural education in terms of race. To do so, I
have provided an overview of philosophical and sociological theories related to race in
the hopes of bringing to the foreground the complexities, limitations, and conflicts related
to the way instructors and pre-service teachers talk about race in ways that are both
constructed by and constructive of racialized notions of identities and difference. I have
described five racialized discourses evident in the narratives and conversations I had with
instructors and students, though I am sure that there are many racialized discourse that
might have been found in my data as well as in the data that is yet to be collected at other
schools. In a way that will be conspicuous to some readers, I have not spent much time
confronting my own complicity in how this project constructs race. In the next chapter, I
reflect on the ethics of my research as well describe how the findings of my study might

affect future research and the practice of teacher education.

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CHAPTER SEVEN
ACT 11:
TOWARDS A DISCOMFORTABLE AND TRAVELING MULTICULTURAL
TEACHER EDUCATION
How we, as teacher educators, position pre-service teachers to think about
diversity and what it means to become a teacher in multicultural world depends on our
social visions and ethical beliefs about how the world is or ought to be, as well as our
epistemological understandings of identities and differences and what it means to teach
and learn. These visions and beliefs are constructed from, and recursively construct the
narratives, images, myths, hegemonic ideals, language and discourses available to us.
This study has examined the social imaginations, moral arguments, and theoretical ideas
of three English Education students and six of their university instructors in order to
come to a complex and critical portrait of multicultural teacher education. In this chapter,
I review the insights fiom my work and discuss the implications my work holds for
multicultural teacher education theory, multicultural teacher education practice, and
English Education. Then, I reflect on the methodological limitations related to the
meaning(s) and ethics of my work. I propose additional ideas for research related to
multicultural teacher education. In doing so, I argue for teacher education to move
towards a “discomfortable” and “traveling” multicultural education. 17
Insights on (Dis)placing and E-raceing (Dis)courses
The students who participated in this project cited a variety of physical and

conceptual spaces as “significant” to their thinking about diversity and their becoming a

teacher. The experience of learning to teach in the English Education program at State is

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an eclectic experience. Each student named family and their hometown(s) as influential.
Each named their religion or faith, though they practiced (or did not practice) and defined
their religious identities differently. They also constructed ideas and made observations
about diversity based on broader their experiences as members of the State’s campus
community. As pre-service teachers, they discussed classrooms and curricultunu both
real and imagined. As future English teachers, they often gathered and expressed their
insights through literature. Rachel, Kayla, and Ashlee identified courses across
disciplines and on multiple campuses as influential to their thinking. Collectively, they
named seven courses: two English courses, a Comparative Literature course, an
introductory Education course, an English Education methods course, and an African and
African American Studies course. Only one course, the English Education methods class
taught by Brenda Parks, was a shared space, a course which each cited as influential.
Finally, significant spaces included beloved courses and instructors as well as troubling
and more difficult spaces.
Geographic Discourses

Employing critical discourse analysis and theories of spatiality and critical
geography as an interpretive frame, I discovered and described what I called “discourses
of place,” including a discourse of tourism, a discourse of cartography, and a discourse of
travel. These discourses, including the students’ language and the paradigmatic
references in their narratives, revealed three distinct geographic and ideological positions
which enabled and constrained how they thought about identity and differences,

multicultural education, and teaching and learning both as students at State and as future

 

‘7 The term “discomfortable” is a direct reference to Megan Boler (1999) who argues for a “pedagogy of
discomfort.” My argument for “traveling” references Katie King (1999) and others mentioned in chapter

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teachers. The discourse of tourism revealed essentialist understandings and binary
constructions of identities and differences. The “tourist” gazed upon courses and
differences. Literature served as a “spectacle” (Boler, 1999) of “Otherness” and a world
outside one’s own. The discourse of cartography also illuminated essentialist
understandings and binary constructions of identities and differences. The
“cartographer” gazed uncritically onto the courses, identities and differences, and
literature in order to map a fixed world. As I argued in chapter five, the discourses of
cartography and tourism assume a modemist worldview in which the world is knowable,
people are rational, and people choose to think and act towards a greater good.
Moreover, neither discourse positions students to be self-reflective or re-constructive.
The discourse of traveling, by contrast, elucidates a shifting position in which difference
is relational. Further, a traveling discourse reveals a project in which experiences—-
including courses and texts-- are spaces in which to rethink, reposition, and reconstruct
oneself. The traveler holds a postmodernist world View that privileges multiplicity and
recognizes “irrational” responses to ideas.
Racialized Discourses

The students in my study repeatedly troubled and were trOubled by definitions of
diversity and the practice of multicultural education that failed to “go beyond”
discussions of Black people and White people. At the same time, however, the students in
this study consistently and repeatedly represented courses, texts, and relationships as part
of a Black/White binary. For this reason, drawing on multiple social and philosophical
theories related to the constructions of racialized identities, and again employing critical

discourse analysis, I interrogated language and the paradigmatic references in the

 

five who write of “traveling theory.” 157

narratives of students and four instructors. This revealed five ideological positions which
I called explicit racialized discourses. They included a discourse of authenticity and
human experience, a discourse of historical artifact and “popular history,” a discourse
struggle and survival, a discourse of empathy and understanding, and a discourse of
testimony and wit(h)ness. The discourse of authenticity and human experience was
founded on humanist ideas and the notion of a true inner and unique self. As such,
racialized identities are constructed within and against an assumed naturalized “White”
identity. A discourse of historical artifact and “popular history” constructs notions of
racial difference and the effects of racism in the past, as something that is “over” and
located in fixed historical signifiers. The discourse of struggle and survival is an
autobiographic, psychoanalytic, and emancipatory discourse which constructs racialized
identities against and by constructing a self identity. The discourse of empathy and
understanding situates racialized identities within hegemonic powers such as white
supremacy, casting difference as objects of study without directly studying the
subjectivities of the readers. Finally, the discourse of testimony and wit(h)ness constructs
relational notions of racialized identities and differences by recognizing our complicity in
a shared history. I used theories of race to show how each discourse is differently useful
for teacher education, some existing at the center and some at the margins of what we
imagine teacher education or teaching and leaming as English teachers to be.
Multicultural Teacher Education Theory: Discomfortable and Traveling

The work of this project illuminates the need for teacher educators to recognize

the “identity work” involved in thinking about diversity and becoming (and growing as) a

teacher. It also suggests that teachers must develop the capacity to shift between and

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among multiple positions, between and among power relationships, theories, disciplines
and notions of identity. In this sense, teacher education must move towards a
“discomfortable” and “traveling” notion of multicultural education.

Borrowing from Boler’s (1999) idea of “pedagogy of discomfort,” the findings of
this dissertation support a call for a “discomfortable” multicultural education theory
recognizing that learning (and resistance to learning) is not just a cognitive process.
Brenda Parks, for example, tells how she could learn to conduct research as an academic
skill but she needed to find a way to conduct research that combined and honored her
multiple roles --- as teacher, activist, cultural worker. Leaming and “unlearning”
(Britzman, cited in Kumashiro, 2000) in this sense when left unmediated can be a self-
constructive and affirming event or self-destructive and hurtful event. I think of Kayla’s
experience in Brenda Parks’ class compared with Heather Gray’s class. The ideas and
representations in Brenda’s class felt very destructive to Kayla, whereas Heather’s class
felt self-affinning and reconstructive. “Discomfortable” multicultural teacher education
and learning recognizes a “thirdspace” (Bhabha, 2000), a space “between and among”
(Sandovol, cited in Duarte & Smith, p. 23) self-destruction and affirmative self-
construction, a space in which teacher educators help students mediate and process--
deconstruct and re-construct--a self.

What would it mean to think about a deconstructive and re-constructive
experience? Teacher education needs to push students beyond what they think of as
common sense or within reason, even beyond what is comfortable thinking. However,
we must begin at a place that our students recognize. For example, Robyn Beatty pushed

students to think about Black history beyond “popular history” by placing history in the

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lives of the students and something with which they could identify. Students need to be
able to try on ideas that exist at edge of what they now think is possible, while at the
same time holding onto something that they know. Perhaps, Kayla resisted Brenda’s
class, not because she did not care about injustice or could not learn the theories, but
because she could not locate herself in the course ideas. At the same time, perhaps Kayla
was not pushed beyond what she knew or what fit into her worldview when she took
Heather Gray’s class. We must make students “discomfortable “ by creating spaces
which come close to, and right up against, socially challenging ideas. Also, in doing so,
we must share our ethics and purpose for asking students to try on ideas, not to make
students think like us but to make students aware of why we think and act the way we do,
so that they deliberate on their own thinking. In doing this, students may feel hurt or
troubled or confused, and we must acknowledge and help students work through this self-
rattling state of being. Yet this confusion and pain is only productive if it comes from
student inquiry and a student’s realization or call to change. Teacher educators must seek
to move and transform students by noticing, processing and working to heal wounds that
our pedagogy creates. “Disruptive knowledge,” as Kumashiro names it, “is not an end in
itself, but a means toward the always-shifting end/goal of learning more” (2000, p. 34).
The notion of “traveling” describes how ideas and our relationship to ideas are
partial, shifting, and differently useful. I call for a multicultural teacher education that
moves “toward an always shifting end/ goal” or toward the “between and among. .[and]
operates like the clutch of an automobile: the mechanism that permits the driver to select,
engage, disengage gears in a system for the transmission of power” (Sandovol, cited in

Duarte & Smith, p. 23). Traveling, as elucidated in Rachel’s discourse in chapter five, is

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a moving location which has been conceived by others as a “differential consciousnesss”
(Sandoval, cited in Duarte & Smith, 2000) and as a “pedagogy of positionalities” (Maher
& Tetreault, cited in Kumashiro, 2000). In travel, neither our identities nor knowledge
are full, complete, or permanent. One may move towards and with an ethics of justice or
anti-racism, for example, but she recognizes that it is the action of moving rather than a
fixed identity marker that constructs “anti-oppressive” teaching and learning. A traveling
multiculturalism is not a journey in a developmental sense, in which one becomes more
anti-racist or more self-actualized in terms of one’s anti-oppressive stance, nor is
traveling a journey in the sense of aimlessly wandering. Instead, traveling multicultural
education is given momentum by and through conscious consideration and practice of
ethics and the recognition of new and various ways to realize one’s ethics.

Traveling is also a multidisciplinary, intellectual endeavor. Teaching and learning
requires eclectic and interdisciplinary thinking. I argue that multicultural teacher
education should continue to look beyond the bounds of the field of education to theorize
what it means to teach and learn in more complex and multiple ways. In this sense, it is
not a problem that students in this study did not take the same classes or that teacher
education occurs outside the bounds the field of Education. Yet, we need to recognize
and talk openly with students how ideas and different ways of knowing can afford new
ways of thinking about multicultural teacher education. One example of scholarship that
discusses this more include Edgerton’s (1997) Translating the Curriculum which makes
an argument to employ multidisciplinary perspectives in order to theorize ideas like
marginality and essentialism. Ladson-Billings (1999b) and Tate (1997) as well as DeCuir

and Dixson (2004) have expanded education by taking up critical race theories. Multi

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and interdisciplinary perspectives, and particularly post structural and deconstructive

perspectives, can help us augment and complicate multicultural teacher education.

Multicultural Education Theory

As I described in chapter one, multicultural education is often conceptualized as
different theories or approaches. These theories are based upon analysis of texts,
scholarly traditions, and larger sociological and philosophical theories, and they largely
imagine what multicultural education ought to be‘ or could be. There is a difference,
however, between these theories and approaches and what my study found. My study
located different discourses related to multicultural education not rooted in texts and
theoretical camps but instead in the language and constructions of my participants. The
participants’ discourses are quite different from any of the typologies of theories of
multicultural education. This reveals a disconnect between multicultural theory, which is
largely text and writer based, and the discourse and speech that students employ to make
sense or meaning related to diversity. Theorists and teacher educators alike need to
recognize and further explore such differences to better theorize the different
multicultural ethics, epistemologies, and politics that may actually be in place.

Also, with regard to taxonomies of multicultural education theory, whether they
be James Banks’ approaches or Duarte and Smith’s foundational perspectives, my study
reveals that there is not just one set of theories or one set of discourses. Theories and
discourse differ according to where you, as well as other factors such as one’s
disciplinary discourses. That is, discourses related to multicultural education sit and
intersect with discourses related to other intellectual spaces. For example, how might the

discourse of “empathy and understanding,” which is not part of any of the recognized

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theoretical approaches to multicultural education, be connected to discourses within the
discipline of English, in which literature is often thought to reveal some greater humanity
or human condition, and in which “reader response theory” positions students to read by
transacting with the text, in which interpretation begins and ends with the self? Might a
group of social studies pre-service teachers, for example, who may have stronger
disciplinary knowledge related to power and institutions utilize a more structurally-based
language to conceptualize multicultural theory? How might the ethos. of “care,” which is
common in elementary education intersect with conceptualizations of multicultural
education? Therefore, one implication is that multicultural education theory needs to
consider how discourses are constructed with and against other discourses.
Multicultural Teacher Education Practice

I came to this project intrigued by the idea that State did not require a “diversity
course” or one stand-alone “multicultural-education course.” State is, instead, a teacher
education program in which diversity and multicultural education is “infused” throughout
the courses and field experiences. Though research suggest that the “infusion model”
works better at effecting one’s ability to teach diverse students, I believe this study
suggests that an either/or option in multicultural teacher education, meaning that
programs either offer a single class or locate issues of power across courses, is limiting.
This limitation has implications for the program, advising, curriculum, and pedagogy.

My study depicted an eclectic program, in which courses were sometimes selected
by happenstance. For example, Rachel took Robyn Beatty’s class because of her
connection with her brother and her boyfiiend. Also, Ashlee confided that though she

enjoyed Chris Alston’s class, she almost dropped the class because of the lengthy papers

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and heavy reading requirement. Students took classes at different campuses and in
different departments, while they talked about only one shared course experience, Brenda
Park’s methods course. It is not my suggestion that the program become more unified.

In fact, I think the diversity of perspectives and ideas afforded are valuable. Yet, with
regard to the “infusion” and eclectic nature of State’s program, I believe that teacher
education needs to openly talk about and teach students to identify various discourses
related to diversity and multicultural education. I propose using existing courses or
creating new courses to specifically teach and examine the multiplicity of ideologies,
approach, discourses, and positions. Teacher education needs to have both a “segregated”
class in which the focus of the class is about human diversity, power, and multicultural
education as well as a program of classes--however eclectic they may be, in which issues
of power, diversity, and ways of knowing are “infirsed” into course content. Students
need a space in which to learn about and process their own discourses which the
“segregated” classes could provide. At the same time, eclectic programs afford students
the chance to experience a multiplicity of ideas, purposes, and perspectives through
which they could think about diversity and multicultural education.

Related to advising, this study suggests that it might matter how, when, and why
they take particular courses. This has implications for academic advising. I believe that
we might help students by recognizing and redirecting their “differential consciousness”
(Sandovol, cited in Duarte & Smith, 2000) by purposefully helping them to find
particular classes to take at particular times. For example, it is not clear from my study
whether or not Kayla would have responded to Robyn Beatty’s African and African

American Studies class the same way that Rachel did. Similarly, though Rachel was

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critical that Brenda Parks’ class did not “push” her in new directions, she was not as
resistant as Kayla was. Ashlee, by contrast, reported to have found the course readings in
Brenda’s methods class important to her emerging perspective that socio-economic class
is one kind of diversity, and that oppression for some Black people, like the Younger
family in A Raisin in the Sun, occurs at the intersection of race and class. In this way, we
need to help students move their thinking by differentiating our pedagogies.

Related to curriculum, the idea that a student’s self identity and self-awareness
matters in becoming a teacher and thinking about diversity often produce assignments
that require students to engage in some kind of autobiographical inquiry. For example, in
Leslie Steiner’s class, students must explore the questions: Who am I as a learner? Who
might I be as a teacher? Also, in Brenda Parks’ class, students were asked to respond to
Langston Hughes’ poem “Theme for English B” by writing their own “I am” poems.
Teacher education needs to think more about how we use and why we use
autobiographical reflections, and how these autobiographical inquires work to affirm,
construct, destruct or deconstruct a pre-service teacher’s sense of self. Britzman, for
example, warns against autobiography as “nostalgia of the personal or the rhapsody of the
unique” (cited in Miller Marsh, 2002). Marsh, echoing Britzman, argues instead for the
need “to contextualize their biographies and social structures. . .such [that] opportunities
for prospective teachers to examine consciously how particular ideologies have worked
in their own lives to define their past, present, and future identities” (p. 155). Marsh also
offers Gee’s concept of a “discourse map” as one way to rethink the purpose and

direction of autobiography (p. 155)..

165

A final pedagogical implication, perhaps the most important one in the study,
suggests that teacher educators need to understand that within the classroom contexts,
multiple discourses come together with various consonances and dissonances. What this
means is though teachers and students may use the same language they may be speaking
and listening to and through different discourses, such that their words and the images
they invoke represent conceptually different ideas. This presents a different problem than
students simply misunderstanding ideas; as the ideas are shaped in and shape entirely
different conceptual spaces. Teacher educators not only need to consider this, but should
explicitly teach and discuss how ideas are being used and constructed in students’ speech
and language.

Multicultural English Education

The students in my study, as future English teachers, defined literature as a space
and place in which to think about diversity and multicultural education; yet, they
positioned themselves differently in relationship to literature. That is, they held differing
understandings of what it meant to read and interpret text. They saw literature as
windows to new worlds, as proof that the world is diverse, as locations for empathy and
understanding, and as sites from which to re-envision their own identities and sense of
place in the world. If we want to use literature purposefully to “read” the world (Freire &
Macedo, 1987) and “write” the world, it is not enough to simply teach student that
language and literature has power, that we need to include works by diverse authors in
our classrooms, or that texts are useful tools in which to engage in multicultural
education and to think about diversity. We must teach how our readings position us to

understand the world and how our understandings of the world position us to read. This

166

means teaching and talking explicitly about different ways to read and interpret texts. I
ask the students in my class, Teaching Literature to Secondary Students, as David Richter
(2000) asks in his edited book Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views of Reading
Literature, “why do we read, how do we read, and what do we read?” In the last week,
as I have been finalizing and revising my dissertation, Lydia Brauer and Caroline T.
Clark depict different “frames” for reading—including some frames which use some of
the same imagery (i.e. tourism) and arguments to talk about literature that I use herein in
reference to multicultural education.

We must trouble the prevalence and practice that particular theories have in our
pedagogies. Allen Carey-Webb (2001), for example, suggests that while reader response
“takes us to the interaction between text and reader,” it does not, however, “facilitate our
thinking about how we define ‘cultural literacy’” (p. 7). That is, students learn to think
about multiple interpretations but they are not necessarily challenged to place or situate
their interpretations in a socio-cultural context. By extension, the same could be said
about “critical literacy.” Though critical literacy interrogates power, it does not
specifically locate power within multicultural contexts or within the reader, and therefore
does not require students to grapple specifically with racism or homophobia or sexism. It
also does not require students to recognize their own complicity or re-construct their own
identities in light of reading.

The Matter of Representation, Limited Interpretation, and Subjectivities

As I outlined in Chapter Two, my work, as a qualitative study, sought to embody

a “bricolage” approach to interpreting research. I do not offer this research as the only

tale that could be told about thinking about diversity and multicultural education broadly

167

or at State particularly, nor is the only tale that could have been told about the data
afforded to me through my interviews. That is not to say, however, that the
methodologies, meanings, and ethical subjectivities do not matter. The matter, however,
is one of representations, interpretations, and subjectivities.

One of the limits of my work has to do with method and what my work can not
represent. That is, one of the limits my work is that my study does not focus on “enacted”
discourses. How did students appropriate, misunderstand, or misappropriate language?
In the case of Chris Alston’s Comparative Literature course which Ashlee took, for
example, my data revealed interesting disconnects and connections between Chris’ notion
of landscape, space, and place and Ashlee’s paper for that class which discussed the
contrasting stories of “journeys” and “exile” and “outcasts.” I could match the language
but I couldn’t tell, because I had observed and seen the constructive process, how the two
uses similar language related or disconnected.

Another limitation of the study has to do with validity. In chapter three I outlined
my intention for the study to possess “catalytic validity” or the capacity for the study to
compel its participants to think differently or act anew as a result of what they learned in
the study. At the end of the study, I can not assess whether or not, nor the degree to which
this study has moved pre-service teachers or their instructors. Short of a few anecdotal
stories in which pre-service teachers suggested that being in the study had made them
think about or think differently about an incident at home or in a field experience, my
ability to assess validity was largely lost in the time and distance that separated me from

the participants as my interviews ended and I began to work on writing the dissertation.

168

One of the most interesting issues related to interpretation and representation has
to do with the way my “findings” connect to theories, discourses, places and spaces that
have influenced me as a researcher. In terms of theory and discourses, the study is
reflective and reflecting of my intellectual travels. That is, as I began to make sense of the
data, I found myself returning to texts, ideas, and language across various moments of my
graduate work. I can see and hear influential professors in the chapters and through the
discourses. My citations of Comel West, Jean Anyon, and Derrick Bell are also
references to the course work I took with Steven Selden at the University of Maryland.
My study weaves ideas across spaces discursively. In chapters two and four, I weave
together theories of critical geography extended to me recently from Elizabeth Heilman
with feminist theory I learned from Katie King over ten years ago. In this sense my
dissertation is “cartographic.”

Another issue related to representation is also about the ethics of my research. I
must acknowledge the capacity for what Patti Lather (2004) calls “epistemic violence”
That is, I must recognize that as I wrote about discourses--geographic and racialized-- I
also constructed identities and ideas that would be used by others to effect particular
pedagogies and relationships with students. What, then, are the responsibilities and the
risks of me, a White woman with particular epistemologies and a history at State, in
terms of my power and the way I represent my research? Though each representation I
constructed within and in response to this study warrants consideration, I consider here
my responsibilities and the risks of some of my representations in chapter six in

particular.

169

In this study, I chose to represent Brenda Parks’ language and narrative as a story
of struggle and survival, rather than name the discourse otherwise or to include her story
as an example of testimony and wit(h)ness. On one hand, representing Brenda’s
discourse as a separate discourse-- the choice I made-- honors her story, her ideas, and
perspectives in a way that counters reactions such as Kayla’s.

Kayla: [Brenda] gave this example. This again is what I mean by I think she is

completely ridiculous. But, she told us that she went to the food store with her

nephew. Did I tell you this story?

M: No. I don’t know this [story].

D: She was at the deli waiting for cold cuts, and then a white woman came in.

And, nobody was in the front yet, but she swears that the deli person asked the

White woman what she wanted first because she was White. And, then, it was this

big Lifetime Movie that she made out of it, where her nephew was like, Grandma,

“how she didn’t ask us what we wanted? We were here first.” “It’s ‘cause we’re

Black, blah blah blah.”

To counter Kayla’s description, I have tried to represent Brenda’s story in a way that does
not speak for nor about Brenda but instead as Lather says (2004) (referring to Spivak and
citing Bahri and Vasudeva) ‘very close to’ or ‘up against’ her stories. That is, Lather
writes

‘When you get that close, the point is not to not that your really speaking for the

right thing; it is always also up against. The writing itself is an act of violation’

Unless we recognize this, we end up commodifying and monumentalizing those

we write about (p. 4).

I hope that this research works against such commodification or monumentalizing,
though I recognize that in choosing to represent Brenda’s story separately, I risk reifying

the Black/White binary as well as the racialized identity that casts “struggle” as the task

of marginalized people.

170

The same risk is true of my choices for my citations, as I described above; that is,
there is a politics and a necessarily partial story related to whom I choose to cite. Toni
Morrison (1992) warns of the risks of White writers who use Black scholarship,
literature, or music to send a message not about the music but about themselves citing the
music. I hope I have situated my arguments in ways that avoid this risk.

Future Research

One product of scholarship is the realization and prospect of new lines of inquiry.
There are several needed areas of research to which this study points. They include foci
on enactment, new methodologies, research that combines the socialization of teachers
with multicultural education, research that recognizes the psychological implications of
learning to teach as they relate to multicultural teacher education, research that draws on
multiple and inter-disciplinary ways of knowing to think about discourses and
multicultural education, as well as additional future research that utilizes critical
discourse analysis to understand teacher education.

Though my study revealed multiple and competing ideologies through critical
discourse analysis, it did not study how these discourse came to be. More research must
study the creation of and interaction between discourses. In order to study how the
discourses came to be or came together, future research is needed to follow and observe
students as they take classes rather than simply talk about the classes they had taken after
they had completed them. Related to studies of enactment and how discourses are
constructed, firture research needs to be conducted that focuses on a dialogical nature of
teacher education. One study that does this is Marsh’s Social Fashioning of Teachers’

Identities (2002); yet, much of multicultural teacher education research relies on

171

functional and dialectical notions of teacher thinking and socialization, as well as
modernist views of knowledge and identity. Through positivist research, we evaluate the
“effective” practices of specific programs, courses, or instructional strategies. Numerous
interpretive studies focus on pre-service teachers’ attitudes and autobiographies. Further,
as I showed in my literature review, studies frequently focus on one class rather than
multiple classes of programs. I propose studies of discourses as they function in
enactment across whole programs of teacher education.

Many of the dialogical theories about the thinking and socialization of teachers do
not address, or do not explicitly address multicultural teacher education. Research, such
as Britzman (1991) and Practice Makes Practice, McWilliams’In Broken Images:
Feminist Tales for a Different Teacher Education (1995) are fabulous and important texts
for rethinking what it means to learn to teach. Both make arguments for dialogical ways
of conceptualizing teacher thinking; yet, they are not texts on multicultural education.
Therefore, I propose further research that addresses multicultural teacher education
dialogically.

Relatedly, there are works, such as Marsh’s The Social Fashioning of Teacher ’s
Identities (2002) that combine dialogical notions of teacher thinking and with a
specifically named focus on multicultural teacher education. In this study, Marsh (2002)
depicts how students adopt and misappropriate discourses in their teacher education
program. Though smart and complex, Marsh’s study does not attend to the emotional
aspects of learning to teach. At the same time, studies that attend to learning to teach in

an emotional and psychoanalytic frame do not seem to speak directly to multicultural

172

teacher education. I do some of this in my dissertation but more is needed. I propose
further research that provides illustrative depictions of emotional struggles and healing.

In addition to making more use of psychoanalytic frames, research in education
could make a stronger effort to take interdisciplinary approaches to augment and
reconstruct notions of multicultural education. What I suggest here is not all that different
my argument proposing that students be positioned to “travel” towards an effort of ever-
becoming. Teacher educators need more research that depicts the processes and politics
of teaching and learning as situated in post-colonial theory, feminist theory, critical race
theory, for example. In terms of interdisciplinary approaches, as they combine with
dialogical studies, multicultural teacher education needs to explore how multiple genres
of discourses that create various spaces come together. For example, how might notions
of being a good Christian, or a New Englander, or a scientist mesh or contrast with
notions of becoming a teacher and thinking about multiculturalisms?

My study shows a disconnect between multicultural education theory and the
student and instructors’ language and conceptualizing process; however, my work would
not have revealed this if I had not employed critical discourse analysis.lt is likely that I
could have found data to support Duarte and Smith’s perspectives, for example.
Therefore, I suggest that critical discourse analysis is both a useful and an underutilized
method for research in multicultural teacher education. Future research could extend this
work to unveil other discourses, to examined how multicultural discourses change across

disciplines, or to study wider cultural patterns related to research.

173

(Re)Directions for Me as Scholar and for Teacher Education

This study along with my new job as an assistant professor of English education,
housed in an English department (re)directs my work in some interesting ways. It has
directed me toward new “travels.” I am newly identifying as a scholar of English
education. Though I taught English, my graduate work was in cuniculum theory and in
teacher education. As this study depicts, I have found new research interests at the
intersection of multicultural teacher education and text. 13 this a new interest or a (re)tum
that I could only have made because my undergraduate work and teaching experience
were in English? My new position in a new school and new department has positioned
me to think about how the various programs of which I have been a part in one or more
ways privilege different ideas and create different lenses through which to think about
teaching and learning—sociocultural constructions of schooling, critical theory, or
English as a discipline, for example. I am newly interested in how program foci and
disciplinary foci matter to multicultural education, in particular in terms of discourses.

With regard to listening to and learning from people across differences, my father
has often told me that we must “be comfortable being uncomfortable.” Teacher
education needs to become uncomfortable. Let me be clear. This was not meant to
paralyze efforts to work through and among differences, as in “Life’s tough, get over it.”
It is meant to say that comfort is a privilege afforded through power, and because
recognizing one’s priVilege is part of changing oppressive relationships, coming together
across difference requires one to, as Rachel said in her interview, “step out of your
comfort zone.” We must avoid misunderstandings of being “uncomfortable” that

translate into paralyzing claims that suggest we can “do nothing” and conclusions that the

174

world will always be “naturally” oppressive. To move us to actively confront that which
makes us uncomfortable, I argue that this study calls for teacher education to move

towards a “discomfortable” and “traveling” multicultural teacher education.

175

 

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