CRITICAL PEDAGOGY UNFOLD, FOLD, AND RE-FOLD: UNDERSTANDING LIMITATIONS AND PROMISES OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION THROUGH THE POST-CRITICAL LENS By Vy Van Dao A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Curriculum, Instruction, and Teacher Education—Doctor of Philosophy 2019 ABSTRACT CRITICAL PEDAGOGY UNFOLD, FOLD, AND RE-FOLD: UNDERSTANDING LIMITATIONS AND PROMISES OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY IN MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION THROUGH THE POST-CRITICAL LENS By Vy Van Dao To meet increasing need for the preparation of teachers who are going to teach the diverse student population and to make social change in the United States, multicultural education has been introduced as a required foundational course in teacher education programs. As of its importance, there has been great attention given to research focusing on the rationale for teaching this course. Often this research has investigated the demographic imperative as constitutive factors of this rationale. However, because students of all demographics have involved some levels of resistance to multicultural issues, researchers have suggested that further studies are needed that do not simply assume the demographic aspects; rather, to consider how the pedagogy of this teaching, as it pertains directly to the critical pedagogy and as it is employed by multicultural novice teacher educators, is understood and enacted, what is promised and limited through the employment of a critical pedagogy in multicultural education, and what are possibilities to respond to the limitations while enabling the promises. My dissertation aims to respond to these questions. Framing my dissertation into an ethnographic case study, a theoretical argument, and an art-based autoethnography, I explore the pedagogical work of multicultural novice teacher educators in a research-based university in the United States. I argue that while multicultural education novice teacher educators pursue critical pedagogy, they face numerous challenges that derive from limitations inherent in the critical pedagogy itself. These challenges are complicated because they may be a source of multicultural novice teacher educators’ vulnerability, a hinder of their commitment to critical pedagogy, and an obstruction of social change goals through multicultural education. Yet, the challenges can be addressed if multicultural novice teacher educators employ a post-criticality-informed pedagogical orientation that integrates arts, relationality, and affect in multicultural education classrooms. My dissertation promises the employment of post-critical theory in teaching multicultural education that informs art, affect, and relationality to mediate the limitations of contemporary critical pedagogy, to have students engage with social justice through education, and to inform broader social change goals through multicultural education. Copyright by VY VAN DAO 2019 To my Mother and Father I am me because of you. To my children, Hòa and Thảo, I am who I am today because of you. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It takes a village to raise a child. It also takes a village to write a dissertation. The village that I lived in while writing this dissertation stretches from faculty members who served on the review committee to the custodial staff of Erickson Hall, and further outward still. I would like to express my special thanks to my co-chairs for their guidance, dedication, and multiple revisions. To Dr. Sandra Crespo, for thinking with me and joining me on a long journey from the practicum to dissertation studies. To Dr. Alyssa Dunn, for directing me in teaching, in research, and in thinking through multiculturalism so I can write a dissertation of my life on teaching, learning, and social justice. To my committee members for their continued support and motivation. Dr. Lynn Paine, my major academic advisor, thank you for staying in touch with me from the beginning and for providing me with ample opportunities to challenge myself and to problematize the world. Dr. Terry Flennaugh, thank you for being my first teaching mentor at Michigan State University. I am grateful to you for advocating for me and for sharing your wisdom on this committee. To my unofficial committee members. To Scott Farver, Tashal Brown, and Davena Jackson, for participating in my research. To Scott Jarvie, for sharing insights and for publishing an article about critical pedagogy that inspired me to pursue my dissertation topic. To Dr. Michael O'Rourke, for awarding me a Transdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship and for engaging me with arts and philosophy on which the central argument of my dissertation is built. To Dr. Margret Crocco, you have been the greatest woman in leadership I have ever known in my life; thank you for your intent listening to my stories and for all of your academic support and advice. To Dr. Karen Klomparens, for your financial support from the beginning of my Ph.D. studies vi through MSU Graduate School Fellowship. Without you, I would have never become what I am today. To Dr. Chris Wheeler, for being a wonderful human being, for being my Fulbright Scholar mentor, for being one of my best friends, and for helping me love Michigan weather and my international life. To Dr. Eileen St George, for giving me a “ticket” to leave Vietnam for the United States through which a new chapter of my life has been opened and become worthwhile. To my children, Hòa and Thảo. Thank you for being self-motivated in your schooling journeys as immigrant students in the United States and for never letting me do the laundry and washing-up through all eight years of my Ph.D. life so that I could concentrate on my reading, writing, and thinking. I am who I am today because of you. To my late Mom and Dad. Thank you for teaching me to be an art-engaged teacher, researcher, mother, and daughter. I am who I am because of you. To my big family in Vietnam and my church friends in the United States, Sue Kamen, and Pastor John Schleicher, for praying for me every day in my life away from home. Thank you for your unconditional love, support, and many phone calls, emails, texts, and talks. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------xii LIST OF FIGURES----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------xiii CHAPTER 1 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 INTRODUCTION -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Research Problem and Its Importance ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Personal Inquiry and Interest ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1 Intellectual and Scholarly Context ----------------------------------------------------------------- 3 Goals of the Study --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 Dissertation Overview ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5 Context of the Study ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 7 Contribution of the Study ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8 CHAPTER 2 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY UNFOLD: TRACING MULTICULTURAL NOVICE TEACHER EDUCATORS’ PEDAGOGICAL WORK OVER TIME ----------------------------------------------- 9 Abstract --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9 Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10 Literature Review -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11 Multicultural Education and Pedagogical Work ------------------------------------------------ 11 Novice Teacher Educators’ Vulnerability and Learning to Become Teacher Educators - 15 Multicultural Novice Teacher Educators’ Pedagogical Work and Challenges ------------- 17 Theoretical Framework -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 20 Pedagogical Work ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 21 Teacher Positioning --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 22 Tracing Pedagogical Work Over Time ----------------------------------------------------------- 23 Research Design ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 24 Methods ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 24 Context ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 26 Research Participants ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 27 Data Sources ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 28 Questionnaire data. ............................................................................................... 28 Interviews. ............................................................................................................. 29 Observations and field notes. ................................................................................ 30 Researcher’s Subjectivities ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 30 Data Analysis ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 31 Within-case-analysis. ............................................................................................ 32 Cross-case-analysis. .............................................................................................. 32 Limitations of Data Analysis ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 33 Research Findings -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 34 Multicultural Teaching Mode 1: Foregrounding Positionalities ------------------------------ 35 viii Self-position as positional teacher educators. ....................................................... 35 Purposes. ............................................................................................................... 36 Action. ................................................................................................................... 37 Being positioned by students. ............................................................................... 38 Reflection on being positioned by students. ......................................................... 39 Multicultural Teaching Mode 2: Encourage Students to Critique Social Problems ------- 41 Reposition as critical pedagogues. ........................................................................ 41 Purposes. ............................................................................................................... 42 Action. ................................................................................................................... 43 Being positioned by students. ............................................................................... 45 Reflections on being positioned by students. ........................................................ 45 Multicultural Teaching Mode 3: Act Against Racial Neoliberalism------------------------- 47 Reposition as a social-activist-teacher educator. .................................................. 47 Purposes. ............................................................................................................... 48 Action. ................................................................................................................... 49 Being positioned by students. ............................................................................... 50 Reflection on being positioned by students. ......................................................... 51 Potential Pathways: Agentic Action, Critical Pedagogy Commitment, and Challenges ----------- 52 Agentic Action --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 54 Commitment to Critical Pedagogy ---------------------------------------------------------------- 56 Challenges: Students’ Mixed Reactions and Multicultural Novice Teacher Educators’ Sense of Vulnerability ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 59 How to Make Critical Pedagogy Commitment Pathway Possible? ----------------------------------- 60 Chapter Summary -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 62 CHAPTER 3 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 64 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOLD: THE LIMITS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY UNDERSTOOD THROUGH THE LENS OF POST-CRITICALITY ---------------------------------------------------- 64 Abstract -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 64 Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 66 Mapping Out Critical Pedagogy ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- 69 Critique of Social Problems ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 70 Class incident 1: Beauty and the Beast. ................................................................ 70 Instructional design, assumptions, and undesired effects. .................................... 71 Act Against Racial Neoliberalism ---------------------------------------------------------------- 72 Class incident 2: “An Indian Father’s Plea” and the testing policy. ..................... 72 Instructional design, assumption, and undesired effects. ...................................... 72 Foreground Positionality --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 74 Class incident 3: “A third gender.” ....................................................................... 74 Instructional design, assumptions, and undesired effects. .................................... 74 Central Tenets of Post-Criticality -------------------------------------------------------------------------- 77 Felski’s Discussion of Critique -------------------------------------------------------------------- 78 Huelhs’s Discussion of Racial Neoliberalism --------------------------------------------------- 78 Ellsworth’s And Latour’s Discussion of Social Groups and Positionalities ---------------- 80 Limitations of Critical Pedagogy in Light of Post-criticality ------------------------------------------ 82 Establish Students Toward Suspicious Affective Orientations ------------------------------- 82 ix Place Students in The Vacillation Between Colorblindness and Multicultural Diversity 83 Position Students with Pre-Identified Social Problems ---------------------------------------- 84 At the Culmination of Limitations: Novice Teachers’ Vulnerability, Their Critical Pedagogy Commitment, and Social Change Goals ------------------------------------------------------------------ 86 Promising Trajectories: Two Art-Based Pedagogical Ideas-------------------------------------------- 89 Chapter Summary -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 93 CHAPTER 4 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 96 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY RE-FOLD: MEDIATING CHALLENGES THROUGH IDENTIFYING AND RESPONDING TO TENSIONS—A MULTICULTURAL NOVICE TEACHER EDUCATORS’ ART-BASED AUTOETHNOGRAPHY ------------------------------- 96 Abstract -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 96 Introduction --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 98 Literature Review -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 99 Define Terms: “Tensions” ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 99 Autoethnographic Research on Teacher Educator’s Pedagogical Work and Involved Tensions -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 100 Teacher Educator’s Pedagogical Work and Their Identity ---------------------------------- 104 Teacher Educators as Researchers of Their Own Teaching Practice ---------------------- 106 Theoretical Framework ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 108 Research Design -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 111 Methods --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 111 Context of the Study ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 112 Context of my teaching. ...................................................................................... 112 Who am I in this autoethnography? .................................................................... 113 Data Sources --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 114 Data Analysis -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 115 Research Findings ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 116 Tensions 1: Engaging Critique Versus Handling Affect ------------------------------------ 116 Class incident: Pocahontas. ................................................................................. 116 Reflection on action-present: “Student’s push-back of the critique.” ................. 118 Reflection on action-then: Identify tension. ........................................................ 119 Reflection on action-then: Seeing possibilities. .................................................. 120 Respond to tension 1. .......................................................................................... 121 Tension 2: Planning Versus Being Responsive ----------------------------------------------- 123 Class incident: “The Color of Fear.”................................................................... 123 Reflection on action-now: “Students are concerned about my identity.” ........... 124 Reflection on action-then: Identify tension. ........................................................ 125 Reflection on action-then: Seeing possibilities. .................................................. 125 Responding to tension 2. ..................................................................................... 127 What Am I Learning Now? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 130 Learning to Appreciate the Roles of (Post-Criticality-Informed) Theory in Practice --- 131 Learning to See My Self as a Promise for an (Art-Based) Teaching Resource ---------- 133 Learning to Research (My Own) Teaching ---------------------------------------------------- 136 Chapter Summary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 137 x CHAPTER 5 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 138 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 138 Dissertation Summary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 138 Contributions to Existing Research ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 140 Implications ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 142 Art-Based Pedagogical and Curriculum Adaptations for Multicultural Education ------ 143 Scaffolded Pedagogical Trajectories for Multicultural Novice Teacher Educators ----- 143 Professional Support for Multicultural Novice Teacher Educators ------------------------ 145 Possible Future Directions -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 145 Additional Considerations about Dissertation Limitations ------------------------------------------- 148 APPENDICES ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 149 APPENDIX A: Pre- Interview Questionnaires and Sit-down Interview Prompts ------- 150 APPENDIX B: End-Of-Semester Interview Prompts --------------------------------------- 152 APPENDIX C: “I Am from the East” ---------------------------------------------------------- 154 REFERENCES --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 157 xi LIST OF TABLES Table 1: Phases of Study and Types of Data ................................................................................ 28 Table 2: Novice Teacher Educators’ Multicultural Teaching Modes of Pedagogical Work ........ 35 Table 3: Foreground Positionality—Examples of Sue’s and John’s Action ................................ 37 Table 4: Encouraging Critique of Social Problems—Examples of Sue’s and John’s Action ...... 44 Table 5: Confront Racial Neoliberalism—Examples of John’s Action........................................ 49 Table 6: Limitations of Critical Pedagogy Understood by Post-critical Central Tenets .............. 68 Table 7: Tensions and Respond to Tensions............................................................................... 116 xii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: Student’s Mixed-media Collage “I Am from the East” .............................................. 128 xiii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Research Problem and Its Importance The central goal of this dissertation is to advance a scholarly understanding of critical pedagogy in the context of multicultural education—how is it constitutive, what are its limitations and promises, and what are possible ways to address its limitations and put forth the promises? The emergence of such an understanding is under-researched, but it is an increasingly significant phenomenon given that multicultural education pedagogy can better enable social change if it is informed by further theoretical conversations and empirical investigations. I narrowed the scope of this study to the pedagogical work of multicultural novice teacher educators—the teachers who teach multicultural education for prospective teachers while doctoral students at a research-based and predominantly White university in the United States. Maxwell (2005) suggests two types of goals as motivations for research: personal and intellectual. The following objectives of this dissertation are framed accordingly. Personal Inquiry and Interest I was born in and grew up in Vietnam. Through my time in high school and college there, I had a “family education” that sowed seeds of inquiry about how teaching can lead to the pursuit of justice. When I became curious about “justice” at my school—for example, when my classmate was humiliated and reduced to tears because of her ethnic minority language accent— it was then I went to see my teacher-painter mother. I aired my concerns and took away a helpful suggestion—"Go and play origami artwork with her so that you will bring yourself affirmatively into a communal relationship with her and you will lift up her hope for a just life!” When my classmates ridiculed my monogramed crucifix necklace, I ran to my father’s teaching-poetry 1 office where he gave me his copy of The Gadfly1. I read it almost every night, first questioning the stereotypes of one’s faith and gradually finding in it that power operates in varying ways, as a manifestation of privileges and forces working on and through all of us; I learned we must develop critical thinking to transform that power. I eventually learned there is always a strong relationship between learning and teaching, drawing on hope and criticality that is reflected not only in the ways we teach but also from our own perspectives about social justice. With this insight, I came to the United States for my doctoral studies, seeking to develop my understanding of the relationships between teaching, learning, and justice. Fortunately, I was tasked with teaching a class on multicultural education for prospective teachers for several semesters. As a multicultural novice teacher educator, I developed faith in my insight about the roles that critical pedagogy plays in multicultural education. I had taken up a critical pedagogy in my teaching because it offered a window into the social justice experiences of others and had the potential to make the social world more just. Critical pedagogy became my pedagogical theme and the names of prominent critical theorists—Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, bell hooks, among others, have been in my mind since then. I brought critical pedagogy approaches into most of my teaching activities—from lesson plans to classroom discussion—all with the purpose of using it as a powerful tool for contributing to social change. At the same time, however, I carried with me doubt about this insight. It was when my students asked me what I had hoped for when I required them to critique a beloved story about a man and a woman. It was when I heard from my critical pedagogy-engaged instructor peers who were novices, that there was student push-back against particular topics, despite the fact the 1 Written during the Italian Risorgimento, the novel primarily concerns with the religious belief revolution. Arthur, the eponymous Gadfly, embodies the tragic Romantic hero, who returns from abandonment to discover his true self in the world and fight against the injustices of the current religious regime. Sources: The Gadfly. [Web log post]. Retrieved August 31, 2019 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gadfly 2 instructors tried their best to mediate demographic issues in the classroom. I began to wonder whether critical pedagogy functions as a window and whether it can make the world more just through multicultural education. This skepticism emerged slowly through the process of many attempts to foster social change with a critical pedagogy I had adopted in my teaching, but the doubt was most clearly ushered in by many experiences similar to the situations I mentioned above. This interplay of faith in and doubt about critical pedagogy of multicultural education undergirds my personal inquiry into my teaching. I asked myself: where or to what extent is there a pedagogy that teaches prospective teachers about social justice via critique, insight about demographics or positionalities, and systematic biases, while simultaneously preserving and acting upon the promise of moving and pushing students onward, of weaving communal relationships between all teachers and students in the classroom? Seeing myself as a teacher- researcher of multiculturalism, I have been motivated to produce scholarship that reflects my efforts to move “against and beyond boundaries” (hooks, 1994, p. 12), by pushing the limits of what counts as research inquiry about critical pedagogy of multicultural education and by imagining, alongside my peer novice teacher educators, a new theoretical vision and empirical possibilities for multicultural education that transgresses; and that brings hope and critique together. When situated in the multicultural education-related intellectual and scholarly context that I present below, this inquiry shapes my research purposes and research questions in this dissertation. Intellectual and Scholarly Context Over the past several decades, there has been increasing need for the preparation of teachers who are going to teach the diverse student population and who can contribute making 3 social change in the United States. To meet this need, multicultural education has been introduced as a required foundational course in teacher education programs. The introduction of this course and the current arising demand to enhance it have been considered responses to the Commissions on Multicultural Education’s (1972) calls for actions for addressing social injustice in education (Cochran-Smith, 2003). In fact, in the practices, the course has greatly helped prospective teachers develop their critical thinking, positive behavior, and actions for multiculturalism (Vavrus, 2009; Ukpokodu, 2007). At the same time, however, researchers have indicated that there have been several challenges involved in the work of teacher educators who have been teaching the course for purposes of changing competence and attitudes of prospective teachers about multicultural issues. As of this importance, researchers have given a great attention to study the rationale for multicultural education teaching. Often this research has investigated the demographic imperative (Banks & Banks, 2005) as constitutive factors of this rationale. These factors include, for example, to whom multicultural teaching is addressed or what students’ demographic aspects that teacher educators most struggled with or whether or not the demographic background of teacher educators matters. At the same time, however, given the fact that prospective teachers of all demographics have involved some levels of resistance to classroom discussion, researchers have suggested that further studies are needed that do not simply assume the demographic aspects; rather, to consider how the pedagogy of multicultural education teaching, as it pertains directly to the critical pedagogy and to multicultural novice teacher educators, is understood and enacted (Ellsworth, 1989; Cochran-Smith, 1995, 2002), what is promised and limited through the employment of critical pedagogy in multicultural teaching (Ellsworth, 1989; Felski, 2015), and what are possibilities to respond to the limitations while enabling the promises. 4 Goals of the Study In responding to the overarching research questions, my goals for this dissertation are multi-faceted. First, I seek to understand the detailed dynamics of critical pedagogy that multicultural novice teacher educators employed by and the concomitant challenges. Second, I offer a theoretical argument explaining why the challenges occur and possible ways to address them. Third, I conduct an experiment of my theoretical argument in my own multicultural teaching practices. In this experiment, I seek an understanding of how and to what extent my theoretical argument informs multicultural novice teacher educators’ ways of mediating the challenges. Each of these goals connects to specific research questions that are addressed through my data analysis, findings, and discussion. Dissertation Overview This dissertation is organized alongside the origami crane artwork’s “unfold, fold, re- unfold”2 praxis. Based on this praxis, I frame my dissertation as an ethnographic case study, a theoretical argument, and an art-based autoethnography to explore the pedagogical practices of multicultural novice teacher educators in a research-based university in the United States. I argue 2 I was reminded of Durst’s (2015) recent blog essay, “Inventing the Digital Humanities through Freirean Praxis,” about crane origami artwork “unfold, fold, re-unfold” praxis when I was thinking about how to frame the structure of my dissertation in responding to overarching research questions. Unfolding is when a researcher conducts an empirical study—looks at an intricate construct or a complex question that is born from a particular practice from different angles to find out the meanings, stories, and problems beyond. This resembles what an origami crane artist does at the beginning of her first steps in a simple and single piece of paper. Folding means to construct the theoretical possibilities—that is, the researcher reflects on the meanings, stories, and problems that are found in the unfolding stage to create a humble theoretical foundation that builds upon the findings themselves, like the origami crane artist does—to form a three-dimensional bird from one flat sheet requires no cutting or gluing, no appliqued wings or painted eyes. Similar to the origami artist, the researcher in the folding stage merely draws forward the new theoretical option—the inherent potential based on what has already existed. The re-unfolding is a stage in which there is an inquiry and action alongside the development of theory, such as when a researcher takes a piece of the theoretical account she has just built to and into data (e.g., new research that is formed with different sets of questions or conducted in another context) while keeping the theory in mind. The unfolding-folding-refolding praxis creates a research loop that addresses overarching research questions while producing multiple layers of findings, discussion, and inquiries around the questions. This origami crane metaphor-informed research awareness aligns with Freirean Praxis as a process of “engaging in a cycle of practice, theory, application, evaluation, reflection, and then back to theory and practice” which informs the organization of my dissertation. 5 that while multicultural novice teacher educators pursue a critical pedagogy, they face numerous challenges derived from limitations inherent in the critical pedagogy itself. These challenges and limitations are complicated because they may be a source of multicultural novice teacher educators’ vulnerability, a hinder of their commitment to critical pedagogy, and an obstruction of multicultural goals of social change. However, the challenges and limitations can be addressed if these teacher educators employ a post-criticality-informed pedagogical orientation that promises the integration of arts, relationality, and affect in multicultural education classrooms. I suggest three design implications for art-based pedagogy and curriculum considerations in the field of multicultural education and professional development ideas for novice teacher educators. In Chapter 2, I unfold the overarching research questions by using the ideas of pedagogical work, positioning theory, and the theory of tracing pedagogical work over time to examine dynamics of pedagogical work of two multicultural novice teacher educators. I find these novice teacher educators pursued various aspects of critical pedagogy constitutive of their positionings, purposes, actions, and reflections of their students’ reactions. I also find that while committing to critical pedagogy, these novices faced challenges concerning undesired effects of classroom discussion, pertaining directly to students’ mixed reactions and resistance. In Chapter 3, I fold the overarching research questions into my theoretical argument. I examine critical pedagogy’s theoretical complexities through a post-critical lens in which I re- describe and reexplain the challenges. I argue that because the assumption that undergirds critical pedagogy is problematic, the challenges that multicultural novice teacher educators encounter derive from the limitations inherent in critical pedagogy itself. I offer an art-based teaching theory that engages relationality and affect to mediate these challenges and limitations. In Chapter 4, I refold the overarching research questions into an art-based 6 autoethnographic study. In this, I take up a part of my post-criticality-informed pedagogical proposal alongside Berry’s (2007) and Wang’s (2005) conceptual frame of tensions to explore how I mediate the challenges in terms of students’ mixed reactions and resistance by identifying tensions and responding to the tensions involved in my own teaching as a multicultural novice teacher educator. I identify two tensions involved in my teaching: my encouraging students to critique versus my handling student’s affective orientations, and my planning versus my being responsive in the classroom discussion. I also find that employing a post-criticality-informed pedagogy that engages artwork as a means to develop relational and affective orientations in my teaching can be a possible way to respond to the tensions, thus, mediate the challenges. In Chapter 5, I wrap up my discussion and suggest three design implications for art-based and relational pedagogy and curriculum considerations in the field of multicultural education and professional development ideas for multicultural education novice teacher educators. Context of the Study This study was conducted in a Multicultural Education course (MTE 101): a required course for all preservice teachers in the College of Education located in a predominately-White university in the United States. The course is a social foundation course, focusing on introducing preservice teachers to the ways in which social inequality affects schooling and vice versa. The course allows prospective teachers to examine how socially constructed categories (such as social class, race, or gender) are used to privilege some individuals and groups and marginalize others. Most instructors are doctoral students who are tasked with adopting a curriculum framework designed by the university; for example, they must integrate required course themes, students’ learning competencies, reading lists, and grading criteria. They are encouraged to engage in a critical pedagogy to design and facilitate classroom discussion. 7 Contribution of the Study The study opens up the promising trajectories of a post-critical theory/philosophy that informs art, affect, and relationality in the context of pedagogy of multicultural education. This can include a promise to mediate the limitations of contemporary critical pedagogy and to have students engage with social justice through education. In addition, this study also adds to a growing body of literature on teachers as researchers and teachers as change agents, especially in informing broader social justice goals in multicultural education. 8 CHAPTER 2 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY UNFOLD: TRACING MULTICULTURAL NOVICE TEACHER EDUCATORS’ PEDAGOGICAL WORK OVER TIME Abstract In this chapter, I examine what kind of pedagogical work two multicultural novice teacher educators undertake across their three teaching semesters in 2016 and 2017, how this work is shaped and changed by their positionings, purposes, and actions, and what challenges they face during the process. Drawing on theories of teacher positioning; the idea about pedagogical work and tracing pedagogical work over time; plus the interviews and class observations of ethnography-informed multiple case studies, I find that these two multicultural novice teacher educators operationalized their teaching by constantly shifting their pedagogical work between three multicultural teaching modes of pedagogical work: (a) foregrounding positionalities, (b) encouraging critique of social problems, and (c) confronting racial neoliberalism. Each of these modes is influenced by these teacher educators’ positionings, purposes, actions, and reflections of students’ responses. I discuss that these modes, when viewed over time, reveal a pedagogical pathway in which they pursue agentic actions and critical pedagogy ideas. In pursuing this pathway, however, their work is not easy. Their work is constrained by challenges that involved students’ mixed reactions and resistance. These challenges are a source of multicultural novice teacher educators’ vulnerability—they are confused, uncertain, and ambiguous about how to teach the course. I suggest that to make the “critical pedagogy commitment” pathway possible and to reconcile multicultural novice teacher educators’ vulnerability, researchers must better inform multicultural novice teacher educator of the reasons why these challenges occur in their classroom teaching. 9 Introduction Over the past three decades, there has been increasing need to prepare teachers to be able to teach the diverse student population in the United States. To meet this need, multicultural education has been introduced as a required foundational course in teacher education programs and researchers have given much attention to studying the rationale for the pedagogy of teaching this course. This research has often investigated the demographic imperative (Banks & Banks, 2005) as constitutive factors of this rationale. These factors include to whom multicultural teaching is addressed, which student demographic characteristics teacher educators struggle with most, and whether teacher educators’ demographic backgrounds matter. At the same time, however, given that prospective teachers and teacher educators of all demographic backgrounds have experienced some levels of resistance to the topics discussed in classrooms, researchers have suggested further studies should not simply focus on demographic characteristics but consider how the pedagogy of this teaching is understood and enacted and what factors constitute that pedagogy. Because pedagogy that involves multicultural education is always socially mediated, it must be studied through the lenses of multicultural teacher educators’ teaching experiences, especially the novices. In this study, I am concerned with how multicultural novice teacher educators operationalize their pedagogical work of multicultural education. More specifically, I examine how they take up the pedagogical work of multicultural education teaching as they move their teaching through three semesters: how this work is informed by their positioning, actions, and interactions with students; and the purpose that drives their teaching; and the pedagogical barriers they face. Research questions include: 10 1. What kind of pedagogical work do multicultural novice teacher educators engage during their three teaching semesters? 2. How is this pedagogical work shaped by multicultural novice teacher educator’s positioning, purposes, and actions? 3. What changes or shifts occur in this pedagogical work? Why? 4. What challenges did multicultural novice teacher educators face while changing or shifting this pedagogical work? Literature Review This section is a review of relevant research. The purpose of this study is to understand how multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work is constituted, how and why it shifts and moves over time, and what possible challenges are involved in the process. I draw on three bodies of literature. First, I review research on the relationships between multicultural education and pedagogical work to contextualize how the pedagogical work of multicultural education is understood by scholars. Second, I review the scholarship of novice teachers’ vulnerability to understand what factors might contribute and negate pedagogical work of multicultural teacher educators who are the novice. Third, because the focus of this study is to understand the pedagogical work of novice teacher educators who teach multicultural education, I review research on doctoral students as teachers of multicultural education and research that highlights the potential challenges in their teaching. Multicultural Education and Pedagogical Work I have conducted a literature review for this section while keeping in mind Cochran- Smith’s (2003) warning of the variance in theme and scope in understandings of multicultural education teaching. I situate my understandings of multicultural education teaching within the 11 belief teacher education classrooms can create opportunities for teacher educators and students to interact so students can confront the status quo and solidify their positions to make social change. I could not find any scholarship that precisely identified this framework’s underlying assumptions about multicultural education teaching, however. Therefore, the scholarship selected for this review may or may not incorporate definitions about multicultural education teaching aligned with my own understandings of the topic. Situating this section in the historical context of efforts to integrate multicultural education into teacher education, I find that although there has been abundant research about the importance of multicultural education taught by teacher educators, there is still a missing line of inquiry. This missing line of inquiry is a detailed overview of what actually occurs in multicultural education teaching in classrooms. Because understanding the pedagogical work of multicultural education can better capture the detailed overview of multicultural education teaching in classrooms, I argue there is a need for further studies focused on how teacher educators shift and change their pedagogical work while teaching multicultural education. Historically, teaching multicultural education has been a primary focus in research and practices in teacher education. In 1972, the first Commission on Multicultural Education, sponsored by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE), made three key assertions: (a) cultural diversity is a valuable resource; (b) multiculturalism is education that preserves and extends the resource of cultural diversity; and (c) a commitment to cultural pluralism should permeate all aspects of teacher preparation programs in the United States (Baptiste & Baptiste, 1980). In 1976, the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) urged the importance of incorporating multicultural education in prospective teachers’ education. NCATE stated teacher education should “represent all socio- 12 economic levels between and within as many diverse groups as possible …Teachers whose clinical experiences are only in a mono-cultural environment will be severely limited” (1976, p. 59). It also added multicultural education to its standards, requiring programs seeking accreditation to show evidence they planned to integrate multicultural education into their curriculum framework by 1979 and then provide it to all students by 1981 (Gollnick, 1992). Gay & Howard (2000) have urged that multicultural education “be prominent in all aspects of the entire teacher education program from course work to practicum, exit requirements, certification, and employment” (pp. 14–15) as well as the pedagogy and curriculum of teacher education programs. In turn, a growing number of scholars have focused on understanding what, exactly, constitutes an effective teacher preparation in this regard. Some have attempted to measure the effect that multicultural education has on multicultural attitudes and practices of future teachers. For example, Vavrus (2009) investigated the effect content topics discussed in gender and sexual orientation classes have on prospective teacher students. The results from a categorical analysis of a cohort of 38 students’ auto-ethnographies, discussing their insights about their lived histories, indicate that teacher candidates express increased confidence in their ability to consider issues of gender and sexuality as a legitimate part of their identity. Similar results have been found in other research (see Mueller & O'Connor, 2007). These studies are important because they indicate what multicultural education content knowledge is needed in forming students’ competency and attitudes about cultural diversity. Other researchers have studied what type of course design is needed in a multicultural education course to aid students in developing multicultural consciousness and competency. Erden (2009), for example, investigates what a semester-long course on multicultural education, 13 designed with a combination of collaborative discussion and student teachers’ choices of learning materials, contributes to the attitudes of preservice teachers with regard to cultural diversity. This study employs a competency analysis on a sample of 133 preservice teachers, 33 of whom had taken the course, and 100 of whom had not. The results show that such a course design has a substantial impact on preservice teachers’ understanding of multiculturalism. The study also found the more teacher candidates participate in discussion about their own identities, the deeper understanding they have toward cultural diversity. Similar results have been found in other research (see Moss, 2008). While these studies are abundant, there have been only a handful of empirical studies investigating the pedagogical work of teacher educators who contribute to the development of multicultural competencies and attitudes (Gorski, 2012). These studies mostly assume that pedagogy of multicultural education is a static practice and that its role is to bridge a certain body of knowledge about multicultural education with the experiences of learners. The common research questions asked in this line of research are usually are “whose knowledge about multicultural education should be taught?” or “which practices will be the most efficient in teaching knowledge about multicultural education?” (Cochran-Smith, 2003, p. 24). Although this empirical research is helpful, it fails to address some important inquiries that envision pedagogy as a changing and fluid process of what a teacher educator does in the multicultural education classroom. For example, this research overlooks whether teacher educators’ pedagogy can change over time alongside the interactions between teacher educators and students (Ellsworth, 1999). Additionally, it misses whether pedagogy can create a space for teacher educators and students to face and challenge their multicultural teaching and learning experiences (Massumi, 2002). My study, with a focus on understanding the changes and shifts of 14 pedagogical work in multicultural education classrooms, seeks to investigate some of these inquiries. Novice Teacher Educators’ Vulnerability and Learning to Become Teacher Educators As the field of teacher educator development has grown over the past two decades, so too has the number of studies that have examined novice teacher educators’ developing pedagogies and their learning process in becoming teacher educators. Much of this literature focuses on those who have previous teaching experience but are novices when it comes to pedagogical practices in teacher education programs as faculty. This research has found that novice teacher educators tend to experience a sense of vulnerability (e.g., uncertainty, ambiguity, and unsureness) and that this sense affects their choice of pedagogical practices as they pursue becoming teacher educators. In this review, I argue that while this research is abundant and helpful, there is a research gap needing further exploration. Several studies have discussed novice teacher educators’ vulnerability. Vanassche and Kelchtermans (2014) conducted a qualitative study of pedagogical practices provided by 12 novice teacher educators who navigated the tension between how they positioned themselves and how they were positioned by the teacher-education institution. This study was designed to help researchers understand why many teacher educators feel frustrated and uncertain about how to teach when facing contradictory views about their assumed roles as teacher educators. Based on data collected from written questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and document analysis, Vanassche and Kelchtermans (2014) discussed novice teacher educators’ sense of uncertainty when navigating between these tensions. These novice teacher educators were frustrated because they did not know how to mediate their perceptions of good teaching and institutional assumptions about their position as good teacher educators. The data show the ways they 15 positioned themselves were not acknowledged as socially legitimate, by teacher educator colleagues, nor by the teacher-education institution. The normative assumptions about good teaching in the teacher-education institution placed different and conflicting demands on these teacher educators. By attributing novice teacher educators’ frustration and uncertainty only to the social and institutional system, this study did not explore how these teacher educators must negotiate and make sense of the relationships between themselves and students as resources for developing their pedagogical practices. Also, by focusing on the institutional issues outside the classroom context, this study lost an opportunity to understand if novice teacher educators can develop their pedagogical practices by negotiating their sense of vulnerability into the relationships inside the classroom and which pedagogical idea they might engage along their path to becoming teacher educators. Cuenca’s (2010) study also discussed novice teacher educators’ ambiguity and uncertainty in their pedagogical practices. The study focused on how a doctoral student teacher educator negotiates the unfamiliarity of his position as a teacher educator of a field placement course and which pedagogical practices he needed to commit to as he became a teacher educator. The novice teacher educator felt ambiguity and frustration because his own perception of teaching was not successfully translated into student learning. He struggled because despite his beliefs in his teaching abilities and efforts to change his pedagogical practices, students repeatedly demonstrated different pedagogical expectations. This study has two implications. One is that teaching in teacher education classrooms is a complex process in which there are many unexpected effects happening outside of the novice teacher educators’ beliefs and intentions. Second, there are dilemmas between what novice 16 teacher educators want to teach and what students really want to learn from their teaching. These dilemmas constrain novice teacher educators’ process of navigating their pedagogical practices and sense of self as they become teacher educators. This study also raises an important inquiry for further research. That is, whether and how novice teacher educators experience a sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, and unsureness when there are unpredictable and complex students’ expectations and reactions in teaching that include multicultural education and social justice topics. The teaching and learning process of multicultural education is significantly different from that of other courses. Student learning in multicultural education classrooms might only occur if novice teacher educators are able to create a classroom environment that challenges students’ existing perceptions about social justice, and then exposes them to particular power- relations practices to help them understand the points from class discussion. Teaching this course is always challenging. How novice teacher educators navigate teaching this course if they experience uncertainty, ambiguity, and unsureness while at the same time, making pedagogical practice choices is a question worth exploring. Multicultural Novice Teacher Educators’ Pedagogical Work and Challenges In this review section, I conduct the literature review about challenges involved in pedagogical work of novice teacher educators, especially those teaching college students while doctoral students. I begin with a glimpse of the roles that doctoral student teaching plays in university and how the challenges involved int their teaching look like across disciplines. I then provide an overview of the scholarship that specifically takes up the issues of challenges that novice teacher educators have faced when teaching multicultural education. Doctoral student teaching is important in the university enterprise. The Carnegie 17 Foundation conducted a five-year-long study in 84 doctoral study-granting departments in 6 fields— chemistry, education, English, history, mathematics, and neuroscience—to examine practices of doctoral students’ teaching and researching practices. The study found that on average, 95% of the departments responded that their doctoral students who were at the dissertation stage taught an undergraduate course independently (Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueshel, & Hutchings, 2008). Notably, because chemistry and neuroscience graduate programs often do not have corresponding undergraduate programs, this percentage is skewed toward doctoral students who teach education, history, and English. Also, in a recent comparative research study about doctoral students teaching in graduate programs between the academic years of 1992–1993 and 2013–2014, Blouin and Moss (2015) found that more than 94% of programs responded that their graduate students are involved in teaching. About 69.9% of participating programs reported that in the 2013-2014 year, they employed students to be either assistants or independent instructors, and this percentage is about 10% higher than 1992-1993. Considering these statistics, doctoral students are a critical source of future faculty for higher education teaching. Despite the critical position doctoral students occupy in the university enterprise, current research reveals these students encounter various teaching challenges. One challenge is that most feel unprepared and lack confidence. Researchers, such as Austin (2002) who has studied the teaching experiences new doctorate recipients who become new faculty members found that this population experiences anxiety and pressures due to these factors: (1) fears that student criticism might endanger their tenure and (2) limited teaching resources. I can extrapolate that when this population was at an early point of their doctoral studies, they might have experienced similar problems in their teaching, especially as they are less likely to have a developed professional network and to have positioned themselves as authorities in their field. 18 I conduct a literature reviews of this section while keeping in mind that although there is much research about. doctoral students’ teaching practices in mathematics and sociology, among others (Blouin & Moss, 2015; Speer, Murphy, & Gutmann, 2009), there has been little research targeting teaching practices of doctoral students’ teaching in the field of multicultural education (Viczko & Wright, 2010). However, because the teaching practices of doctoral students in the field of teacher education share similar characteristics with that of other doctoral student instructors in mathematics and sociology, it makes sense to focus my review on doctoral students’ teaching practices in those areas to inform corresponding issues of teacher education for doctoral students who teach multicultural education. As doctoral students who teach multicultural education share some similarities with doctoral students in other disciplines, it is likely they may encounter similar challenges. At the same time, they also face other challenges particular to the field of multicultural education. For example, they are usually uncertain about their actual roles in multicultural education teaching (Smollin & Arluke, 2015); do not feel well- qualified to incorporate multicultural ideals into the teacher education courses in which they are enrolled (Gay & Howard, 2000); and struggle to deal with pervasive teaching obstacles such as student resistance (Foot, Crowe, Tollafield, & Allan, 2014; Thomas & Vanderhaar, 2008). Indicating challenges in ones’ own teaching practices can help one become aware of the constraints which exist in doctoral students’ teaching. However, understanding the challenges does not elucidate the necessary pedagogical processes to overcome these challenges. Descriptions of the challenges do not automatically provide a greater understanding of the detailed nature and dynamics of doctoral students’ pedagogical practices. Walker et al. (2008) stated that “there is no guarantee (or structure to ensure) that [identifying] experiences [including challenges] actually leads to greater understanding of complicated dynamics of [doctoral 19 students’] teaching” (p. 67). They added that because over 25% of doctoral students, including those who teach multicultural education, reported they encountered all of the above-mentioned challenges, there is a need to help them better understand the complexities of their pedagogical work. Zeichner (2005) shared the same insights, adding that because most doctoral students who teach multicultural education face student resistance, there is a need to discuss further why this resistance continues and appropriates pedagogical responses to it. In short, this research reveals a need to go beyond descriptions of challenges to understand the dynamics of doctoral student teacher educators’ pedagogical work in multicultural education. If doctoral student teacher educators tasked with teaching multicultural education are not informed of the complexities of their pedagogical work, then they may have to face these teaching challenges alone (Austin, 2002); this may constrain prospective teachers’ learning about multicultural education issues in the classroom. My study endeavors to help fill these gaps by focusing on understanding the pedagogical work of doctoral student teacher educators who teach multicultural education and the challenges involved. Theoretical Framework The purpose of this study is to understand how multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work is constituted; how and why it shifts and moves over time; and possible challenges in the process. I ground this study in sociocultural perspectives and constructivism—a research approach that suggests that, “individuals create their own understandings, based upon the interaction with [others and surrounding environment] of what they already know and believe, and the phenomena or ideas with which they come in contact” (Richardson, 1997, p. 3). This stance acknowledges that human selves, “do not find or discover knowledge, so much as we construct or make it. We invent concepts, models, and schemes to make sense of the experience 20 within certain contexts encompassing our work and life” (Schwant, 2000, p. 197). To examine how novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work is constituted; how and why it shifts and moves over time; and possible challenges involved, my theoretical framework relies on the concept of pedagogical work, positioning theory, and tracing pedagogical work over time. Pedagogical Work Although the term pedagogy is most often understood as what teachers do in classrooms, more recent research using the lenses of critical pedagogy and cultural studies has defined pedagogy in much broader terms. From these perspectives, pedagogy is any process “through which we are encouraged to know, to form a particular way of ordering the world, giving and making sense of it” (Simon, 1992, p. 56) The practice of pedagogy, according to these perspectives, is an attempt to influence both teachers’ and learners’ experiences and subjectivities. Therefore, pedagogy can be inherent in any message inside or outside the classroom, contained in any form of action, structure, or text that “recognizes a view or stance of, and action about particular versions of what knowledge is of most worth, in what direction we should desire, what it means to know something, and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and the world” (Giroux & Simon, 1988, p. 12). In this sense, pedagogical practices in multicultural education should include exploring who enacts it and what, how, and toward what multicultural contents organize students to experience social experiences (Cochran- Smith, 1999). In my study, I use Giroux’s (1981) phrase, “pedagogical work,” to capture the stances and actions by teacher educators toward any multicultural topics in the curriculum through their relationships with themselves and the world that encompasses, enables, or constrains every given teaching moment in their classrooms. To enact this pedagogical work, teacher educators usually 21 choose ways to engage students in multicultural issues with and against the tension between their internal sensibilities and external demands placed on their teaching (Cochran-Smith, 1991). Teacher Positioning Multicultural education classrooms are social settings (Ukpokodu, 2007). The different ways in which classroom activities are set up and carried through (e.g., how teachers lead class discussions or set up small group activities) creates multiple worlds within those settings (Foot et al., 2014). When multicultural novice teacher educators undertake their teaching, they work with different social worlds that may be parallel to or in competition with one another (Trent, 2013). This often causes frustration, particularly for a novice struggling to construct teaching practices with which they are unfamiliar (Newberry, 2014). According to Harre & van Lagenhove (1999), when working with different social worlds, individuals often engage in various modes of positioning. They can position themselves as they want to express their personal agency to achieve a particular goal in interacting with others. They can be positioned when they think they are required or expected by others to act in some certain ways. They can reposition themselves when their intentional positioning can lead to the positioning of someone else in a correlative position. The ways in which individuals position themselves, are positioned by others, and reposition affect their agentic action in which they “use [particular] …devices [e.g., instructional tools] to express their standing presence in various kinds of [social] relations” (Harre & van Lagenhove,1995, p. 362) in order to choose “a preferred way of being with and relating to students” (Bullough & Gitlin, 2001, p. 3). Each positioning is associated with a coherent pattern of purpose in the pursuit of good teaching (Trent, 2013; Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2014); valuable methods and strategies to enact these assumptions in teaching practices (Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2014); and a preferred relationship with 22 students (Sharkey, 2004). Tracing Pedagogical Work Over Time Teaching multicultural education course is an ongoing pedagogical task, thus, pedagogical work of novice teacher educators who teach the course can be understood by tracing their work over time (Herbel-Eisenmann, Wagner, Johnson, Suh, & Figueras, 2015). To understand this ongoing work is to pay attention to key class incidents that appear to show meanings of the pedagogical work that novice teacher educators engage over time and how the outcomes of one incident are related to those of other incidents. Such traces reveal multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work that have potential effects on their pedagogical trajectories. One way of tracing multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work is to focus on their reflection upon how and why they engage with particular pedagogical intentions and enactment and how these pedagogical intentions and enactment are shifted and changed across class incidents and over time. Another such way is by examining how multicultural novice teacher educators who position themselves in particular ways engage in the relationships with students over time. This way might reveal how the social relations between multicultural novice teacher educators and students “at some [points of time] become linked, or coupled, and thus more interdependent” by which “the new patterns [of relationships] were emergent” (Lemke, 2000, p. 278). In other words, examining how multicultural novice teacher educators shift their positioning experiences into the relationship with students can reveal the patterns of social relationships between them and their students in multicultural education classrooms. By carefully examining pedagogical work across key class incidents, by paying attention to the ways in which multicultural novice teacher educators identify their pedagogical intentions and enactment, and by investigating their 23 social relations between teacher educators and students, I intend to understand how and why multicultural novice teacher educators shift their pedagogical work over time. In sum, pedagogical work ideas and positioning theory weaving with the notion of tracing teacher pedagogical work overtime help me to account for details of how multicultural novice teacher educators operationalize their pedagogical work in their teaching and “find individual or social processes, a mechanism, a structure at the core of events that [can] be captured to provide a causal description of the forces at work” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p.4). I theorize that while undertaking the tasks of teaching multicultural education course throughout three semesters and attempt to operationalize it, (1) multicultural novice teacher educators shift their pedagogical work over time and constantly make sense of the changes happening while shifting; (2) this shifting is informed by their positioning, purposes, and ways of acting; (3) the ways in which they shift their pedagogical work can be considered a predictive for their future pedagogical work pathways. Methods Research Design The purpose of this study is to understand how multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work is constituted; how and why it shifts and moves over time; and what possible challenges are involved in the process. I drew on multiple methodological resources when designing this study. The first resource was my theoretical framework, which informed the decisions I made in crafting this study. These theoretical considerations influenced the design most notably in my commitments to crafting a study that (a) helps produce data to support novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work, and (b) allows for the examination of the relationship between my participants’ teaching experiences in multicultural education classrooms as a part of 24 the teacher education program as well as their narratives about how and why their pedagogical work shifts over time. The theoretical framework also led me to embed a commitment to understanding how classroom contexts and temporal scales influenced participants’ teaching experiences. The second set of methodological resources I drew from were resources that outline and describe standard processes and practices of qualitative research. For example, I drew on chapter 17, written by Robert. E. Stake from The Handbook of Qualitative Research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2004) and chapters from The Basics of Qualitative Research (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Strauss & Corbin’s (1998) chapters on designing qualitative research were particularly valuable as they helped me settle on a multiple case study design and also suggested I could draw on ethnographic methods to personalize my approach. As a result, I chose to make case studies a central structure of the study but included elements more typical of ethnography, like intensive field notes and allowing for the formal and informal conversation with participants in interviews. Finally, one of the more important resources I used in my research design was my experience conducting a semester-long pilot study in 2015 when I completed my practicum study about the multicultural teaching experiences of a novice teacher educator. There were considerable differences between the pilot study and this study: the cultural background of participants was different; the course syllabus and instruction had changed to some degree; different students enrolled in the course; and the research questions were entirely different. However, some of my experiences from the pilot study did inform decisions for my dissertation research. For example, I decided to include questionnaires in this study before my beginning- semester interviews in Fall 2017 to allow me to review my participants’ ideas before the interviews. This helped me focus interview time on participant responses to the questionnaires 25 that were the most interesting and relevant to the research. This study is a descriptive and interpretive multiple case study with ethnographic features. It is a case study in that it is “an intensive, holistic description and analysis of a single unit or bounded system” (Stake, 2004, p. 445)—a case of novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work that is constituted by their positionings, purposes, and actions in a classroom context and across time. By taking Stake’s (2004) point of view, I aim to understand more about the complexities of each case in itself and less about the context that bounds that case—I echoed Stake’s sentiment that “each case study is concentrated inquiry into a single case” (p. 444). Thus, I first examined each case, and then I compared cases to explore commonalities and differences. Taking this idea into account, I structured my methodological approach by framing each novice teacher educator as a single case, and then used a constant comparative approach to analyze the data on comparable dimensions of that novice teacher educator’s pedagogical work with that of other novice teacher educators across time and in multicultural classroom contexts (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Comparative case methodology helped me move the research beyond a description of each mode of novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work to understand and explicate common aspects of the dynamics that drive novice teacher positionings, assumptions, and enactment of their work (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Context This study was located in the MTE 101 course: A multicultural education course required for all preservice teachers at a predominately-White Midwestern institution of teacher education. The course is a social foundation course that introduces preservice teachers to the ways in which social inequality affects schooling and vice versa. It is designed to allow students to examine how socially constructed categories (such as social class, race, or gender) are used to privilege 26 some individuals and groups and marginalize others. The course meets three hours each week throughout the semester. Most instructors teaching the course are doctoral students or multicultural novice teacher educators who apply to teach the course for at least four semesters. Multicultural novice teacher educators adopt a curriculum framework designed by the university (with required course themes; requirements for students’ learning competencies, reading lists, and grading). Based on this framework, the multicultural novice teacher educators developed their own syllabi. Each syllabus reflected the curriculum framework requirements and allowed instructor autonomy in selecting course materials. Each semester, multicultural novice teacher educators met in required bi-weekly instructor group meetings to share teaching approaches, design common assignments, reflect on classroom practices, and share ideas to improve their teaching. During my research, multicultural novice teacher educators also met informally to talk about their individual needs and interests around the course. These novice teacher educators are usually assigned to teach one section in one classroom for the whole semester. The students are mostly White females and from middle-class backgrounds. Research Participants Two multicultural novice teacher educators were selected as research participants for this study. To select the participants, I relied on the course coordinator for her suggestions with consideration about the participants’ personal attributes (e.g., age, race, gender, etc.), how long they have taught the course, and their professional backgrounds. Participant 1 is John who is in his early 30s and defines himself as a married, native English speaker, and White American male. He was born in and grew up in northern Michigan. Prior to his doctoral studies, he was an elementary school teacher and had taught in the United States and abroad. At the time of my study, he was a second- and third-year doctoral student in 27 the teacher education program who taught the course for his first, second, and third time. Along with teaching the course, John was also an instructor of an immigrant language education course and a field instructor for interns in teacher education. John shared with me that although he had previous teaching experiences in cross-cultural teaching contexts, he had inadequate preparation for college teaching practices and responding to students in the classroom. Participant 2 is Sue who is in her early 30s and defines herself as an African American female and a native English speaker. She was born in Jamaica and grew up in the United States. Prior to her doctoral studies, she was a classroom teacher in elementary schools in New York City. At the time of my study, she was a first-and second-year doctoral student in the teacher education program. During my data collection, she taught the course for her first, second, and third time. Data Sources Data was collected in three rounds: Spring 2016, Fall 2016, and Spring 2017. Phases of the study and types of data are summarized in Table 1 below. Table 1: Phases of Study and Types of Data Phases of Study Types of Collected Data Spring 2016 Fall 2016 Spring 2017 Questionnaire survey; class observations; semi- structured interviews; artifacts, documents, lesson plans; Class observations; semi-structured interviews; artifacts, documents, lesson plans; students’ assignments and instructors’ feedback Class observations; semi-structured interviews; artifacts, documents, lesson plans; students’ assignments and instructors’ feedback. Participants John, Sue John, Sue John, Sue Questionnaire data. These data consisted of the systematic exploration of the participants’ formal career using a set of questions as the guidelines in preparation for the sit- down interviews. In the questionnaires, participants were asked to give a chronological overview 28 of their lived and working experiences around multicultural education issues. In addition, the questionnaires also contained open-ended questions about the perceptions of their actual job situation, the purpose that guided their teaching of teacher education practices, and factors that influenced their multicultural teaching. For example, the participants were asked about what they hoped to get from teaching multicultural education in a particular semester and what “teaching human diversity” meant to them given their previous lived and working experiences before their doctoral studies and their past teaching experiences with the multicultural course. These questionnaires were used in Fall 2016 and Spring 2017. Interviews. Interviews were semi-structured and included (1) a pre-interview during the first three weeks of the semester, and (2) during-semester interviews conducted after my class observations of selected lessons. Each interview lasted approximately 30–45 minutes. I chose this method to maintain flexibility in following up on ideas that emerged during the interviews or during observations. In addition, I included items in the interviews about unanticipated observations that took place during the semester. As positioning can be traced through people’s speech acts (Harre & van Langenhove, 1991), I focused on promoting and listening for stories during interviews. I did not ask direct questions about positioning but explored interviewees’ daily teaching practices, probing for detailed descriptive information about their actual work activities, as well as how they made sense of class activities. I also asked participants to describe and explain in detail their instructional goal for students and how their actions would lead to achieving these purposes. Interviewees were also asked to choose an artifact from their practice as an exemplar of their goals and pedagogical practices. For example, these artifacts included student assignments, lesson plans, and excerpts from an online discussion forum. During the interviews, I 29 systematically explored the artifacts as aspects of their sense-making and reflexive (re)positionings. Observations and field notes. I conducted observations in all of the courses where my research participants were instructors. During class observations, I positioned myself as an “observer as a participant” (Glesne, 2011). According to Glesne (2011), an observer as a participant primarily observes, but also minimally participates in activities. Because I did not wish to influence the discussions instructors had with students during their classes, I played a role of observer as a participant during my class observations. My participation in these types of settings means I did not speak, ask questions, or attempt to influence the discussions or experiences of the students and instructors in any way. Researcher’s Subjectivities The subjectivities of this study concern my personal characteristics, my roles as an insider in the study, and the accuracy of data interpretation. First, as a qualitative researcher, I recognized any observation and interpretation I made would be filtered through my own professional vision and biases created by my own experiences, values, and knowledge. I am an Asian woman whose teaching experience comes from a college of education in Vietnam. I had six years of teaching experience in the courses that my researcher participants taught in that college. I came to believe strongly that a better understanding of the pedagogical practices of multicultural teaching is the key to making actual change in teacher education classrooms. During the three semesters of data collection in the United States, my role was as course instructor; I worked with many instructors and two of them—John and Sue—were selected as research participants. Before and during my research, I was able to hear many stories about them, including their progress and struggles in their teaching which they brought to instructor group 30 meetings, as well as to many other informal conversations with me. My role as an insider in this study and my relationships with the novice teacher educators certainly influenced my interpretation of data, as well as the novice teacher educators’ responses because I knew them and their struggles. I was actually a part of the issues that novice teacher educators responded to, and I was aware all the participants might recognize this when they responded to my interview questions and completed questionnaires. With this in mind, I addressed the issue of subjectivity with multiple layers of triangulation. First, I used multiple theoretical perspectives to understand phenomenon from multiple data points on the same selected lesson, including observations of novice teacher educators themselves, other observations, interviews, memos, and questionnaires. By comparing the interpretation in their responses to my interview questions on the same teaching lesson, I was able to compare and triangulate my interpretation with others. Second, I set up comparisons of cases in similar contexts, and I was a part of their common context. Third, I conducted a formal inter-rater reliability check with another graduate student of my coding results with a sample of data. Data Analysis The purpose of this study is to understand how multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work is constituted, how and why they shift and change their pedagogy, and what are the possible challenges they encounter. In the analysis of data, I examined the modes of pedagogical work Sue and John engaged over time as they undertook their teaching and how this pedagogical work is constituted by Sue’s and John’s positionings, purposes, and actions. I began the analysis process by reading, rereading interview transcripts, and then dividing the transcripts into text fragments. The fragments’ length depended on their meaningfulness: all utterances constituting one coherent, meaningful message or viewpoint by Sue and John were 31 kept together in one fragment. Therefore, the length varied from a couple of words or sentences to a short paragraph. Within-case-analysis. The purpose of this study is to understand multicultural how novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work is constituted, how and why they shift and change their pedagogy, and what are the possible challenges they encounter. In the analysis of data, I examined the modes of pedagogical work Sue and John engaged over time as they undertook their teaching and how this pedagogical work is constituted by Sue’s and John’s positionings, purposes, and actions. I began the analysis process by reading, rereading interview transcripts, and then dividing the transcripts into text fragments. The fragments’ length depended on their meaningfulness: all utterances constituting one coherent, meaningful message or viewpoint by Sue and John were kept together in one fragment. Therefore, the length varied from a couple of words or sentences to a short paragraph. Cross-case-analysis. This goal of this analysis is to build a general pattern of explanation based on selective codes (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). The aim was to identify commonalities regarding Sue’s and John’s positioning of themselves, the positioning of their student teachers, and how this relates to their teacher education practices and student teachers’ possibilities for learning. In this phase, I used Sipe’s (2000) taxonomic analysis. This analysis focuses on generating more inclusive categories in the data by grouping segments of data as items in a subset of a more inclusive term. In this study, this included combining different contents of Sue’s and John’s understanding about the purpose and meaning of multicultural teaching; their conceptualization and sense-making of their interactions with students; and their pedagogical actions. 32 Limitations of Data Analysis There are considerable limitations to the methods and analysis I adopted for the research in this chapter. The first limitation is that I mostly selected the categories and sub-categories (further refining a category into specific properties and dimensions) (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) that closely reflected the theoretical accounts embedded in my chosen theoretical framework and what I saw as the commonalities among the events/actions/viewpoints of two research participants. I did this to accomplish my purpose of creating conceptual categories (namely, positionings, point of view, actions, and being positioned by the students) which emerged from research participants’ responses (Sipe, 2000, p. 263). Strauss & Corbin (1998) stated that conceptual categories must be brief enough to support researchers to describe them in a small research scope like the research I am doing in this chapter. I am aware that by doing so, the subcategories chosen in my study might not have covered all diverse properties of my data, such as the race and gender differences between the two research participants. To address this limitation, the incorporation of my research participants’ detailed narrative that included their insight about their race and gendered experiences in my discussion of findings which includes the analytical lens I used to discuss the findings. The second limitation is that qualitative case study research does not lend itself to generalization to other cases. While it might contribute to the development of mid-range theory about what may be happening in similar cases if replicated in another case, the value is to shed light onto pedagogical practices in a specific classroom context and particular points in time through my own theoretical and methodological lenses. The primary goal of this case study is theory building, not generalizability. The third limitation is that I am the primary coder and interpreter of the data. There was 33 no process of determining inter-rater reliability across coders, nor were there group discussions between researchers about how to interpret certain events. For this reason, the research positionality as I mentioned above is particularly important for readers to understand how my subjectivity and positionality inform every aspect of the research, which includes the analytical lens I used to interpret the results. Research Findings The purpose of this study is to understand how multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work is constituted, how and why it shifts and moves over time, and what possible challenges are involved. The findings indicate three pedagogical modes of multicultural teaching. My presentation of these findings is organized in the following way: Each pedagogical mode charts the positions and repositions that novice teacher educators took for themselves, followed by descriptions about their purposes for what they wanted to achieve based on their positionings, and then the preferred instructional ways that they chose in the classroom. All of these descriptions include narrative about how multicultural novice teacher educators thought about how their students recognize what they did in the classrooms. After presenting the description of each mode, I synthesize my main points and indicate the noticeable shifts in pedagogical work that novice teacher educators took over time. The brief details of three pedagogical modes are summarized in table 2. 34 Table 2: Novice Teacher Educators’ Multicultural Teaching Modes of Pedagogical Work Semesters Multicultural Positioning Purposes Action Teaching Modes How Sue and John (re)position What Sue and John aim to achieve What Sue and John do Spring 2016 Foreground positionality a positional teacher educator, students would feel empowered, Fall 2016 Critique social problems critical pedagogue, Spring 2017 Act against racial neoliberalism social- activist- teacher educator, students would understand the structural power dynamics, students would turn their understandin g into action, relate students’ positionality with their life experiences, elicit students to interpret social practices, elicit students to act to confront power relations, Being Positioned by Students How students recognize Sue’s and John’s work count on some students’ voice but leave others the feelings of being untouched. engage students with social meanings but create students’ unsettled feelings. some students doubt the realities of changes in racial neoliberal orders Multicultural Teaching Mode 1: Foregrounding Positionalities Self-position as positional teacher educators. Making positionalities of race, gender, language, and sexuality prominent in classroom discussion about multicultural education was a central teaching mode that Sue and John engaged during Spring 2016. Sue and John viewed themselves as instructors aware of their institutional authority and also considered their positionalities as a constitutive part of their teaching. Sue and John mentioned in the interviews that while they saw themselves as instructors who were appointed by the department to teach multicultural education, they also believed they could teach only if their teaching intersected with their positionalities. For example, positioning himself as “a White male heterosexual 35 teacher educator,” John thought that he had decided to teach the course because he wanted to bring the experiences that were shaped by his multiple privileged identities—White, middle- class, heterosexual, able-bodied, and native-English-language speaker into his teaching. He hoped these privileged positionalities might encourage students to share their experiences with him about how their privileged or marginalized positionalities related to their sense of being valued or not valued in society. Purposes. The ways Sue and John positioned themselves closely related to what they aimed to achieve in their classrooms. Both Sue and John set up goals in which they expected students to feel empowered—for example, students should be able to share how they navigated their experiences with social problems in their daily lives—the experiences that were associated with their positionalities. John indicated that [i]t is imperative for me to negotiate between multiple tensions in my teaching to make students feel [that] their stories are listened to. As a White man, I know I belong to mainstream social practices, so I feel good when I am able to support students, especially who are under-privileged, to speak out loud the experiences that might have been distorted by the mainstream power. It’s important for them [under-privileged people], through education, to have a sense of liberating themselves from being oppressed and to believe that they are ones who can claim the knowledge of their own. Similarly, Sue emphasized that creating class environment that scaffolds students’ feeling of empowered through listening to stories of students who came from marginalized positionalities was an important goal in her teaching. She said, A [future] teacher has the power to make or break children whether she takes into account or neglects what social background their children come from, what experiences 36 students gain from their own background, and how valuable they are to the world. I want my students, who are future teachers, to consider these by creating a wide variety of opportunities to make them express their own experiences to make them visible to the world. I hope they’d feel they are not denied from any chances of staying true to who they want to be in the social order. Action. Sue’s and John’s self-positioning and goals represent the preferred ways they engaged with their students. As shown in Table 3, Sue and John seemed to enact their goals by focusing on eliciting students to reflect and talk about their experiences with actual social problems and from their particular positionalities. They included three specific instructional strategies that have been mentioned in the literature: encouraging students to express their or others’ difficult experiences (Cochran-Smith, 1991); charting students’ experiences with their positionality (Ellsworth, 1989) and encouraging students to speak about their experiences by dialoguing with others with different positionalities (McLaren, 2009). Table 3: Foreground Positionality—Examples of Sue’s and John’s Action Context of the Class Incident Class Incidents Incident 1 Students watched the movie If These Halls Can Talk followed by John’s request for the whole class discussion asking them to share how they thought about the movie in connections to their positionality. Summaries of Sue’s and John’s Action When John asked students to speak about their feelings after watching the movie, no students responded. John jumped in telling his own feelings about the movie. He said the movies reminded him about his White man positionality turning himself in feeling angry about what was happening to the African American people shown in the movie and that it was difficult for him to watch till the movie ended. Summaries of Students’ Responses One student who is White man followed John’s words, sharing that the film was an eye-opening moment for him because it was a real history lesson and stories that he did not know before and how what John said helped him better imagine the tough life of black people. 37 Table 3 (cont’d) Incident 2 Students were asked to discuss the final assignment topics Sue asked students to identify their positionalities in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation status and write the assignments that reflect their life experiences in relation to these positionalities. One African American student announced she wanted to write her assignment on her hair in relation to her sexual orientation identity and refused to respond to Sue’s question about her reason for why she chose that topic. A noticeable theme of the ways in which Sue and John enacted their teaching goals was that as they assumed their roles in supporting students to share their experiences from privileged and marginalized positionalities, they tended to use their own positionalities as a mediating account to facilitate class discussion. For example, when Sue and John expected students’ experiences about social problems to be heard by others, they shared their own feelings with their students about what they considered oppressive experiences themselves. How John responded to his students in class incident 2 on Table 3 is an illustration of this strategy. While reflecting on African-Americans’ tough lives, John also shared with his students that through his White man positionalities, he found himself vulnerable to what he thought of as social oppression of African Americans. Just as John expected students to bring their own experiences about social problems into class discussion, he personified this expectation for the whole class. Being positioned by students. As Sue and John self-positioned as ones who were capable of stimulating students to talk about their own experiences in the classroom and enact their instructions accordingly, they began to notice students’ reactions to what they did and to reflect upon how what they did was recognized by students. There were two class incidents that led to Sue’s and John’s feelings of embarrassment. In the first, Sue, who used her positionality and experiences as an African American woman to stimulate student’s talk about their experiences with gendered issues, received push-back from students: 38 I put forth a question to her [student] [while] keeping in mind that I’d hear more of her voice, just as what I have learned from Freire, Ladson-Billings, and my mentors. But, you see, as I wanted her to speak up, she refused. What happened next was [that] after class, she [as her preferred pronoun] left me a note in the stack of students’ exit tickets that she thought most of what I had done was off and that it would have been better if I had told class how my experiences were related to one who viewed themselves in a third gender. The second incident was John’s reflection about how his anti-racism agenda and his respective instructional strategies made him feel crippled as he recognized that some of his students expected him to act like a “nice White guy,” referring him to their allies who support the dominance of people with privileged positionalities. Referring to students’ reactions to the prompt he posted in the class incident 1 presented on Table 3, John recalled: I’d always try to express myself in class that I’d confront racism and name it and ask my students to grapple with it. But some students thought that I’m a nice White guy who has shared [the] membership of [the] White club with them. So, when I put White identity as a dominant [social] group as a prompt for class discussion to challenges those who had privilege, some [students] thought that I’d withdrawn my white membership. One student caught me when I was walking from class to my office with a question about whether by doing so, I had withdrawn my race card from the race table of White people. Reflection on being positioned by students. While reflecting on how what they did in the classroom was recognized by students, Sue and John expressed a sense of uncertainty. Sue said, At that moment, I felt extremely embarrassed. I was embarrassed not just because my intentions to place a question on her [student who self-defined as a third gender person] 39 choice of the topic for the assignment, but also because I wondered if my heterosexuality hindered the ways students take up my question. “Should I dive in or draw back?” if I want to continue the conversation with her in the next class. “What did they [students] think about me being not capable [of] understand[ing] their experiences? John expressed somewhat similar feelings: At the moment [the moment that student asked John if he had withdrawn his White card from the race table of White people] I felt hesitant. I hesitated to move forward. Am I less capable to move my agenda forward while calling on my Whiteness in it than I thought? Sue’s question (”what did they [students] think about me being not capable of understanding their experiences?”) and John’s question (“am I less capable to move my agenda forward while calling on my Whiteness in it than I thought?”) seemed to refer directly to Sue’s and John’s uncertainty about whether their intentions to use their positionalities to their teaching resources were positively taken up by students. Putting all together, in Spring 2016, Sue and John operationalized their pedagogical work by mainly foregrounding positionalities in class discussion, and by encouraging students to share their experiences as they pertained to marginalized or privileged positionalities in which students were categorized. Sue and John accomplished these tasks by positioning themselves as instructors who embraced positionalities as central to their teaching and by setting goals to promote the feeling of inclusiveness among students. They enacted their teaching by taking up pedagogical strategies that used their positionalities as a mediating account to facilitate students’ reflections. Students’ reactions were mixed, varying from appreciating Sue’s and John’s actions, to being concerned. Most of the students’ concerns arose among students who found it difficult to speak about their experiences coming from marginalized positionalities in large group 40 discussion. Multicultural Teaching Mode 2: Encourage Students to Critique Social Problems In Fall 2016, I noticed Sue and John made considerable changes in their course reading selections on their syllabus, as well as the ways they facilitated class discussion. My interviews and observations, then, showed they began positioning themselves, assuming pedagogical intentions, and carrying out instructional strategies differently from those in Spring 2016. These changes, according to them, were designed to assist their students in critiquing social problems through class discussion. Reposition as critical pedagogues. Central to the pedagogical work in the Fall 2016 was a teaching mode in which Sue and John’s focus on encouraging students to critique social problems. Both Sue and John considered themselves to be critical “pedagogues”: teachers who claimed certain teaching knowledge and experiences about the meanings of common social practices constituted by hegemonic power practices (Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2014). John said he intended to see himself differently in the new semester based on his sense-making about students’ reactions toward what he did in the previous semester (Vanassche & Kelchtermans, 2014). While he thought his positionalities were still an important element of his teaching, he also wanted to be one who could connect class discussion to the broader social world: Moving forward from the feelings of embarrassment [of student’s reflections during his past teaching semester], I still feel instances of imposter syndrome periodically, but I have also been able to look at my position again as an instructor to find the strengths from the problems. I liked to pick up what was left off as a good thing of my past teaching. But, I have started this semester rethinking about it and myself, reaching out to adjust my teaching for the concern of students while still keeping in mind my social 41 positionality as a White man, maybe I should call myself less as an instructor, but more a pedagogue—the word I have picked up from my [doctoral] course work, referring teachers to a nest of all relational, social, political, and moral aspects. I can do something, like, adjust[ing] the social norms through assisting students to understand the complexities of the world out there [the social world]. Sue was also able to respond to a specific student’s expectation, which also resulted in changing the way she positioned herself: Student reactions in the last semester got me thinking. This semester I want to appropriate my pedagogy to cater to those diverse needs. I’m now [in] my second year in the [doctoral] program, and as I’ve taken course work, I see myself having some knowledge and stances about how to be critical to the social practices. I’d like to assist students to know more about what has been really going on in socially problematic organizations, such as schools and the lives of each individual. These reflections show that Sue and John regarded themselves as people with a theoretical specialization and expertise, which, in their view, allowed them to analyze educational phenomena and reveal social relations of oppression invisible to those who do not use a critical lens to examine the social world. Purposes. By repositioning themselves as critical pedagogues, Sue and John’s teaching goals were to assist students in understanding the dynamics of social problems. John said students needed to be able “to name and interpret the dominant ideologies, cultures, economies, institutions and political systems.” He added, “I think, as an instructor, I’d like to have students interrogate particular social problems, concerning race and gender and to use their critiques to engage uncovering the truth beyond those problems.” He continued, “students need to interrogate 42 social practices to notice whose voices and stories are heard. For their part, they need to learn to develop critical mind and analytical skills to examine unjust social practices.” Similarly, Sue said: I’d like to invite my students to the learning process in which they are supported to have an eye of an investigator who practice focusing their experiences on social problems. How the poor life affects the world and why? Why has such a poor life happened? Why do the lives of underprivileged individuals happen in some undesirable ways? Sue also shared the same experiences with John, especially with respect to the importance of the “interrogation of the social practices.” Sue mentioned the “interrogating of multiple viewpoints,” in which she assumed she would feel good about her teaching if she were able to ask students to interrogate social problems; to notice whose voices and stories are heard; whose are not heard; and “how power, history, and ideology are inscribed in particular values that each student brings into their school life.” Sue’s and John’s reflections on the purposes of their teaching in the context of their new positioning reveal they placed more interest in working with the core conceptions of social problems; aiming to work with students to explain the social world; and to identify the roles education plays in making social change happen rather than self-reflecting on what social issues occur around them. Action. Table 4 includes Sue’s and John’s two main strategies to facilitate class discussion: focusing on hegemonic messages behind social practices (Parkhouse, 2018), and interrogating cultural models embedded in narratives about social problems (Connors & Rish, 2015). 43 Table 4: Encouraging Critique of Social Problems—Examples of Sue’s and John’s Action Context of the Class Incident Class Incidents Incident 1 Students watched extracts from the animated film Beauty and the Beast. Incident 2 Students were asked to discuss the final assignment topics Summaries of Sue’s and John’s Action Sue requested students to join the whole class discussion, asking them to use feminist readings to interpret gender hegemony represented in the film. Sue asked students to identify their positionalities in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation status and write the assignments that reflect their life experiences in relation to these positionalities. Incident 3 John introduced cultural value models: feminist model and oppressive cultural model. Students watched the Chimamanda’s TED talk, The Danger of Single Stories. John set up class for a small group discussion John asked: What cultural values did Chimamanda bring to the talk? Could you name those values? If you are asked to attend to the conversation with the speaker, what cultural values would you bring in? Summaries of Students’ Responses One student responded to Sue’s question, indicating that the movie portrayed a girl with femininity figures as ways to attract the men or to please them and that reflected social construct of women and femininity. One African American student announced she wanted to write her assignment on her hair in relation to her sexual orientation identity and refused to respond to Sue’s question about her reason for why she chose that topic. Other student raised different opinion, stating that the movie was no more than a love story movie and that he felt ways of disconnection to the feminist reading and of uncertainty about having the movie thought in a message about sexism. One student responded to John’s question, asserting that the feminist model was helpful for her to better understand an oppressive model over race and gender. Other student shared that he regarded feminists as angry militants who belittle men and take the fight for gender equality to unnecessary extremes. A noticeable theme emerged from the ways in which Sue and John performed in their classrooms: they engaged students to make sense of both small narrative and cultural models 44 about power imbalances embedded in social problems. John, for example, was consistent in facilitating students to examine social problems. The purpose is for students to not imply neutral practices or the status quo, but to ask them to expose themselves to small narratives about social problems from everyday people while introducing the cultural model which “either reflect liberating ideologies or ways to understand how the status quo is reinforced and the power imbalances are reified” (Connors & Rish, 2015). Being positioned by students. As the course approached the end of the semester, Sue and John noticed how their actions were positioned in class. While some students recognized what Sue and John did actually helped them gain more experiences about the social world, others expressed unsettled feelings. For example, Sue reported that after the class period, a few students approached her and asked why the experts who commented on the Beauty and the Beast video really wanted to disregard many beloved aspects of the movie. Sue said these students did not seem to dismiss their classmates’ and the experts’ interpretations and critiques. But they claimed that if the critique was a required way to interpret the movie, then they would feel unsettled about being forced to construe the movie’s meaning in a particular way. Sue shared during our end-of-semester interviews that “[when I] hear[d] those students’ concern, I could feel like I saw their mind [going in a] whirlwind about what was happening in the class[room] moments.” Not all students in Sue’s and John’s classes were entirely engaged in the ways these teachers encouraged them to explore and interpret hidden meanings of social practices. Reflections on being positioned by students. While reflecting on how students recognized what they did, Sue and John expressed uncertainty about instructional strategies. Sue continued to reflect on students’ reaction to the Beauty and the Beast class incident above: Although it [above conversation] was happening in the past few weeks, I’m now still 45 feeling that I’m not so sure about what I have achieved in that lesson. I was pretty sure that I tied the lesson to the tools of critical thinking, [with the] hope of creating a condition for students to understand how the biased messages inscribed in the movie or social media would make it hard for education to change the negative social norms over particular social groups. I felt OK seeing some students immediately got the points I wanted to share. So, I was not sure what I did left all students truly engaged in the topic. I know I shouldn’t view the concern of those students like, “they don’t want to get it.” There is something there that made me think maybe I had missed an important thing . . . John also shared the same sense with Sue in that he was uncertain about whether his intentions to engage students with a critical lens might not have met what students thought about what the critical lens should be: th[e] [ways in which he required of students to wear a critical lens all the time to look at social problems] reminds me about what has driven the ways I taught the course and the constraints I think I have had... I wanted to construct a classroom discussion with a feminist foundation based on my experiences as a White man and native American English speaker. But I felt sometimes my students remained in their own spaces, leaving the notion of critique behind. On the whole, Sue and John operationalized their teaching in Fall 2016 by making a move away from mainly using student’s and instructor’s positionalities as teaching resources to primarily encouraging students to critique social problems. They did so by repositioning themselves as critical pedagogues who had expertise about the nature of social problems and by setting goals to facilitate students to uncover the structural power dynamics in society. Sue and John enacted their teaching by taking up pedagogical strategies that engaged students in making sense of both 46 personal narratives and cultural models about power imbalances hidden in social problems. Students’ reactions to Sue’s and John’s ways of instruction were mixed, varying from acknowledging Sue and John’s expertise to complaining that Sue’s and John’s teaching seemed to be forceful, therefore making them feel at times unsettled and bewildered. Multicultural Teaching Mode 3: Act Against Racial Neoliberalism My interviews and observations showed that as John continued his teaching in Spring 2017, he began to switch his positioning and accordingly, teaching goals, and the ways he facilitated students in the classroom—all to focus on assisting students to act against racial neoliberalism practices Reposition as a social-activist-teacher educator. Making sense of students’ responses in Fall 2016, John switched his positioning in Spring 2017, describing himself as an activist- teacher educator, one who played a dual role: “teaching multicultural education to prospective teachers while committing to become a social change agent” (Gorski, 2012). Citing Tim Wise, John explained why he committed to this position: As it stands now at the beginning of this semester, I’m pretty sure that I want to set my path toward a researcher and a teacher who works on anti-racism. I was inspired a lot by Tim Wise’s statements. One was when he said: Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture. What his saying means to me was [that] it forced me to ask myself daily: What do I do research and teaching for? Racism is there for a long time and there’s a lot of research to confirm that racism is so ubiquitous. There’s also a lot of talk about the political aspects sneaking into standardized tests that teachers shared. But we need someone who has research and teaching experiences and is willing to stand up not only for questioning but acting against the 47 orders that reinforce racism. I felt good hoping for adding such a role to my “pedagogue” roles, and maybe this semester is a time to try. When asked about whether students’ White identities would be a concern in his repositioning, John responded, “I felt it was important that I explicitly name racism and other injustices so that students would know they could do so without fear so that they may not find the issue too controversial to discuss in class.” These responses seemed to indicate John intended to change his position by focusing more on supporting students to act for social justice because he had a strong purpose. One prerequisite to the latter was his ability to name, or “verbalize and call out those things [injustices] when they occur” (Parkhouse, 2018), and that was because students of privileged backgrounds may first need to become aware of those injustices and have practice recognizing them. Purposes. As John wanted to focus on racial biases and how these biases would affect individual students, as well as the whole system, John assumed that if students were facilitated to engage in discussion about neoliberal racial orders, they would be able to turn their understanding and awareness of the political and social forces and the dynamics of power imbalances about racial practices into action for change: It is important to set my students in the place in which they can stay informed about the neoliberal pieces embedded in each education aspects. How, for example, as future teachers would they, not only understand, but confront high-stakes testing that has had a negative effect on teachers and students, and curriculum, as well as increase the number of underprivileged students dropping out of schools? In narrowing in on this point more closely in relation to his teacher-activist position, John added, “it is all about what and how the instructors start the dialogues. If students hesitate to speak 48 openly about racial biases, then, the instructor would indicate the effects of neoliberalism from this first day [with a hope that] it will make students more willing to call those things out in the present, and then to act on them.” According to John, what made his teaching a good teaching was when this goal was enabled in practice and “through dialogues between teachers and students and between students and students about the effect of structural biases on learning opportunities of individual students with particular race” and “joining social movement[s] where it is possible.” Action. As presented in Table 5, John’s intentions to help students translate their understanding about racial biases to action against racial neoliberalism was represented in the ways he created a dialogue with students about racial injustice practices that needed attention. These instructions included two specific strategies: naming injustice (e.g., racial biases) (Parkhouse, 2018), and questioning the legitimating norms of mainstream groups about racial practices (McLaren, 2009). Table 5: Confront Racial Neoliberalism—Examples of John’s Action Class Incidents Incident 1 Before having Context of the Class Incident students watch the news about the grand jury decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, John introduced the video clip. Summaries John’s Action John spoke for a length, narrating his reflection about the news. He said he recognized that it was an obvious case of racism and that he realized society has granted him the White privilege to feel these things as empathy rather than a threat. He asked how White students would do to challenge the hegemonic system. Summaries of Students’ Responses Most students responded that votes, writing letters to Congress, discussing that kind of new with students when going to teach would make the system change. 49 Table 5 (cont’d) Incident 2 Students read about standardized testing system and how it might harm Students of Color’s learning opportunities. John asked students to read an article about how standardized testing reflected the ideas of neoliberal hegemony. He then engaged students to re-read and re-examine “An Indian Father’s Pleas” to get an idea about how this policy privileges the interest of learning of White American students while threatening that of students of color as well as to think about ways to confront the neoliberal ideologies. One student reacted by asking whether it might be realistic to act against the policy and that the boy student in the reading had his own learning process [that] came from his distinct cultures, he continues to learn, and he wants to learn more and that got him think he wanted to teach. What John did in class reflected his self-repositioning as a teacher activist who engaged classroom discussion in the topics about the confrontation of racial neoliberalism for its racial biases through taking action to address the impact of neoliberal practices. John’s introduction to the case of Michael Brown and his follow-up question posted for class discussion demonstrates his engagement to call for action against racial neoliberalism, which seemed to elicit focused attention by students. Being positioned by students. As John began to reflect on what he noticed about students’ reactions to his teaching during the semester and how those reactions made them think about what he did was recognized or positioned by the students, I was most struck by John’s narrative about his students’ responses to the dialogue about the relationship between mainstream curriculum and the Indian boy’s learning style in class incident 2 in Table 5. John shared that near the end of the semester, he met a student on his way from the library to his office. She was troubled, she said, by the hypocrisy she was experiencing in the course, in which she was being taught to understand the critique on the neoliberal social order. She said that she did not “feel” the critique in such a way that she would be inclined to turn her 50 understanding into action. John commented, At times, like when talking with this student . . . This student seemed to doubt the actual changes of social issues and neoliberalism, especially when she said she liked to make changes, too, but suspected if the change really happens and if yes, when it takes place. These responses show that while some students considered what John did to encourage them to connect their understanding about racial neoliberalism to their possible actions against racial neoliberalism seemed helpful, others doubted his actions. Perhaps some pieces of John’s pedagogical enactment were seen by some students as too idealistic that left them feeling doubtful about the possibilities of actual changes in racial neoliberalism practices. Reflection on being positioned by students. While reflecting on how students recognized what he did, John expressed feelings of ambiguity about what might or might not work for students. Her question got me to think a lot. There may be something I didn’t know about students’ experiences, especially about racial biases under the effect of neoliberalism. I may have pushed them helplessly toward what I think should make sense for them. At this point, I felt like my whole personal assumption and philosophy of teaching this semester as being a teacher-activist person contradicted the practices I have seen through those reactions. Later on, at the end-of-semester interview, John recalled this same class incident, referred to his social-justice teaching philosophy, and expressed his contradictory feeling: I feel like if I were able to stop at that point, I would not be pushed back . . . but that I would be giving up on this [in teaching about racism with implication about actions to confront neoliberalism] that I had said I commit to and [so] I feel uncomfortable about it. Teaching for social justice as an anti-racist teacher carries something that maybe teaching 51 [by itself] doesn’t. I see everything that I do as a political act as I tended to steer the discussion toward the confrontation of racial neoliberalism, so I am not sure which plane I should be inclined to so as to get the right way to all students. This response shows John seemed to constantly struggle to make sense of the effect of his teaching in the position of a teacher-activist. John desired more positive recognition from students while continuing to worry about negative reactions from students. In summary, John operationalized his teaching in Spring 2017 by shifting his teaching toward encouraging students to act against neoliberal racial orders. He did so by repositioning himself as a social-activist-teacher educator committed to teaching while advocating social activism; he highlighted an intention to work together with students toward a common goal of combating neoliberalism, aiming to support students to translate their understanding of neoliberalism’s dynamics into its practices. John enacted his teaching goals through two pedagogical strategies in which he seemed to seriously call on students to debunk the invasion of neoliberal racial ideologies in education and asked them to take action for social change. Students’ reactions were also mixed. Some of the things John did were recognized by students as significant while other students doubted the content of social change toward racial neoliberalism and whether it was realistically possible in the future. Potential Pathways: Agentic Action, Critical Pedagogy Commitment, and Challenges This study draws on the concept of pedagogical work, the theoretical framework of teacher positioning, and tracing multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work over time. It is situated within the multicultural education classroom context of two multicultural novice teacher educators, Sue and John. The study seeks to understand the dynamics of these two multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work and how that work is constituted and 52 moves over time. The findings, then, segue into multicultural novice teacher educator’s (re)positionings, purposes, and actions that constitute three modes of pedagogical work: foreground positionality, encouraging critique of social problems, and encouraging action against racial neoliberalism. When taken together, these modes, alongside the theoretical framework, reveal multicultural novice teacher educators’ engagement in continuously shifting their pedagogical work with a hope to foster classroom discussion about multicultural education. The pedagogical work accumulated in and across time and occurs because of these multicultural novice teacher educators’ personal desires and within the fluid teacher-student relationship in the classroom where the pedagogical work and its shifts take place; this is a trace of multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work. The moments of shifting pedagogical work crystalize in time and in multicultural education classroom contexts signal what the pedagogical work of multicultural novice teacher educators will look like in the future. In the following sections, I look across these three modes and across time, then into each individual multicultural novice teacher educators’ pedagogical experiences. I then connect the findings back to themes outlined in the literature review and the idea about of “local agency” in positioning theory I mentioned in the theoretical framework section. I discuss how the findings help inform the pedagogical pathways of multicultural novice teacher educators. Specifically, I note the common tendencies in Sue’s and John’s multicultural teaching modes of pedagogical work to pursue agentic action and to pursue a commitment to critical pedagogy. These pursuits were not easy. Their work was constrained by undesired effects in the classroom that led to their feelings of vulnerability, specifically uncertainty and ambiguity about ways to teach the course effectively. 53 Agentic Action The first commonality between Sue’s and John’s multicultural teaching modes of pedagogical work is their agentic action seemed to play the central role in shifting their teaching purposes and strategies in their relationships with students. The findings show that both Sue and John moved their pedagogical work: they constantly moved back and forth between what they intended to do, and their observations of what students recognized what they intended to do. This led to a continual changing of positions. Both the movement and the observation of students’ reactions resulted in the shifts of Sue’s and John’s roles in the classroom: the positional teacher educator, the critical pedagogue, and the social-activist-teacher educator. It is noteworthy that Sue’s and John’s fluid (re)positioning was intrinsically linked to their ways of (re)thinking their teaching purposes and their revisions of pedagogical strategies. For example, in Fall 2016, Sue switched her position from being “a positional teacher” to “a critical pedagogue.” By engaging in this (re)positioning, she made sense of students’ reactions. She responded to these reactions by choosing teaching strategies based on student ideas and responses; for example, she adapted the Beauty and the Beast movie clip as a new teaching resource to help students adopt a critical lens to analyze gender hegemony, then applied reciprocal understandings and used this application to encourage discussion and exploration in class discussions. So, too, was the case with John. As he reflected upon when he had seen of student responses to his racial positionality in Spring 2017, he then used that reflection in Fall 2017 as a resource to modify his pedagogical strategies. By inviting students into the discussion about a feminist cultural model, John seemed to readjust his relational struggles with students based on his positioning switches that led him to focus more on having students engage with critiquing social problems through a feminist lens. According to Harre and van Langenhove (1999), the 54 shifts and switches based on Sue’s and John’s positioning and repositioning across multiple classrooms can be considered agential action—an action in which they acted based on their individual view of the situations in class from their specific position. This agential action is situated in their relationships with students, their reflections about their observations of students’ reactions, what these novice educators made sense of, and what they felt would move their teaching forward in responding to students’ reactions. Undergirding these moves and agentic actions were Sue’s and John’s understandings of the roles their positionalities (race and gender) played in their positioning changes. John, for example, demonstrated this understanding by constantly reflecting upon his White male identity and the purposes, emotions, and commitments that were based on this identity to navigate and adjust his pedagogical work. This was shown in his sensitivity toward student feelings about having or not having the motivation to move forward with particular learning topics but also to challenge himself (as a White male teacher educator) and his students to interrogate certain ideas and thoughts about racial neoliberalism. Through this positional reflexivity, he also began to confront his anxiety by making these feelings into the implications for his teacher-activist repositioning—all were to serve his purpose of socially just teaching. Important aspects of this process were his reflection about his students calling him a “teacher who withdraws the White identity card from race table”; his concerns about being a White man who challenges White students; and his thoughts about being perceived as a nice White guy (Kenyon, 2019). All three aspects exemplify the value of his attention to his racial positionality to increase his readiness to switch, move, and change his pedagogical work. At first, Sue’s efforts to engage her teaching through her gendered and African-American positionality seemed threatened to her own sense of authority as an institutional teacher, and 55 though she tried to overcome many of the struggles prompted by her overwhelming ambivalence, Sue also encountered some negative student responses. This challenging navigation was stirred up in her reflection on what she had seen as students’ push-back to her request to critique social problems as seen in class incident 2 in Table 4. Ellsworth (1989) explained that coping with the struggles coming from the experiences with one’s own positionality can lead to in-depth reflection on ways to shift one’s action toward change. This might be true for Sue, as evidenced in the ways she translated student’s push-back recognition into the changes in her relationships with students (as shown in her responses to the student who identified as a third gender person) and her efforts to question her own pedagogical perspectives (as shown in her reflection about whether her pedagogical changes might be worthwhile for the purposes of socially just teaching during the end-of-semester interviews in Spring 2016). As these relational and positional-based agentic actions occurred across three semesters, they tended to accumulate over time—that is, they not only capture the detailed nature of Sue’s and John’s pedagogical work from past to present, but also their momentum toward the future aspects of their sense of self as novice teacher educators of multicultural education, and the relational nature of their teaching. Thus, it is likely Sue’s and John’s pedagogical work might center on this agentic action in which they “switch [a] sense of self” or “the investment in self” to mediate their multiple self-positions in their future multicultural teaching pathways, or, as Akkerman & Bakker (2011) put it, “in such a way that a more or less coherent and consistent sense of self is maintained throughout various participations and self-investments in one’s [teaching] life” (p. 315). Commitment to Critical Pedagogy The second commonality between Sue’s and John’s multicultural teaching modes of 56 pedagogical work is they tended to seriously incorporate the ideas of critical pedagogy into their pedagogical purposes of and actions for multiculturalism. One example is their expressed commitment to foreground positionality. John’s commitment to use his social positionality to create a connection between his social experiences and those of students who are seen as underprivileged. According to John, this connective creation aimed to support his purpose of letting students feel empowered by asking him (as a teacher) to join students’ lives. Also, Sue’s intention to “learn from or be a learner of the students and the experiences they carry with them to class” and to “put forth a question to student while keeping in mind that students put forth their voice toward the question,” reflected her strong will to promote student voice and empowerment. What both John and Sue did here, in fact, echoed Giroux’s & McLaren’s (1986) expectations about the roles of critical pedagogy in classrooms—that is, student voice needs to be supported by teachers for being open to public debate and on the platform of sharing to be “the measures by which both teachers and students participate in the dialogue, any social experiences shared and expressed through” (p. 251). Another example was shown by how John engaged students in using various cultural models to make sense of particular social practices incorporated in course readings. In this incident, John’s pedagogical strategies seemed to precisely reflect critical pedagogy ideals in which instructors are in charge of “developing students’ capacities to read the word and the world” (Freire & Macedo, 1987), or develop student consciousness about their right to know the truth behind social practices. Indeed, John used and applied critical pedagogies of advocates, such as Peter McLaren, who believed that once students gain abilities to understand the hidden meanings behind social practices, they could then transfer this knowledge to analyzing how such power imbalance reinforces the hegemonic order. Present in each of the examples mentioned 57 above is Sue’s and John’s embrace of nuance and distinctive aspects of critical pedagogy, as they pertain directly to empowerment and critical consciousness to engage students in the learning process of multicultural education. In committing to critical pedagogy, Sue and John were influenced by their past experiences, life history, and their own doctoral study experiences as these experiences pertained directly to their uses of critical pedagogy as a tool to help students to understand the social world. For example, Sue’s commitment to critical pedagogy stemmed from her own experiences as she used the scholarly work of Freire (1974) which, according to her, supported her choice of Beauty and the Beast among many other teaching materials to, as she put it, “foster the kinds of critical thinking practices about gendered issues she wanted students to be able to use in their own lives.” Likewise, John seemed to have a strong commitment to critical pedagogy as he thought that it “trained himself to wear critical thinking and a feminist lens through his everyday life and was tempted to bring that lens to walk into his own teaching.” For John, this commitment encouraged him to select the cultural value model to introduce a feminist lens to support students’ ability to interpret social problems through a feminist lens while also, as John put it, “helping [him] show students that unless [they] wear critical lenses regularly, the unequal power relations can happen right beneath [their] noses.” Sue’s and John’s personal and professional experiences and perhaps, the reflections that followed, informed their commitment to their enactment of a critical pedagogy. In the future, it is likely Sue and John will employ their understanding of, experiences about, and investments in a critical pedagogy that is informed by some central idea about critical pedagogy tenets (e.g., empowering students through supporting them to have voice in the social world) and their own experiences about how to think and act critically in the field of multicultural education. 58 Challenges: Students’ Mixed Reactions and Multicultural Novice Teacher Educators’ Sense of Vulnerability The third commonality between Sue’s and John’s multicultural teaching modes of pedagogical work is that although they pursued agentic actions and committed to critical pedagogy, they both encountered a prominent challenge, concerning undesired effects of classroom discussion, leading to Sue’s and John’s sense of vulnerability (Chubbuck & Zembylas, 2008. Sue and John faced embarrassing situations, particularly when their students reacted to classroom discussions in unexpected ways. One example is that Sue was uncertain about how to respond to the reactions of students who self-defined with a third gender in the classroom discussion about relations between students’ life experiences with their positionalities. Her wondering, “should I dive in or draw back?” provides evidence that she grappled with her instructional strategies and ways to make sense of the gendered experiences that student had experienced prior to classroom discussion. Her question to herself, “What did they [students] think about me being not capable of understanding their experiences?” provides evidence of her struggles about ways to navigate her anxiety about the consequences of those instructional strategies. Another example is that John was ambiguous, and perhaps, anxious about the effect of his instructions in classroom discussions of racial neoliberalism. As was evident in his narrative “my whole personal assumption and philosophy of teaching this semester as being a teacher- activist person contradicted the practices I have seen,” John felt trapped in his theoretical view undergirding his instructions and the undesired effect happened in the practices of classroom discussion. This ambiguity seemed to intensify when his student shared with him her concern about her difficulties to take the points from the classroom discussion about racial neoliberalism. 59 This is evident in John’s his reflection: “I may have pushed them helplessly toward what I think should make sense for them . . . I feel like if I were able to stop at that point, I would not be pushed back . . . but that I would be giving up on this [in teaching about racism with implication about actions to confront neoliberalism] that I had said I commit.” John was ambiguous about why some students’ reactions had occurred in ways he did not foresee. As the findings show, this challenge was ongoing and expanded across the time span of Sue’s and John’s three consecutive teaching semesters. Thus, it is likely that in the future, the challenge that leads to Sue’s and John’s sense of uncertainty, ambiguity, and anxiety about how to respond to students’ reactions to classroom discussion will be a part of their “agentic action” pathway and their “critical pedagogy commitment” pathway. Because the challenge tends to run alongside these two pathways, however, it might impede the realization of them. How to Make Critical Pedagogy Commitment Pathway Possible? What, then, can be learned from Sue’s and John’s shared multicultural teaching experiences that will move their pedagogical work forward in the future? The important implication is that in order to make the “agentic action” and the “critical pedagogy” pathways possible, we may need to explain why their shared challenges, such as the undesired effects in classroom discussion exist; then, based on these explanations, we may find ways to mediate these same challenges. It is important to note that current literature has explained these challenges. For example, Opfer & Pedder (2011) explained the challenges by attributing to the novices’ (Sue and John) lack of knowledge and expertise. According to this explanation, Sue and John might have naively assumed students would have similar experiences and points of view about racial issues as the teacher (in John’s case) or had an inadequate understanding of social and historical 60 contexts of gender issues (in Sue’s case). Also, the existence of these challenges can be definitely explained by student resistance theory. Student resistance theory defines student resistance as the oppositional attitudes and actions of students from minority groups who, when confronted with the norms, values, and language of dominant groups in society, are consequently unwilling to agree with points from classroom discussion (Alpert, 1991; McDermott, 1974; Ogbu, 1987). According to student resistance theory, the challenges Sue and John encountered might be attributed to the situations in which the discussion about particular multicultural topics appears to force particular interpretations of students’ previous experiences about race, gender, and class (Alpert, 1991). Sue and John must be influenced by their positional identities because we teach who we are (Palmer, 2007). Sue and John could not divorce themselves from the lived experiences built on their positional identities, especially while having difficult conversations on controversial topics. Their personal experiences might affect the levels of student resistance to classroom discussion. While Opfer & Pedder’s (2011) and student resistance theory explanations can account for Sue’s and John’s professional inadequacy and their positional identities that cause challenges, they do not explain all aspects of these challenges. For example, the following questions are overlooked by these explanations. What might Sue have missed when she tried many ways to encourage students to speak up about their experiences with the gender positionality, but the students chose to be silent? What constrained John’s pedagogy that was intended to promote students to act against racial neoliberalism? What limits some students from wanting to translate their understanding of racial neoliberalism acquired in John’s class into action? Attention to finding ways to help novice teacher educators understand all aspects of challenges involved in their pedagogical practices is not a typical part of what counts as a 61 primary research inquiry about pedagogical pathways of novice teacher educators who teach multicultural education. As mentioned in the literature review, recent policy attention regarding the quality of teacher educators’ teaching has focused its calls on further understanding the challenges entailed in the pedagogical practices of teacher educators. Yet, there is little known about how to respond to these calls. At this point in time, the study in this chapter provides no clues about how to respond to these calls. But it provides evidence there is a need to consider finding possible ways to respond to them. As a novice teacher educator, who has experienced similar challenges to Sue and John, I am intrigued enough to respond to these calls by addressing the issues of challenges in multicultural education teaching in the next chapter. In terms of the scope of this dissertation, I purposely chose to make sense of how the challenge related to the realization of Sue’s and John’s “critical pedagogy commitment” pathway. As mentioned above, Sue’s and John’s commitment to critical pedagogy is characterized by three aspects of their action: they encourage students to critique social problems, they encourage students to confront racial neoliberalism for its racial biases, and they foreground positionalities in classroom discussion. Chapter Summary Increasingly, multicultural novice teacher educators bear the responsibility to enhance social justice curriculum in multicultural education teaching practices. To better understand those practices, particularly what is taught, and how what is taught is enacted, this study traces the constitutive process of pedagogical work of multicultural novice teacher educators. The study provides a detailed description of the nature of pedagogy of multicultural education through charting novice teacher educators’ fluid positionings, teaching goals and actions with their making sense of student’s reactions to their teaching. Whether or not this constitutive process of 62 pedagogical work is found in other fields of teaching is an empirical question to be explored. However, this study suggests pedagogical pathways are formed by the evolving relationships between teacher educators’ sense of agency, the ways they activate it, and the ways they commit critical pedagogy ideologies to move and switch their pedagogy while reaching the socially just end of multicultural education. The most important point is the potential for these pathways to become part of multicultural novice teacher educator’s pedagogical trajectories in the future. Thus, in order to put that potential into place, there is a need to respond to and, address challenges happening and impacting the realization of these pathways. To the extent the challenges can hinder multicultural novice teacher educator’s future commitment to and the enactment of critical pedagogy—a prominent pedagogy of multicultural education—the theoretical and empirical conversations about the challenges and how to respond to them in the context of multicultural education, and novice teaching must move forward. 63 CHAPTER 3 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY FOLD: THE LIMITS OF CRITICAL PEDAGOGY UNDERSTOOD THROUGH THE LENS OF POST-CRITICALITY Abstract In Chapter 2, I indicate that while committing to a critical pedagogy characterized by three aspects—encouraging critique of social problems, confronting racial neoliberalism for its racial biases, and foregrounding positionalities—two multicultural novice teacher educators, Sue and John, have faced challenges. These challenges came in the form of undesired effects in classroom discussion that leads to feelings of confusion, uncertainty, and ambiguity about how to teach the course effectively. I suggest that to make their critical pedagogy commitment possible, researchers must consider keeping multicultural novice teacher educators better informed of the reasons why challenges occur by better describing and explaining them in the first place. In this chapter, I describe and explain these challenges. I problematize the assumptions that undergird critical pedagogy through reading them alongside post-critical perspectives and by juxtaposing three mentioned-above aspects of critical pedagogy with three central tenets of post- critical theories proposed by Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), and Huehls (2016). I specify three limitations inherent in critical pedagogy. First, by emphasizing the critique of social problems, critical pedagogy, and the instructors who use it have a set of affective orientations toward social problems. These orientations ask students to be suspect of others and even hate others; this orientation goes against human qualities of care, trust, and hope. Second, by encouraging students to critique neoliberalism on its racial biases, critical pedagogy fails to recognize that neoliberalism’s vacillation between colorblindness and multicultural diversity shapes students’ experiences about race on a daily basis and in an intimate manner; thus, it is 64 embedded in students’ mind much deeper than what is given in a radical, formal, and fragmented arrangement from multicultural teaching. Third, by foregrounding positionalities, critical pedagogy fails to consider how the pre-identified social problems associated with a particular social positionality might constrain the extent to which students feel empowered through discussion about multicultural education in the classroom. I argue Sue’s and John’s challenges around classroom discussion are due to limitations inherent in critical pedagogy itself. I discuss how these limitations may be a source of multicultural novice teacher educators’ vulnerability, a hinder of their commitment to critical pedagogy, and at the same time, an obstruction of realization of social change goals. I offer two pedagogical possibilities concerning the employment of artwork as a means for developing relational and affective orientations toward hope, trust, caring, and mutuality in multicultural education classrooms, aiming to mediate the limitations of critical pedagogy. Finally, I discuss that because the theoretical argument and the two pedagogical possibilities I have offered derive from my own interest and the narrative of two multicultural novice teacher educators, they need to be researched further. One of the ways that can be further explored is to take it up, play with it, and experiment it with my own teaching and research practices as a novice teacher educator who is committed to critical pedagogy in teaching multicultural education. 65 Introduction During my dissertation research, I had an opportunity to spend a significant amount of time in the multicultural education classrooms of two multicultural novice teacher educators, Sue and John. I put out a call for these research participants for my dissertation project focusing on the pedagogy of multicultural education; indeed, I sought multicultural education novice teacher educators who believed they were enacting a pedagogical paradigm that challenged problems of multiculturalism and aimed to foster social change. I eventually ended up with my first dissertation manuscript in which I documented Sue’s and John’s pedagogical work over three semesters of their teaching. In this manuscript, I found these multicultural novice teacher educators engaged in three multicultural teaching modes of pedagogical work aligned with three powerful aspects of critical pedagogy: encouraging students to critique social problems, encouraging students to act against racial neoliberalism, and foregrounding positionality. These three aspects are important in the scholarship of Freire, McLaren, and Giroux. At the same time, however, I also found that as these novice teacher educators aimed to foster social change through critical pedagogy, some undesired effects of using this pedagogy arose. In attempting to make sense of those undesired effects, I realized current literature has little discussion as to how to fully explain why these undesired effects occur. As a multicultural novice teacher educator of multicultural education who was struck by the problematic side of critical pedagogy, I also began to wonder about the potential restrictions on those who want to enact this pedagogy. I asked myself: What are the limits of a critical pedagogy that consists of (1) the critique of social problems, (2) acts against racial neoliberalism, and (3) the foregrounding of positionality? 66 In this chapter, I respond to this question by employing the lens of post-critical3 theorists, including Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), and Huehls (2016), who have grappled with the ideologies and practices of contemporary critical pedagogy theory. These theorists do not take up the sharp lines of assumptions that undergird critical pedagogy and by that, they believe that students might be more willing to take the points from multicultural education classrooms. By examining critical pedagogy’s limitations through a post-critical lens, I seek to illuminate the theoretical complexities of critical pedagogy in multicultural education teaching. The reflection, narrative, and practices of two multicultural novice teacher educators—Sue and John—facilitate the examination of these theoretical complexities. If I can complicate the theoretical complexities of critical pedagogy through the lens of post-criticality, I might better inform multicultural novice teacher educators like Sue and John about the reasons why some of the undesired challenges occurred in their teaching and why they may be limited by critical pedagogy. By doing so, I hope to open up ways of thinking about how to respond to the problems, limitations, and challenges involved in multicultural teaching practices of multicultural novice teacher educators who engage critical pedagogy. In the following sections, I map the instructional design of three aspects of critical pedagogy: critiquing social problems, acting against racial neoliberalism, and foregrounding positionality, as well as the assumptions that undergird them and undesired effects each poses in Sue’s and John’s classrooms. I draw on the work of contemporary theorists of critical pedagogy and three class incidents.4 Then, I complicate these three aspects, by drawing on the post-critical 3 I have chosen the term “post-critical” deliberately as I am conscious of the pressure put on this term by recent theoretical movements associated with nonrepresentational theory and the posthuman turn. In my understanding, “post-critical” refers to any scholarship that offers theoretical accounts that center the limits of critical theories, particularly with respect to their overemphasis of representationalism in social practices. 4 The vignettes of these class incidents were brought in and narrated by Sue and John in my interviews. All three vignettes are presented in the findings section of Chapter 1. For example, Sue’s vignette about students’ push-back to the Beauty and the Beast film is presented in Table 4. I retold these stories with student pseudonyms. 67 work of Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), and Huehls (2016). I introduce the central tenets of post-criticality; then, I juxtapose these tenets with the undergirding assumptions of three aspects of contemporary critical pedagogy. I find the three aspects of contemporary critical pedagogy are at odds with the insights of post-critical theorists, and these contradictions involve the limits of contemporary critical pedagogy. The summary of my discussion is presented in Table 65 below. Following the presentation of findings in Table 6 below, I argue these limitations may be reasons for the undesired effects or challenges happening in Sue’s and John’s teaching. Finally, I discuss how these limitations might impede the purpose of social change in multicultural education teaching. I also explore how contemporary critical pedagogy might incorporate the insights of post-critical perspectives as a way to minimize these limitations and address challenges. Table 6: Limitations of Critical Pedagogy Understood by Post-critical Central Tenets Class Incidents Aspects of Critical Pedagogy “Beauty and the Beast” Critique social problems Critical Pedagogical Assumptions Students understand the nature of social problems (e.g., gender inequality) by rationally interpreting hidden meanings underlying social problems Undesire d Effects Post-critical Central Tenets Students push back against critique Felski’s (2015) discussion on critique: critique based on interpretation requires co- production of multiple factors, including rational thinking, affect, and materials. Limitations of Critical Pedagogy Students tend to be set in affective orientations toward suspect and doubt which tend to detach students from a sense of caring, hoping, and trusting others. 5 I summarize post-critical theorists’ description of the three notions “critique,” “racial neoliberalism,” and “positionality” in mapping each critical pedagogy aspect that derives from my findings in Chapter 1. I do this to introduce and explain the concepts undergirding my understanding of how post-criticality can help me reconsider the contemporary critical pedagogy of multicultural education and to identify its limitations. I have summarized post-critical work in the most economical way possible. I cannot, however, replace this overview with a quick outline because I have come to appreciate post-critical theorists’ assertion about the complexities of their theories. 68 Act against racial neoliberalism Table 6 (cont’d) “An Indian Father’s Pleas” and testing system Multicultural diversity perspective is privileged. Students are expected to embrace multicultural diversity and resist the discourse of colorblindness ; thus, they act to change racial biases. Students (Maria) are unsure/unw illing to become involved in changing racial biases. Huehls’s (2016) discussion of racial neoliberalism: racial neoliberalism has the nature of vacillation between multicultural diversity and colorblindness . “A third gender” Foreground positionality Students, who socially grouped in under- privileged categories, feel valued as members of the society. Students (Abby) hesitate to share oppressive gendered experiences . Ellsworth (1989) Latour’s (2005) discussion on social groups and positionality: social groups are made and remade from time to time and under the effects of various factors of which the social perception is just one. Students (Maria) tends to be torn between two conflicting perspectives— going for the multicultural diversity perspectives that the teacher privileges and shaping the actions on transforming the racial biases and going against it by following the discourse of colorblindness Students (Abby) tend to be positioned in a stable category; therefore, pre- identified social problems (e.g., gender inequality) and struggled with a sense of inferiority. Mapping Out Critical Pedagogy In this section, I sketch the contours of contemporary conceptions of critical pedagogy. I 69 begin by providing descriptions of three instructional designs that Sue and John employed in their teaching. Then, I read these descriptions alongside prominent scholarship of well-known critical pedagogy theorists, such as Paulo Freire (1974), Henry Giroux (2011), bell hooks (1994), Peter McLaren (2009) to identify the assumptions undergirding each design. While conducting these readings, I am informed by McLaren's (2009) general viewpoint about critical pedagogy: “[c]ritical pedagogy is a way of thinking about, negotiating, and transforming the relationships among classroom teaching, the production of knowledge, the institutional structures of the school, and the social and material relations of the wider community, society, and nation-state” (p. 65). Then, I map the instructional designs and undergirding assumptions with the undesired effects contained in Sue’s and John’s classrooms. I argue the field of multicultural teaching may benefit examining this sketch to understand better the complexities entailed in critical pedagogy and the reasons for its undesired effects. Critique of Social Problems Class incident 1: Beauty and the Beast. In Fall 2016, Sue taught a class of 24 students: 20 females and 4 males. Of the 24 students, 22 were White Americans. The other 2 students, both males, were African Americans. In the “Social Construction of Gender” lesson, Sue had students watched a clip from the animated film, Beauty and the Beast. Before a large group discussion, Sue asked students to respond to a journal prompt that required them to use a critical thinking lens to read against the gendered issues shown in the movie. She mentioned bell hooks’s (1994) feminist reading as guiding material and encouraged students to think about the ways gender is portrayed and who benefits from such a portrayal. During the class period, some students identified and critiqued the movie as a representation of gendered biases while others pushed back against this critique. At the end of the class period, a number of students, all of 70 whom, according to Sue, were White (some were males, and others were females), turned to Sue and asked why the lesson seemed to ruin such a beautiful love story. Instructional design, assumptions, and undesired effects. The instruction designed by Sue in this incident illustrates a critical pedagogy approach to multicultural teaching in which the teacher educator encourages critique of social problems. This instructional design focuses on using interpretive practices with instructional material: The Beauty and the Beast animated film, centering on a social problem (gender inequality), and offering students a framework (feminist pedagogy) to guide critique of the gender inequality problem. As the incident shows, Sue explicitly required students to interpret how the woman was treated unequally by the man. Although Sue noted students could choose ways to interpret the gender inequality issue represented in the movie in any way they wanted, the context of the classroom pointed students to interpret against the men’s hegemony. This strategy illustrates McLaren’s (2009) critical pedagogy ideas by reading against gender problems portrayed in Beauty and the Beast: students might focus on the language and action of the woman, a character who was characterized with gender inferior in relations to her husband and interrogate the ways the movie inscribes her with an underprivileged gender identity. In light of critical pedagogy theory, what Sue did was to ask students to “read between the lines to expose and interrupt embedded, dominant narratives, power dynamics, and perceived normalcy espoused by and hidden in the social practice, including its inclusion in school curricula” (McLaren, 2009, p. 125). In essence, the critical pedagogy aspect that privileges “the critique of social problems” that Sue offered assumes if students are exposed to the social problems represented by the instructional material in which they “interpret and interrogate how individual works on social problems reinforce or complicate dominant cultural models” 71 (McLaren, 2000, p. 23), then they can foster social change. The instructional desired end is to support students to engage in critical conversations about power relations represented by the instructional material. Despite Sue’s efforts to enact this assumption, undesired effects arose: some students resisted Sue’s call to critique gendered issues in the film. Act Against Racial Neoliberalism Class incident 2: “An Indian Father’s Plea” and the testing policy. In Spring 2017, John taught a class of 23 students; 19 were females and 4 were males. Of the 23 students, 18 were White Americans. Three other students, all males, were African Americans and the other 2 students, both females, were Asian American. In the “Race and Tracking and Testing” lesson, which, according to John was designed to focus on the racial biases of unequal social orders produced by neoliberalism through an analyses of institutional policies, John asked students to read the article, “Standards and Tests Attack Multiculturalism,” (Bigelow, 2009), to understand how standardized testing is a problem for schooling as it is formed by hyper-market driven and political purposes of neoliberal hegemony. He then engaged students in re-reading and re- examining “An Indian Father’s Plea,” (Lake, 1990) using this understanding to understand how policy privileges the learning interest of White American students while threatening the interests of students of color. Then, he asked students to propose ways to confront this racial neoliberal ideology. John shared with me that after that class period, he met with Maria, a White female student, who expressed uncomfortable feelings about the class. According to John, Maria was troubled by the hypocrisy she experienced in the class that she was taught to understand the critique of racial neoliberal social orders. She said she did not “feel” racial neoliberalism in such a way that she would be inclined to turn her understanding into action. Instructional design, assumption, and undesired effects. The instruction designed by 72 John in this incident illustrates the critical pedagogy aspect with a focus on acting against racial neoliberalism. This instruction focuses on using a critical pedagogy tool with learning materials, including the racial issues-related texts—“An Indian Father’s Pleas“ (1990) and the policy text— ” High-stakes testing and curricular control,” (Au, 2007) centering on a neoliberal practice with its racial biases, offering students a socio-political framework to guide potentially transformative action against racial neoliberalism. As the incident shows, John explicitly required students to understand how standardized testing policy is formed by hyper-market driven and political purposes of neoliberal hegemony; how this policy privileges White American students’ learning interests while limiting the learning interests of students of color; and the need to confront the racial biases of the policy. Confronting neoliberalism for its racial biases is considered a privilege in a multicultural education agenda (Giroux, 2015) because neoliberalism “upholds the notion that the market serves as a model for structuring all social relations: not just the economy, but the governing of all of social life” (pp. 124-125). In essence, the critical pedagogy aspect that asks students to act against racial neoliberalism assumes that if a student can “name, organize, order, and categorize matters of race . . . from which to engage race and the relationship between the self and the other and between the public and private” (Giroux, 2006, p.154), then they might be able to take transformative action to change the racial neoliberal order. The instructional desired end of this critical pedagogy aspect, then, is to have students understand what racial neoliberalism is and then to translate that understanding into action against a racial neoliberal orientation. Although John designed his lesson deliberately to call students to act against racial neoliberalism, his teaching involved unexpected consequences: the student (Marie) seemed unwilling/unsure about how to set herself to be willing to take action involved in combating racial neoliberalism. 73 Foreground Positionality Class incident 3: “A third gender.” In Spring 2016, Sue taught a class of 19 students; 15 were females, and 4 were males. Of the 19 students, 12 were White Americans. The other 7 students, 5 males and 2 females, were African Americans. In a class that discussed the final assignment topics, Sue asked students to identify their social positionalities in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation status and write the assignments that reflect their life experiences in relation to these positionalities. According to Sue, a White American student, Abby, announced she wanted to write her assignment on her hair in relation to her sexual orientation identity. Sue said she did not see what her hair had to do with sexual orientation identity. Sue commented, “That’s not relevant knowledge.” Abby shook her head, did not respond, and remained silent for a while. Sue put forth a question to Abby about the topic, and Abby responded, saying she would prefer continuing to talk about her topic at another time. When the lesson ended, Abby approached Sue. Sue told me later that Abby left her a note in the stack of students exit tickets that said that she thought most of what Sue had said that day was off from her experiences and that it would have been better if Sue had told class how her experience was related to one who viewed themselves in a “third gender.” Instructional design, assumptions, and undesired effects. The instruction designed in this class incident illustrates the critical pedagogy aspect with a focus on foregrounding positionalities. In this instructional design, Sue focused on highlighting the positionalities of students and considered students’ autobiographical experiences based on the positionalities as a part of her instructional materials. Sue specifically required students to identify their positionalities based on given social categories (race, gender, social class), and asked students to choose a topic in mapping out the positionalities with their privileged or marginalized 74 experiences. This pedagogy commits to what critical pedagogy requires as it asks students to “bond with their own oppressive and privilege[d] experiences with the categories of their positionalities [that] they [students] have [before they enter classrooms]” (Freire, 1974, p. 56). According to theorists and practitioners of multicultural education, this pedagogy is helpful as it facilitates students seeing the oppressive situation as a problem, through acknowledging oppressions within ones’ positionalities—a particular worldview associated with socially located factors such as race, class, gender, and sexual orientation; it also helps them understand different positionalities through that social oppression (hooks, 1994). The assumption undergirding this pedagogy, according to Freire (1974), and its desired end is that if classroom pedagogy can make positionalities a prominent issue in a multicultural education discussion, then it can sensitize students to the diverse needs and perspectives of themselves and others whose positionalities might be similar and different (through which students who are thought under-privileged can view themselves as valuable members of the society). Given Sue’s efforts to enact this assumption, the student (Abby) who saw herself with an underprivileged gender positionality refused to share her experiences with the class. I have sketched some outlines of instructional designs and assumptions that undergird three aspects of critical pedagogy that Sue and John employed in their teaching—critiquing social problems, acting against racial neoliberalism, and foregrounding positionality. This sketch shows what I find worrying as I observed my peer multicultural novice teacher educators teaching multicultural education with a critical pedagogy: while they had good intentions, were committed to enact critical pedagogy, and wanted their pedagogical tools to encourage students to be empowered, critical, and transform to foster social change, they were not sure why some 75 undesired effects had arisen in their classrooms. Critical pedagogy is not a pedagogy that is easily enacted, nor is it a framework that is willingly embraced by students with deeply rooted assumptions about what multiculturalism learning should be. Taking up critical pedagogy with the difficulties derived from its implementation is a challenging task. It is even more challenging for those who are tasked with teaching multicultural education but are novices regarding pedagogical practices they are unfamiliar with as multicultural teacher educators of multicultural education. Why are these challenges? Some researchers may explain these challenges by looking at intersectionality issues in the classroom: “the complex and cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups” (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2017, p. 158). Students whose first cross-cultural conversation about an “-ism” takes place in Sue’s or John’s multicultural education class, might be sensitive to issues of race and class. At the same time, other students resist acknowledging the presence and intersectionality of their privilege. Those students become so entrenched in their own personal form of experienced oppression that they have a difficult time accepting their privileged identities in other areas (Crenshaw, 2005). Other researchers, especially those who believe that students of all demographic backgrounds resist multicultural issues, such as (McFarland, 2001), however, might claim there is a need to examine the challenges from the context of pedagogy, especially the critical pedagogy teacher educators employ in multicultural education classrooms. These realities bring into sharp relief the need to better understand the problems entailed in the underlying assumptions of critical pedagogy and the unintended consequences that follow. Only when 76 researchers and teacher educators can better understand the complexities of critical pedagogy with an examination of its problems will critical pedagogy actualize the goals of social change in multicultural education teaching. Keeping this insight in mind, I problematize the underlying assumptions of three aforementioned aspects of critical pedagogy through the employment of a post-critical lens in the following sections. I first examine how Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), and Huehls (2016) describe their central tenets of critique, racial neoliberalism, and positionality, and my view of the problems of critical pedagogy inherent in each aspect. Then, I read three aspects mentioned above of critical pedagogy alongside post-critical tenets and consider the ways these tenets also apply to explain why when novice teacher educators such as Sue and John attempt to enact critical pedagogy some undesired effects occur. Central Tenets of Post-Criticality Post-criticality offered by Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), and Huehls (2016) is a theoretical approach to sociological research that attempts to account for as many factors as possible in its explanation of social problems. In post-criticality, everything connects together to become factors that co-produce the social: rational thinking, affect, things (texts, images, and pictures), church doctrines, non-human objects such as bank statements, iPhones, and Christmas lights, to name just a few. Post-criticality attempts to account for as many factors as possible because these theorists consider social problems, practices, and patterns to be made and remade in multiple ways with little reliance on social determinants (e.g., capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy). Although Ellsworth’s (1989), Latour’s (2005), Felski’s (2015), and Huehls’s (2016) theories of critique, racial neoliberalism social groups, and social groups and positionality varies in terms of scope and theme, they share a common goal: they 77 seek a new way of thinking and reimagining social change in the contemporary United States. Felski’s Discussion of Critique Felski’s (2015) interdisciplinary work centers on the intersection between education, literature, arts, and cultural studies, grappling with the idea of “critique.” She has identified critique as a method of thinking that is built on the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Felski, 2015, p. 1). For Felski (2015), this term is anchored in the interpretive lens and reflects one’s commitment to unmasking the “false consciousness” on which the society is built. Felski (2015) argues interpretation is not a matter of “recollecting” meaning, but instead is the “reduction of the illusions and lies of consciousness” (p. 32). For her, consciousness itself cannot be trusted to access the truth, and so interpretation requires a method of thinking that debunks what false consciousness has hidden. For Felski (2015), suspicion is not inherently bad, but it creates problems for critique because “suspicion which is merely usually based on rational thinking, however, signifies an affective orientation – one that inspires differing lines of argument and that does not always terminate in the grand abyss of radical about” (p. 4). Thus, the problem with critique is that it has become the “default option” (p. 5), narrowing the “affective styles and modes of argument” with which one can engage (p. 3) and leading to feelings of suspicion and distrust turning in people who involve critique. According to Felski (2015), this problem locates people as an “all- knowing” and “all-seeing authority” or “reaffirming one’s own superior position,” which then detaches them from trust, care, and hope. Huelhs’s Discussion of Racial Neoliberalism In his ambitious book, After Critique: Twenty-First-Century Fiction in a Neoliberal Age, Mitchum Huehls (2016), who takes up an ontological lens—the lens that helps define things as 78 what they are, their principles, their functions, and how their practices come to be and are being—to describe race and racial neoliberalism. According to Huehls (2016), race is a thing as it is “like an elevator . . . a thing that unexpectedly crashes down on you, but usually doesn’t” (p. 116). In describing neoliberalism, he first takes up Henry Giroux’s argument (2006) about neoliberalism in which neoliberalism is described as something that is born out of economics that “embraces commercial rather than civic values, private rather than public interests, and financial incentives rather than ethical concerns” (p. 155). Then, Huehls (2016) goes on to argue that understanding neoliberalism from socio-political and economic perspectives is not enough to explain how neoliberalism functions in the contemporary moment. Based on this argument, he further describes neoliberalism as it is in the form of “hybridization”—that is, it is created by the vacillation between private-public, commercial-civic, and incentives-ethics, and the like in opposition to the “purified distinctions between these two” (p. 7). In applying this concept to racial issues, Huehls (2016) describes racial neoliberalism as a vacillation between two modes of dealing with race: colorblindness and multicultural diversity as the former asking us to ignore race and the latter pointing our attention to it. While he acknowledges that this “concept of colorblindness and multicultural diversity seem contradictory,” he believes that neoliberal discourse is constructed by bifurcating both colorblindness and multicultural diversity and then, when appropriate, “vacillating” between both, irrespective of their incompatibility (p. 99). For example, “neoliberalism speaks the language of the greater communal good as a cover for its systematic exploitation of individual- objects,” Huehls (2016) writes, “and it speaks the anti-exploitative language of social justice as a cover for its championing of entrepreneurial individual-subjects” (p. 12–13). For Huehls (2016), as this vacillating nature of racial neoliberalism can manifest itself 79 into individual’s perception and experiences through everything happening in their daily life; it poses problems for teaching that involves students’ understanding about race and racial neoliberalism. Teaching may involve students in “hybridization” or “purification” as the former makes students oscillate between the binaries of “colorblindness” and “multiculturalism” and the latter positions students in one side of binaries. If students oscillate between the binaries of “colorblindness” and “multiculturalism,” then they might associate with a sense of uncertainty about what to do in reality to confront the negative effects of racial neoliberalism. If students are inclined on one side of the binaries, then they might “refus[e] to ask what race means” and instead portray it as an object that can wield influence without having a fixed representational meaning (p. 108). Ellsworth’s And Latour’s Discussion of Social Groups and Positionalities Multicultural education scholars who grapple with critical pedagogy, such as Elizabeth Ellsworth, describes “positionalities” as a resource for teaching grounded on the idea that positionalities are “multiple, fluid, and malleable” (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 302). By “multiple, fluid, and malleable,” she refers to the claim that although race, gender, social class, sexual orientation and other positionalities are socially grouped, they are not fixed and static categories. Instead, they are “multiple, fluid, and malleable” because the social meanings attributed to them, such as “women are subordinate to men” or “LGBT is at-odd” are context-dependent. Those social meanings are usually shaped depending on the way in which individuals interact with one another across contexts and usually in the situation in which there is a combination of oppressive situations—the situation in which racism, heterosexism and cissexism, and anti-LGBT and other -ism occur at one time. For Ellsworth, therefore, there is a thin line between race, gender, and social class categories, which means the categories of positionalities are elastic, changing, and 80 intersectional. For Ellsworth (1989), in the teaching that involves positionalities, problems occur when each positionality is treated separately because it “polarize[s] and dichotomize[s] or alleviate[s]” the multiple, fluid, and malleable meaning of positionalities. Latour (2005), another post-critical scholar, expands this idea, arguing that in the context of pedagogy, if positionalities are treated as stable categories—as opposed to elastic, changing, and intersectional—they may provide students with pre-identified social problems. For example, if gender is treated in a stable category in separation from other positionalities in a particular class discussion, students attending the discussion who are non-conforming gender might feel really marginalized and struggled with the social problems attributed to their non-conformity coming from the situation of sexism and gender domination that affect their gendered experiences. I have been intrigued by the ways Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), Huehls (2016) have described and complicated three aspects of critical pedagogy—encouraging critique, acting against racial neoliberalism, and foregrounding positionalities. For me, they set out a new way of thinking about the approaches to engaging in enacting critical pedagogy, as well as understanding the challenges that critical pedagogy might ensue. In the next part, I will read Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), Huehls (2016) alongside the three aforementioned vignettes to understand how these theorists’ descriptions also apply to the critical pedagogy outlined in the vignettes. Specifically, I illustrate how critical pedagogy practices are outlined in the vignettes: (a) orienting students toward a suspicious affective line in classroom discussion; (b) positioning students as vacillating between multicultural diversity and colorblindness; and (c) providing students with pre-identified social problems. 81 Limitations of Critical Pedagogy in Light of Post-criticality Establish Students Toward Suspicious Affective Orientations In her description of critique, Felski (2015) argues that critique often constitutes “forms of plotting that seek to identify causes and assign guilt” (p. 87). Critique encourages one to view social problems through the eye of an “active perpetrator” (p. 97). Thus, when asked to critique social problems with a suspicious eye, students are positioned as investigators who examine clues and interrogate the social problems to determine whether there was a transgression. Therefore, when students interrogate gendered hegemony in Beauty and the Beast and link it to their real-life experiences about gendered issues, they act as if they are detectives: examining clues in gender practices and discovering hidden assumptions about gender inequality. Because critique positions students as detectives who carry a sense of suspicion, it also promotes a specific set of affective orientations in students toward social problems. In her description of critique, Felski (2015) notes that critique requires readers to be “alert” and “vigilant” (p. 37). As Sue created her instructional plan to include critiquing hidden meanings to discover gender inequality practices, it is likely her pedagogy also encouraged students to take up suspicious orientations toward these social practices. This might be true as Sue began her lesson by suggesting students be empathetic to others, the critical pedagogy aspect that Sue employed with a focus on critique of social problems might have imposed gender oppression ideologies on students and students might have been on the lookout for these ideologies. Thus, in light of Felski’s (2015) concept of critique, students might have felt unwilling to critique gender inequality represented in Beauty and the Beast because they had this affective orientation toward suspicion. Sue, who found this situation unfamiliar, might not have been informed of this inherent limit in her pedagogy, which constrained her intention to help students 82 critique social problems. Place Students in The Vacillation Between Colorblindness and Multicultural Diversity Given Huehls’s (2016) description of race and racial neoliberalism, the critical pedagogy aspect that focuses on acting against racial neoliberalism (class incident 2) is problematic. The problem is that because race is a tangible and intangible object, it appears everywhere; thus, neoliberal discourse about race is ubiquitous. Therefore, Maria might have learned about colorblindness practices from many places, people, and things outside classroom settings, including, for example, church doctrine, her friends’ religious beliefs, her family dinner table, and MacBook advertisements. According to Heuhls (2016), outside-classroom resources such as church texts, families, and even social media advertisements usually transmit colorblindness ideas to individuals like Maria in a more intimate, friendly, continuous, connective, and sustainable manner than what is taught in the structure of a multicultural education classroom. In doing so, those resources might have embedded colorblindness ideas into Maria’s mind in a much deeper sense than those of multicultural diversity perspectives taught in John’s class. Therefore, John’s lesson on multicultural diversity perspectives might have placed the student into a place of “vacillation” between two different perspectives: moving between multicultural diversity perspectives that John’s lesson privileges about transforming the racially biased testing system and following the discourse of colorblindness. As Huehls (2016) argues, this situation leads to a sense of vacillation in that students are not sure how to act in their own lives although they understand that they need to disrupt the negative effect of racial neoliberalism. There seemed to be feeling in students that big social changes were about to arrive, but as those changes were imminent, she considered them a game and expressed her unwillingness to play. This might be true for Maria, evidenced in the ways she shared with John 83 that she did not “feel” what she learned in such a way that she would be inclined to turn her understanding about neoliberalism into action. Maria may have felt uncertain about whether and how she should transform her understanding of racial neoliberalism into action because she was constrained by her vacillation between multicultural diversity perspectives and colorblindness perspectives. John, who was a novice in this particular pedagogical situation might not have been informed of this inherent limit in his pedagogy. Position Students with Pre-Identified Social Problems In her description of positionalities, Ellsworth (1989) argues that asking students to constantly adhere to their privileged or marginalized experiences alongside the categories of their positionalities is to read against the fluid and malleable nature of positionalities. It means that foregrounding positionalities, especially in attempting to “forge it through classroom pedagogy,” as Sue seemed to do in her instruction outlined in vignette 3, re-inscribes static categories of students’ positionalities and stabilizes fixed social meanings attributed to them. In his joining Ellsworth (1989) to describe positionalities, Latour (2005) claims that because foregrounding positionalities re-inscribes static social meanings and treats individuals as if they are stable entities, it also promotes an establishment of pre-identified social problems exhibited in the lives of those individuals who bear the social groupings based on race, gender, social class, and other positionalities. Latour (2005) illustrates this claim by gesturing toward the contents of a single newspaper reporting how a group of CEOs identified participants by their marketing projects. According to Latour, these CEOs began their projects “by setting up one—or several—types of social categories” that ground their study; for example, they decide a priori that they are interested in a social category that they call “Catholic women” whom they established with 84 problems such as “conservative” and “refusal to take birth control,” assuming that Catholic women transport social forces “without transformation” (p. 29). Ellsworth’s (1989) claim and Latour’s (2005) illustration speak to the case of Abby. As students’ positionalities were foregrounded, it is very likely that Sue’s pedagogy also encouraged the establishment of pre-identified social problems which affected a student like Abby who struggled with her third gender (as she preferred to be pronounced). For example, Abby might have thought that being grouped in a non-conforming gender category might be associated with the problems of—as Latour points out—using gender queer as an identity card to claim privilege or being too sensitive about their body under others’ judgment or scrutiny. Or, she might have been concerned about the instructor’s (Sue) positionalities and that of pre-identified social problems as a barrier to her speaking up in classroom discussion. Thus, there may be a strong possibility that Abby refused to speak in class about their third-gendered experiences are because in the moments of that class discussion, she was constrained by the pre-identified marginalized social meanings imposed on the category of gender positionality that she is socially grouped into. Critical pedagogy, in this case, while ambitious, unintentionally creates tension and miscommunication in cross-gender classroom discussion. While Sue, who was a novice in this context, was attentive to foregrounding positionality through her critical pedagogy approach, might not have been informed of this inherent constraint in her pedagogy and that it contributes to limiting students’ sharing their oppressive experiences associated with their positionalities. In sum, I have resituated and re-described what I see in critical pedagogy through accounts of how this pedagogy can constrain the pedagogical work of novice teacher educators in light of post-critical pedagogy. To describe critical pedagogy and its problems that follow in a 85 non-traditional light, I draw my inspiration from scholars whose work catalyzed my research intentions such as Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), Huehls (2016). In reading three aspects of contemporary critical pedagogy used in multicultural teaching alongside these authors—critiquing social problems, acting against racial neoliberalism, and foregrounding positionalities, I have drawn attention to the limitations of critical pedagogy as it positions students (1) with suspicious and doubtful affective orientations when students are asked to interpret social problems; (2) in a state of vacillation between multicultural diversity and colorblindness perspectives; and (3) in pre-identified social problems—all lead to feelings of unease, discomfort, unwillingness, and hesitance in students. I have also illustrated that as these limitations are inherent to critical pedagogy itself, they create undesired effects and challenges concerning student’s mixed reactions and novice teacher educators’ uncertainty and ambiguity about how to effectively enact critical pedagogy in multicultural education classrooms. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, by identifying the limitations of critical pedagogy, I do not want to diminish or remove the roles of critical pedagogy from multicultural education teaching. Instead, I want to offer concerned people one way to move forward in maintaining the prominence of critical pedagogy, to enable its existing gains, and to protect it from losses. In the following sections, I discuss what might be lost, given the identified limitations and how I think we can minimize these limitations and while enabling the possibilities to reconcile them. At the Culmination of Limitations: Novice Teachers’ Vulnerability, Their Critical Pedagogy Commitment, and Social Change Goals In reading three aspects of critical pedagogy used in multicultural teaching alongside Ellsworth’s (1989), Latour’s (2005), Felski’s (2015), Huehls’s (2016) discussion of critique, 86 racial neoliberalism, and positionalities respectively: critiquing social problems, acting against racial neoliberalism, and foregrounding positionalities, I have drawn attention to the limitations of critical pedagogy. These limitations are that it positions students (1) with suspicious and doubtful affective orientations when asked to interpret social problems; (2) in a situation of vacillation between multicultural diversity and colorblindness perspectives and (3) in pre- identified social problems, all of which lead to student feelings of unease, discomfort, unwillingness, and hesitance. I have also illustrated that as these limitations are inherent in critical pedagogy, they create undesired effects and challenges concerning student’s mixed reactions and multicultural novice teacher educators’ uncertainty and ambiguity about how to effectively enact critical pedagogy classroom discussions about multicultural education. In the following sections, I discuss that if these limitations and challenges continue to exist in the multicultural education teaching practices of Sue and John, they may make their commitment to critical pedagogy difficult. After discussing these limitations and challenges, I explore how these limitations and corresponding challenges may impede multicultural education’s goal of social change. First, researchers who examine problematic aspects of critical pedagogy state that the uses of critical pedagogy that involves these limitations often creates “casualties” (Hess, 2017, p. 182)—that is, students feeling unsafe or showing resistance toward topics discussed in class. The feeling of resistance may be represented by how students are unwilling to counter prejudice despite the opposite intention of teaching materials, or they are discouraged from committing to valuing a sense of openness to others (McKenzie & Jarvie, 2018). Students feeling unsafe is represented by how students of color experience domination in a classroom discussion led by White teacher educators, or how White students feel uncomfortable if classroom discussion is led 87 by teacher educators of color (Ellsworth, 1989; Hess, 2017). When students feel unsafe and resistance to multicultural education discussion, teacher educators who facilitate that discussion become involved in what Chubbuck & Zembylas (2008) called “persistent emotional ambivalence” (p. 303): negative feelings about their own vision and their pedagogical practices. This feeling eventually causes teacher educators to give up this pedagogy or to have hesitance in moving forward with it. Thus, it is likely that if the three mentioned limitations continue in Sue’s and John’s teaching, they will lose their commitment to critical pedagogy in the future. Second, the three limitations of critical pedagogy and the challenges involved are considered, as Foucault states, “dangerous” (cited in Huehls, 2016, p. 16) because they may impede the role that critical pedagogy plays in promoting social change. This claim is more or less true given the findings of this study for two reasons. The first reason is that critical pedagogy that focuses on critiquing social problems and foregrounding positionalities may move students into a constricted cluster of relational and affective orientations; these orientations can detach students from an “affective sense of hoping for the good and caring for and attaching to others” (Felski, 2015, p. 87), which can distort how the critique should be and moves students into a situation in which they “don’t feel empowered” and “are not willing to take part in the course of action of social change” (Ellsworth, 1989, p. 297). Researchers in the field of multicultural education, such as Cochran-Smith (1991), Wang (2005), and Chubbuck & Zembylas (2008) concurred with Felski’ (2016) and Ellsworth’s (1989) claim. For example, they shared that many of their students who were committed to critiquing social problems but failed to acknowledge how their own socially constructed relational and affective orientations, couched in the unconscious, affect the way they critique. Some students responded to the discomfort of encountering gender injustice by choosing to reinforce their own 88 identities rather than risk self-transformation, while others felt overwhelmed and depressed by the dark side of racial and gender injustice. As a result, they, who are in the position of the critics, are driven by hatred, hopelessness, frustration, suspicion, and so on. What is “dangerous” is when students are disciplined into such rigid relational and affective orientations toward conversation about social problems—resisting or suspecting them—that a critical pedagogy aimed to create movement toward social change, as Cochran-Smith (1991), Wang (2005), Chubbuck & Zembylas (2008) all argued, fails to become a reality. The second reason deals with the roles that critical pedagogy plays in supporting students to confront racial neoliberalism. As I discussed above, the critical pedagogy aspect that John employed in his teaching seems to place students in a state of vacillation between colorblindness and multicultural diversity. This limitation gave students a feeling of being “at odds” with their daily life experiences with racial practices which, then, led to their sense of uncertainty about how to act against the negative effects of racial neoliberalism. Thus, the instruction that aims to debunk neoliberalism as John did does not seem to aim at the right target or as Huehls (2016) put it, generates a sense of “complicity” (p. 102) in students. Whether Huehls’s (2016) claim is applicable to other researchers’ insights is an inquiry worth exploring. However, for my purposes, his argument suggests that what might become dangerous given the vacillating nature of neoliberalism is that students—who want to be part of the solution of transforming racial neoliberalism—unintentionally become a part of the problem because of their unwillingness to confront racial neoliberalism itself. Promising Trajectories: Two Art-Based Pedagogical Ideas I offer two pedagogical possibilities, which I hope promise to orient students and multicultural teacher educators differently toward multicultural education teaching, aiming to 89 minimize the limitations and enable the advantages of contemporary critical pedagogy. First, the role of feelings, desires, and affects, as well as relational praxis (between teachers and students and among students) should not be neglected in multicultural education teaching, and therefore feelings of anger, frustration, struggle, and depression must be addressed in a tactful way (Wang, 2005). One approach draws on Felski’s (2015) discussion of “affective space”—the physical or imaginative space that is formed with rhythms and resonance (through the presence of, for example, poetry, music, writing, and fiction) to generate an environment of shared affective experience. In this affective space, the feelings of one (e.g., student) can be connected to that of the other (e.g., teacher) which then leads to affective resonance in the relationship with hope.6 By “hope” I mean a form of human activity: “hope is an ontological dimension and optimism an ontic manifestation of a more fundamental attitude towards the world” (Hodgson, Vlieghe, & Zamojski, 2017, p. 86, emphasis in original). We have hope when we are involved in an affective orientation “characterized by a secure trust in the behavioral activity of other” (Webb, 2013, p. 400) without an a priori assumption that others (and all human aspects that belong to all gender) are trying to harm us. For example, the instruction about gender practices can begin with the assumption that particular characters in the poems, fiction novels, or films are not trying to impose gender hierarchy on us. Rather, they are willing to cooperate with us in the interpretation about gender practices to “bring new things to the light rather than an endless rumination on hidden meanings or representational failures” (Felski, 2015, p. 174). Teaching in this light is to treat students as ones who can let critique coexist with affective orientation toward 6 My understanding of hope is informed mainly by the work of Hodgson et al.’s (2018) and Webb’s (2013) notion about hope from ontological perspectives. These authors have tried to intersperse their ideas about hope and philosophy of teaching with particular pedagogical practices. At the same time, I am conscious there is the Freirian ideology of transformative hope grounded in socio-political praxis in which hope is considered a political act toward the utopian world. The former resonates with the later because onto-sociopsychological hope can lead to hopeful practices in teaching, which then might be a condition for transformative hope to occur. 90 “putting what is good in the world and in the present to [classroom discussion], in order to preserve it” (Hodgson et al., 2018, p. 17) rather than suspicion and resistance while keeping in mind that students need to exercise power relations. Teaching in this way, as Felski (2015) puts it, “is an embodied mode of attentiveness that involves us in acts of sensing, perceiving, feeling, and engaging” (p. 186). Learning about social problems in this light is a “matter of attaching, collaging, negotiating—of forging links between things [or example, gender issues] that were previously unconnected” (p. 176). In this sense, I insist on teaching that privileges critique while also preserving hope. This teaching may require the embodiment of a post-critical lens with an emphasis on an ontological, rather than a representational orientation7 toward pedagogy. What it means is that, even given the obvious contradictions, critique and affect can coexist, not in the form of rational knowledge but rather as something we can only make sense of ontologically, not through telling students to be hopeful; rather through the means of arts-based teaching that might be outside of verbal language and representation that provokes student’s feelings of emotions, empathy, and hope toward themselves and others alongside having critical thinking and action toward changing power relations. The purpose is not to ignore the role of critical pedagogy; rather, it is to protect it or let it work in tandem with post-critical perspectives or other alike perspectives. Furthermore, an affective line like this can help facilitate classroom moments when students like Abby (class incident 3) are hesitant to speak about their oppressive experiences with gendered problems because “when words fail, art speaks” (Stuart, Burke, & Maria, 2016, p. 7 I am conscious of the pressure put on this term by recent theoretical movements associated with nonrepresentational theory and the posthuman turn. I have admitted that there has been ongoing debate about whether the work that promotes hope based on trust and sincerity is still a representational project (Huehls, 2016) that centers the human. 91 235). Here, I refer to Paris and Winn’s (2013) “humanistic research” to stress the values of building authentic relationships with students through power-sharing, meaningful participation, and engagement in social practices that may constrain them. The space that incorporates art materials with students’ affective feelings and critical thinking serves as an environment that enables students and teachers to see themselves in relation to others in an authentic way, which then invites all positionalities into “intimate circles” where the pre-identified social meanings can be destabilized and deconstructed. Creating an affective space infused by the use of art might also be considered the second pedagogical possibility about how to respond to potential complicity with racial neoliberalism. Huehls (2016) contends that to avoid “being complicit in critique and action” toward racial practices requires an ontological, rather than a representational orientation toward a pedagogy that teaches multicultural education. For me, what this means is that a pedagogy that supports students to navigate binaries between multicultural diversity and colorblindness must place students in a situation in which they can “establish connection, produce sympathy, trigger change, affect the world”—not by “showing and revealing the world to us, but by being in the world with us” (Huehls, 2016, p. 24). If Maria (student in class incident 2) said she had feelings of complicity, then it might mean that she knew when complicity had happened, but she didn’t know how to express it in words. Thus, multicultural teaching that supports students to be conscious of complicity might need to be thought of outside of language and representation. For example, teaching can let students express their thoughts through artwork—the non-verbal tool to communicate one’s “state of mind” because “before it is a verbal structure, it is a way of perceiving and interacting with the world, including oneself, one’s own life” (Leggo, 2005, p. 442). 92 While proposing this post-criticality-informed pedagogical orientation, I do not understand it as a replacement for a critical pedagogy of multicultural education. Rather, it is a pedagogical option for teacher educators to have post-criticality work in tandem with contemporary critical pedagogy. One way this orientation can work alongside critical pedagogy is through arts-based teaching for hope, which can simultaneously reduce the grip of suspicious affective orientation based on social constructs while developing liberal agency in individuals that can then manifest their engagement with social equality.8 Another way that a post-critical framework can work together with contemporary critical pedagogy is that the post-critical point of view cannot work well in multicultural education teaching practices if it ignores the central themes of critical pedagogy such as the economic, social, and cultural differences. For example, the focus on teaching critique alongside hope and trust driven by post-critical point of view needs to be in support for, not in opposition to the emancipatory paradigm of critical pedagogy, especially when teacher educators choose to focus on social problems, such as the impact of austerity on society, the impact of cuts in education funding, and the impact of standardized testing policy on the learning opportunities of students of all ethnicities. Multicultural novice teacher educators must position themselves as insiders to foster the purpose of social change through multicultural education. Both post-critical theorists and contemporary critical pedagogy theorists will only grow stronger if they stand alongside one another. Chapter Summary In this chapter, I problematized the assumption that undergirds critical pedagogy by reading it through post-critical perspectives to describe and explain the challenges that novice teacher educators encounter when they attempt to translate critical pedagogy into classroom 8 More discussion will explicitly elaborate this point in the next chapter where a part of my post-criticality-informed proposal is taken up into my own pedagogical practice. 93 discussion about multicultural education. I argue the challenges exist due to the limitations inherent in critical pedagogy. I indicate three limitations of critical pedagogy in mapping three aspects of critical pedagogy with three central tenets of post-critical theories proposed by Ellsworth (1989), Latour (2005), Felski (2015), and Huehls (2016). First, by emphasizing the critique of social problems, critical pedagogy and its instructors create a particular set of affective orientations toward social problems, asking students to be suspect of, and even hate others; this orientation goes against the human qualities of caring, trusting, and hoping. Second, by encouraging students to critique neoliberalism based on its racial biases, critical pedagogy fails to recognize how neoliberalism’s vacillation between colorblindness and multicultural diversity shapes students’ experiences about race on a daily basis and in an intimate manner; thus, it neoliberal racial discourse is embedded into students’ mind much more than what is given in a radical, formal, and fragmented arrangement in multicultural teaching. Third, by foregrounding positionalities, critical pedagogy fails to consider how pre-identified social problems associated with particular social positionalities may constrain the extent to which students feel empowered through discussions about multicultural education in the classroom. I discuss how these limitations might impede the realization of multicultural novice teacher educators’ commitment to critical pedagogy and the goals for social change in multicultural education classrooms. I offer two pedagogical possibilities concerning the employment of artwork as a means for developing relational and affective orientations toward hope, trust, caring, and mutuality in multicultural education classrooms. Present in each of these possibilities is an embrace of nuance and an instinct to resist totalization in multicultural teaching. In this sense, critical pedagogy is not lost or dismissed but instead held up alongside 94 other ways of encountering a fresh view about the pedagogy of multicultural education. The goal in taking these possibilities up is to open up rather than narrow the relational and affective possibilities for students to challenge social problems in multicultural teacher educators’ instructional designs and in the space of creativity toward the multicultural content we teach. I end this chapter by acknowledging that as I am new to the education system and also new to the research community in the field of critical pedagogy in multicultural education in the United States, I am not certain how my theoretical argument, proposed pedagogical possibilities, and implications might be used in the future. I hope that by expressing my thoughts, I invite scholarly and practical discussion about the role of critical pedagogy in combating social problems in the United States. At the same time, as a novice researcher who has conducted research in the field of her teaching, this study, as Latour (2005) suggests, encourages me to experiment and play with what I have offered so I will keep my faith about what I am doing and attend to the theoretical discussion of critical pedagogy in multicultural education. How I experiment and play with the findings, discuss this study, and reflect on my own learning are the subjects of the next chapter. 95 CHAPTER 4 CRITICAL PEDAGOGY RE-FOLD: MEDIATING CHALLENGES THROUGH IDENTIFYING AND RESPONDING TO TENSIONS—A MULTICULTURAL NOVICE TEACHER EDUCATORS’ ART-BASED AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Abstract In Chapter 3, I identified three limitations inherent in two multicultural novice teacher educators’ multicultural critical pedagogy practices—establishing students in affective orientations toward suspect and doubt that tend to detach them from a sense of caring, hoping, and trusting others; placing students in a state of vacillation between multicultural diversity and colorblindness, which leads students to uncertainty about how to act toward neoliberalism; and positioning students in a stable category that leads marginalized students to feelings of inferiority. These limitations, in part, constitute the undesired effects and challenges that occurred for two multicultural novice teacher educators who pursue commitments to critical pedagogy in classroom discussions about multicultural education. In response to these limitations, I propose a post-criticality-informed pedagogical possibility, concerning the employment of artwork as a means for developing relational and affective orientations toward hope, trust, caring, and mutuality in multicultural education classrooms, aiming to mediate the limitation and move multicultural novice teacher educators’ commitment to critical pedagogy forward in the future. I discuss that because the theoretical argument and the two post-criticality- informed pedagogical possibilities I have proposed are derived from my own interest and the narrative of two multicultural novice teacher educators, they require further consideration. One of the ways these possibilities can be further explored is to use them, play with them, and experiment with them in my own teaching and research practices. 96 In this chapter, I take up a part of my post-criticality-informed pedagogical proposal alongside Berry’s (2007) and Wang’s (2005) conceptual frame of tensions to explore how I reconcile the challenges I encounter in my own multicultural teaching as an international novice teacher educator in the United States. Specifically, I focus on what tensions are involved in my teaching and how I respond to the tensions. In employing art-based autoethnographic research and analyzing my journal entries, reflective essays, and students’ work in my own teaching, I find two tensions involved in my teaching: my encouraging students to critique versus handling student’s affective orientations, and my planning versus being responsive in the classroom discussion. I also find that employing a post-criticality-informed pedagogy that engages artwork as a means to develop relational and affective orientations in my teaching can be a possible way to respond to the tensions, therefore, reconcile the challenges I encounter. I discuss what I learn from this process with respect to the role of theory-in-practice, the teacher educator’s identity as a resource for teaching, and the ideas about teacher as researcher. 97 Introduction Multicultural education is usually a required course in preservice teacher education curriculum (Jun, 2016; Sleeter, 2001). The course plays an important role in shaping preservice teachers’ orientations and practices toward the increasing cultural diversity of the United States (Ukpokodu, 2007). Teacher education communities acknowledge that multicultural education is critical to the development of preservice teachers’ understanding of structural and systemic challenges that minoritized students face in schooling (Gorski, 2012). However, teaching this course entails various challenges (Cochran-Smith, 2000). While the challenges constrain the pedagogical work of all teacher educators (Foot et al., 2014), they do more so on the work of international teacher educators who come to teaching from particular cultural, personal, and professional backgrounds. Research shows that one way to understand the dynamics of challenges and how the challenges constrain pedagogical work of teacher educators is to conduct studies about tensions underlying teaching (Berry, 2007; Wang, 2005). Researchers in autoethnographic study communities agree that tensions in multicultural teaching can be understood through examining stories told by teacher educators about the struggles they encounter and the ways they respond to these struggles (Hamilton & Pinnegar, 2015). Many of these studies focus on the U.S. context but, in so doing, fail to account for non- American novice teacher educators who teach multicultural education while pursuing their doctoral studies. By using autoethnography and investigating the tensions I encountered in my multicultural teaching, I hope to narrow this gap. Research questions include: 1. What are the tensions involved in my multicultural teaching? 2. How do I respond to these tensions? 98 Literature Review With the idea of using autoethnography to investigate tensions in a teacher educator’s pedagogical work of multicultural education, I draw on three bodies of literature. First, related literature of autoethnographic studies on tensions in pedagogical work of teacher educators is reviewed to understand how teacher educators might encounter tensions in their teaching and how these tensions can be factors that enable and constrain their pedagogy. Second, because this study is a study of someone (myself) who carries an international identity into their pedagogical practice, I draw on the literature of teacher educators’ identity and pedagogy. Third, because this study is the study of my own pedagogical practice and because I have positioned myself as one who is learning to teach through teaching, I draw on teacher-as-researcher literature to provide a basis for my own way of learning to teach multicultural education. Before I present the literature review, I introduce my understanding of the key term in this study: tension. Define Terms: “Tensions” The term “tension” has been used in education research to generally mean the social, emotional, or political state of being constrained due to the contradictory or conflicting forces made by individuals or groups (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001). Taking this term into the studies of pedagogical practices of teacher educators, Berry (2007) frames tensions as “problematic situation” (p. 1297): meaning “the elements of ambivalence and contradiction so intrinsic to the complex nature of pedagogy” (p. 1298). Wang (2005) takes the term “tensions” more closely to the field of multicultural education teaching of teacher educators. She frames tensions as “state of impasse, non-passage, or logical contradiction,” “a state of constant dilemma,” and a “problematic closure,’’ indicating the complex and competing responsibilities 99 and role demands face by teacher educators of multicultural education. For Wang (2005), the tensions inherent in multicultural education teaching practices are more intense than those of other practices, pertaining directly to emotions, critique, teacher authority, and student agency— four factors that constitute the nature of multicultural teaching. Autoethnographic Research on Teacher Educator’s Pedagogical Work and Involved Tensions Autoethnographic researchers used various approaches to conduct their studies about tensions in the pedagogical work of teacher educators. Some have focused on the tensions in the pedagogical work of teacher educators grounded in the relationships between teacher educator’s pedagogy and institutional contexts. The purposes of these autoethnographies are to understand the external factors that encompass teacher educator’ teaching practices to draw implications for their pedagogical practices. Newberry (2014), for example, has focused her autoethnography on the institutional and community of practice context that bounds her teaching. She finds there are many external factors that enable and constrain her insight about her teaching, such as expectations, meaning, boundaries, and the structures of the institutions for which she works. She reports that institutionalized thoughts placed a lot of limitations and expectations on her role as a new teacher educator which either stifle development or open opportunities for her to explore new pedagogical practices. Other autoethnographic researchers, such as McDonough (2014) and Trout (2008), have studied tensions in their teaching in relation to their personal relationship with students. McDonough (2014), for example, uses an autoethnography of her one-year supervision of prospective teachers to explore tensions as challenges for her teaching to better understand how to teach in the classrooms. She encountered multiple tensions concerning issues of obligation, loyalty, and advocacy. She argues that if a teacher educator has opportunities 100 to make meaning of these tensions in ways that mediate conflicting forces underlying these tensions, she can better articulate her pedagogical practices. This body of research is valuable because it helps researchers understand that pedagogical practices of teacher educators are complex and multifaceted phenomenon; thus, an individual teacher educator’s impact on their own teaching is difficult to isolate from the many other influences during teaching. It also helps researchers understand that through years of experience in teaching and continual reflection on their own teaching, gradual changes and improvement will emerge. While valuable, this body of research does not address intended practices of instruction and the pedagogical work of teacher educators who engage in classroom practices. Thus, for the purposes of this study, I focus the next part of my literature review on autoethnography that directly investigates teacher educator’s pedagogical work in the classroom. I select studies that focus on teacher educator’s classroom pedagogical work in the fields of multicultural education-related courses, such as social studies or foundational courses that focus on multiculturalism. I have conducted this literature review while keeping in mind that the pedagogical work of teacher educators is framed from various angles. For the purposes of this study, I engaged in Cuenca’s (2010) framework, which views teacher educator’s pedagogical work as three overlapping components—managerial, relational, and instructional. In this study, I draw on the last two: relational and instructional components. The relational component refers to relationships that teacher educators build with their students through, for example, student talking and non-talking, teacher rapport with students, and non-content teacher conversations. The instructional component refers to what a teacher does with students regarding content, including, for example, giving class explicit instructions, opening interactions with class, and the functionality of group activities. 101 My review indicates most of the studies in the field of teacher educator’s pedagogical work of multicultural education center on identifying the tensions and the challenges inherent in the intersections of both relational and instructional components. Ellsworth (1999), who draws her study on the literature of film studies, feminist perspectives, and her autobiographical essays of her own teaching of foundational course on multiculturalism, focuses on the relational aspects of her pedagogical work, that is, how the interpretation of her and her students’ positionalities, concerning race, gender, and sexuality, affects the ways she delivers curriculum and pedagogy. She argues the biggest challenge in her teaching was that no matter how the teacher educator positioned herself and her students, and how much knowledge and experiences about race, gender, sexuality experiences she tried to infuse into the classroom, she could not be completely certain of whether and how her positionalities and knowledge were read, interpreted, thought about, and felt by her students. She suggests that further research should focus on why there is always a possibility that a teacher educator is limited in coming to know what happens within her own sense of self and the self of others when teaching about multicultural issues. Trout’s (2008) autoethnography interrogates teacher-student relationships where a teacher educator enters into relationships with preservice teacher students as a stranger. Using the framework of the “ethic of care,” Trout (2008) indicates the tensions concerning how she can put her own ideas about what her student teacher should be doing and her desire to know where she knows a particular prospective teacher is in his development into practice. The reason for this tension relates to the contradictory interpretation of the purpose of an ethics of care model between her and her students. Cuenca (2010) uses autoethnography to examine how his own experiences as a classroom teacher shapes his pedagogical decisions in a university social studies course. He finds that his 102 teaching involved tensions between his intentions to construct a new approach to his pedagogical work and his student’s desire to maintain their learning in a traditional way. He argues for the need to mediate these tensions and suggests that simultaneously working on both relational and instructional aspects is key. Ritter (2011) conducts an autoethnography in which he examines teacher educator- student relationships in his social studies teaching. He contends his role as a teacher educator of social topics is trapped between the content and pedagogy of his instruction in more standard ways and being tempted to author his sense of self in a more sophisticated manner. What he struggled with most within this tension were affective challenges in the forms of fear, exhaustion, frustration, and therefore struggled to navigate interpersonal relationships with his students. More importantly, these challenges reflect a misleading “assumption that educating teachers is something that does not require any additional preparation and that if one is a good teacher of elementary or secondary students, this expertise will automatically carry over to one’s work with novice teachers” (Ritter, 2011, p. 231). For Ritter (2011), affect is an important factor in shaping the relationship between teacher educator and students and that intersects with the ways he facilitates student learning. Thus, only when teacher educators find the ways to mediate between affective tensions will they change the nature of their teaching. My review suggests teacher educators have constantly and continuously faced various tensions, and there is a way to conduct research to identify them. It also suggests that studying tensions can help identify challenges in a teacher educator’s pedagogical work. Indicating challenges in ones’ teaching practices can help one know about the constraints that exist in their teaching. While important, this research primarily focuses on identifying and describing the tensions. This makes it difficult for researchers to conceptualize the pedagogical work process 103 that teacher educators engage beyond those tensions. Specifically, it is difficult to understand whether those tensions constrain or promote teacher educators and how they respond and mediate the tensions, as well as how they use them to adjust their teaching. This issue is vital to those who are new to the pedagogical work in teacher education, such as a novice teacher educator who is also an international student. Walker et al. (2008) state that “there is no guarantee (or structure to ensure) that [identifying] experiences [including challenges] actually leads to greater understanding of complicated dynamics of [doctoral student teacher educators] teaching, as in other complex practices, more experiences does not automatically lead to more expertise” (p. 67). Thus, there is a need for continuing research to go beyond the descriptions of tensions to understand the dynamics that explain the complexities of international novice teacher educator’s pedagogical work in multicultural education. My research intends to meet that need and fill the gaps, as well as add to the scholarship of pedagogical development of multicultural education by providing insightful observations about the detailed nature of pedagogical practices of an international novice teacher educator who teaches multicultural education, social justice, and equity in the United States and in many other parts of the globe. Teacher Educator’s Pedagogical Work and Their Identity Teacher educator identity—what a teacher educator is, what a teacher educator does, and who a teacher educator is in relation to self and other (Clarke, 2009; Newberry; 2014) is abundantly researched in relation to their pedagogy in autoethnographic research communities. Some have attempted to investigate the ways teacher educators’ pedagogical work forms teacher educator identity. This research indicates that teacher educator’s identity can be developed (e.g., it changes and shifts) through years of developing pedagogical practice while working with 104 students, colleagues, and others in schools. Newberry (2014), for example, investigates the relationships between her pedagogy and how her identity as a non-traditional teacher educator (a teacher educator who teaches a foundational course without formal training to teach the course) is shaped and reshaped through her work with students in classrooms. She experienced an iterative process in which her pedagogical work, accompanied by other factors, such as institutional norms and collegial expectations, asked her to conform to those norms and expectations. This affects the ways she viewed herself as a teacher educator. Similar results have been found in other autoethnographic studies (see Williams, 2010). These studies are important because they indicate that teacher educator’s pedagogical work and their identities are interrelated and can inform each other. While abundant, there is a thin line of this research that has focused on whether and how teacher educator’s identity, as it pertains to who they are in terms of race, gender, nationalities, and other identities (a.k.a. positionalities), informed the pedagogical work that teacher educators attended to. When this line exists, it mostly concerns the ways this identity constrains teacher educator’ pedagogical work. Ellsworth (1989), for example, finds that her identity as a White female middle-class teacher educator constrained the ways she conducted her pedagogy of multicultural education in the classroom. Similarly, Cochran-Smith (2000), finds that her White identity tended to make the dialogue between her and her students, especially those who were racially different from her, difficult to process. Another researcher, who is an international teacher educator in the United States, such as Wang (2005), also finds similar results. Wang indicated that her international identity seemed to affect her the relational aspects of her pedagogical work. She concludes that “teachers from minority backgrounds who are teaching in mainstream classrooms, students’ resistance against pedagogical authority can be discerned from 105 the very beginnings” (2005, p. 53). This literature provides an important baseline insight into how teacher educator’s identity in relation to race, gender, and nationality relates to tensions, challenges, problems, and dilemmas that teacher educators face through the ways they do their pedagogical work. However, little effort has gone to mapping how a teacher educator makes this identity into opportunities to mediate the tensions and challenges, in order to adjust, shift, and change his/her pedagogical work (Cochran-Smith, 2003). Identifying tensions and challenges of teacher educator’s pedagogical work in relation to this identity is important, but further research is still needed to understand whether and how a teacher educators uses their identity and the experiences associated with it as a resource to enable them to navigate, respond, and mediate tensions of their pedagogical work, and most importantly to understand what they are learning from this process. This study, with a focus on how my international identity is used by me to respond, then operationalize the tensions in my teaching, will help narrow this gap in the literature. Teacher Educators as Researchers of Their Own Teaching Practice The movement toward teacher research as advocated by Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) and Zeichner (1993) seeks to place teachers’ experiences at the heart of research. Those who support this movement consider this “insider” research: the research conducted by teachers using their own site as the focus of their study. It is a form of research that enables teachers to investigate their practice, to communicate their understanding to other teachers, and to transform their own teaching practice. Just as teacher’s experiences need to be the heart of research, so too teacher educator’s experiences need to be at the center of the research about their pedagogical work. The emphasis on teacher educator research signifies the roles that identities of teacher 106 educators, especially those who are new to the profession, play in the development of their pedagogical practice. We teach who we are, so learning to teach is not just about accumulating subject matter knowledge; it has to do with the consideration of identifying self as a teacher educator. Saying “self” means the whole self, intellectual, emotional, gender identity, racial identity, cultural identity, and cross-cultural understandings. One way to see teacher educators developing their identities is through connections between themselves and what they do in the classroom or the pedagogical practice they are engaged in; through the autoethnography of a teacher educator’s work. The emphasis on teacher educator research also stresses the role of inquiry developed by teacher educators about their own pedagogical practices. Because teacher educators, especially those who pursue doctoral studies, are considered potential knowledge producers, both in the form of pedagogy and curriculum, there is need to have them take an inquiry-orientation toward their own pedagogical practices so that they can develop their skills and knowledge that allow them to do so. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) argue for a comprehensive view of what counts as teacher educator research. For them, it is as a form of inquiry that contributes both to the pedagogical knowledge and theoretical argument base in the context of the classroom and scholarly communities. Teacher educators, including novice ones and ones coming from cultures other than U.S.- based cultures, are in a unique position to provide inside perspectives, knowledge, and theory about teaching prospective teachers in any course in the university (Wang, 2005). They are in the position to research their experience as they live it. In researching their own practices, they become both teacher and researcher exploring and understanding pedagogical and curriculum experiences in which they exist. 107 Yet, there is considerable debate in the literature about what is and is not teacher educator research, about whether it should be about pedagogy, curriculum, or student learning, about whether it should be insider research, and about whether it is research at all (LaBoskey, 2007). Others counter this argument, suggesting such debates do not help us understand more about teacher educator research and what it can do in pointing to various conceptions of teacher research. These controversies point to the constant need to examine what is being done in teacher educator’s teaching practices, and how and why it is important to further our understanding of the field. Teacher educator research matters. By conducting this study, I hope to make it matter more, especially in the context of pedagogy and curriculum—the field that entails a lot of tensions, problems, and dilemmas; this filed needs to incorporate teacher educator’s ways of being and their inquiry about their own teaching practices. Theoretical Framework The purpose of this study is to identify the tensions in my pedagogical work of teaching multicultural education and how I respond to them. To address these questions, I employed the conceptual work of Berry (2007) and Wang (2005) and my own theoretical discussion in Chapter 2 to find themes in the data and make sense of them. Berry (2007) contends there are many tensions teacher educators of all subject matters may experience. She created a six-tension typology to articulate the possibilities. (1) Telling and growth • Tension between informing and creating opportunities to reflect and self-direct; • Tension between acknowledging student teachers’ needs and concerns and challenging them to grow. (2) Confidence and uncertainty: 108 • Tension between making explicit the complexities and messiness of teaching and helping student teachers feel confident to proceed; • Tension between exposing vulnerability as a teacher educator and maintaining student teachers’ confidence in their teacher educator as a leader. (3) Working with and against: • Tension between working towards a particular ideal and jeopardizing this ideal by the approach chosen to attain it. (4) Discomfort and challenge: • Tension between a constructive learning experience and an uncomfortable learning experience. (5) Acknowledging and building upon experience: • Tension between helping students recognize the authority of their experience and helping them to see that there is more to teaching than simply experience. (6) Planning and being responsive: • Tension between planning for learning and responding to learning opportunities as they arise in practice (pp. 1313–1314). As Berry’s (2007) framework conceptualizes the hidden problems teacher educators face in their pedagogical practices, it has been widely used in autoethnographic research about teacher educators’ pedagogical work. While helpful, Berry’s (2007) framework needs complementary research to address concerns about tensions in multicultural teaching practices. This is where Wang’s (2005) framework helps. Wang’s (2005) typology of four possible tensions that speak to the practices of multicultural teaching complements Berry’s (2007) framework: (1) teacher authority and student agency; (2) self and other; (3) center and margin; and (4) intellect and 109 emotion. Wang also provides detailed descriptions of and arguments for each tension. For example, the tension of intellect and emotion focuses on the way in which student learning experiences involve situations that asks students to engage in rational argument but fails to acknowledge how their own emotions are couched in the unconscious; while socially constructed, affect the way they know. Both Berry (2007) and Wang (2005) contend their frameworks are not intended to offer solutions to these tensions. Rather, they are reference points when one wants to think through possible responses to these tensions. For example, they suggest teacher educators can take up their ways of being in the world and things coming for their own teaching and researching experiences, including their own teaching insights, research findings, and reflections about teaching and learning as a resource for their sense-making of the tensions which might, then, direct them to find ways to respond to the tensions and contradiction that are inherent in their pedagogical work. Following these suggestions, I have read themes that represent tensions in my teaching in my data analysis, alongside my theoretical from Chapter 2. In reading Wang (2005), Berry (2007), and my theoretical discussion alongside of the data, I am able to make sense of the dynamic underlying the tensions and identify possible responses. I theorize that when I am teaching multicultural education, there are tensions concerning my relationships with students and my instructional approach (specifically, a critical pedagogy approach) that seem to constrain my teaching. In an attempt to respond to these tensions, I make sense of my own lived experiences as a foreigner in the United States, my own artifacts related to these experiences, and my dissertation research outcomes and then use this sense-making to mediate these tensions. 110 Methods Research Design This research is designed as an autoethnography to examine tensions I encounter in my teaching (Ellis, 2005; LaBoskey, 2007). In this study, I am both a researcher and participant. In the following sections, I explicate why autoethnography, as a methodological tool, can serve my research purpose. An autoethnographic approach helps examine tensions in my teaching in three ways. First, it provides a methodological cue that fits my research specifics. Ellis (2004) stated that auto-ethnography is a way of bringing one’s own stories and personal experiences to light through exploring the interplay of “current and introspective, personally engaged self with cultural descriptions mediated through language, history, and ethnographic explanation” (p. 12) and “autoethnography involves a back-and-forth movement between experiencing and examining . . . and observing and revealing” (Ellis, 2004, p. 13). Thus, auto-ethnography is considered a more suitable methodological tool for my study than other research methodological approaches, such as ethnography or survey. Second, this methodology creates a site for presenting my self-representation to the world. As a foreign-born person in the United States, like many others who share a similar ethnic and social status, I have always been on the quest to bring my true self to the world through my research. To that end, I seek to bring my enduring values and modes of self-representation to my professional world. Third, autoethnography, which relies heavily on written texts about the self, makes space for me to examine myself through my own writing—another way of introducing my representation to the world. Richardson (2001) encouraged me to take up autoethnography by 111 stating that: “I write because I want to find something out. I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it” (p. 35). She helped me observe that autoethnographic inquiry can serve as “a way of finding out about [my]self and [my] topic . . . a way of “knowing”—a method of discovery and analysis” (Richardson 2001, p. 923). Later, the more I wrote through this research, and the more I read academically, the more I found similar stories to my own from people I never met. Yet, they have been working in the same fields with me and have been trying to address the same challenges I have encountered. This encouraged me, giving me a reason to believe this representation of myself would be seen by others. Richardson (2001) suggests that this method can play a collective and personal role: (1) “[it] provides a research practice through which we can investigate how we construct the world, ourselves, and others” (p. 924); and (2) “I want writing to move me someplace new in terms of my knowledge about myself, the world, or how things hang together. To sit at a desk and to really be engaged in the process requires that I not know where the writing is taking me” (p. 319). On the whole, auto-ethnography offers a tool for me to gain an in-depth insight about my own teaching practice and my representation of my teaching as an international teacher educator in the United States. Context of the Study Context of my teaching. As a doctoral student in teacher education program and similar to Sue and John, I was assigned to teach MTE 101 as a sole instructor for five semesters between Spring 2016 and Fall 2018. This social foundation course focuses on multicultural issues and introduces preservice teachers to the ways in which social inequality affects schooling and vice versa. It is designed to allow students to examine how socially constructed categories (such as social class, race, or gender) are used to privilege some individuals and groups and marginalize 112 others. The course meets three hours each week throughout the semester. I was in charge of adopting a curriculum framework designed by the university (with required course themes and requirements for students’ learning competencies, reading lists, and grading). Based on this framework, I developed my own syllabi. Each syllabus reflects the curriculum framework requirements though I had instructor autonomy in selecting course materials. Each semester, I participated in required bi-weekly instructor group meetings to share teaching approaches, learn to design common assignments, reflect on classroom practices, and share ideas to improve teaching. Mentoring support, in the form of informal and formal meetings with faculty course leaders, was provided to me during the time I was teaching my courses. In my teaching, I relied on critical pedagogy and feminist lens to design class activities. In doing so, I hoped I would foster the kinds of critical thinking practices I wanted students to be able to use in their future teaching. Who am I in this autoethnography? I was born in Vietnam where I completed my high school and college education. I was a college teacher for several years before I earned my Master of Arts degree in England and moved to the United States. When I came to the United States, I enrolled in a doctoral program. In the United States, I identify myself as heterosexual, cis-gendered female and a mother who arrived in the United States from Vietnam. Although I have previous college teaching experience in Vietnam, I found myself constantly in search of a cross-cultural identity that was not confined within one space nor trapped between two spaces. My Vietnamese schooling experience conveyed to me that teacher-student relationships are hierarchical; teachers dominate the educational process, and students tend to conform to the direction and guidance of their teachers. The Vietnamese system I experienced as a student was generally characterized by 113 power distance. The teacher was the sole authority figure, and students simply obeyed or followed directions. Teachers were highly respected and hardly challenged, contradicted, or criticized publicly by students. The curriculum was more or less teacher-centered, and there was little or no room for students to negotiate the curriculum with teachers. On the contrary, the American educational system emphasized closer relationships between teachers and students. Besides, an institutionalized culture of student empowerment means that students not only feel entitled to several privileges, they were also bold and sometimes assertive, with a potential for tension and conflict creation. Having been taught primarily in the Vietnamese education system, I had limited access to opportunities for my comprehensive development. For example, the system did not support me to pursue my interest in arts, such as poetry and painting—the arts I had been taught by my parents since I was born. I had never known that poetry and other arts could be used as a lay artwork and as a medium to communicate about social issues. I have only just learned there is a strong relationship between arts, justice, learning, and teaching; artistic creation incited my inquiry about the social issues I experienced during my graduate education in the United States. Data Sources In Ellis’ (2004) auto-ethnography categories, I see my auto-ethnography as a form of “reflexive ethnography” in that it “focus[es] on a culture and sub-culture and author use their life story in that culture to look more deeply at self-other interactions” (p. 46). In my data collection, I produced three main sources of data. First, prior to the semester, I wrote autobiographical essays on my own teaching. The purpose of these accounts was to identify and describe my beliefs and practices about teaching and learning based on an examination of my past experiences. Second, during my time teaching every semester, I took note of each lesson and 114 wrote journal entries that record my reflections from my teaching. Employing Schon’s (1987) suggestion about the forms of reflection-in-practice, I produced this text in two forms. The first from is reflection on action-present which is my reflection after a few hours of class events. The second form is my reflection on action-then which is my reflection after a period of time of the class events when I re-read the refection on action-present in connections to theories, including Berry, Wang, my theoretical argument presented in Chapter 2. Finally, I collected my students’ work, including their emails responding to my after-class emails, their notes on exit tickets, and their work produced in some class activities. All of these sources serve as a basis for my data analysis. Data Analysis I organized my data analysis into three phases. In phase 1, I read and re-read my journal entries to identify significant class events in terms of problems, surprises, and challenges. In phase 2, I read and re-read my refection on action-now and reflection on action-then along my Berry, Wang, and my theoretical discussion in Chapter 2. I developed initial codes (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Then, I used these codes to theme up the texts that represent the tensions. I worked on the text along with Berry’s (2007) and Wang’s (2005) theoretical framework about tensions and discovered two tensions: (a) encouraging students to critique and handling their affective orientations; and (b) planning and being responsive. Next, to make sense of the tensions and to find possibilities for responding to the tensions, I worked alongside the text and my theoretical argument, combined with post-critical arguments of Felski (2015) and Latour (2005). For example, I determined what the affective orientations that my requirement to students of critique place on students. In phase 3, the text in this phase is read and re-read to select segments from my reflection on action-now based on what I noticed when I responded to tensions. The 115 results of data analysis are presented in Table 7. Research Findings The purposes of this research are to understand tensions I encounter in my teaching. How I identify and respond to the tensions is presented below. Table 7: Tensions and Respond to Tensions Identify tensions Class incident (What I did do in class? Pocahontas Students Reflection on action-present (What did I concern? resisted to critique The Color of Fear Students were concerned about my international identity Reflection on action-then (What I discover when reading post-critical theory? Respond to the tensions Class Incident (What did I do to respond the tension?) Reflection on action-present (What worked?) Tension 1: Facilitate students to critique versus handle their affective orientations. Possibilities for responding to the tension: Building an art-based affective space in classrooms. Tension 2: Planning versus being responsive. Possibilities for responding to the tension: Developing art-based identity artifacts. “Dreamings” Critique can coexist with affective orientations (e.g., critique coexists with hope) Relational aspects coexist with instructional aspects “I am from the East” Tensions 1: Engaging Critique Versus Handling Affect According to Wang (2005), the tension of facilitating students to critique and handle their affective orientations involves difficulties when teacher educators require students to critique social problems; yet, at the same time, they encounter student emotional expressions that seem to resist the purposes of critique. Class incident: Pocahontas. To introduce the “Race and Gender” theme to class, I began with a 10-minute clip of the Pocahontas animated film. I took this clip from already-established course materials from D2L. 116 Pocahontas loved John Rolfe. She left her hometown (Jamestown), and her tribe to live in John’s house in London. John asked her to stay home to do housework, and she did. John asked her to go with him to entertaining events, and she did. Even then, after he had taken almost everything from her, she provided a welcome place at home for him to rest. Students watched the clip intently. They laughed when John told Pocahontas witty jokes. They were wowed when Pocahontas welcomed John home from his long trip with her sweet smile and loving expression. They whispered to each other with satisfied signs on their faces when the clip ended with the beautiful soundtrack of the hit single, “Color of the Wind.” Committed critical pedagogy which privileges critique before a large group discussion, I asked students to work in the small groups to respond to my prompt that required them to interpret what had been shown in the movie by examining it through a feminist lens—a reading that students had studied at the beginning of the course. I intended for this prompt to lead to the discussion about the ways race and gender are portrayed and who benefits from that portrayal. I noticed during the small group discussion that many students seemed unsure of what they would share with their partners. During the large class discussion, I also noticed some students identified and critiqued John for his domination through his treatment of Pocahontas due to her underprivileged race and gender status. One said, “she never made London her home because John overruled her entire life.” Others pushed back against this critique. At the end of the class period, a handful of students came to me and asked—in a tone of anger—why I had asked them to destroy this love story and how they had not wanted to critique the story. One said, “I know I am speaking for only myself, but, many of us were torn between thinking between interpreting against the movie and thinking that the movie was just a love story with no race and gender issues involved. Yeah, it was great to critique against the love story, but 117 where might be the hope for love?” Another said, “I’d like to see the movie as what it was and what it was is the movie of the beauty and the love between two lovely individuals.” Reflection on action-present: “Student’s push-back of the critique.” I wondered what I had accomplished. The pace of the discussion was exhausting and discomforting. It had not gone at all as I had expected. I didn’t find aspects of the class to the degree expressed by students who came to talk with me after class on the negative side, but problematic. They seemed to express feelings of frustration and discouragement. They were not the only students who felt that way, but they were the voices I interpreted as the loudest. These students expressed a desire to not engage in looking beyond the surface of the story to find the hidden meanings of racial and gendered hegemony. They wanted to view the movie as interesting, not view it as depressing due to its hidden messages. They directed their feelings of discomfort at me and at the ways the lesson was not helpful for their learning. At the time, I interpreted their difficulties, frustration, and discomfort as resistance—something I had not thought of at all when I planned the lesson. Also, at the time, their expression as emotions of anger and depression was something I had not ever imagined happening before I taught the lesson. I struggled, wondering why there were so many emotional student expressions. I wrote these thoughts as a brief: I am still not so sure about that lesson, and my feeling now is just full of uncertainty. But I can be sure to myself from reflecting on that student’s reactions that my teaching, at the moment, offered student opportunities to be critical, but it didn’t offer hope—a significant form of emotion—an affective form that student might have been especially looking for at that time. This means while both critique and affect are important for students to learn difficult knowledge concerning social justice issues, my teaching had not well facilitated students to make this connection. What are the possible reasons for 118 this? Reflection on action-then: Identify tension. When I revisited this question a few weeks later while writing Chapter 2, I was reminded of one finding. The finding was that Sue—my peer teacher educator who is a research participant in this dissertation—encountered the same situation as I did in this episode. I was also reminded of my theoretical argument guided by Felski’s (2015) theory of the limits of critique. That is, the critical pedagogy I used in this incident tends to discipline the students into a rigid set of relational and affective orientations toward social practices, and by that, it involves students in intense emotional moments, and it creates contradictory and conflicting situations in class. In placing this theoretical argument alongside Wang’s (2005) theory about the tension of intellect and emotion, I came to understand the critical pedagogy aspects I had used in the class incident may have involved students in the tension of critique and affect in which the students were oriented toward a sense of suspect, doubt, and untruthfulness about others and toward social practices. Examples from the episode might be: in order to critique gender relations between John and Pocahontas, students needed to suspect the sincerity and honesty in the ways John expressed his love for Pocahontas. These rigid orientations created intense moments because—and I echo Felski (2015)—they “detach” students from “hoping, caring, loving” and “cut” students off from “being touched by the genuine strangeness and otherness of the work of art” (p. 39). This means students who did not find themselves necessary to engage in this orientation would express their felt resistance to the class activity. This also means that while I used a critical pedagogy approach, I encountered the tension between facilitating students to critique the social practice versus handling student’s affective orientations. At the same time, I was reminded of Wang’s (2005) and Felski’s (2015) suggestions 119 when I wrote these thoughts as a brief: I also came to understand that this orientation might distort the purpose of critique in the discussion about social practices. Felski’s (2015) encourages researchers to resist this default option of critical pedagogy to avoid risking the emancipatory goals of critical pedagogy. Wang (2005) claims that the feelings of anger, frustration, struggles, and depression must be addressed in a tactful way. I was inspired, then, to think about finding ways to respond to the tensions. Possible responses to the tensions and how I brought them into my teaching are presented in the next two sections Reflection on action-then: Seeing possibilities. This claim took me to revisit the discussion about possible options for ways to enacting critical pedagogy I offer in Chapter 2. I argued—again, based on Felski’s (2015) theory—for the development of an “affective space”— the physical or imaginative space formed with rhythms and resonance (through the presence of, for example, poetry, music, writing, and fiction) to generate an environment of shared affective experience. In this affective space, the feelings of one (e.g., infant or student) can be connected to that of other (e.g., mother or teacher) which then leads to sincerity, trust, and affective resonance in relationships. I argue it is easy to create affective orientation toward trust, hope, and care alongside critique in this space. I also wonder if the development of this space can be a fruitful way to open up new orientations toward critical pedagogy in my teaching with a hope of balancing the tension of critique and affect. For example, my instruction about gender practice can begin with the assumption that particular characters in the poem, fiction novel, or movie are not trying to impose gender hierarchy on us. Rather, they are willing to cooperate with students in the interpretation about gender practice in order to “bring new things to the light rather than an 120 endless rumination on hidden meanings or representational failures” (Felski, 2015, p. 174). In making sense of this discussion, I wrote, This thought fascinates me because it sets out a new way for me to think about the possibilities for an approach to respond to the tension of encouraging students to critique and helping them handle their affective orientations. The ideas of creating and attending to the affective space through artwork seem intriguing and applicable. Below is my presentation of how I used this idea to shed light on ways I responded to these tensions. Respond to tension 1. Below are my ways responding to tension 1. Class Incident: “Dreamings.” I designed “Dreamings”9 activity to offer students opportunities to learn about how neoliberalism and its racial biases harm the lives of students. I had students watch a 30-minute documentary titled Dreamings: The Aboriginal Australian in the previous class. I asked them to notice how the artwork represents Aboriginal people’s ways of hoping, dreaming, love of freedom, and how their ancestral values were projected into their identities. I also asked them to gather stories from their ancestors (parents or grandparents) about their hope/dreamings when they were young and bring the stories to the following class. In class, I had students retell stories in quick drawings then share them with others given my prompt asking them to discuss what their own hopes/dreams looked like and to what extent the past hopes/dreams of their ancestors connected to whom they see themselves as now. I followed along with the whole class discussion in asking students to talk about the extent to which testing 9 Bell, J. & Riley, M. (Directors). (1988). Dreaming: the art of Aboriginal Australia. Film Australia, Lindfield: N.S.W. DREAMINGS: The Art of Aboriginal Australia is a documentary of a journey to lands and mangroves of Australia, where Aboriginal artists keep alive their ancient and traditional forms expressed through the artwork. Showing Aboriginal artists at work in their native environments, DREAMINGS explores the meaning and mystical significance that reflects Aboriginal people’s hope for the new life. Sources: Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia [Web log post]. Retrieved August 31, 2019 from http://icarusfilms.com/if-drem 121 policies might give and take away the hopes/dreams of students, especially students from underprivileged backgrounds. In the last 15 minutes of class, students and I did a “they say, I say” activity on a google doc. My hope for all of these activities was that students might experience moments in which they had opportunities to rise with hopeful lives of themselves and those of others while understanding that they exercise power relations. I noticed the discussion was brief and focused. I also noticed some signs of contemplation on the students’ faces. Reflection on action-present. That night, I looked at the student exit tickets and specifically the “they say I say” activity. I was curious. What were they thinking about? What were they hopeful for? Were they involved hopeful affective orientations while being critical of neoliberalism? As I read the texts, I was surprised and excited about the tone, manner, and content of student responses to the class. Here is one exit ticket: The activity gave me the idea that our life is a relational cycle. Without the sacrifice my grandfather made in order to give his future children and grandchildren a better life and his resilience to overcome the turmoil in society as a Greek immigrant, I most likely would not be in the position I am today. My hope, dream, and values I have pursued cannot be separated from those of others. I would choose to represent my people in order to move them forward with their hope and dreams rather than to stand on the side of those who would ruin the hope and dreams. One the “they say, I say” activity: I said: one day you will get an email from a student that just reads, you see me, and you will not know what I am hopeful for or even what it meant when I go to the test rooms. They said: Openness is not really hard. It is up and down, but it never disappears. Hope is 122 like that, too. The biggest hurdle is to do it while being alerting to influence of power hegemony. The power might use that against me. But, it’s impossible for it to do harm the lives of people in need when hope and dreams drive us and sustain us. I wrote in my reflective essay about how I felt what the class had taught me about responding to the tensions: Responding to the tension of critique and affect means attending to an affective act in the way that offers teacher of teaching both hopefully, critically, and openly. The point is not to avoid or move traditional critical thinking approach away but rather to preserve hope alongside the critique through an avenue of a creative lesson plan through the means of arts. Responding to tension, as Felski (2015) puts, is a “matter of attaching, collaging, negotiating--of forging links between things that were previously unconnected.” Teaching in this light is to “embod[y] mode of attentiveness that involves us in acts of sensing, perceiving, feeling, and engaging” (p. 176), and to make possibilities for having a room in which hope to coexist critique in the class discussion about social practices. Tension 2: Planning Versus Being Responsive According to Berry (2007), the tension of planning and being responsive involves difficulties and challenges that teacher educators experience when they have particular goals and intentions for student learning yet, at the same time, want to be responsive to the kind of problems and concerns that students express in class. Class incident: “The Color of Fear.” I planned carefully for the lesson that aimed to introduce students to the lives of people of color. I revisited the teaching templates of faculty instructors and accordingly chose The Color of Fear video clip as a stimulating material for discussion. As I was committed to critical pedagogy and thought I would bring my own 123 experiences as a foreigner and international teacher educator about cultural differences into class to develop a mutual understanding—regardless of cultural differences in class—I followed the clip screening by sharing my own challenging experiences as a foreigner in the United States. For class discussion, I posted a prompt asking whether students had previous experiences with people of color and how they might relate those experiences with the experiences that people of color had in the documentary. The idea underlying this design was that students might make connections between their own experiences with their observations from class materials and with my shared stories about race. I noticed the discussion was flat with superficial responses, signs of passive participation, and several periods of silence. After class, a student approached me and talked in between many pauses: “I think most of what I said today was off . . . I know it’s not really . . . easy . . . the movie was not OK . . . the discussion in the movie was biased and I guess it would have been better if you had told us how your experiences were related to racial discrimination in this country.” Reflection on action-now: “Students are concerned about my identity.” I wondered what I had accomplished. I felt that class period was one of the many I marked as being hopeless. I felt students wanted to see something interesting in the clip, not something awful about U.S. history—which was not something for which I had not planned. I also felt the student did not see my identity as an Asian as something that was helping him to get the point, which was in complete contrast to what I had anticipated. They directed their resistance to me, which was also not what I had anticipated. At the time, I interpreted their reactions as resistance, something I had not thought of at all when I planned the lesson. I wrote in my journal: I am not sure why the class went that way. My lesson plan which was designed based on rigorous template went into an unexpected desire. My intentions to make my own cultural 124 experiences to be a part of the curriculum seemed completely fail. I felt that students took up their agency in viewing the course in a particular frame of reference, that is, culturally, teachers need to be American-like, and pedagogically, teachers need to have all understanding about multicultural issues of the U.S society. What is the problem here? How can I work on my pedagogy in the ways that student learning can be authentic? Reflection on action-then: Identify tension. When I revisited these questions a few days later while writing Chapter 2, I was reminded of two scholarly aspects of the tension argument. One aspect came from Berry (2007), who argues there is a tension between planning for student learning and responding to unplanned reactions in the classroom—as she named it— the tension of “planning and being responsive” (p. 1324). When taking this theory into account this episode, I realized the unexpected desire might have been because I had established a good intention for my teaching, but I had not been ready or prepared enough to respond to unexpected student interpretations. For example, I had thought hard and planned hard to use my own experiences as a springboard for students’ understanding of the oppressive experiences of people of color, but students’ interpretation of my attempt to position myself in that way was that I lacked content knowledge about the teaching topic. I wrote in my reflective text: And, my reactions to students, at the moment, perhaps did more harm than good. Perhaps, as I strictly planned for the lesson, I saw this as teachable moments for myself with students, but students saw this as unlearnable moments for themselves with me. How might I work with students with a certain plan on integrating teacher self in the curriculum in a way that my students feel worthwhile for their learning about social practices? Reflection on action-then: Seeing possibilities. In an attempt to make further sense of 125 this tension, particularly to understand why my identity as a foreigner and the experiences associated with it did not seem to be a springboard for student learning, I was also reminded by my findings and theoretical argument in Chapter 2. In Chapter 2, along the theoretical lines of Ellsworth (1989) and Latour (2005), I argued there might be a strong possibility that critical pedagogy that privileges positionality or one’s cultural identities positions both teachers and students in certain social problems that are pre-identified, particularly for the categories of positionalities in which they are socially grouped. A student might refuse to share their social experiences in class is because the moments of class discussion which involve the privilege of particular positionality, they were constrained by the pre-identified the meanings of the social problems that impose on the category of positionality to which they belong. This theoretical argument and my reflection on what the student reacted to in the episode helped me understand what happened. I came to understand that the critical pedagogy aspects I had used in the episode may have positioned students who are mostly White American in the social problems in which they are thought to always have more privilege than the rest of society. Thus, what I brought into the class might have been interpreted as if they were learning from me but at the same time, I felt frustrated that I was blaming them for the privilege they did not earn. This means that students who did not find the learning helpful for their own sense-making of their privilege would express their felt resistance to the class activity. This also means while I was committing to enact my teaching with critical pedagogy approach that planned on privileging my positionality, I was very certain about the power of my teaching position which tended to contradict to student agency. In making sense of this argument, I wrote, How the teachers balance the issues of the presumable power inherent in their teaching positions and the ways student take their agency in their learning has an important impact 126 on how multicultural education is received by students. Perhaps, the development of an “affective space” companying the uses of arts would help. I was inspired by these reflections to think about finding ways to respond to these tensions. The possibilities for responding to these tensions and how I used them in my teaching is presented in the next section. Responding to tension 2. My ways of responding to tension 2 were as follows. Class Incident: “I am from the East.” This lesson was designed to help students reflect on their identity as teachers who teach students from whom they are culturally different. I asked students to develop mixed-text collages representing the multicultural teachers they want to be in the future. I passed out the main text, taking a few minutes to tell them that it was a poem, “I am from the East” (see Appendix 1), I wrote a few months earlier after I had returned to the United States from Vietnam, following my beloved mother’s memorial ceremony. I had not seen her for several years before her passing, something I grieved deeply. I said the poem was not entirely about my mother, but I wrote it with her image in mind, thinking it would be my tribute to her. I also set out supporting texts from a variety of disparate texts I had collected: favorite poems, beloved quotes, and pictures of favorite places. I then gave them the prompt, asked them to create a collage using the supporting texts with the main text, turned them loose with the scissors and glue sticks, and let them be. The point was to open students to the concept of human selves to get them thinking about the social issues broadly and the values they might bring to their own multicultural classrooms in the future. At first, I noticed students were only concerned with the personal accounts embedded in my poem. Then, I mindfully worked with students to go beyond the personal accounts and helped them to deepen their thoughts about the historical, social, and political constructs of those countries/places. I noticed the entire class seemed to go very well. 127 Students seemed to invest all their emotions, thinking, and time in the artwork. When called on to present their art, all of them raised their hands. The presentations were fun and invoked many inquiries and thoughtful questions. A student’s collage is portrayed in Figure 1. Figure 1: Student’s Mixed-media Collage “I Am from the East” My intentions for this activity were modest. I wanted to use beloved things of my own— the one I lived with, breath through, and laid on to tell the truth of a piece of my life to my students, with the hope of building students’ critical thinking through a sense of sincerity and honesty. I was not certain at all about the result when I planned the activity. Reflection on action-now. I was startled when I first saw the student’s work (Figure 1) because I felt that my very personal texts were taken seriously by the student; she made them into something new, filled with some special aspects of her own personality. Also, in it, all materials had been reimaged in an aesthetic manner, portraying the student’s images of her future life as a committed multicultural education teacher. This told me the student was inspired by the activity and remade the materials for herself in ways that spoke affirmatively to the teacher she aspired to be. That evening, I looked at all of the student work again. I was excited, then felt that I 128 wanted to share my feelings with the students. I wrote a reflective text and emailed it to the whole class: I want to read your work as a way in which my attempt to use things coming from my beloved values of my cultural identities that are shaped by both East and West cultures somehow reconcile some intense moments in our class. My experiences accumulated by the time of my living in both Vietnam and the U.S. were made as a substance of the poem. It, then, was used by me to bring who I am, what I love and hope for, and what I was struggled with in and from my real life into my classroom and to my students. You all took my stories up and did something with it yourselves to present who you were through the process of connecting your American cultures with that of mine. No matter how we [students and me] thought we might have differed from one another in terms of cultural background, it looks like we began to think about our relationships in a new way and in a new spirit. In response, I received one student email: This activity was my most memorable moment of this class. You shared your personal stories about the death of your mother and how you looked for making it meaningful in your life, then to me and to my peers. I think that after that moment I felt very comfortable and safe sharing with you my stories. Later, in the following class, one student, who was pursuing a creative writing major in the College of Arts and Letters, came to me and shared that she had asked students in her service- learning placement at a local Refugee Center to do similar things as I did—to write poems about the most memorable things in their lives. She expanded in a different direction by asking them to 129 do the poems in a “weathergrams” format10; she felt that she and her students had the most interesting lesson ever. These class moments where the autobiography of my life became curriculum materials shifted the classroom environment to where the students and I seemed to feel a sense of collective agency. I seemed less worried about the rigor of my lesson plan and the strengthening or weakening of my teacher authority. Rather, I tended to let go of the strict lesson plan to be more responsive to questions, concerns, and sharing from the students. I wrote in my reflective text: I think I was able to do so because I tended to author my cultural identity as ways to reach and share out my real-life experiences with my students. My students took up what I shared, made sense of them, and infused in them their own values and wisdom. This means that both my students and I worked together opening up a space where my institutional authority merged with students’ sense of agency—I was a teacher while also a learner of my students. My students’ sense of agency, in terms of their American cultures, merged with the nuances of my culture. With the merger of two positions, there must exist collective so that cultural boundaries between students and me becomes fluid in the teaching. What Am I Learning Now? Drawing on Berry’s (2007) and Wang’s (2005) conceptual frame of tensions and my post-criticality-informed argument about limitations of critical pedagogy in the previous 10 Weathergrams are a Japanese poem style. They are poems of about ten words or less. They are written on the narrow strips of craft paper cut from used grocery store bags. They are hung on bushes or trees or mountain trails. They are generally seasonal and are left out for three months or so. The name means “weather writing”—notions by sun, wind, and possibly ice. Written with special and proper ink, the writing lasts. Let them weather and wither like an old leave. The meaning is to let things live naturally and be not all on the surface. Sources: Switchboard [Web Log Post]. Retrieved August 31, 2019, from https://switchboardhq.com/weathergram 130 sections, I explore what tensions are involved in my multicultural teaching and how I respond to the tensions. I identify two tensions: (1) encouraging students to critique and handling students’ affective orientations; and (2) planning and being responsive. I also find my ways of responding to these tensions are informed by my identity and the theories with which I am engaged. In the following sections, I discuss what I am learning from identifying and responding to the tensions, with respect themes mentioned in the literature review. Specifically, I discuss what I am learning about the role of theory-in-practice, teacher educator’s identity as resources for teaching, and the idea about teacher as researcher. Learning to Appreciate the Roles of (Post-Criticality-Informed) Theory in Practice I began teaching the course by fixing myself to a vision of how I might encourage students to wear a critical lens all the time to interrogate social problems. Freire’s (1974) critical pedagogy, hooks’ (1994) feminist pedagogy, among others, were my pedagogical themes. I entered the course with these themes and a vision of teaching about multicultural education in ways which paralleled the curriculum framework of the university. However, my analysis, reflections on, identification of, and response to tension 1 and tension 2 reveals reconstructed visions of a pedagogy of multicultural teaching and a new understanding of my teaching practice as a teacher educator. I am learning to make theoretical shifts; to have new ways of listening to my students’ feelings; to have a sense of problems and dilemmas and how to respond to them; and to accept uncertainty—that is, although some of what happens during teaching might be anticipated, much of what happens cannot be planned or predicted. Much of this learning came under the influence of the theoretical argument in the field that I had an opportunity to access to and to make sense of. I turn now to two aspects of what I am learning in terms of theoretical shifts and how to have a new way to listen to students. The third and fourth aspects—to have a 131 sense of problems and dilemmas and to accept uncertainty—is discussed and intertwined with my discussion of the other two discussion parts in this section. First, when I noticed each class incident mentioned in my analysis entailed possible problems, and I struggled to figure out why they happened. Then I consistently engaged with Ellsworth’s (1989), Felski’s (2015), Latour’s (2005), and Huehls’s (2016) theory of post- criticality, taking seriously what these theorists ask of us; for example, that there are affective orientations that students are disciplined into alongside the requirement of asking them to critique. Letting students engage in artwork can reconcile this tension. This led me to question my certainty about the power of critical pedagogy. Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1993) call this a “theoretical shift,” referring to the situation in which one moves toward a new direction as she finds a worthwhile conceptual matter for thinking and living (e.g., affect matters in the realm of critique), while she attends her own teaching practice. I began to learn, and then to listen to my students’ reactions differently. Second, learning to listen to student reactions differently involved stopping my perceptions of student reactions (e.g., putting doubt on my identity or push-back my requirement of critique) as resistance or depression. Rather, I turned to my own pedagogical practice and put my questions on the way it goes in my teaching, in order to re-describe and re-explain the situation. For example, when reading of Felski (2015), I began to reexplain the reason why students resisted my requirement of critique in class incident 1. For my reexplanation at the time, it was not because students wanted to reinforce their own privileged identities or they were ignorant to the social practice; rather, they pushed-back because they were driven by the affective orientations, such as hopeless or doubt that the requirement of critique generated. My response to students, then, was informed by this reexplanation. 132 What the findings show from student exit tickets and “they say, I say” exercise indicates they seemed to associate their feelings (or affect) with a sense of hope, while not losing their chance to think about others who are subject to social power relations (or being critical about social practices). This response activity seemed to set out an affective space for hope—“a fully human, concrete, and lived level of affective experiences” (Felski, 2015, p. 84), and critique to coexist and work together. Attending to affective acts in this way provides new opportunities for the teacher (me) to teach both hopefully and critically. By bringing myself and my beloved personal things to my classroom and into my students’ discussion with the intention that students will be critical about positional differences, I offered my “hope-in-the-present” (Hodgson et al., 2018, p. 43) that the teacher’s (me) and students’ different positionalities can be a learning resources in the classroom discussions about social justice. When the student treated my personal items and memories with care and trust, my hope-in-the-present was passed on to her with no need of explanation. When she reacted to the poem and collaged her thoughts and images to envision her teacher aspirations in an affirmative and critical way, she made my hope (and her hope) into critical thinking about social equality and transformation. At that point, my teaching, which was built on mutual trust between the student and me, and the optimistic hope for social change, was not eclipsed by critique (Hodgson et al., 2018, p. 57). Rather, this teaching moment reduced the grip of a social construct; thus, it seemed to develop the student’s liberated agency, which can then manifest in her active engagement in the pursuit of social equality. Learning to See My Self as a Promise for an (Art-Based) Teaching Resource As I struggled to make sense of student concern about my identity and to figure out ways to respond to classroom tensions, I learned to see myself and my personal experiences as possible resources—rather than an impediment—in my teaching. At one level, this seeing 133 involves investigating or looking closely at my own identity, positionality, and associated lived experiences, as well as those of my students to understand what cultural blend a resource for teaching would be and learning in the context of multicultural education. In my approach to responding to the tension in class incident 2 through the “I am from the East” activity, I began to let go of the planned lesson by placing students in an arts setting (that is, the mixed-media collage with my poem11) in which my lived experiences rooted in my home country and those lived experiences of students rooted in the United States seemed to intertwine. Student’s responses to my email after the collage activity shows they wanted to learn more about me, build trust, and put more value on my work. Making myself into the learning resource, in this sense, is to use myself to create opportunities to think about the lives of others, regardless of cultural differences. If this is worthwhile for student learning (as I felt from reading their responses to my after-class email), then it is worthwhile for my understanding about the values of my international identity. My international identity, in this sense, is not the target of criticism; it is, instead, a resource for teaching and student learning. At another level, this seeing involves my attempt to blend distinctive cultural aspects— that is, to combine the traits of student autonomy and freedom of expression (e.g., talking about their “dreamings” with their own artwork)—which I had learned to value in the West (or the United States), and the attentiveness and caring (e.g., offering students chances to explore the lives of their ancestors) I acquired from my home country culture, the East (or Vietnam). In this way, my identity was used to harmonize my presupposed institutional authority (as a teacher 11 By choosing this poem as an art-based teaching material, I aware that I might have been involved a kind of teacher biases—that some students might have been familiar to the context and contents of the poem then others, depending on the cultures from which they come. At the same time, by bringing my own art to class, and taking the activity as a metaphor for the type of problematic and unjust reproduction (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977/1990), my teaching intention may deserve criticism. In addition to that critique, though, I am interested in the way the activity also demonstrated something different from reproduction, in that the students repurposed materials in new and surprising ways, suggesting, as per the collage, that the material belongs to both teachers and students. 134 educator in the United States) and international identity (as Vietnamese) by creating a reciprocal learning environment in which my identity became a tool for teaching, and my students’ sense of others were respected and included. Teacher and student identities are interrelated in an arts context. The arts help one to see commonalities between one and another while recognizing power relations concerning the differences between race, gender, and other related identities (Webb, 2013). My attempt to respond to the tension, then, is characterized not by erasing contesting ideologies and assumptions (for example, whose teacher’s cultural background is or how different or similar to mainstream community she acts to reach rational agreement), but by the movement among differences to generate a new sense of the familiar self that invites willingness and capabilities of creativeness. Eventually, I learned that by considering East and West as a continuum, rather than the binaries, I could destabilize my planned lessons and base my teaching more on the relationship with my students which leads students to, as I see from student’s responses to my after-class email, better relate what I was teaching to their lives. If Paris & Winn (2013) suggest a humanizing pedagogy for our work as teacher educators of education taking seriously the idea that education has indeed a relational character, that it doesn't exist in any other sense than as a relation and there is “no education without relation” (Bingham & Sidorkin, 2004), then what I did here to respond to the two tensions identified in the findings was an illustration of their points. In this sense, I am learning that teaching multicultural education is to acknowledge the paradoxical notions toward cultural terms have existed due to multiple forces, such as “norms and differences”; “self and other”; and “mainstream and minority.” Multicultural teaching in this context is to shape “cultures” in fluid terms and take it as a means to unsettle paradoxes, rather 135 than secure them. With my international identity, I want to artfully create a pedagogical space in which both teachers and students are open to embodying one another’s cultural diversity. At the same time, I want to see my learning in the United States as authoring the values of my culture, in order to learn to accept the new ones. When I live my stories as an international teacher and student alongside other people’s stories in a new culture, my learning becomes constant. I learn through openness to both criticism and opportunities about my own culture without overruling my students’ perceptions of other cultures. Learning to Research (My Own) Teaching This is the study of my own teaching, and this is my first time to carry out such a study. I have encountered challenges. One is that I conducted the research on my own and rarely had conversations with others along the way. With this, I agree with those debate against the movement “teacher as researcher.” When conducting research about my own teaching, it is easy to isolate myself from the community. Other than that, I learned that my efforts to conduct research about my own practice was worthwhile for my own learning. First, I learned my methodological approaches promote my teaching and vice versa. Employing self-reflective inquiries and my explicit and intentional use of my teaching experiences helped me to analyze and understand the problems, tensions, and dilemmas of my own practice and myself. A better understanding of my own teaching practice and myself, in turn, led me to more reflections about my teaching. When this cycle continues throughout this study, it generates important resources for my teaching. My research about my own teaching sustains me while I am teaching. I am both a researcher and teacher throughout the process (LaBoskey, 2007). 136 Second, this study enhances my autoethnographic epistemology as it helps me go beyond merely telling stories to produce knowledge. As I consider autoethnography a way to “locate our own experiences to our own teaching practices” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993, p. 36), I believe my study generates knowledge in the field by telling an updated teaching story about an under- researched group (i.e., doctoral students teaching multicultural courses) in a new way. The purpose of my storytelling began with my personal experiences, which helped me understand the nature of my work and the complexities underlying it. If my study can tell a traditional story in a refreshing way, then I agree with Loughran's (2010) call for “push[ing] toward a sophisticated articulation of the knowledge that lies beneath the story” (p. 223) and offering ways to engage in producing knowledge about teacher educators’ practices. Chapter Summary In this chapter, I examined my post-criticality-informed pedagogical proposal alongside Berry’s (2007) and Wang’s (2005) conceptual frame of tensions to explore what tensions are involved in my multicultural teaching in the United States and how I responded to these tensions. In employing autoethnographic research and analyzing my journal entries, reflective essays, and my students’ work, I find two tensions involved—(1) my encouraging students to critique versus my handling student’s affective orientations and (2) my planning versus my being responsive. I also find that employing a post-criticality informed pedagogy that engages artwork as a means to develop relational and affective orientations in my multicultural education teaching can be a possible way to respond to these tensions. I discuss what I learn from identifying and responding to these tensions, with respect to the role of theory in practice, a teacher educator’s identity as resources for teaching, and the idea about teacher as researcher. 137 CHAPTER 5 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Dissertation Summary Over the past three decades, there has been an increasing need to prepare teachers for diverse student populations and to help them contribute to making social change in the United States. In order to meet this need, multicultural education has become a required foundational course in teacher education programs. The introduction of this course and the current rising demand to enhance it have been considered responses to the Commissions on Multicultural Education’s (1972) call to action to address social injustice in education (Cochran-Smith, 2003). In practice, the course actually greatly helps prospective teachers develop their critical thinking, positive behavior, and actions toward multicultural issues (Ukpokodu, 2007; Vavrus, 2009). However, at the same time, researchers have also indicated there are several challenges involved in the work of teacher educators who have been teaching this course and in changing the purposes and attitudes of prospective teachers about multicultural issues. Therefore, researchers have given a great deal of attention to study the rationale for multicultural education teaching and the challenges that ensue. Often, this research has cited a demographic imperative (Banks & Banks, 2005) as constitutive factors for this rationale; for example, to whom this teaching is addressed or with what demographics of prospective teachers this teaching is most struggled or whether or not the demographic background of teacher educators matters. At the same time, however, given that prospective teachers of all demographic backgrounds have experienced some levels of resistance to multicultural issues, researchers have suggested that further studies are needed that do not simply assume demographic characteristics but consider how pedagogy, as it pertains directly to the critical pedagogy, is understood and 138 enacted (Cochran-Smith, 1995, 2003 Ellsworth, 1989); what it requires of prospective teachers and teacher educators (Cochran-Smith, 2003); what is promised and limited through the use of critical pedagogies in multicultural teaching (Ellsworth, 1989; Felski, 2015); and what the possibilities are for responding to the limitations while put forth the promises. I began to address these questions with an ethnographic empirical study that investigates the pedagogical work of multicultural novice teacher educators in relation to their positionings, purposes, actions, and sense-making of student responses. This analysis results in understanding the dynamics of multicultural education teaching that is constitutive of multicultural novice teacher educators’ agentic action and commitment to critical pedagogy—both of which are constrained by the challenges concerning students’ felt resistance. This study is followed by a second study in which the challenges are re-described and re- explained through the lens of post-criticality. In this study, a theoretical framework of the limitations of critical pedagogy and an understanding of the challenges are explored. In an effort to respond to these challenges, I have offered two pedagogical orientations which are informed by post-critical perspectives, art-based teaching insights, and affective orientations toward multiculturalism. Furthermore, I have utilized the proposed post-criticality-informed pedagogical orientations, the aspects of novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work dynamics, the assumptions undergirding critical pedagogy, and the idea of challenges in multicultural teaching in my own teaching practice. In this study, multiple connections and relationships between my critical pedagogy experiences, my encounters with challenges, and my ways of responding to these challenges have been explored through my authentic teaching experiences of multicultural 139 education. The insights from my sense-making of these relationships can be considered resources for novice teacher educators’ learning to teach multicultural education in the future. In summary, framing my dissertation into an ethnographic case study, a theoretical argument, and an art-based autoethnography, I explore the pedagogical work of multicultural novice teacher educators in a research-based university in the United States. I argue that while multicultural novice teacher educators pursue critical pedagogy, they face numerous challenges that derive from limitations inherent in the critical pedagogy itself. These challenges are complicated because they may be a source of multicultural novice teacher educators’ vulnerability, a hinder of their commitment to critical pedagogy, and an obstruction of social change goals through multicultural education. However, the challenges can be addressed if multicultural novice teacher educators employ a post-criticality-informed pedagogical orientation that integrates arts, relationality, and affect in multicultural education classrooms. Contributions to Existing Research My dissertation supports some findings in extant research about the limitations and promises of critical pedagogy in multicultural education teaching through the discussion of the dynamics of multicultural education novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work. First, consistent with previous research that has demonstrated that individual characteristics are associated with how teacher educators of multicultural education form their pedagogical practices (Cochran-Smith, 2003; Ellsworth, 1989), my findings indicate that novice teacher educators’ sense of agency (through their (re)positioning and doing research about their own teaching) and their positional identities (race, gender, social class, and international identities) are constitutive of the dynamics of their pedagogical work. At the same time, my findings 140 indicate these individual characteristics are also associated with the challenges inherent in novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work of multicultural education. As a complement to previous research, my study examines the moves, shifts, and changes of novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work. This means I examine the constitution of novice teacher educators’ pedagogical work, their commitment to critical pedagogy, and the involved challenges from different points of time in their current multicultural teaching. Existing research on novice teacher educators’ learning to becoming teacher educators suggests the traces of novice teacher educators’ pedagogical practices that derive from examining their work over time signal their pedagogical trajectories in the future (Cuenca, 2010; Zeichner, 2005). Thus, on the way to becoming teacher educators, novice teacher educators like research participants in my research might engage in developing pedagogy informed by the intersectionality of their sense of agency, positional identities, and commitment to critical pedagogy—all of which are associated with challenges inherent in their future multicultural education teaching. Second, consistent with previous research, I find that critical pedagogy has inherent limitations concerning teachers and students’ differing positionalities (Ellsworth, 1989; Hess, 2017), the negative affective orientations toward particular social problems (McKenzie & Jarvie, 2018), and the vacillation between racial neoliberalism and colorblindness (Kumar, 2019). Adding to the findings of these studies is my finding that arts-based teaching informed by post- critical perspectives on affect and relationality can be ways to mediate these limitations. This means that when one understands the limitations of critical pedagogy, it is possible to find promising aspects that enable social change through multicultural education teaching. Above all, there is hope for a new pedagogical option grounded in a critical analysis of the pedagogical work of practitioners and in the theoretical arguments of traditional and contemporary theorists 141 in the fields of teaching, learning, and justice to come true and become helpful for the novice who teaches with and for the purposes of social transformation in multicultural education. Finally, my study extends ongoing conversations about the roles of autoethnography and reflection on teacher educators’ identities, their pedagogical practices, and their process of learning to teach teacher education courses. Zeichner (2005) notes there is no such thing as an unreflective teacher; likewise, there is no such thing as an unreflective teacher educator. Engaging in reconceptualizing my pedagogical work based on making sense of involved challenges; understanding students’ needs; seeking and finding different theoretical frameworks to explain the challenges; and constantly reflecting on my own work had a significant influence on my ways of becoming a teacher educator. Reflecting on my experiences as an international novice teacher educator of multicultural education helps me to question my underlying assumptions in the classroom and search for new ways of teaching. Autoethnography and reflection have played an important role in existing research about the pedagogical work of teacher educators; they continued to do so in my research. In sum, my dissertation promises the employment of post-critical theory in teaching multicultural education that informs art, affect, and relationality to mediate the limitations of contemporary critical pedagogy, to have students engage with social justice through education, and to inform broader social change goals through multicultural education. Implications With an understanding of the ways in which multicultural novice teacher educators approach and enact a critical pedagogy and related curricular issues of multicultural education, we can create designs that more effectively address the challenges, inquiry, and theoretical thinking about what novice teacher educators bring to the social change. In addition, we can 142 design adaptive curricula and professional development that address the pedagogical challenges and learning to teach needs of novice teacher educators and will allow us to better support them in the process of achieving social change. Based on the theoretical argument and proposal of pedagogical orientations offered above, I have identified three specific design implications, discussed below. Art-Based Pedagogical and Curriculum Adaptations for Multicultural Education One way to achieve the goal of helping novice teacher educators diversify their understanding of critical pedagogy, while also helping them make pedagogical adaptations that maintain the social change-oriented purposes of multicultural curricula framework they are implementing, would be to suggest specific pedagogical and curriculum adaptations for novice teacher educators to choose from when creating a lesson. For example, instructor group meetings, besides encouraging novice teacher educators to share a sense of their students’ reactions, need to provide an opportunity for novice teacher educators to think through and experiment with various lesson plans that shed light on multiple perspectives about critical pedagogy (e.g., art-based models, non-representational modes of teaching, and affective lines in teaching). This professional line would empower novice teacher educators whose own experiences have led them to believe that they are struggling to respond or adapt their teaching. At the same time, these adaptations might help novice teacher educators move toward multi- dimensional understandings of critical pedagogy and toward more humanizing action through multicultural education Scaffolded Pedagogical Trajectories for Multicultural Novice Teacher Educators Finding from Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 discussed in this dissertation is that novice teacher educators come to know and enact critical pedagogy with established ideas about what critical 143 pedagogy is and with preset beliefs that critical pedagogy can make a real change in students’ preexisting perceptions of social practices. Furthermore, these ideas and beliefs are embedded in novice teacher educators’ purposes and assumptions about the roles of critical pedagogy in multicultural education. For some novice teacher educators, critical pedagogy means using critique as a teaching and thinking method that can absolutely bring in change in students’ attitudes and beliefs about social practices; for others, critical pedagogy is about acquiring changes through one-dimensional perspective about what change means; for others still, critical pedagogy is a template for planning and enacting classroom discussion to foster social change. One implication of these findings is that to open multiple venues for diversifying novice teacher educators’ understanding of the roles of critical pedagogy in multicultural education, there is a need to connect novice teacher educators to different perspectives about what critical pedagogy really means and to what extent it might enable or constrain the social change when it is used in multicultural education practices, especially in the current socio-political climate. For example, instructional dialogue in professional support settings, like instructor-group meetings must convince novice teacher educators that there are “entry points” to explore many new theoretical and practical discussions about critical pedagogy outside their classroom teaching practices and institutional boundaries when they want to diversify their knowledge and experiences about critical pedagogy. In other words, in order to help novice teacher educators understand many facets of critical pedagogy and build truly transformative critical-pedagogy- oriented practices, multicultural education curricula framework and institutional policies must be designed to explicitly scaffold novice teacher educators’ development from a particular understanding of critical pedagogy to multiple understandings of critical pedagogy 144 Professional Support for Multicultural Novice Teacher Educators An important finding from Chapter 1 and Chapter 3 is that novice teacher educators sometimes felt significantly less prepared to take up diverse theoretical perspectives of the pedagogy of multicultural education as a theoretical foundation to handle challenges in their teaching. Evidence from similar research (Mac Kenzie & Jarvie, 2018) also indicates novice teacher educators may not have developed enough of diverse ways of responding to challenges (e.g., affective challenges and struggles with their own demographic backgrounds as teacher educators of multicultural education) in their teaching practices that aim to achieve the purposes of social change through multicultural education. If we want novice teacher educators to teach multicultural education in a social change-oriented way, then the classroom context, curricula, and forms of professional development must be designed to support these teacher educators not only in terms of understanding what “challenges” are involved in their teaching, but also understanding and developing responsive pedagogical abilities. Furthermore, classroom contexts, curricula, and professional development activities can play an important role in pointing novice teacher educators to contemporary theories as a source of knowledge for helping these novice teacher educators build both social change-oriented teaching practices and deeper pedagogical and curricular knowledge (Wang, 2005; Zeichner, 2005). Possible Future Directions Where does this research go from here? This dissertation leads me to imagine an engagement with a post-criticality-informed pedagogical orientation through arts, affect, and relationality that accommodates a shift away from the struggles with some limitations of critical pedagogy. The findings of this pedagogical orientation grounded in theoretical/philosophical arguments and empirical studies could provide encouragement for further investigation of this 145 pedagogy, curriculum, and student learning. It could also offer insight for professional development activities for novice teacher educators concerning ways to think and act beyond the challenges involved in their teaching. First, although this study signals that post-criticality-informed pedagogy might bring some benefits to multicultural education teaching, further research is needed. In particular, future research must consider the benefits and constraints this pedagogy might bring in other fields of multicultural-education-related courses taught by other novice teacher educators in teacher education programs. Future research will also want to expand the post-criticality-informed orientation to K-12 teaching practices, particularly for teaching social science subjects or the subjects that need pedagogical insights about multiculturalism, social justice, and equity. This line of research may focus on how teaching multicultural education-related subjects could use students’ connections to arts, personal inquiry, and communal reflexivity as a means to achieve the content knowledge and to sustain it through students’ life. The second line of furthering the outcomes of this dissertation concerns the professional development of novice teacher educators of multicultural education. There have been (and will continue to be) a considerable number of doctoral students like Vy (me), John, and Sue teaching multicultural education at research-based universities and in the positions of international novice teacher educators (Walker et al., 2008). They have been and will continue to be committed to critical pedagogy and attempt to enact it in class while making sense of their own experiences and the scholarship that informs their teaching. As discussed in Chapter 1, this pursuit is predictive of their pedagogical pathways in their multicultural education teaching career. At the same time, however, they continue to encounter many challenges given the inevitable complexities, problems, and challenges to their teaching practice. While they make their own 146 effort to navigate and cope with those inevitable challenges and remain committed to learning to change their teaching practice, they continue to seek professional, social, emotional, and intellectual support to enhance their teaching (Bullock, Williams, & Ritter, 2012). However, they typically receive little professional support for their teaching (Zeichner, 2005). This study suggests that novice teacher educators tasked with teaching multicultural education-related courses might benefit from professional development that takes into account the complexities of their teaching and the multiplicity of their ways of being, background, experience, and understandings. There is also a need for further research focusing on better understanding the challenges inherent in their teaching, despite the fact their teaching may be associated with significantly different sets of skills, assumptions, and expectations. For example, future research can further investigate challenges involved in the multicultural teaching of novice teacher educators who use critical pedagogy. As I discussed throughout the literature review, the challenges involved in multicultural teaching and why those challenges occur have been discussed widely in the existing literature. However, little research has been conducted to investigate challenges involved in multicultural teaching by looking at the assumptions undergirding critical pedagogy, in order to identify problems that are specific to multicultural teaching, as well as possible ways to respond to them. This study is my attempt to engage in understanding the challenges inherent in multicultural teaching in ways which are in connection to the limits of critical pedagogy. I offer a space for rethinking these challenges and at the same time, for reconsidering our certainties about the power of critical pedagogy in multicultural education teaching and therefore, other structural issues, such as the students rating of the pedagogical qualities of teacher educators who teach multicultural education.12 If we can 12 This line of discussion and its implication is context-dependent. This means my implication for rethinking challenges and reconsidering critical pedagogy in multicultural teaching is framed within my attention to the 147 consider further research and professional support in these matters, then we will be responding to the recent calls from many multicultural education scholars, such as Cochran-Smith (2003) and Gorski (2012), for high-quality professional support, aiming to trace and sustain the pedagogical trajectories of novice teacher educators, including one with an international identity. Additional Considerations about Dissertation Limitations The consideration of possible directions for this research needs to be situated in the limitations of data analysis of this study. The pedagogical work of novice teacher educators is interpreted from a predominantly theoretical perspective and based on general conceptual accounts, which may have left out some individual characteristics. This means that my data and analysis do not provide evidence of all positional identities (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) of participants reasoning to explain why the one participant might differ from others in terms of ways they frame their stances and responses in their teaching, in the ways they enact their teaching, and what their teaching means for their future pedagogical development. multicultural teaching practice of novice teacher educators who are new to the profession and possess limited institutional authority. I restrict my attention to this context in recognition that critical pedagogy might be enacted in different traditions and trajectories by veteran or tenured teacher educators who embrace different perceptions about integrating critical pedagogy in multicultural teaching. As Ellsworth (1989) discusses the roles that teacher educators play in carrying out theoretical and practical perceptions of critical pedagogy in multicultural teaching, it is that her “institutional role as a university tenured professor would weigh [her] statement about [how she enacts the principles of critical pedagogy in her own teaching] differently from others” (p. 308). Thus, while I keep in mind that the implication of rethinking challenges and reconsidering critical pedagogy might make sense for any multicultural teaching practices, I also understand that it might be interpreted differently in different teaching contexts, depending on the weight of institutional authority that instructors possess and carry on into their multicultural education teaching. 148 APPENDICES 149 APPENDIX A Pre- Interview Questionnaires and Sit-down Interview Prompts 1. What was your major before your doctoral study? 2. What is your research interest in your doctoral study? 3. Which college/university (in what country) and when did you attend as an undergraduate and/or master degree study? 4. What was your working experiences (e.g., what was your working duties, duration, and location) prior to your doctoral study? 5. In what year are you in your doctoral study? 6. In what semester are you in your teaching of this course? 7. How and why did you first interest in teaching this course? 8. How do you define yourself as a teacher of this course? 9. What do you hope to get from this teaching? 10. What does “teaching human diversity” mean to you? 11. How do you describe your teaching approaches of this course? 12. What does “MTE 101teaching” mean to you? 13. What experiences did you have about human diversity and justice before you teach MTE 101? 14. What elements of pedagogy have you incorporated in your teaching approaches thus far? Could you list a few specific examples about how you have incorporated them? 15. How do you describe challenges you have encountered in teaching this course thus far? When you think you encounter challenges, in what ways do you deal with them? 150 16. How do you envision challenges you would encounter in teaching this course throughout the semester? 151 APPENDIX B End-Of-Semester Interview Prompts 1. How do you describe your MTE 101teaching so far? 2. Let’s think about MTE 101teaching as practice. A “practice” is anything that you do regularly to reach your goals. - Do you think teaching MTE 101practice important to you? - What do you think is the effect of this practice? (How it changes/affects your study, other course’s teaching, your personal life, etc.,) - MTE 101 framework states that the course aims to “help student critically think and examine how socially constructed categories (e.g., social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and physical and mental capacity) are used to privilege some individuals and groups and marginalize others”. Do you think this practice can enable student to do so? 3. What things did you do that you consider “not well”? List some. 4. What things did you do that you consider “very well”? List some. 5. Is there anything that you wanted to do, but were unable to? If yes, why? 6. In the last interview (beginning of this semester), you mentioned that… Now we at the final points of semester, could you tell a little bit more about that? Are there any examples of classroom, do you want to relate to? 7. In the last interview (beginning of this semester), you mentioned that…Now we are at the final points of semester, could you tell a little bit more about that? Are there any examples of classroom, do you want to relate to? 152 8. In the last interview, you mentioned that you tried to approach your teaching in the ways that … How do you feel about this approach at this point of time? 9. Comparing to your Fall teaching, I recognized that you have changed some parts of your teaching, such as … Would you like to one or two of those that you felt good about and talking about that? - How did you come with the changes, with respect to your own experiences, ideas from folks/colleagues in personal conversations, ideas/thought form MTE 101group meetings’ suggestions, suggestions from your mentors (e.g., advisor)? - Why do you think the changes might be helpful? 10. In the last interview, you mentioned that you felt challenged when students … At this point of time, are there any challenges you want to add? 11. How do see those challenges as hopeful or/and harmful aspects for your teaching? 12. Let’s take one or two challenges that you think most memorable to you. When encountered those challenges, how did you work on them and why, with respects to: 13. Overall, do you think you learn something from teaching this course? If, yes, what are some of them that are important for you? 14. Looking forward, - What are some of things that you want to continue/sustain in your MTE 101 teaching next semester? - What are some of things that you want to improve in your MTE 101teaching next semester? 153 The father talks The son listens The teacher talks The student listens The order, the commands I am from the East. The mottos spoke The man, silent The chalks wrote The child, silent The autocrats, the power I am from the East. The war goes The battle remains Some win, some lose Some stay, some leave I am from the East. APPENDIX C “I Am from the East” 154 The flamboyant red Leaving streaks, my arms The mimosa wet Leaving dew, my lash(es) Their beauty, my heart I am from the East. The tears the mother shred The New Year the brothers hug The ancestors the daughter prays The families, the memories I am from the East. 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