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http://jte.sagepub.com/content/61/3/211The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0022487109354089

2010 61: 211 originally published online 29 December 2009Journal of Teacher EducationMica Pollock, Sherry Deckman, Meredith Mira and Carla Shalaby

''But What Can I Do?'': Three Necessary Tensions in Teaching Teachers About Race

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Journal of Teacher Education61(3) 211224

2010 American Association of

Colleges for Teacher EducationReprints and permission: http://www.

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DOI: 10.1177/0022487109354089http://jte.sagepub.com

But What Can I Do?: Three NecessaryTensions in Teaching Teachers About Race

Mica Pollock

1

, Sherry Deckman

1

, Meredith Mira

1

, and Carla Shalaby

1

Abstract

A core question of teacher educationWhat can I do?plagues courses on race in particular ways. Teachers struggle forconcrete applications of theoretical ideas about race, question the potential for everyday activity to dismantle inequalitystructures, and wrestle with the need for both professional and personal development on racial issues. In this article, we

discuss how these three core tensions surfaced in one race-oriented teacher education course. We demonstrate that theteachers who seemed most invigorated and who expressed feelings of efficacy in serving students of color were those who

pledged to continue ongoing inquiry into both sides of each tension. We propose that these three tensions require explicitattention in teacher professional development. Indeed, we suggest that to create inquisitive and efficacious teachers, teacher

educators can encourage teachers to keep all three tensions in play for the duration of their careers.

Keywords

diversity, race, class, gender, teacher education, teacher development

In any course or workshop for teachers on issues of race,

someone can be expected to ask a crucial question:But what

can I do? The question indicates both a desire for profes-

sional development and a frustration with it. At face value,

the question What can I do? indicates the fundamental

vagueness in our field regarding how we train teachers for

diversity. Scholars have offered many important lists of the

attitudes, knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary to

work effectively with a diverse student population (Zeichner,

1992, p. 1; see also Banks et al., 2005; Delpit, 2008; Gndara

& Maxwell-Jolly, 2000; Grant & Sleeter, 2007; Irvine, 2003;

Nieto, 2000), but a recent review of research conducted for

the American Educational Research Association (Hollins &

Guzman, 2005) makes clear that each teacher education pro-

gram still proceeds with its own definition of the task. It is no

wonder, then, that educators often express confusion about

how exactly they should prepare to teach in a diverse and

unequal nation.

Regarding preparation for racial diversity and inequality

often a core focus of professional development (PD) fordiversity (Hollins & Guzman, 2005)this question tends to

be asked in three different inflections. Each version of the

question raises its own particular tension related to teaching

teachers about issues of race:

1. What can I do? Teachers routinely search for

concrete, actionable steps they can take in their

classrooms and schools, questioning how abstract

ideas or theories about racial inequality and dif-

ference can help them.

2. What can I do? Teachers routinely question the

power of the individual educator to counteract

structural or societal problems of racial and race

class inequality via the classroom.

3. What can Ido? Each teacher routinely questions

his or her own personal readiness to become the

type of professional who can successfully engage

issues of race and racism in his or her life and class-

room practice.

In this article, we discuss how these three core what can I

do?tensions surfaced repeatedly, both in real-time conversations

and in reflective journal entries, during one teacher education

course focused on issues of race. Prior research suggests that

effective efforts to prepare teachers for engaging issues of

race and inequity specifically assist teachers to grapple with

the tensions and dilemmas they encounter in their work

(Cochran-Smith, 1995; Gay, 2003). As Zeichner (1992)

recommended some years ago,

Probably one of the most important things we can do

as teacher educators . . . is to use an approach that

enables teachers to talk and think together about the

various kinds of problems they encounter related to

1Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA

Corresponding Author:

Mica Pollock, Harvard Graduate School of Education, Appian Way, Larsen

506, Cambridge, MA 02138

Email: [email protected]

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212 Journal of Teacher Education 61(3)

cultural diversity and how they are addressing them.

(p. 22)

Still, far less research has ethnographically examined the

moment to moment tensions that arise as teachers talk and

think during PD for diversity, and particularly during race-

related PD (Ahlquist, 1991; Lin, 2007; Luttrell, 2008). Thisarticle explores findings from an ongoing project closely

examining the real-time struggles of PD on race. Primarily,

we focus on issues of preservice teacher preparation; still, as

these issues may also be central to inservice PD, we often use

the encompassing term professional development. In the

following sections, we first discuss general literature on

preparing preservice teachers to serve diverse populations,

and then discuss literature related to each specific tension of

race-related PD. After this review, we discuss our research

setting and methodology, our findings, and our recommen-

dations for teacher educators.

Reviewing the Literature

What Can I Do? Ambiguity in What It Means to

Prepare Teachers for Diversity

How researchers and educators even define diversity varies

widely, but preparing teachers to educate young people of

color in the context of an unequal nation is often one core

focus of preparation for diversity (Gay, 2003; Hollins &

Guzman, 2005; Ladson-Billings, 2008). Most programs

seem primarily concerned with so preparing White teachers,

though some efforts explicitly focus on preparing teachers of

color (Hollins & Guzman, 2005). An even rarer aspect of get-

ting prepared for diversitylearning to understand and

respond to a diverse and unequal nation via classrooms of any

demographic, including all-White classroomsseems to be a

focus in a far smaller subset of teacher education efforts. Pre-

service preparation on issues of race typically asks teachers

to investigate life experiences, to rethink typical explana-

tions for racial inequality, and to counteract possible biases

against (or misinformation about) the students and families

of color they will serve (Hollins & Guzman, 2005).

Teacher educators may increasingly share this generic

constructall educators should be prepared for diversity

but despite various scholarly efforts to describe necessary

preparation, teacher educators share no unified definition ofwhat an educator prepared for diversity actually looks like,

how such an educator should get prepared, or how his or her

preparation could best be assessed.Grant, Elsbree, and Fon-

drie (2004) characterized the field as plagued by conceptual

confusion (p. 200).

Still, some consistencies exist. First, the field seems

increasingly united on two basic reasons that an educator

must become prepared for diversity: Students are getting

more diverse, while the educator force is not (Irvine, 2003;

Sleeter, 2007), and students of color are routinely underserved

and disserved by schools, making better preparation for

serving students of color, in particular, very important

(Delpit, 1995; Gndara & Maxwell-Jolly, 2000; Ladson-

Billings, 1999, 2008). Second, we know that much

preparation for diversity in teacher education particularly

isolates discussions of race issues into specific courses or

weeks of courses, with both positive effects (conscious focus)

and negative effects (cursory treatment and, sometimes, aproblematic divorce from other facets of difference; Zeich-

ner, 1992). And a final consistency exists in teacher education

on issues of race specificallynamely, that educators

encountering PD on race issues often argue particularly heat-

edly that they are not getting the preparation they believe they

need (Ladson-Billings, 2008).

We define a teacher prepared to engage issues of race as

one who consciously and thoughtfully considers how his or

her everyday actions might counteract racial inequality and

racist ideas about types of people (Pollock, 2008a). Such

inquiry is encapsulated in a foundational practice of every-

day antiracism. Philomena Essed (1990) first named

everyday racism as the re-creation of structures of racialand ethnic inequality through situated practices normalized

in everyday life (see Essed, 2002, p. 180). Michle Lamont

(2000a; 2000b) then first adopted the specific phrase every-

day antiracism to describe beliefs emphasizing the equal

worth of human groups. Simultaneously, Mansbridge and

Flaster (2007)coined the term everyday feminism to describe

everyday acts against gender inequality. Author 1 (Pollock,

2008a) shares the phrase everyday antiracism to refer to

everyday actions challenging racism and racial inequality in

the educational domain. The course analyzed here, Every-

day Antiracism for Educators, invited inquiry into which

actions by a teacher might constitute everyday antiracism.

As we propose later in this article, such inquiry can perhaps

be extended to educators other everyday struggles with

difference and inequality in schools and classrooms (e.g.,

everyday issues of gender inequality or homophobia). Still,

this course focused exclusively on preparing educators to

engage race issues in their work. Prior research has touched

on each of the three core tensions students came to grapple

with throughout that inquiry.

What Can I Do? The Tension of Offering Teachers

Both Theories and Concrete Ideas

Much scholarship on preservice teacher education has dis-cussed a tension teachers feel between theoretical and

practice-based knowledge. Research has made clear that

teachers desire not just new ideas, but concrete and practical

suggestions for their work (Fenstermacher, 1994; Ladson-

Billings, 2008; Schwab, 2004). Researchers of inservice PD

also generally express concerns that changing daily educator

practice with PD efforts is often the most necessary (and

difficult) piece of improving schools (Elmore, Petersen, &

McCarthey, 1996). Some researchers imply accordingly that

PD efforts are too often focused on changing educators inter-

nal beliefs and commitmentstheir ideasrather than focused

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Pollock et al. 213

more effectively on pinpointing the consequences of . . .

instructional practices on real students (Elmore, 2004,

p. 95). Regarding both preservice and ins ervice PD on issues

of race in particular, some authors imply that teachers learn-

ing big ideas about racism, such as the need to have high

expectations for students of color, may need more explicit

instruction about how to activate high expectations throughactual everyday interactions with students (Cohen, 2008;

Ferguson, 2008; Taylor, 2008). Yet such work also indicates

that the distinction between ideas and practice is not so clear

in the race arena (King, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1999),

making the tension an ongoing one rather than one easily

resolved. Indeed, some scholars suggest that regarding issues

of race in particular, shifting educators beliefs about students,

schools, society, and themselves is actually more important

than providing concrete things to do in the classroom (Lad-

son-Billings, 2008).

As PD on racialized practice engages racialized beliefs

and societal issues, an ongoing perceived tension between

ideas and actions carries on in preservice classrooms. Thisleaves some teachers critiquing race-related PD as a particu-

larly abstract effort that provides too few concrete suggestions

of things to do. In PD, teachers themselves generally express

a core tension between asking abstract questions about race

and desiring concrete answers for classroom use. This is the

important tension articulated whenever a teacher asks, But

what can I do?

What Can I Do? The Tension of Educating Individual

Teachers to Act Within a Racially Unequal Structure

Some well-known scholars of teacher education ask teachers

to think more about racial inequality in American society at

large, to examine and rethink their explanations for race

class inequality in America, and/or to learn more about

students lived experiences in an unequal society (e.g., Gay,

2003; King, 1991; Nieto, 2000; Villegas & Lucas, 2002).

Simultaneously, teacher education scholars make clear that

teachers also need ideas about what they can do individually

in the classroom to counteract historical and contemporary

structures of racial inequality (Delpit, 2008; Ladson-Billings,

1999; Sleeter & Grant, 2007). Teacher effort alone cannot

remedy racial inequality (Rothstein, 2004), but research sug-

gests that teachers still need to feel individually efficacious

about serving students, particularly students of color, toserve them well (Day, Elliot, & Kington, 2005; Grant, 2006;

Johnson & Birkeland, 2003; Ware & Kitsantas, 2007).

Research suggests further that more generic consciousness

of racial inequality can actually be deadening for both educa-

tors and students unless analysis pinpoints concrete ways of

counteracting racial inequality (Nieto, 2008; OConnor,

1997; Pollock, 2008b). Indeed, teachers confronted solely

with information about structural patterns such as achieve-

ment gaps or dropout rates often argue that their everyday

activity plays no role in countering such societal patterns

(Diamond, 2008; Pollock, 2008b). The tension between the

possibilities inherent in individual teaching amid the over-

whelming reality of structural inequality particularly plagues

courses engaging issues of racial inequality in American life.

Both resignation and hope in the face of overwhelming sys-

tems of inequity surface each time a teacher asks, What can

I do?

What Can I Do? The Tension of Educating

Individual Teachers at Various Moments

in Their Personal Development

Research suggests that many preservice efforts to prepare edu-

cators to teach in diverse settings pursue PD on race issues by

asking educators to examine themselves personally in order to

raise self-awareness of their racial biases, personal histories,

privileges, and identities (Cochran-Smith, 1995; Sleeter &

Grant, 2007; Tatum, 2007). Similarly, according to Hollins and

Guzman (2005), researchers studying efforts to prepare teach-ers for diversity predominantly seem to desire, expect, and

measure personal changes in a teachers mind (i.e., a reduction

in bias; an increase in awareness about privilege) and in a

teachers heart (i.e., a decrease in disdain for families of color

or an increase in appreciation for urban schools or communi-

ties) more often than in the educators observable practice. Far

less research seems concerned with measuring what teachers

are then able to do professionally forstudents, and even less

research seems to measure actual interactions between teachers

and students. As some teacher preparation for diversity high-

lights the personal at the seeming expense of the professional,

teachers struggle to determine the kind of preparation they

think they need. Conversely, as the PD effort studied here made

clear, highlighting professional development at the seeming

expense of personal development can backfire as well. Each

tension demands that both sides remain in play.

Research Setting

The course studied here, titled Everyday Antiracism for Edu-

cators (EAR), was a half-semester course on race, newly

required for all 50 teacher candidates in our universitys

teacher education program. The candidates had taken another

required summer half-course, Race, Class, and Power, desi-

gned to prod the candidates to consider those aspects of theirsocial location within an unequal society. The race course

feel of EAR (Zeichner, 1992) was obvious to all. To some,

this felt like a problematic minimization, while others saw it

as a necessary focus; still others thought there was too much

race tacked onto the program. Some faculty and students

worried that issues of ableism, sexism, or heteronormativity

demanded more attention; others contended that basic sub-

ject preparation demanded priority.

In general, the EAR class consisted predominantly of White

women, as is the norm in teacher education. One third were

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men. Of the 51 students enrolled, 11 (22%) chose not to

identify a race/ethnicity on institutional paperwork. Seven

(14%) identified as African American, 3 (6%) as Asian

American, 1 (2%) as other, and the final 29 (57%) as

White. The term studied was the inaugural year of the

required course.

Author 1, M.P., a White professor of race studies and for-mer high school teacher, designed EAR as an opportunity to

engage participants experiences from their ongoing practi-

cum in middle and high school classrooms. In the first class

meeting, M.P. (hereafter, the professor) stressed that the

course was designed to address the first two tensions we

explore in this piece: the teachers desire for concrete rather

than solely abstract ideas, and the teachers worry that struc-

tural inequality makes personal effort against inequality

futile.She highlighted that the 70 researchers contributing to

the course text,Everyday Antiracism (Pollock, 2008), were

asked to go far beyond vague and abstract strategies (such as

celebrate diversity or pursue equity) to pinpoint precise

recommendations for equitable everyday teacher activity.She also verbally articulated the goal of searching for con-

crete things to do in her introductory lecture and continued

in the second lecture by asking the students to pull out tools

from the essays and to try to apply them to [their] own

situations.

To address directly the tension of the individual educator

within an overwhelming structure, the professor introduced

the courses first full meeting with a gallop through history

that positioned teachers everyday activity within 600 years

of history of racial inequality. She then suggested that coun-

teracting and deprogramming oneself from this history was

both difficult and the most important thing to work on.

In terms of the third tension, between professional and

personal development, the professor, who had not yet con-

sidered this tension as such, introduced the course itself as

less interested in emotional development than intellectual

development, and she suggested that the class was less about

uncovering students personal racism than considering

how racist ideas in the world at large get programmed into

individuals and activated in peoples behavior. The profes-

sors intention was to supplement more typical efforts in the

field that prioritize teachers personal development of new

beliefs and attitudes over pinpointing things to do in the class-

room. Since she had conducted prior research on educators

defensive reactions to accusations of racism (Pollock,2008b), she also wanted to lessen students possible defen-

siveness. Still, her framing of the course as interested in

professional rather than personal development had many par-

ticipants calling for the latter.

Method

Much research on preservice teacher education for diversity

measures improvement on the researchers preferred mea-

sures post facto rather than studying the learning experience

as an ongoing interaction in which people struggle in real

time to discuss issues of difference and inequality. As a

research team, we reasoned that since the PD effort was itself

a real-time conversation (Kegan & Lahey, 2002), it was

essential to study that effort in detail in real time rather than

attempting only to evaluate its effects after the fact. Accord-

ingly, 10 fieldworkers (including authors S.D., M.M., andC.S., who identify as biracial [African American and White],

White, and Arab American women, respectively) studied the

entire course experience as participant observers. Students in

the course were made aware that the course text was in draft

form and that their feedback on the essays was welcome. The

syllabus also actively framed the course as an experiment in

PD on race. Students were made explicitly aware that the 10

doctoral students were acting as participantobservers in

both the full-class and small-group discussions with the

express goal of figuring out, with the professor, how best to

inquire into issues of race during preservice teacher educa-

tion. All students were asked to sign permission slips to

approve this self-study; those who did not want to participatewere allowed to opt out of having a doctoral student in their

small group. Only two chose this option. We told students

verbally and via the course syllabus that our research team

wanted to understand two core questions for education: (1)

What are the skills educators need in order to successfully

negotiate the racial issues and situations they encounter? and

(2) how might PD experiences on issues of race and diver-

sity, such as this course, be improved? Students also were

asked to analyze the course weekly, by responding in their

journals to the following questions:

1. In the conversations just had as a small group and as

a large group, what was said and possibly notsaid?

2. Which ideas seemed to cause particular agree-

ment or particular disagreement?

3. What were some seeming emotional snags, some

intellectual snags?

All students took the course pass-fail. The professor stressed

that the point of the journal assignmentwhich could be

submitted anonymously, if students chosewas serious

inquiry and self-preparation rather than pleasing the professor

with right answers. The professor also suggested that by

analyzing the pros and cons of course discourse themselves,

students would prepare themselves for future conversationswith colleagues. Finally, students were told that at the end of

the course, they would have the choice to share or not share

their journals (anonymously) for our teams research.

With the permission of the students, the 10 fieldworkers

typed field notes throughout the module (keeping all par-

ticipants anonymous) while participating in both full- and

small-group interactions. At the end of the course, as adver-

tised, all students were asked whether they might allow their

journals to be used anonymously as data. We used a number-

ing system to track agreements; 33 students agreed.

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Pollock et al. 215

The interpersonal difficulty of studying ones own course

in real time was offset by the research benefit of being there

both to experience and examine the ongoing conversations in

detail. We also contend that including students in analyzing

their own preparation for diversity was a pedagogical benefit

to students. While the research project may have made stu-

dents especially critical of how conversations wereprogressing (or for some, particularly self-conscious about

those conversations), the method also prompted them to

articulate their struggles with PD on race particularly clearly,

both for themselves and for us.

Data Analysis

Students grappled with the course during brief statements

verbalized in the large- and small-group discussions, but

they did so in far more depth in their journals. Group discus-

sions were taken up with conversation about weekly essays

and real-world situations experienced by participants more

than by discussion of students reactions to the course. Fur-ther, norms of verbal race talk meant that many participants

remained colormute in public (Pollock, 2004a). In contrast,

students often wrote at length about their reactions to the

course. For that reason, the majority of our analysis focuses on

data from the journals, using key in-class moments to sup-

port our claims. Collectively, our research team read all 33

anonymous journals.

When possible, participants who self-identified in discus-

sions or journals as being a member of a certain racial group

or gender, or as teaching a particular subject, will be described

as such and have been given pseudonyms; others are defined

by the numbers we assigned to all anonymous journals. As we

do not have demographic data for the writers of all the jour-

nals we examined, we will not attempt to make any claims

related to those factors. While we recognize the slight dis-

tancing effect of our limited descriptors, we use them because

of the added understanding that a teachers self-identified

background characteristics can afford readers and to show

how the trends we observed were pervasive across different

demographic groups. We have omitted particular demographic

details in some cases in order to mask any speakers who could

otherwise be identified individually.

Using techniques of discourse analysis, we analyzed educa-

tors verbal (class time) and written (journal) discourse, coding

the data for repeated words, references, and themes (Charmaz,2006; Lofland & Lofland, 1995). As our coding became more

focused, we began to see core tensions engaged repeatedly in

students discourse (Luttrell, 2000; Pollock, 2004b; Willig,

2001). In this analysis, we also paid special attention to stu-

dents metapragmatic reactions (Silverstein, 1981) to the

ongoing conversation as an interaction; that is, we analyzed

their talk about talking, which had been invited by the jour-

nal assignment, as described above. The professor also

urged students to go meta whenever they wanted to com-

ment verbally on the running conversations of the full class

meetings, so verbal discourse sometimes evaluated the course

itself.

That so many students actively struggled with the same

three core tensions, both in their private journals and in real-

time class conversations, even in a course designed toalleviate such tensions, suggested the salience of these ten-

sions for participants. It also suggested that PD on race

perhaps cannot alleviate these tensions but rather should

explicitly identify them and prepare educators to navigate

and to grapple with them. We now turn to discussing how

each of these three core tensions arose in the discourse of our

participants.

Findings

Tension 1: What Can I Do?

The professor first organized the course around fishbowl dis-cussions in which students workshopped real-world student

teaching dilemmas related to the suggestions made by

authors in the course text. Despite this pedagogical attempt

to organize the course around applying scholarship to prac-

tice, the tension between abstract and concrete ideas

simmered in the first weeks of the course. Participants argued

both that some articles did not seem concrete enough and

that some articles seemed too concrete for intelligent

people accustomed to thinking big thoughts; some partici-

pants seemed frustrated with the attempt to pinpoint specific

things to do. By Week 6 of the 7-week course, a White stu-

dent, Cyndi, argued in the full class session that countering

racism is more organic than creating these rulesits gotta

be organic in your own self. The real issue is what you

believe underneath it all. You cant just read some rules. . .

Developing the 10 rules of antiracism is ludicrous.

In Week 5, the professor noted in an e-mail to the research

team that she was noticing that students seemed frustrated

by wanting to talk on different levels ranging from the very

concrete to the abstract. Perhaps, she wrote,

Educators can be offeredgeneralprinciples for antira-

cism that can be carried around in ones head; more

specifictactics for antiracism that can be tried in any

given situation; and super-specific solutions forspecific situations that arise in real-life practice. Ive

offered them the first two things with the EAR essays

and my prompts for discussing them in class. But in asking

them to debate real-world scenarios, Ive also asked

them to come up with the third thing [particular every-

day solutions]. . . . My sense is that they want me to tell

them the right answer to the third thingbut I actually

do not have that right answer.

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After a lively e-mail exchange with the research team, the

professor proposed an explicit inquiry model in which teachers

could both name big, abstract ideas and pinpoint concrete,

everyday acts for their own classrooms. She came back to

class explicitly encouraging conversations to occur on these

three levels, which she described on a handout. She later built

this inquiry model into the book itself:

The level of principle: big ideas about antiracist teach-

ing and the pursuit of equal opportunity.

The level of strategy: general actions that seem com-

pelling or not compelling for classroom use.

The level of try tomorrow: specific solutions that

seem to hold potential for a specific classroom or

school at a given time, depending on the local set-

ting and its specific personalities and dynamics.

The professor also suggested that students pull out gold

nugget ideas from their own conversations at each of the

levelsthat is, that they literally name particularly helpfulideas for future use. One of the first class conversations

using this inquiry model concerned an essay by Dorinda Carter

(2008) related to racial spotlighting, or moments when tea-

chers or classmates force students to represent their purp-

orted group in discussions. In the full-group conversation,

two class participantsKaren, a self-labeled African American

woman, and Rebecca, a self-labeled Jewish womanidentified

a principle:

[Rebecca]: I think theres a difference between speak-

ing as a group member and speakingforthe group.

[Professor]: Is one better?

[Rebecca]: Yeah, speaking as a member of a group.

[Karen]: I agreealways acknowledge that you cant

speak for everyone. . . . A teacher can say, no one

is expected to speak for the community.

The gold nugget principle named by the class became, People

can speak as race group members if they wish, but no one

should be forced to speakfora group. Carters essay itself

suggested a strategy: Teachers should try not to spotlight

students based on their race group membership. After some

discussion, students then suggested various acts that they as

individuals could try tomorrow, depending on the specific

individuals, dynamics, and curricula in play in their classrooms.For example, one student planned to purposefully invite

reactions from all of her students if particular students were

possibly feeling spotlighted.

For some, the newly offered framework and suggestion

to search for gold nugget ideas at multiple levels success-

fully presented an opportunity both to think broadly and to

generate concrete takeaways for use in their classrooms.

In Week 5 of class, in response to a member of his small

group saying that the issues [discussed in EAR] were not

relevant to her current teaching experience, one participant,

Devon, who described himself as a Black man, wrote in his

journal, I am just urging colleagues to find a way to con-

nect to antiracist work, reflect on practice and extract some

nuggets from the text and discussions. If we all do this

we can begin to become more conscious educators and

thoughtful colleagues. For this participant, and others like

him, there was a clear benefit both to reflecting on andthinking about issues of antiracist pedagogy abstractly, and

pinpointing useful tactics at the concrete, try-tomorrow

level of his own practice. Elsewhere in his journal, Devon

described an essay by Carol Mukhopadhyay (2008) that

proposed that educators question the category Caucasian,

because to many listeners it connotes (incorrectly) that race

categories are biological. He described how he was both

beginning to analyze and become critical on the topic and

struggling to incorporate and pinpoint specific tweaks to

his everyday practice:

I have many reactions to Mukhopadhyays Getting

Rid of the Word Caucasian. Immediately after read-ing the article, I wondered how I might incorporate

this work into my everyday practice. I asked myself,

What does this mean for my students? I think this

question is still lingering; however, I have begun to

think about how our use of language conveys messages

about our beliefs and knowledge. I think Mukhopadhy-

ays message is a great place to begin a discussion around

the power of languagea discussion that moves stu-

dents to a place where they can begin to analyze and

become critical of their, as well as their peers, use of

language.

Participant 3, who did not describe himself or herself in

racial or gender terms, suggested another version of the concrete

versus abstract tension. This participant referenced an essay

by Samuel Lucas (2008) arguing that teachers should inquire

into students individual lived experiences rather than use

abstract notions about a racial group to determine how stu-

dents should be treated. Participant 3 noted the need to both

look at macro issues related to race and generate micro

action steps with the real potential for change:

Within the series of articles that we read, by far the one

that has been most thought provoking for me is Samuel

Lucass Constructing Colorblind Classrooms. I wasinitially drawn to it by the audacity of the title, but

after I had read it, the idea of really looking at racial

inequities at a macro level and focusing on the indi-

vidual at a micro level really resonated with me. Doing

either one of those is not going to make a whole lot of

difference, but taking both of the approaches hand in

hand has the real potential for change.

Thus, for these participants, big ideas culled from the essays

and course formed the foundation for continuing to develop

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Pollock et al. 217

concrete strategies for their classrooms. With both sides of the

tension in play, ideas at first not practice-oriented or micro

enough could continueto spark ideas for everyday use.

The optimistic approach both Participant 3 and Devon

expressedholding onto the tension between abstract prin-

ciples and concrete strategieswas, however, not consistent

among participants. Some resolved the tension in an eitheror rather than a bothand manner, typically by expressing in

frustration that they would have preferred to focus more

exclusively on concrete strategies to use in their classrooms

(see also Ladson-Billings, 2008). The sentiment expressed

by Participant 12, a White history teacher who did not iden-

tify gender, was repeated throughout the journals: Overall,

I was hoping for some more concrete strategies that are more

doable for a 1st- or 2nd-year classroom teacher. Some

claimed that theoretical discussion was a poor use of time

in the endeavor of addressing racism in U.S. classrooms.

Participant 20, for example, wrote:

I dont feel that this class fulfilled all its potential. . . .[The professor] tried to make the class more practical

by having conversations focus on the specific situa-

tions we could do tomorrow, but the idea didnt come

until the third-to-last class, and again was dropped often

for more theoretical situations.

Jane, a White woman, expressed similar concerns:

If we are serious about moving our more disadvan-

taged students towards higher levels of achievement,

we need to move beyond understanding and high

expectations and embracing structuralism [sic]

and move towards improving our instructional strategies,

organization, time management and classroom man-

agement. . . . In my opinion, too many of the readings

were aimed at the academic and not enough at the

practitioner.

The above quote from Janes journal also illustrates how

some participants in the course positioned academic versus

practitioner knowledge, or suggested a perceived disconnect

between thinking about and doing. Both were versions of the

what can I do? tension.

In Week 5 of the course, the class was generating lists of

harmful and helpful strategies to use in confronting raciallycharged scenarios in their practice. One White man, Richard,

punctuated a class discussion by pointing dramatically at the

board and saying of the list on the helpful side, [Every-

thing listed] is about thinking or remaining conscious, but

not about actions to take. When such comments dichoto-

mized theory and practice, some students chose the latter

rather than the former and refused ideas that were about

thinking. In two separate journal entries spaced one week

apart, another White student, Tim, critiqued Carters essay

on spotlighting for failing to pinpoint concrete ways of

taking action against spotlighting. He argued first that the

essay, while interesting . . . did not address how as a teacher

I can help students to not feel that way, and that is what I am

most interested in.

In contrast, some participants argued that the essays were

too concrete and failed to prompt deep thinking. In a discus-

sion of the utility of distilling concrete try-tomorrows andstrategies from the readings, a White female student said,

Were trying to define the un-definable. . . . It has to do with

the whole moment. . . . In this whole room, we could never

agree on what to boil it down to. And some participants

argued that even boiling down big ideas to to-dos would

not actually change practice. During this same class discus-

sion, another participant asked the group, [How does boiling

down these ideas] change actions on a daily basis?

Some participants vacillated endlessly between calling

for more concrete strategies and calling for more focus on

abstract principles. In fact, those who left the course seem-

ingly most invigorated (according to the excitement audible

in their journals) explicitly wrote of wanting more of each.For example, Tina, a self-identified White woman, wrote of

the Lucas article:

Im not sure how to transfer this understanding to my

classroom. How could I focus on actual practices and

lived experiences in terms of culture and power? What

would that look like in the classroom? I love the idea,

but I dont know really what it would mean to do that.

I can definitely interact with a student in an explor-

atory mannerthat seems like the most concrete advice

in this article. But I want more. I want to know how to

do thishow to not inflict disadvantage or assume

advantage.

Overall, participants grappled with a perceived tension

between theories, worldviews, and ideas, on one hand,

and concrete, moment-to-moment strategies, and

actions, on the other. While some, in frustration, stated a

clear preference for the concrete to the exclusion of the

abstract, those who left writing most excitedly of wanting

more described their ongoing commitment to acquiring both.


Never before has it been clearer that I am fighting asystem, and never before has that system seemed so

overwhelming. Should I be empowering my students

in some significant way? Should I be explicitly decrying

and struggling against the larger system that we are all a

part of? If I should be, I am not sure how to go about it.

John, a White teacher

The second core tension in the courses effort to prepare teach-

ers to engage issues of race was the need to acknowledge

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structural systems of inequality while managing to salvage

each individual teachers hopeful belief that he or she could

(and must) be an agent of change in the context of such ineq-

uity. The course and course text asked educators to personally

address inequality of opportunity in the context of an already

unequal educational system; both framedmoment-to-moment,

ordinary classroom acts as having the potential to help dis-mantle large, oppressive structures. Still, this tension between

individual and structural change arose repeatedly throughout

the course.

In full-class discussion during the fourth week of the

course, a member of the research team, a White woman,

offered a hypothetical quandary she had read about. In it,

babies were falling off a cliff while adults scrambled to decide

whether they should catch the babies from down below or

identify and tackle the force pushing them off in the first place.

In response to the question of which adult response was pre-

ferred, the professor explicitly answered, Both! Throughout

the rest of the course, students continued to reference this poi-

gnant analogy for the individualstructural tension. Notably,the data collected from participants suggest that throughout

the course, those teachers who seemed to feel most inspired

and potentially efficacious were those most committed to

living permanently in the middle of this tension.

Many others, however, posed structural or systemic prob-

lems against everyday acts and decided the former had to

trump the latter. Specifically, participants privately framing

the individualstructural tension as an eitheror proposition

typically emphasized all they perceived they could notdo

in the face of structural inequities, understood to be seem-

ingly beyond their control. This sense of futility was typified

in the comment by Eugene, a self-identified Black man who

wrote in his final journal entry, Race exists, prejudices exist,

and they are not going anywhere.

Some teachers who spoke of being overwhelmed by racial

inequality called antiracism itself an overwhelming and

impossible extra effort by individuals. Those teachers who

adopted this eitheror stance argued explicitly, at times, that

all they could do in the face of teachings overwhelming

demands in an unequal structure was simply to be a basi-

cally good teacher of students of color, a task they framed

as somehow separate from being an antiracist teacher who

combated systemic inequality on a daily basis. Shannon, a

White science teacher, wrote that her baseline goal in an

overwhelming world was just to make sure students wereno worse off than before she taught them:

I had been thinking about this; why do I teach? . . . I

cant be a mom for every parentless child, a friend for

all social outcasts, a role model for all women in sci-

ence. Im not going to turn every student into a biologist,

or even get every student to pass my class (the latter of

which has hit me of late). My baseline goal is to do no

harm to my students. I dont want anyone to leave my

classroom worse off than beforefeeling more spot-

lighted or ignored, stupid, or unsafe than when they

came into my class.

In a similar vein, John, the White teacher quoted above, wrote

that after confronting the struggles of real teaching inside an

overwhelming system, he had scaled down a pursuit ofsocial justice in society to the primary concern of teaching

skills as an individual:

When I first began to think about becoming a teacher,

it was because I saw a potential bridge between teach-

ing and social justice. Now, I stand every day in front

of my students, and my primary concerns are whether

I am making sense and whether I can keep the class

focused. . . . Right now, I believe my job is to teach my

kids physics, to push them to do high schoollevel

work, and to somehow give them the skills they need

to do it. A part of me believes that this is antiracist

work; a part of me only hopes it is.

Tension continued to surface in the course over whether just

teaching a subject adequately as an individual teacher was

enough to make change in a larger system. In one full-class

discussion, one member of our research team herself brought

back the analogy of the babies and the cliff:

All of us are well-wishing with good intentions. I can

be in a class and say that Im going to help these kids

pass [the state assessment], but is that really being the

type of person that stops the babies from falling? That

doesnt mean that Im being a good antiracist educator,

that Im looking to change and to shift a racist system.

Multiple course participants ended their journals by con-

cluding explicitly that in the face of the overwhelming cha-

llenges of antiracist teaching in an unequal society and a

racist system, they would settle simply for good teaching of

basic subject matter. To these students, teaching against racial

inequality seemed somehow more than good teaching, and

the prospect invited a sense of overwhelming hopelessness

and fatigue. Lisa, a White science teacher, wrote of what would

be simply enough as an individual teacher:

What I am starting to wonder now is what it does actu-ally mean to be an antiracist educator? We keep trying

to come up with specific actions to take that will make

our classroom better for all of our students, but do we

really have to do that? Im wondering whether . . . its

enough to simply (yeah, rightsimply) provide each

of my students with a safe and fun place to learn.

Similarly, Tim, a White history teacher quoted earlier in this

article, also wrote of a desire to just pursue teaching and

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Pollock et al. 219

classroom management as a lesser version of antiracist tea-

ching, and he wrestled explicitly with which to make his priority.

While wrestling, however, this teacher refueled himself with

a bothand approach and reasoned that antiracism was an aspect

of good teaching inside an overwhelming system, not double

the work:

Another part of the discussion that spoke to me was

when one student said that hes just worrying about

teaching and classroom management at the moment,

and being an actively antiracist educator is a little too

much to ask right now. Again, to an extent I agree. I am

overwhelmed with lesson planning, discipline issues,

students failing, etc., so Im not actively thinking at

every moment how I can make my class more antiracist.

However, while Im not consciously thinking antira-

cism all the time, I have found myself to be more aware

of racial issues and making more of an attempt for

equity in my classroom between myself and the students

and among the students themselves. So while I agreethat curriculum and teaching is No. 1 on my mind, the

antiracist aspect of my teaching is still pertinent, though

I may not notice it as much as I should at the moment.

Just as those teachers who felt most active (rather than

overwhelmed) were those who envisioned that good teaching

and antiracist teaching could be the same, those who explicitly

envisioned both engaging large racial systems and taking

everyday acts as individuals to counteract them seemed to feel

most energized, even while they expressed frustration about

the daunting need for this simultaneous work. During a class

conversation in which teachers discussed the treatment of one

Black high school student in a real-life classroom dilemma,

Steve, a Black man, explained to his peers that he felt our

conversation and analysis overlooked big structures of ine-

quity contributing to racialized classroom dynamics between

individuals. He excitedly made an explicit call for dealing

with both the large and the daily in his classroom:

Large racial structures are missing from the conversa-

tion. Im not hearing comments about the racial hierarchy

that gets reproduced in our schools and how [it] plays out

with this one little Black girl in [the] classroom. Its

something I deal with in my class on a daily basis. . . .

Were not thinking about these racial structures and theirplace in our schools. I think about the history of racial

oppression and it feels, its just big. Its real big.

Teachers calling for this bothand stancefor simultaneously

dealing with racial oppression as just big. . . real big and

taking acts on a daily basis in the classroom to face such

oppression as an individual educatorcould consider antiracist

and good teaching as an ongoing merged project and view

structural and individual efforts as simultaneous rather than

as sequential or extra additions to their basic teaching practice.

They reasoned that teachers could seek concrete, actionable,

everyday steps as individuals while considering the full con-

text of structures too big for them to solve as individuals.

Anna, a White history teacher, concluded in the following

way in her journal:

I realize that teaching is hard and being a teacher com-

mitted to antiracist education is even harder . . . . These

everyday acts may seem small, tiny in fact, but the

truth is that every little bit helps. Even the smallest act

can go a long way. So, I am committed, I will continue

to take those small steps, and one day perhaps the

world will be a slightly better place because of it.

Students taking a more eitheror stance about the possibility

of doing antiracist orgood teachingor, similarly, about dis-

mantling large racial structures ortaking ordinary, everyday

acts as individualsspoke instead of what they could not do.


After reading course journals, the professor noted that she

had least successfully navigated a final tension toward a

bothand stance for students: the tension between pursuing

necessary personal development and necessary PD on issues

of race. As stated earlier, the professor had found in prior

research that teachers, made defensive by claims of personal

racism, could refuse to analyze the effects of their actions

on children (Pollock, 2008b). Accordingly, she purposefully

downplayed the need for development on personal racism

in her remarks to the group. She told the class that the course

explicitly steered away from keeping teachers generically

worried about whether they were or were not racist people

(particularly people with racist intentions) and sought instead

to get teachers counteracting pervasive racist ideas and actions

through their activityin the classroom. She noted that the intro-

duction to the course text stated explicitly, This book . . . is not

designed to get you to ask, Am I a bad person? Instead, it is

designed to get you to ask, Do my everyday acts help pro-

mote a more equitable society?

Still, this attempt to get students examining pervasive racism

rather than personal racism backfired: As the professor did not

explicitly invite personal inquiry, many students experienced

the struggle for professional inquiry as an attempt to sup-plant personal inquiry. Students in the course continually

expressed (predominantly in their journals) a desire to keep

talking about their individual development, not just as pro-

fessionals trying to workshop things to do in the classroom,

but also as people struggling to rid themselves of world-

views and mind-sets they had developed through personal

experience. Crucially, numerous participants responding to the

eitheror framing presented by the professor argued repeatedly

that they had to do personal developmental workbefore they

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11/15


could develop any professional tactics for classroom use.

With the tension between personal development and profes-

sional development submerged in the course rather than

explicitly addressed beyond the opening day, many students

spoke in their journals about what they could not do: they

argued that they could not develop as professionals until they

developed as people.Tina, a White English teacher, suggested that her world-

view would need to change before she would be able to

implement micro changes within her classroom:

The readings for this class gave me a lot to grapple

with and think about in my own work. The most valu-

able ones for me, however, at least foundationally

speaking, were those that identified mind-sets that I

was participating in without being aware of it. . . . My

conclusion is that if you dont change or challenge

your worldview, theres little you can do successfully

in the way of micro changes.

While she was still willing to grapple with her own work,

she contended, there was little [she] could do successfully

before undoing her mind-sets. In one journal entry after

another, students argued that they had to undergo personal

development of some sort before they could undertake pro-

fessional improvement. Once again, taking an eitheror sta-

nce on this core tension had teachers arguing more about

what they could not do than what they could. Multiple

students expressed concern over their lack of personal

readiness to talk about or perform the daily antiracist

activities that the course and book proposed. Lauren, a math

teacher, wrote, I am always afraid that I will say something

stupid and everyone will think that Im a typical White,

ignorant teacher, and went on to express that her personal

lack of understanding antiracism left her unready to

apply at all:

I feel like I am not ready for the full implementation

stage because I still struggle to understand the racism

that I see and the racism that I am told exists. For each

class, we were expected to read ideas from educators

to help us become antiracist in our practice, summarize

what they were suggesting, and predict possible obsta-

cles in implementing these ideas. There seemed to be a

rush to an action plan when I still needed to sort outand understand the episode of racism. . . . That leads

me to believe that I might still be in an identifying and

comprehension stage of understanding antiracism and

that I do not really have the understanding yet to apply

antiracist strategies.

During a full-class debate in the fourth week regarding whe-

ther good teaching and antiracist teaching were synonymous,

Sharon, a White woman, verbalized that the students in the class

were all starting in different places in their development

about race and that she might need to do some personal

development before she could pinpoint what I can do:

What I feel like is happening is that this class is treated

like a blanketalmost like we all are in the same place

and like we all have this race consciousness. I found

myself at the beginning to be very much excited aboutthe readings and how it made me think of race and my

view of the world, but then I realized that it was about

what I can do with colleagues and students and Im not

sure Im ready to be there. I thought I was coming in to

do social justice teaching and I think its actually anti-

racist teaching, but first I think we all may need to do

some personal development.

In particular, White students suggested repeatedly that

personal development had to come before they could take

any antiracist actions. Some argued that coming to terms

with what they defined as their White privilege or White

guilt had to precede their pursuit to become antiracist educatorswith specific skills for classroom use. John, the White science

teacher, argued that teachers needed to personally deal with

their own identity and understanding of these issues before

they could play out specific problems and solutions for the

classroom:

I want to talk about this question of whether . . . people

need to connect with racism (and other forms of iden-

tity and privilege systems) personally before dealing

with the sorts of logistical and practical questions

were approaching in this class. Having given it some

thought, I strongly feel that they do. People need to

form and INTERNALIZE an understanding of race,

racism, and identity in order for these suggestions to

make sense. Otherwise, its like trying to teach a lesson

that you didnt design and dont understand the reason-

ing behind. Youre bound to overlook or oversimplify

something. In contrast, incorporating an understanding

of these issues into your view of yourself, others, and

the world will naturally start to play out in your class-

room because your thought processes have actually

changed. At this point, discussion of specific problems

and solutions can be useful.

Participant 22, a White student who did not identify her orhis gender, also argued that the students should have had

more personal antiracism development prior to the course

so that they would have been more prepared and ready to

discuss antiracism in their practice within the course:

We all, as teachers, come from very different backgro-

unds. Some of us are very much used to thinking about

and discussing issues of race and racism very openly.

Others are very new to it. Some of us have already had

years of experience in the classroom as teachers from

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journal of teacher education 2010 polloc 1

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