Abstract
How teachers “care” for students is a well-established line of inquiry in educational research, but the ways such “care” may function as symbolic violence have received scant attention. In this ethnographic investigation of classroom disciplinary interactions, the characteristics and functions of preservice teachers’ care discourses are examined. By translating deficit discourses into expressions of praise for students’ nonacademic talents, the participants’ rhetoric of care effectively shifts blame for failure from teacher to student. The preservice teachers’ expressions of care also function to veil the power being produced in such rhetoric, to frame the teacher as victim when said care is rejected, and to reverse the carer/cared-for dynamic when teachers’ attempts to inspire academic progress are unsuccessful. Implications for teacher education and teacher development are provided as are suggestions for how to recognize and implement more authentic forms of care.
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Notes
Similar to “marginalized,” I use this term to suggest an active process of relegating “minority” populations to corollary consideration, even when demographic trends indicate such groups will comprise the nationwide numeric majority in the next few decades, and especially when they constitute super majorities in many urban schools. The Unites States Census Bureau, in fact, has designated four states (California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas) and the District of Columbia as “majority-minority,” indicating that more than 50% of its population is “non-White.” See http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/population/005514.html for more information.
For instance, teenagers are often framed by a discourse of “raging hormones” that hails them as pathologically and biologically incapable of controlling base urges, a script that lends itself to arguments for stricter measures of control over youth.
For a full explanation as to why I believe it is important to capitalize racial designators such as White and Black, see endnote #9 on pp. 262–263, in Nakkula and Toshalis (2006).
All names of schools, programs, and participants are pseudonyms.
In NETEP, preservice teachers are commonly referred to as interns. Hereafter I will use the terms interchangeably.
During the fall of 2005, that probation was lifted and full accreditation was granted by the Massachusetts Department of Education.
All citations of data excerpts begin either with a “TN,” indicating the source was a transcript, or “FN,” indicating the source was a field note. The letter and number combination after the hyphen indicates the preservice teacher and/or the student who were the subjects of that observation or interview (letters denote the intern and numbers the student), and the number or range of numbers after the slash indicate on which lines of the transcript that data may be found. Quoted passages that appear in all caps are the words of the author spoken during the interview.
At the time of the interview, I did not probe Sorange’s understanding of the racial designators she used to describe herself here. Consequently, it is unclear whether she was using the descriptor “[H]ispanic” to signify race, ethnicity, culture, linguistic heritage or something else altogether. For detailed explorations into how “Hispanic” and similar terms function when used by themselves and/or in combination with other racial/ethnic descriptors, see: Clark and Flores (2001), Comas-Díaz (2001), Duncan-Andrade (2005), Garrim (2000), Leistyna (2001), Phinney (1996), Phinney and Devich-Navarro (1997), Poston (1990), and Sheets and Hollins (1999).
Though Annie was well supported in terms of curriculum and pedagogy by a collegial and innovative department at Powell High, she had little to no support in terms of dealing with and developing in her understanding of the racialized issues that invariably arise in teacher-student relationships in diverse urban classrooms. Her cooperating teacher and supervisor/advisor both demonstrated little willingness or capacity to critically analyze race as an organizing category in schooling experiences. Consequently, I attribute part of Annie’s difficulties with expressing productive forms of care to the fact that she herself was ineffectively cared for as a preservice teacher tackling tough urban classroom issues.
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Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Michael J. Nakkula, Janie V. Ward, Wendy Luttrell, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernandez, Heather Harding-Jones, Elis Kanner, Sarah Sentilles, and an anonymous reviewer at TUR for their help in editing and refining successive drafts of the manuscript and/or their invaluable assistance in developing this research.
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Toshalis, E. The Rhetoric of Care: Preservice Teacher Discourses that Depoliticize, Deflect, and Deceive. Urban Rev 44, 1–35 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-011-0177-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-011-0177-y