Envisioning Spaces of Anti-racist Pedagogy in Teacher Education Programs

Abstract

The influence teachers have on our society is far-reaching as public-school teachers touch millions of lives a day. In colleges of education, we know that in order to serve all students, teachers must be caring, knowledgeable, and fair. For decades teachers have been tasked with creating multicultural lessons for their culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students, but to what avail? Schools are still defined by their socially segregated neighborhoods, the teaching force is still predominantly White, and Critical Race Theory has been denounced at a national level as anti-American. As teacher educators, we are called on to move beyond what has been deemed as a foods and festivals approach to culturally relevant pedagogy and explore how to enact change that will support pre-service teachers in their role to shift the balance in the United States to one of racial equity. This conceptual chapter explores some of the hesitancies and barriers to enacting a more structured pedagogy of anti-racism in teacher education programs at the faculty level and probes the use of strategic empathy (Zembylas, Teaching in Higher Education 17(2):113–125, 2012) as a tool to encourage the self-reflection and paradigm shifting necessary to engage pre-service teachers in examining the societal and policy structures that impede the success of CLD students. In addition, questions of how to balance pre-service teachers’ identities and beliefs with targeted goals of anti-racist pedagogy are examined with specific emphasis on using offices of diversity and inclusion to support teacher education faculty in creating spaces for reflection, growth, and change.