Abstract
This article explores parallel findings from two critical ethnographies (Miller in Whiteness, discourse, and early childhood: an ethnographic study of three young children’s understandings about race in home and community settings. University of South Carolina, Columbia, 2012; Nash in Blinded by the white: foregrounding race and racism in a literacy course for preservice teachers. University of South Carolina, Columbia, 2012) of white early childhood teacher educators using a critical race stance as they researched race and racism in two contexts: an early childhood education course and home and community settings with the author’s own three young children. In each context, the researchers/authors found that participants used discourse to both resist and reify racism. The authors share these findings, offering implications and questions for critical reframing of the socially and historically located meanings of race and racism in early childhood education and teacher education.
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Notes
I received IRB approval from my university to conduct the study before beginning to collect data.
The findings related to the African American student are described elsewhere (Nash 2012).
I received IRB Approval from my university in August of 2009. All participants willingly volunteered to participate in the study. All person and place names for Study B are pseudonyms.
Discourses of blackness and whiteness, primary in both studies, (rather than discourses about other people of color or marginalized societal groups) may have been the result of the geo-political context of the Southeastern region where our studies took place.
Item 12 on a pre/post racial attitudes questionnaire. Responses are from the post-questionnaire.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge Susi Long, PhD, Michele Foster, PhD and Zach McCall, PhD for their feedback on this manuscript.
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Nash, K.T., Miller, E.T. Reifying and Resisting Racism from Early Childhood to Young Adulthood. Urban Rev 47, 184–208 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-014-0314-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-014-0314-5
Keywords
- Whiteness
- Early childhood
- Teacher education
- Preservice teachers
- Racism