Diverse realities and policy portrayals : what teacher experiences bring to the antiracism policy process

This project was inspired by my desire to investigate what teacher experiences could bring to the antiracism policy process. I provided a space within which study participants could talk about their experiences teaching racially and ethnically diverse students and asked them to look at how those experiences are represented in or framed by district multicultural or antiracist policy. Informed by critical antiracist theory, I collected qualitative data using critical policy analysis, individual interviews and a focus group whereby study participants came together to discuss and analyze a specific policy text issued by the school district. I enacted a critical policy analysis that set the context of these discussions by explicating the tensions and coalescences of educational policy, race and the city, and by providing an initial thematic analysis of the policy text in question. I then constructed assertions based on the discussion transcripts, asserting that: participants talked more in terms of bullying and anti-bullying than in terms of racism and antiracism; participants were concerned with how students understood racism and accusations of racism; participants talked about policy as disconnected from their everyday realities and as only minimally relevant to their teaching, and participants did not see the particular policy text analyzed as useful or relevant to their experience. In examining these assertions within the greater context of the city, I identified ways in which discursive maneuvering within policy and media impacts conceptions of race and racism. I also considered how teachers are simultaneously positioned as objects of and agents within policy, which may provide useful spaces for influencing the policy process. In conclusion, I argued for a more meaningful and relevant relationship between teachers and education policy, policy that must maintain the tenets of social justice, including antiracism, at its core.Education, Faculty ofCurriculum and Pedagogy (EDCP), Department ofGraduat