Things get glossed over: Whiteness and multicultural education.

This qualitative research study draws from James P. Gee's theory of discourse analysis, from critical studies of whiteness, and from feminist theory to investigate the ways that white teachers, students, teacher educators, and researchers approach multicultural issues in white-dominated educational settings. The author draws from a year-long study to describe what she calls white educational Discourse [WED]: a constellation of ways of talking, behaving, interacting, and thinking about multicultural issues in white-dominated educational settings that insulates participants from implication in social and educational inequality. In keeping with poststructural concerns about the subjectivity of the researcher, the author included herself as a participant in the study, and analyzed her own university teaching and relationships with participants. Through extensive microanalyses of classroom and research situations involving multicultural issues, the study illuminates how the power and privileges of whiteness get enacted and maintained in an 8th grade English class, a university student teaching seminar, and an educational research relationship. Data collected include over forty one-to-two hour participant interviews; eight weeks of audio and video tapes, field notes, and artifacts from the 8th grade class; and audio tapes, field notes, and artifacts from a semester of the university student teaching seminar. Through data exemplars and vignettes, the study details 16 rhetorical, behavioral, analytical, and interactional strategies of WED, such as avoiding words, changing the topic, letting others off the hook, and focusing on barriers to multicultural education, that participants used to insulate themselves from implication in social inequality. The author shows how participation in WED stymied attempts at transformative multicultural education or critical research, and thus functioned to reproduce rather than challenge the status quo of educational and social inequality. However, the study also builds upon moments when WED was contested to show how white teachers, students, and researchers may self-consciously appropriate some of the strategies of WED to begin to rearticulate their discourse practices and move towards those that further rather than hinder progressive educational and research efforts.PhDBilingual educationEducationEducational sociologyLanguage artsTeacher educationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124073/2/3121941.pd