Anti-racism in White Educators’ Classrooms: A Complicated Journey Toward Conscientization Maturation

Presentation for the Georgia Educational Research Association (GERA) Conference. In this presentation, two White educators will describe the personal and professional journeys they underwent while embedding anti-racist pedagogy in their instructional methods courses at a large, rural southeastern US university. Both presenters identify as middle class, cisgender, White women. As teacher educators dedicated to anti-racism, presenters established a critical friendship (Tagoonaden et al, 2018) to awaken (Lloyd, 1972) their anti-racist selves by asking the following research question: How do two teacher educators embed anti-racist pedagogy in the wake of the racial and social unrest of 2020? To investigate their question, they inquired about their relationship with Freire’s conscientization while developing anti-racist pedagogy in their classrooms. Presenters will detail their collaborative self-study in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) commons (Gilpin & Liston, 2009; Huber & Hutchings, 2005). Attendees should expect to learn how presenters recognized their enactments of Saad’s (2019) components of white supremacy, such as white silence, privilege, and apathy as well as optical allyship. These enactments made them believe they were doing good because of their “desire to be seen as good” (Saad, 2019, p. 43); however, results revealed the emotional work it took to speak back at their racist intentions and tendencies while embedding anti-racist pedagogy