Becoming an antiracist educator, Black, South and East Asian perspectives

grantor: University of TorontoThis thesis utilizes a critical life history methodology to examine the lived experience of eight research participants. Each participant experienced a one year teacher education program at a Canadian university with a focus on antiracist education during the 1994-95 academic year. The participants included three Afro-Caribbean Canadians; three Asian Canadians, (a Korean, a Hong Kong Chinese and a Japanese Canadian); and two East Asian participants--an Indian Catholic Canadian and a Hindu-Muslim Canadian from Guyana. Through a series of intensive interviews and through bi-weekly dialogue journals this research explores the influences from their previous life history that brought them into teaching, particularly into a program committed to antiracist education, and examines their transformation as antiracist educators during their one year teacher education program. Their experiences of racism and marginalisation as a result of their immigrant status or race, both prior to entering the teacher education program as well as during the teacher education year, prove to be defining experiences in their decision to be teachers and in their transformation as activist teachers. These participants draw on the theory of antiracism presented in the program by several of their professors, contest the status quo in their practicum placements and emerge as antiracist teachers. In examining their life history we see the participants moving through a series of idiosyncratic stages from the early rejection of their own race or culture, to a commitment to social justice, not only for their own race or group, but for all marginalised students.Ed.D