Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education

Learn how to disrupt the reproduction of White supremacy in curriculum and instruction. This volume directly confronts persistent iterations of whiteness in English education through advancing antiracist dispositions and practices. Readers will find a variety of practical implementations of teaching and learning in English Language Arts, English literacy, and English as a Second Language. Chapter authors are educators who describe various teaching projects located in K–12 and teacher education contexts. Each chapter includes a dialogic reaction by an acclaimed and experienced scholar to further extend thought around complex themes. Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education encourages a more pedagogical view of how to engage teacher and student thought, feeling, and action in ways that combat White supremacy in English education across schools and society.

Book Features:

• Illustrates how and why whiteness enables racism and argues that racism harms both students of color and white students.
• Describes teaching projects from K–12 and teacher education classrooms that include dialogical exchanges with racially and intellectually diverse scholars.
• Addresses a range of topics, including using children’s books and young adult literature, teaching emergent multilingual students, developing curriculum, and preparing teachers.
• Provokes readers to imagine nuanced teaching and learning that invites students into antiracist values and dispositions that resist white supremacy.

Pauli Badenhorst is assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Samuel Jaye Tanner is an associate professor of English Education at The University of Iowa. Justin Grinage is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Minnesota

“This text offers an invitation to join the thinkers whose ideas comprise these pages in the always unfinished project of becoming more fully human via engagement with English education. As we reckon with whiteness, let us aim to do more than merely account for white supremacy—let us struggle to make it right.”
—From the Foreword by Zachary Casey, associate professor and chair of educational studies, Rhodes College

“A brave, necessary, and unique book, Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education puts urgent concepts to practical use.”
—Christina Berchini, assistant professor, Michigan State University

Contents

Foreword Zachary Casey  ix

Introduction  1
Pauli Badenhorst, Samuel Jaye Tanner, and Justin Grinage

Part I: Teachers Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education

1.  Reopening Racial Wounds: Whiteness, Affect, and Race Dialogues in the English Classroom  15
Justin Grinage

2.  Engaging Awareness of Race and Racism in Early-Career ELA Teaching: Interview With a High School Teacher  26
Adison Godfrey and Pauli Badenhorst

3.  There Is Sickness in the Soul: Considering Soul-Centered Questions While Reckoning With Whiteness in ELA Education (Commentary)  41
Jeanine M. Staples-Dixon

Part II: Students Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education

4.  An Opportunity to Be Better: Whiteness Pedagogies in English Education  47
Samuel Jaye Tanner

5.  A Voice From an Inner Room: Using Personal Narrative Writing to Strengthen the Racial Competency of White Students  58
Paul F. Walsh

6.  The Power of Writing in a Critical Examination of Whiteness (Commentary)  71
Jill Ewing Flynn

Part III: The Nuances of Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education

7.  Middle Grades English Language Arts, New South Classrooms, and the Prism of White Femininity  79
Erin T. Miller, Laurie Dymes, and Spencer Salas

8.  “Cool It for a Bit”: Navigating Antiracism in One Rural Context  90
Kelsey R. Jones-Greer

9.  Reproduction and Contestation of White Habitus Among ELL Teachers  101
Jenna Min Shim, Chelsea Escalante, Cynthia Helen Brock, and Cecilia J. Aragón

10.  Reading Whiteness With a Little Help From Bakhtin (Commentary)  114
Timothy J. Lensmire

Part IV: Curriculum and Instruction for Reckoning With the Whiteness of English Education

11.  Characterizing Whiteness: Using Critical Whiteness Pedagogies to Teach BIPOC YA Literature  121
Erin B. Stutelberg and Heidi J. Jones

12.  The Slippery Spaciousness of Whiteness: Critical Creative Writing Pedagogy in Teacher Education  133
Elise Toedt and Anna Schick

13.  Resisting Whiteness While Facilitating Discussions in (Socratic) Student Seminars  145
Abigail Rombalski

14.  The Necessity of a Suspect Mindset: Interrupting Whiteness Through Literature Study, Creative Writing, and Whole Group Talk (Commentary)  161
Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides

15. Conclusion  166
Samuel Jaye Tanner, Pauli Badenhorst, and Justin Grinage

About the Editors and Contributors  169

Index  173