Teachers, Talk, and the Institute for Transformative Education

Abstract

Few studies have examined educators' understandings of racial politics in schools and the larger social world through a social interactionist lens (Mead, 1934). Scholars such as Milner (2006) and Sleeter (2008) focus on improving multicultural teacher education. While understandable, this focus prevents scholars from forming a deeper, multi-dimensional picture of teacher learning, racial ideas (synthetic, conscious) and ideologies (derivative, un-examined), and social interaction. This year-long study of 15 participants in the 2009-10 Institutes for Transformative Education asks how educator discourse about the Institute contributes to this picture.Teacher life narratives have been linked to conceptions of race, class, and culture effectively (Johnson, 2002), and constructivist reflection in teacher education (Loughran, 2002) continues to command attention in current work on teacher learning. Yet the context of spoken discourse is often absent from the analysis in these studies, making it difficult to understand how contextual framing in conversation reflects and affects teachers' social mediation of racial politics in their daily practice and their civic lives. This study focuses on talk between the researcher and 15 educators, connecting the local frames of participants' stories of race in schools with state, national, and theoretical discourses.Understandings of critical multicultural education build on interactions between critical multicultural scholars including Grande (2004), hooks (1994, 2006), and Spivak (1988). Analysis of individual educator discourse can only be effective with the aid of previous work on teachers and race (Pollock, 2004, 2008), socially situated learning (Cole, et al., 1978; Guitart, 2008), racetalk in conversation (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Anderson, 2008), conversation in social interaction (Goffman, 1959; Wooffitt, 2005), institutional theory (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Foucault, 1972), and educational philosophy (Freire, 1984, 1988).