White Curricula Effect to White Replacement Anxiety, Status Quo Politics: Teacher Experience and Understanding in Culturally Responsive Professional Development

Abstract

While the student demographic continues to shift in public education across the country, reflecting a more diverse classroom comprised of minoritized students, teacher preparation programs continue to espouse White middle-class values. As such, the education process continues to dehumanize minoritized students through socially acceptable discriminatory practices and policies. This approach to teacher preparation leaves teachers ill prepared to adequately teach minoritized students by not recognizing the resources that they bring to the classroom. To the contrary, minoritized students are expected to leave their culture and identity outside of the classroom. As the achievement gap is maintained, this study purposefully examines the process implemented to interrupt that disparity through in-service teacher professional development in culturally responsive teaching in a large urban school district. This grounded theory method study examines in-service teacher experience and understanding in culturally responsive professional development that tends to teacher bias thinking and critical awareness development. Teacher critical awareness development focuses in these four areas: ongoing effort to instructionally integrate students’ cultural knowledge, attention to the effects of explicit and implicit bias, ongoing effort to affirm students’ academic and ethnic identities, and heightened awareness to issues of social justice, teachers’ asset-based beliefs, teacher critical awareness, and student identity. The findings provide insight regarding the ways that in-service teachers experience and understand the culturally responsive professional development that encompass six themes: (a) Status Quo-White Curricula Effect, (b) Altruistic Reconciliation, (c) Pensive Practitioners, (d) Colorblind Liberal, (e) People of Color Apologetic Syndrome and White Replacement Anxiety, and (f) Practical Complacent Practitioners. The six emergent themes were further analyzed and categorized into three overarching categories: the Conventional Practitioners, the Dysconscious Racists, and the Equity Saboteurs. The results of this study serve to inform approaches to implement culturally responsive professional development to interrogate educational inequities and provide humanizing spaces of authentic learning for minoritized students.