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Title: Using Traffic Stops to Engage Preservice Teachers in Thinking About Systemic Racism
Racism impacts the lives of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) in a myriad of ways. It is important that future teachers go beyond individual acts of racism to understand how racism operates as a system. To this end, we designed and implemented a statistical investigation with 13 preservice teachers using real traffic stop data from a local city. We were interested in how preservice teachers explained the role of racism in the policing of traffic stops. Drawing on a framing of systemic racism as an intertwining of individual, cultural, and institutional factors, we found that most of the preservice teachers made connections between the results of their statistical investigations and broader institutional factors that affect policing. Statistical investigations using large datasets that highlight disparities based on race provide affordances for preservice teachers to start thinking about systemic racism. Further, the investigations can normalize challenging conversations around race and racism in mathematics and statistics content courses. more »« less
Gutiérrez, J.F.
(, Reflecting the Past and Embracing the Future.” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS 2021).)
null
(Ed.)
This paper contributes to the literature challenging color-blind racism in teacher education by presenting findings from a study involving elementary preservice teachers responding to a hypothetical teaching scenario about race. Framed by theoretical perspectives on race-evasive teacher identity studies and color-blind racism, our findings reveal four typical response components—apologize, explain, solve, and appreciate. We describe each component and explain how all four can serve to evade race and hide/reproduce color-blind racism.
Julia Spielmann; Kathryn M. Kroeper; Alejandro Lleras; Jean E. Fox Tree
(, Translational issues in psychological science)
Race and racism shape individual beliefs and perceptions, interpersonal and intergroup interaction, and institutional processes. Psychological science can aid in critically examining how race shapes psychological processes across these levels—individual, interpersonal, and institutional. The current special issue ties together a variety of methodological approaches and presents innovative research findings about the impact of race and racism on psychological processes, shedding light on how individual, interpersonal, and institutional structures affect racial equity. Together, these articles call on the research community to critically examine our own positionality and privilege when conducting psychological research, and provide recommendations for including and, importantly, centering people from traditionally marginalized social backgrounds in our work. In the introduction for this special issue, we situate the included articles in the broader context of psychological literature, and provide a reflective summary of the articles.
Madkins, Tia C.; Nazar, Christina Restrepo
(, Science Education)
For some time, scholars who are guided by critical theories and perspectives have called out how white supremacist ideologies and systemic racism work to (re)produce societal inequities and educational injustices across science learning contexts in the United States. Given the sociopolitical nature of society, schooling, and science education, it is important to address the racist and settled history of scientific disciplines and science education. To this end, we take an antiracist stance on science teaching and learning and seek to disrupt forms of systemic racism in science classrooms. Since teachers do much of the daily work of transforming science education for minoritized learners, we advocate for preparing teachers who understand what it means to engage in antiracist, justice-oriented science teaching. In this article, we share our framework for supporting preservice teachers in understanding, developing, and implementing antiracist teaching dispositions and instructional practices. In alignment with other researchers in teacher education who emphasize the importance of anchoring teacher education practice and research in prominent educational theory, we highlight the theories undergirding our approach to antiracist science teaching. We offer considerations for how researchers and science teacher educators can use this framework to transform science teacher education.
Bradford, Allison; Gerard, Libby; Tate, Erika; Li, Rui; Linn, Marcia C.
(, Science Education)
Abstract To promote a justice‐oriented approach to science education, we formed a research‐practice partnership between middle school science teachers, their students, curriculum designers, learning scientists, and experts in social justice to co‐design and test an environmental justice unit for middle school instruction. We examine teacher perspectives on the challenges and possibilities of integrating social justice into their standards‐aligned science teaching as they participate in co‐design and teach the unit. The unit supports students to investigate racially disparate rates of asthma in their community by examining pollution maps and historical redlining maps. We analyze interviews and co‐design artifacts from two teachers who participated in the co‐design and taught the unit in their classrooms. Our findings point to the benefits of a shared pedagogical framework and an initial unit featuring local historical content to structure co‐design. Findings also reveal that teachers can share similar goals for empowering students to use science knowledge for civic action while framing the local socio‐political factors contributing to the injustice differently, due in part to different institutional supports and constraints. Student interviews and a pre/postassessment illustrate how the unit facilitated students' progress in connecting socio‐political and science ideas to explain the impacts of particulate matter pollution and who is impacted most. Analyses illuminate how teachers' pedagogical choices may influence whether and how students discuss the impact of systemic racism in their explanations. The findings inform refinement of the unit and suggest supports needed for co‐design partnerships focused on integrating social justice and science.
In this article, we examine how southern white Christian secondary mathematics teacher candidates reflected on racial inequities in academic opportunities and school discipline after engaging with data sets highlighting such disparities. Using a lens of racial noticing, informed by Leonardo’s (2009) conceptualization of whiteness as a racial discourse that normalizes white dominance, we analyze candidates’ written reflections to identify how they interpreted and responded to issues of race in mathematics education. Two dominant themes emerged: the normalization of implicit biases and the tensions between aspiring to objectivity and acknowledging subjectivity in educational practices. Both patterns aligned with whiteness by obscuring systemic inequities. Notably, while many candidates avoided overt deficit views of students of color, their reflections often framed inequities as personal or inevitable rather than structural. We conjecture that their Christian commitments reinforced color-evasive framings while also discouraging overtly deficit interpretations. Statistical investigations, however, created openings for naming race and bias, suggesting both the potential and the limits of such approaches. Findings underscore the need for teacher education to explicitly confront whiteness, with data investigations that highlight racial disparities as being a promising avenue to develop racial literacy and promote systemic change.
Fernandes, Anthony, Simic-Muller, Ksenija, and Weiland, Travis. Using Traffic Stops to Engage Preservice Teachers in Thinking About Systemic Racism. Retrieved from https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10648104. Mathematics Teacher Educator 13.2 Web. doi:10.5951/MTE.2023-0029.
Fernandes, Anthony, Simic-Muller, Ksenija, and Weiland, Travis.
"Using Traffic Stops to Engage Preservice Teachers in Thinking About Systemic Racism". Mathematics Teacher Educator 13 (2). Country unknown/Code not available: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. https://doi.org/10.5951/MTE.2023-0029.https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10648104.
@article{osti_10648104,
place = {Country unknown/Code not available},
title = {Using Traffic Stops to Engage Preservice Teachers in Thinking About Systemic Racism},
url = {https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10648104},
DOI = {10.5951/MTE.2023-0029},
abstractNote = {Racism impacts the lives of students who identify as Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) in a myriad of ways. It is important that future teachers go beyond individual acts of racism to understand how racism operates as a system. To this end, we designed and implemented a statistical investigation with 13 preservice teachers using real traffic stop data from a local city. We were interested in how preservice teachers explained the role of racism in the policing of traffic stops. Drawing on a framing of systemic racism as an intertwining of individual, cultural, and institutional factors, we found that most of the preservice teachers made connections between the results of their statistical investigations and broader institutional factors that affect policing. Statistical investigations using large datasets that highlight disparities based on race provide affordances for preservice teachers to start thinking about systemic racism. Further, the investigations can normalize challenging conversations around race and racism in mathematics and statistics content courses.},
journal = {Mathematics Teacher Educator},
volume = {13},
number = {2},
publisher = {National Council of Teachers of Mathematics},
author = {Fernandes, Anthony and Simic-Muller, Ksenija and Weiland, Travis},
}
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