Abstract
This article focuses on how color-evasiveness, i.e., the bypassing of racial issues, manifests in classroom interaction in the context of a Finnish adult basic education center. Drawing on critical discourse studies, we analyze moments in which race-talk is or could have been present, using culturally sustaining pedagogy to identify alternatives for the absence of race-talk.
The main data includes classroom recordings that were collected as part of a 5-year ethnographic project. Our findings show that when race-talk occurred, academic language, racial proxies, and tokenistic representations, and disconnects between personal- and structural-level talk, erased students’ lived experiences of racialization and racism. This study calls for slow educational spaces in which teachers have time and support to engage in self-critical and data-based learning, have structures that allow for student-centered antiracist pedagogies, and where Black and Brown people are well represented in key roles of teaching and educational policy making.
In this article, we study color-evasiveness in adult basic education (ABE) in Finland. In the school where our ethnographic study took place, most students were racialized as Black or Brown, but topics of race or racism were rarely addressed and typically relegated to the liminal spaces of school, like side-conversations in class between peers.
Race-talk can refer to discriminatory talk about race but also to expressing racial joy (Myers & Williamson, 2001), while sometimes it is extended to mean meta-talk or media discourse about race (Epstein, 2019; Orelus, 2013). In this article, by race-talk we mean explicit talk about race, racialization, racism, and racially charged experiences. We understand race as a socially and historically constructed category and line of difference. As Kendi (2023) puts it, skin color, language, clothing, or religious affiliation are sometimes used as markers of such difference. However, the construction of race (racialization) is not dependent on them, nor do these markers necessitate or legitimate any racial categorizing. In other words, race is not based on appearance, but on power (Kendi, 2023). Relatedly, color-evasiveness is a discourse that avoids race-talk or engages in race-talk in a harmful, inadequate, or discriminatory manner, both of which have real-life consequences for people from marginalized racial groups and thus maintains a white hegemony (Annamma et al., 2017). To study color-evasiveness in the classroom, we approach it as an absence, that is, as something that would have been relevant to but is not addressed in a specific context (von Münchow, 2018).
Color-evasiveness has not been at the forefront of discourse studies in education or classroom-based research and is particularly scarce in ABE contexts in Nordic countries. In the Finnish context, it is partly due to the discourse of Finnish exceptionalism, which has been used to dismiss and minimize topics of racism and decolonization as irrelevant for Finland (Rastas, 2012), framing these issues as concerns for places elsewhere, like the United States. However, this exceptionalism has been refuted as inaccurate, as Finland participated in settler colonialism and benefited from European imperialism (Merivirta et al., 2021).
In this article, we focus on classroom recordings collected in a migrant-serving ABE center to study how color-evasive discourse is localized in the classroom interaction. We define discourse as a social practice that produces and is simultaneously defined by social reality. It encompasses all semiotic practices, including but not limited to linguistic means (Blommaert, 2005). Discourses are translocal, and they have historicity; they carry traces of past events, texts, and practices across contexts (Blommaert, 2010; Henaku, 2024). We draw on critical discourse studies (e.g., Henaku, 2024) as a theoretical foundation as we seek to answer our research question: How do the students and teachers reproduce and/or resist color-evasive discourse in the classroom?
We open our article with a concise overview of adult basic education in Finland and a review of existing literature on race and racism in that context. Next, we turn to color-evasiveness as a phenomenon and outline how it can manifest in interaction. Then, we introduce the results of our analysis, showing that color-evasiveness was a prevalent discursive strategy in the classrooms of our research site.
Adult Basic Education as a Context
ABE in Finland is offered by municipalities, schools, and community colleges and is organized in three stages (literacy, first level, second level) that are designed to be completed within 3–5 years. It targets people above the age of 17 who require a basic education degree to continue their studies on the secondary level. ABE is not an educational path designed for migrants only, but they do constitute a significant proportion of the current ABE student body (EDUFI, n.d.). The courses of ABE programs follow a comprehensive canon as stipulated by the national curriculum that is published by the National Agency for Education (National Core Curriculum for Adult Basic Education, 2017).
Data for this article is associated with the larger research project “Who knows? (De)legitimizing knowledges in a refugee-serving school”, which was funded by the Research Council of Finland (2020–2025, #332390) and comes from a community college (kansalaisopisto) in rural Finland, which served mostly students from West Asian and North and East African contexts. Students at the school are typically 18 years or older and have completed some Finnish courses and/or the first level of ABE. Although there is a great variety in the linguistic, ethnic, racial, religious, and educational backgrounds of the students, within Finnish society, they are commonly racialized as non-white and perceived as Other. Many of the students have interrupted trajectories of formal schooling.
In adult education, studies focusing on race and racism remain scarce, while, for instance, adult migrant students’ skills (Gray, 2019) and their reasons for entering education (Zhu, 2020) have been studied. Students like the ones in our study have received attention in the relatively young field of Literacy Education and Second Language Learning for Adults (LESLLA), which particularly focuses on the education of learners with interrupted formal schooling and emerging print literacy. Although topics of racialization and racism have not been at the forefront of the field, they are often raised or implied in other discussions. For instance, Pucino's (2018) chapter examines the reports of Islamophobia of 17 Muslim Iraqi students in U.S. high schools. Others document more systemic forms of racism, for instance, how epistemic resources of adult and adolescent students with refugee experience are ignored or dismissed (Crandall, 2018) or how educational pathways of asylum seekers are systemically obstructed (Khan, 2018; Korntheuer et al., 2018). In a similar vein, Bowman (2021) has discussed the epistemic resources and life experiences of Indian and Pakistani women in an ABE context by applying a power- (especially gender-) sensitive lens. In Finland, Ennser-Kananen (2021) has analyzed how ABE learners resist and navigate instances of explicit racialization and racism. Nevertheless, race, racism, and racialization remain rather understudied topics in ABE contexts in the Nordic countries. This article contributes to bringing these topics to the fore.
Theoretical Framework
From Color-Blindness to Color-Evasiveness
Color-evasiveness is a form of racism and, as such, an invention of colonialism and a function of coloniality that maintains whiteness as a social norm. Although Finland has not typically been identified as a colonial power, this view is changing, particularly considering the state's theft and exploitation of Indigenous Sámi lands, Finnish representatives’ or companies’ active participation in colonial activities (Kuokkanen, 2022; Merivirta et al., 2021). Part of a decolonial effort is the identification and dismantling of color-evasive discourses and practices. Originally termed color-blindness, color-evasiveness has been used in the context of the U.S. legal system (Gotanda, 1991) as a condition for equality. More specifically, the notion of colorblind justice suggests that people's racial identities should not be considered, or even be known by legal authorities, so that everyone would be treated the same (Gotanda, 1991). While the original ideas undergirding “color-blindness” may have been well-intended, it has led to unjust practices in both the legal and educational spheres.
Annamma et al. (2017) proposed expanding the concept and replacing it with color-evasiveness, which has since gained traction in the field. They argue that color-blindness does not consider how historical processes have shaped our understanding of the link between race and ability, constructing an image of white people as superior and more intellectually capable. This also relates to terminology: (color-) blindness refers to a disability, and it is itself ableist. It implies that blindness is related to the ability (or the lack thereof) to grasp complex phenomena, which is not the case with either “color-blindness” or “blindness” (Annamma et al., 2017). Annamma et al. (2017) argue that color-evasiveness better describes the phenomenon: evading race is an active discursive practice rather than a passive event.
Color-evasive discourse enables and amplifies erasure of lived experiences and histories of people of color (Annamma et al., 2017). As Bohonos et al. (2023) have shown, this also applies to adult education studies, which is why they call for an inclusion of Black Adult Education. Several studies in the United States have provided evidence that explicit talk about race and racial inequity is particularly difficult for people who are racialized as white due to their lack of racial literacy and resistance to acknowledging racial privilege (King et al., 2023; Lensmire et al., 2013; Mena, 2024; Sue, 2016). In addition, talking about race can prompt racist microaggressions, which can also discourage people of color from engaging in it (Sue, 2016). Furthermore, prior studies (Alemanji & Mafi, 2018; Willey & Magee, 2018) have shown that people shy away from race-talk because they find it difficult to act and challenge the status quo with concrete practices.
Color-evasiveness is most evident in situations where racial experiences are omitted, belittled, or denied. For example, in Chang-Bacon's (2022) interview study with teacher-educators who instruct courses on teaching emergent bilinguals in the United States, the participants chose to limit topics of race and racism to the designated classes in the syllabus. In other contexts, they invoked the fact that race was not the subject of the course. In their study with undergraduate-level STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) instructors, King et al. (2023) found that teachers may not recognize race as a key factor in various classroom situations or deny its impact. Even if a racial motive is recognized, it is not necessarily treated seriously or profoundly, but educators may, for example, make excuses for racist behavior or dismiss people pointing out racism as being overly sensitive (King et al., 2023; Mattsson et al., 2024).
Another color-evasive practice is to replace the word race with different proxies, such as ethnicity, migrant background, or second language learner (Alemanji & Mafi, 2018; Chang-Bacon, 2022; Tran & Paterson, 2015). This is common in European contexts where the word race is often dropped, because of its connotations with Nazi vocabulary and white right-wing extremism (Jugert et al., 2022; Vietze et al., 2023). Different strategies exist for reclaiming race-talk (for instance, by coining words or using English ones), which is important work, as the use of proxies enables evading race-talk and thus racism-talk and ultimately leads to “a denial of the necessity to take action against racism” (Sue, 2016, p. 34). Ignoring differences means minimizing the struggles racialized people face or failing to acknowledge that different social rules apply to people who are racialized differently. The counterpart of ignoring differences is to emphasize similarities. For example, in Migliarini's (2018) study with professionals working with refugee children in Italy, the participants engaged with color-evasive ideology by emphasizing children being humans and thus disregarding the role of race. Furthermore, they reproduced harmful stereotypes and exoticized children's disabilities (Migliarini, 2018).
Not all race-talk supports antiracism or equity. For instance, Stinson and Migliarini (2023) found that educators talked about their students from racial minorities as people who need extra help, implying that it is due to their race. In their study, Migliarini (2018) also documented a connection between racialization and likeliness to be ascribed a disability, such as dyslexia. Like Siuty et al. (2024) have argued, even if educators have good intentions, such discourse reconstructs Black and Brown people as less capable and reinforces both ableist and white(-ability) savior-ideology. Important work exists to counter such deficit discourses; for instance, Goings (2021) has suggested an asset-based framework for studying Black male adult learners. In general, using stereotypes or other essentializing imagery, for example, by talking about race only negatively, does not dismantle white hegemony but reproduces it.
Whiteness can be performed by people of any racial identity. It is a social construct people think or aspire to be or sound like, defined by the same white raciolinguistic imagination that constructs its antonym: the stereotype of Blackness (Alim, 2023). Identifying whiteness or white normativity is often challenging for white educators, such as the authors of this article, because their practices, knowledges, and ways of being are normalized and not usually questioned (e.g., Mena, 2024; Figure 1).
Discursive strategies of color-evasiveness in earlier research.
Color-Evasive Discourse as an Absence
Studying color-evasiveness ultimately means studying something that is not there. An absence can manifest as vague terms (racial proxies), implication, foregrounding, and backgrounding in the framing of topics (belittling the harm, ignoring differences, and emphasizing similarities), or it can be symbolically represented (e.g., claiming race is not part of the class; von Münchow, 2018). In discourse studies, absences are interpreted as windows to understanding individual agency in resisting or reproducing hegemonic discourses. The social context and habitus of participants prescribe to some extent what is legitimate to say, but the power dynamics are nevertheless in continuous transformation and/or under negotiation (Henaku, 2024). That is, even though discourses of whiteness and white culture are hegemonic and restrict race-talk in the context of our study, students and educators can and do exercise their agency to disrupt that hegemony.
We draw on culturally sustaining pedagogies (CSP) (Paris, 2012) as an alternative framework for the absence of race-talk. CSP addresses the need to foster and develop both traditional and evolving cultural practices of marginalized students in school systems that demand adopting socially dominant “language and literacy skills and other white, middle-class dominant cultural norms of acting and being” (Paris, 2012, p. 94). It decenters whiteness, including white normativity and white supremacy, and acknowledges how race intersects with other social categories like gender, dis/ability, class, and language (Alim et al., 2020). CSP prepares students to interrogate hegemonic discourses and their origins and encourages them to recognize and critique how inequity is reproduced in their own cultural practices. Furthermore, it calls for joy, not only pain, when engaging with student experiences and communities (Alim et al., 2020). In our article, we use CSP to imagine what should have been in lieu of color-evasive discourse.
Race-talk needs to also penetrate structural racism, not to stay only on the individual or discursive level of antiracism or multicultural education (Alemanji & Mafi, 2018; Mattsson et al., 2024). In contexts where white normativity is normalized, resorting to superficial, performative actions happens easily despite antiracist approaches (Woods, 2024). In contrast, effective race-talk fosters critical awareness of racial ideologies, breaks stereotypes, and strengthens belonging by creating a safer environment for all students (Sue, 2016). For example, in her moment-by-moment study on classroom discourse, Ferreira (2022) found that when racially diverse students were allowed to utilize their knowledges and ways of being in interaction, they were collectively able to “re-think and, perhaps, begin to imagine new subjectivities not linked to their own narrow racialized socializations” (p. 308) (Figure 2).
Discursive strategies of color-evasiveness and their alternatives as in CSP.
Data Collection and Analysis
Within the larger study (see above), ethnographic data was generated over 3 years. The school in rural Finland was a familiar context for Johanna, who had been collaborating with members of the school community for several years. Venla, who joined the research project when data had been generated, had no first-hand knowledge of the participants and had thus limited access to ethnographic knowledge (Atkinson & Morriss, 2017). It is important to acknowledge that both Venla and Johanna identify as white, benefitting from white normativity and free from racial discrimination: their lived experiences as white people also shape the analysis. They extend particular gratitude to Black and Brown scholars whose work has informed their understanding of critical race studies and racially diverse educational contexts.
55 students, 12 teachers, and 1 administrator participated in the study. Consent was sought in writing and orally, and all participants gave written consent to their participation. Based on the guidelines of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK) (2019), the study did not require separate ethical review. The data of the larger study consists of:
many unstructured and 35 semi-structured interviews 120 hr of participant observations 88 hr of classroom audio recordings 12 hr of recordings from workshops with teachers at the school.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of the classes were held online. In the recordings, English and Finnish were transcribed verbatim.
For this article, we primarily used 25 transcribed recordings of classes that took place between 2020 and 2022. Although, according to some fieldnotes, race-talk occurred among the students during class, this data was not substantial enough for our analysis and not detectable in the audio recordings. We thus acknowledge that what we represent in this article is not a complete account of the race-talk that occurred in the lessons we analyzed. Venla started the analytical process by identifying explicit race-talk that occurred in 10 recordings. During a close reading of all the transcripts, she identified moments in which strategies of color-evasiveness as described in existing literature occurred, that is, she identified 11 instances of race-talk being absent/evaded, using CSP as a point of comparison.
In a second step, Venla and Johanna conducted individual analyses of the chosen classroom excerpts and compared their results to identify strategies of color-evasiveness. During this phase, we also paid attention to how white normativity was centered instead of race-talk. For this article, we chose the three excerpts that most clearly illustrate different types of color-evasiveness and translated them into English.
Findings and Discussion
In this section, we present three moments from cultural studies lessons. The first one illustrates how racism can be a lesson topic but in a manner that centers white educators. The second excerpt focuses on how race is omitted as a category for defining migrants, and the third one explores tokenism in visual representations.
Struggles to Define Racism
One day, the teacher of cultural studies, Oliver (all names are pseudonyms), was absent, and an assistant teacher, Ruslana, together with two researchers, Johanna and Minttu, offered to teach a class on his behalf.
Oliver had prepared a test for the students to take. The students were allowed to use the internet or their notes to answer the open-ended questions. The assistant teacher and the researchers were also helping the students. One of the questions on the test was “What is racism?,” which both the students and instructors of the class struggled to answer. The following instance occurred after Ruslana, Minttu, and Johanna had attempted to define racism several times with different students and student groups. Students Amira and Hassan were close by and waiting for input from Ruslana and Johanna, respectively (Excerpt 1).
Classroom Transcript 2021.
To answer the question “What is racism?,” Hassan and Johanna first turn to class materials (lines 1–3), but Johanna deems the language of those too difficult (line 4) and begins to search the internet for alternatives. In line 6, Ruslana suggests students could answer the question with an example of a “dark-skinned and light-skinned” person, arguing that such an example would immediately produce the answer. Johanna, reading test questions and text from her phone, clarifies which test question this is in response to (“Equality?,” line 9) and Ruslana answers that this would be the definition of racism. Amira has found a definition online and interrupts (lines 11 and 13) to have it checked by Ruslana (line 15), and Johanna hands Hassan her phone with a definition she found online (line 16).
What is noteworthy in this excerpt is the reliance of all participants on the internet as a resource for defining racism. Although in this case Johanna and Hassan attempted to find a definition of racism in the class materials, they soon abandoned this strategy and Johanna consulted the internet instead, following what most students and teachers in the room were doing. The situation can be read as a direct omission (type 1 color-evasiveness), as race is not mentioned in the final definition of racism, but it is described as “decreasing the human dignity of a person” (line 16). The only attempt to address race (as skin color) comes from Ruslana (line 6) but is questioned by Johanna (line 9), and not taken up. Otherwise, there seems to be general and unquestioned trust in online resources, despite their often abstract (and mostly English) language. Despite likely sharing racist experiences, students’ voices are ignored, and teachers’ website translations are seen as legitimate knowledge.
Even if defining racism is read as race-talk, it is nevertheless done in a superficial and even harmful way (type 3). The context of a testing situation seems to demand a dictionary-like definition of racism that, in the end, centers whiteness, i.e., not the experiencing but the disembodied defining of racism, as mediated by white teachers, which erases the knowledge of the affected community. As abstract and remotely produced definitions are privileged vis-à-vis local students’ knowledges of racism, we suggest that such a de/legitimizing of knowledges is co-constructed with students’ racial, educational, and socioeconomic identities; in other words, not only is race erased from race-talk, but students are also delegitimized as reliable knowers (Ennser-Kananen, 2024; Nguyen et al., forthcoming).
Who is a Migrant?
In the fall of 2021, Johanna agreed to teach or co-teach some sessions in Oliver's course to deepen some discussions he had with his students on migration and belonging. This excerpt is taken from one of these classes, more specifically from a longer discussion on citizenship, migration status, and labels. The students knew Johanna had moved to Finland from another European country. Issaka, who had come to Finland from a West African country, was particularly engaged in this part of the discussion. Also, Abebe, from an East African country, and Karim, from a West Asian country, participated (Excerpt 2).
Classroom Transcription 2021.
The class starts off with Johanna asking the students to define who is a migrant. The students’ bring up the complexity of the term in relation to the contexts they are familiar with. For instance, in line 2, Issaka names different countries outside of Europe, from which migrants may arrive, ending with “but Europe? Europe same same” (line 2), meaning he does not consider inner-European sojourners to be migrants. Quickly, the discussion turns from defining migrants to a longer and emotionally charged conversation, during which distance (lines 5 and 6) and language (lines 7–9) are mentioned as criteria for being a migrant. Abebe and Issaka state that Johanna is not a migrant (lines 11–12). After a while, Johanna introduces a short version of the Finnish word for migrant, a derogatory word that is primarily used for migrants who are racialized as non-white. She mentions that the word m*** carries a negative connotation (line 13), which sparks students to discuss whether the word migrant is an appropriate and non-offensive term for them.
It is particularly important to take different social identity positions and privileges into account. For Johanna, a white, European, highly educated migrant, passing as local (non-migrant) is a relatively realistic scenario, whereas this is far less likely to happen to Black and Brown students, whose racialization as non-white tends to be co-constructed with otherness and foreignness in the Finnish context. Despite good intentions behind discussing the migrant label and the hierarchies its use can reinscribe, Johanna ignores the racial and other differences such as socioeconomic and educational (type 2) that make her migrant experience fundamentally different from those of the students.
Particularly noteworthy are Abebe's comments throughout the extract. As a Black man from an East African country, he insists that not all migrants are the same, and points to language as evidence for difference (line 7). He also rejects Johanna's identification as a migrant. Issaka takes this up by explaining that the label does apply to him because Finland is “of course” not his home, and he is “not the same” (line 16). In his lengthy comment (line 16), he argues emphatically for migration and specifically his migrant identity as something evident (“totta kai”) and “normal” (line 16). Color-evasiveness in this excerpt is striking, particularly considering that language, Arabic names, and citizenship are mentioned as markers of difference. Those can be considered racial proxies (type 1) that point to what is absent: a mention of being racialized as non-white. When Johanna introduces a common discourse and derogatory Finnish term for migrant, she fails to point out that this term applies only to migrants who are racialized as Brown or Black (line 13) and she (implicitly) continues with the original (color-evasive) definition of migrant as someone who has moved countries, regardless of their racial identity.
Explicitly addressing racialization regardless of language, name, or citizenship could break the silence around race in such moments. Specifically, the situation would have called for a discussion on processes of othering in Finnish society and beyond, for instance, by building on students’ examples and expanding on them. Importantly, it is the students who approach race-talk by pointing out racial proxies such as names, language, and home (countries) as markers of difference.
The students have a chance to talk and seem to want to focus on the legal, official level, such as their children's future and citizenship status (Karim in lines 19 and 21), and interpersonal support. However, the students’ topics are dismissed (type 3), and the focus of the conversation turns to the themes introduced by Johanna. In all, even in a situation that is dedicated to a discussion on belonging and migration and thus supposed to center students’ lived experiences, the gaze is on white people and their perspectives.
Representations in the Classroom
Oliver's commitment to discussing race stood out at the school. He typically spoke about race and racism from an expert perspective, having both personal experiences as well as broader knowledge about racism in Finland through his activism in different NGOs and political groups. In one interview, he mentioned that he wanted to “bring this information to [his] students” (interview, winter 2021). Oliver's classes highlighted Finnish whiteness and called for diversity.
On the day of the following exchange, Oliver presented a slide with the cover of a book titled Islam Suomessa [Islam in Finland], which shows a young Brown girl wearing a hijab and holding soccer shoes in her hands. Oliver used this photo repeatedly when presenting statistics on the same topic. In the following excerpt, Majid, a student, reacts to the photo (Excerpt 3).
Classroom Transcript 2020.
Oliver talks about diversity in Finland using the metaphor of a salad, stating “the more things, the better the taste” (line 3), which could be read as an attempt to introduce the discourse of joy of racial diversity (Alim et al., 2020). Similar intentions might have inspired Oliver to talk about Rosa Emilia Clay in several lessons (Fieldnotes 2020–2023), who is one of the key figures in earlier scholarly work that writes Black people and communities back into whitewashed Finnish history discourses (Rastas, 2012). These are all counter-acts to type 3 color-evasiveness, the addressing of race only as a source for discrimination (type 3).
Oliver's monologue is interrupted by Majid, who questions the teacher's repetitive use of the same photo (especially lines 4 and 10). Here, Oliver engages with race-talk, but through essentializing imagery (type 3). Majid's comment points to the idea that, through its frequent use in relation to the topic of Muslims in Finland, the picture has become a stand-in and replaced more diverse and more adequate visual representations of a heterogeneous population. Intended as a picture in which students see themselves or their family members, its repetitive use runs the risk of tokenizing the people it represents, and thus of undermining its original intention, even creating a distance between the students and the image.
Oliver does not seem to understand Majid's argument (line 5) and shifts back to class content. His not engaging with Majid's comment can be read as belittling or dismissing the harm or even the possibility of it (type 3). The situation is complex. As reflected in an interview, Oliver operates from the standpoint of an expert on antiracism and tends to position himself as an antiracist and student advocate, sometimes in comparison to other teachers at the school. Speaking from this position may have contributed to his not being receptive to Majid's criticism. Additionally, the teacher-focused nature of the lesson may have been an obstacle to student contributions. The question must be raised why, in an activity on Muslim communities in Finland, the Muslim students in the room were not involved. We do not suggest that the students should involuntarily represent any group they might identify with, but that they should be offered a chance to talk about their own experiences and perspectives.
Conclusion
In this article, we have analyzed how teachers, researchers, and students at an ABE institution reproduce and resist discourses of color-evasiveness, with a focus on how the absence of meaningful race-talk manifests in classroom interaction. Following earlier studies, color-evasiveness is reproduced through direct omission: race or racism were not mentioned at all in 15 out of 25 classroom recordings. To identify absences, we used CSP as an alternative framework—of what could have been. In Figure 3, we present discursive strategies that reproduce color-evasiveness and their alternatives (Figure 3).
Discursive strategies of color-evasiveness with examples and alternative practices.
We identified several attempts at engaging in race-talk. Oliver challenges Finnish racism by sharing counter-stories to white-washed history and encouraging students to question dominant narratives. Similarly, Johanna initiates discussions that may encourage race-talk or even antiracist pedagogies. However, neither in Oliver's nor in Johanna's lessons does this lead to meaningful race-talk. Instead, the teachers’ color-evasive discursive practices create absences around being Black and Brown, which tacitly normalize the discourse of white hegemony in education. The institutional power hierarchy, students’ racialization, and possibly their developing language skills in Finnish dictate whose knowledge, in this case on race-related experiences, is legitimate in the classroom. Race-talk circulates around topics relevant to the teachers, and the students’ attempts to bring up topics that are important to them are, by and large, ignored. This dynamic could be owed to identity positions of “good teachers,” who have established themselves as experts on topics related to race, racialization, and antiracism. An important contribution of teacher education would then be to foster teacher identities that allow for failure, changes of mind, and space for the unexpected. In addition, self-criticality and awareness of one's own status as a lifelong learner, and the importance and ability to decenter oneself (despite one's expert status), would be important dispositions for teachers to develop. In this call, we implicate ourselves as teachers, teacher educators, and researchers, who work with critical and culturally sustaining pedagogies: How are we able to stay humble, to learn and unlearn (while being in expert/teaching roles), and actively combat (our own) color-evasiveness?
Importantly, dispositions are always intertwined with structures, so that a call to learn or unlearn must go hand in hand with structural change. In Finland, ABE is geared to adults who have not followed a traditional educational path, so that ABE programs and curricula tend to be permeated by a sense of having to compensate for schooling that was missed. This is palpable, for instance, in the curriculum, which rushes students to complete their programs within 3–5 years, while children spend 9 years completing the same degree (National Core Curriculum..., 2017), and emphasizes a quick transition from school to working life (Rantanen et al., 2024). Meaningful race-talk in ABE contexts would require slow pedagogy that is multilingual and multimodal, scaffolds for different language proficiencies, is intersectional, and recognizes the diverse identities, needs, and assets of members from marginalized groups (see e.g., Holst, 2020). The current structure does not allow for that but rather pushes teachers, racially aware or not, to focus on more time-efficient teacher-led practices. In the spirit of slowness, we recognize our privilege as researchers to have the time and opportunity to analyze our teaching through recordings and transcripts and thus learn from otherwise often fleeting interactions. Although we have shared some of this work with our teacher participants, close encounters with classroom data are not typically part of their professional experience. We call on decision makers to provide spaces for critical data-based learning and reflection.
To center students’ realities, ABE must be reimagined to prioritize their needs and interests, shaping curriculum and instruction accordingly. Teachers, in turn, need space and support for an unlearning of whiteness, ideologically, but also discursively and linguistically. As our analysis shows, mentioning Black, white, or racism in class is not enough for resisting color-evasiveness, because power remains unnamed: race-talk does not get substantial without reference to colonial history. We need time and space to create student-centered pedagogies for ABE that do not merely add content to an already packed curriculum. This ultimately requires involving students and teachers in curriculum design as well as including a lot more Black and Brown people into teaching, teacher education, and policymaker positions.
Such a curricular and pedagogical reorientation would directly challenge color-evasiveness and thus oppose silences around and legitimacies of existing racial hierarchies. As these racial hierarchies represent a pillar of continued colonial thought and action, the shift we propose to challenge color-evasiveness is an integral part of decolonial education and scholarship.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors want to thank all the participants of the study, as well as Sanna Riuttanen and Hải Nguyễn, for their contributions and insights during the fieldwork and analysis.
An early version of this article has been presented on the 22nd of May 2024 in Exploring Language Education Conference in Vaasa, Finland.
Ethical Considerations
The ethical review was waived by the University of Jyväskylä Ethical Committee Board. All participants provided written informed consent prior to participating.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Finnish Research Council (2020-2025, #332390).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Transcription Codex
, short break
(text) metatext, e.g., description of a way of talking
hu- partial word
[…] omitted conversation
((to)) a word added for clarity in the translation