Abstract
Drawing on a theoretical framework that centers race, racism, and anti-racism, this study explores a coaching conference in preservice literacy teacher education. In classrooms, teachers often encounter disruptions in the community; however, those disruptions are often seen as problems to be solved and are addressed without interrogating race discourses. This study builds on previous research that has explored how teachers engage in developing understandings about race in relation to their practice using discursive tools of racial literacy. We ask, How do three White teachers draw on race discourses that are racist and anti-racist within the context of one coaching event, a post-conference? Using critical discourse analysis, we describe and interpret how race discourses were drawn upon and disrupted in the conference. We conclude with a discussion of the racial literacy practices that have promise in this coaching context and in other professional settings.
On May 25, 2020, a White police officer murdered George Floyd Jr., a Black man in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In response to the surge of protests in the midst of the pandemic, Mosley and Hagan (2020) reported the response of Angela Davis, a longtime Black activist for racial justice: “This is an extraordinary moment which has brought together a whole number of issues,” she says. “I don’t know whether it would have unfolded as it did if not for the terrible COVID-19 pandemic, which gave us the opportunity to collectively witness one of the most brutal examples of state violence.” More people now “feel compelled to adopt a posture of self-criticism,” she says.
In the introduction to the special issue Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research in the Journal of Literacy Research, the editors echoed this call for self-criticism: “In this moment of 2020, we recognize the need to amplify and center research that critiques anti-Black racist ideologies that oppress literacy learners and educators across contexts” (Bauer et al., 2020, p. 379). In response, we disrupt color-blind ideologies in coaching research, examining how one preservice teacher (PT), a cooperating teacher, and a field supervisor interrogated race in a preservice literacy teacher education context. Coaching provides opportunities to learn with the guidance of mentors to be more equitable and impactful in future teaching. However, White teachers, who evade race, make up the largest racial demographic of educators. In this study, we draw on a theoretical framework centering race, racism, and anti-racism to examine a post-conference. In doing so, we build on previous research that explores how teachers develop understandings about race in relation to their practice using discursive tools of racial literacy. We use critical discourse analysis (CDA) to interpret how a PT and her mentors engaged with race discourses and their racial identities and considered the impact of race and racism on their teaching. We ask, How do three White teachers draw on race discourses that are racist and anti-racist within the context of one coaching event, a post-conference?
As a group of researchers who are Asian American and White, we start our analysis with ourselves: How we theorize issues of race is limited by our experiences and perspectives. A theoretical perspective of race that interrogates how race discourses are enacted and disrupted improves our ability to make explicit and visible how it is that inequitable outcomes persist and are disrupted within systems and institutions (Kendi, 2019).
Theoretical Framework
We approach coaching from a practice-based view of learning to teach, focusing attention on coaches (i.e., mentor teachers, field supervisors) and how they mediate learning experiences. We center critical race theories that 1) combat racist ideas and policies (Leonardo, 2009; Omi & Winant, 1994) and the normalization of Whiteness (Leonardo, 2009; Mills, 1998), 2) advance anti-racism and actions it requires, and 3) offer tools to understand how harmful race discourses and racial violence and injustices are disrupted (Guinier, 2004; Sólorzano & Yosso, 2002).
Race as a Social Construction
Critical race theory (CRT) developed as scholars of color sought to place race rather than class at the center of the analysis of inequities and oppression (Ladson-Billings, 1998). Race is often misunderstood as biological difference in humans (Singleton, 2015), but CRT defines race as a social construct used to protect racist ideas and policies (Kendi, 2019; Omi & Winant, 1994; Popkewitz, 2013). Guinier (2004) wrote, “Race is a powerful explanatory variable in the story of our country, which has been used to explain failure in part by associating failure with Black people” (p. 116). Racial categories hierarchically rank some people as more human than others. Race discourses are linked to racial formation, which Omi and Winant (1994) described as “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (p. 55). Race discourses “limit theories of the human to those with White skin particularly, and those broadly conceived as White by the master race” (Leonardo, 2009, p. 69).
The material consequences of race discourses are significant, as race has been used to allocate material wealth, and “despite its unscientific status, race is a structural formation that maintains an interdependent, co-determining, and heteronomous relation with the economy and other social relations” (Leonardo, 2009, p. 33). Because institutionalized practices such as school segregation are the foundation of U.S. society, direct links can be drawn between race, access, opportunity, and wealth. Race is key to understanding educational outcomes as well as wellness, disease, violence, and death. Leonardo (2009) pointed out that Black people are more often in danger of violence from Whites, or from White institutions where racial violence is perpetuated. We capitalize “White” as well as other identity markers, following Ewing (2020), who emphasized that White racial identity is connected to White privilege and White supremacy. We use lowercase for terms such as “scholars of color” aligned with conventions of current racial justice conversations.
Normalization of Whiteness
White people perform violence toward people of color by drawing on harmful race discourses in language and through other forms of violence (Leonardo, 2009; Mills, 1998). In schools, violence is not usually challenged because of White-privileging race discourses and Whiteness operating as ordinary (Kendi, 2019). Leonardo (2009) argued, therefore, that educators have to disrupt business as usual: “If educators conduct schooling as usual, the results are predictable and consistent with racial stratification” (p. 108). Shalaby (2017) explored the notion of “troublemakers” in early childhood classrooms and the ways students of color can be positioned as trouble for teachers who are focused on lessons, assessment, and content. Shalaby suggested that students are not always doing something illicit in moments of disruption, but they may be responding to the oppressive structures around them. Therefore, White teachers must actively reject race discourses that uphold White supremacy.
Anti-Racism and Racial Literacy
Anti-racism is the active work of analyzing race discourses that uphold White supremacy. White ways of knowing and viewpoints are posed as more established than the viewpoints of people of color (Guinier, 2004). Certainly, there are race discourses that lead to empowerment, curriculum revision, and anti-racist ways of knowing and being relating to people of color (e.g., Kinloch et al., 2020), but those are less common in White-dominated spaces. Anti-racism requires the ability to unpack race discourses through the color blindness that characterizes White-dominated spaces (Bonilla-Silva, 2010). To identify inequalities related to race and take an active stance toward disrupting them, CRT scholars use tools such as counter-storytelling, which illuminates how race operates within institutions from the perspective of people of color (e.g., Kinloch et al., 2020; Sólorzano & Yosso, 2002).
Other tools include racial literacy, or the uncovering of complex practices that further White supremacy, or in Guinier's terms (2004), how race is used as a decoy when people are analyzing inequalities. We draw on a racial literacy framework, focused on the discursive and material processes that uphold race and inequalities (Rogers & Mosley, 2008) . We define race discourse using Gee's (2015) framework of d/Discourse, which is widely cited in educational research and contrasts the ways we use language every day (discourse) with the storylines we draw upon to make meaning (Discourse). Gee argued that Discourses are ideological, value-laden, durable, and not easily disrupted. Discourses are key to understanding how power is distributed within our society and how that power is maintained. The storylines, Gee wrote, are historically and socially defined Discourses [that] speak to each other through individuals. The individual instantiates, gives voice and body to a Discourse every time he or she acts or speaks, and thus carries it, and ultimately changes it, through time. (p. 180)
We know from previous research how teachers and students practice racial literacies in classrooms (e.g., Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Sealey-Ruiz, 2011; Skerrett, 2011; Vetter et al., 2018). This body of research indicates that engaging with the practices of racial literacy involves acquiring critical knowledge as well as developing the skills and strategies to make use of critical race knowledge in practice (Brown, 2017). Literacy scholars have indicated that this dual process of knowledge- and skill-building to practice racial literacy takes time (Flynn et al., 2018; Vetter et al., 2018), benefits from critical and collaborative reflection (Kohli, 2018), and requires a “sustained and strategic approach” to attend to the impact of race in literacy teaching and learning (Skerrett, 2011, p. 318). Rogers and Mosley (2008) described the tools for deciphering racial grammar as “a set of tools (psychological, conceptual, discursive, material) that allow individuals…to describe, interpret, explain and act on the constellation of practices (e.g., historical, psychological, interactional) that comprise racism and anti-racism” (p. 110). Relevant to this study and coaching, these discursive tools for racial literacy develop through ongoing collaboration and dialogue with others (Rogers, 2018). Thus, racial literacy encourages a dual focus on both individual action and institutional structures influencing personal and pedagogical action as generative in the context of literacy coaching (Guinier, 2004; Skerrett, 2011).
We present this case study as neither a cautionary tale nor a counterstory (Sólorzano & Yosso, 2002) but as a reading of an everyday event that has the potential to further the earnest work necessary for anti-racism through a racial literacy lens.
Literature Review
Research in literacy teacher education has addressed teachers’ need for sociocultural knowledge in relation to race (Brown, 2013), racism (Kohli et al., 2017), and anti-racist perspectives (Sealey-Ruiz, 2017). Although a great number of studies take up this call in relation to exploring sociocultural knowledge (Mosley Wetzel et al., 2019), a smaller number of studies address how White teacher education students (dis)engage with race and racism (Schieble, 2011; Skerrett et al., 2015) or inquire into topics of race and racism (Dávila, 2011; Simon, 2015). Another small subset draw on a discursive definition of race and racism, examining how White PTs (Godley et al., 2015; Kohli et al., 2017; Lazar, 2007; Vetter et al., 2018) and PTs of color (e.g., Souto-Manning and Price-Dennis, 2012) engage with race discourses and racism in learning to teach literacy. As Kohli et al. (2017) explained, racism often operates at the “micro or interpersonal level, and thus is often unrecognized or viewed as insignificant” (p. 186). Our analysis of the research collectively points to the ‘new racism’ of K–12 schools, “a system of institutionalized power and domination that works best when invisible” (p. 186). New ways of thinking about race and racism are necessary because of the pervasive presence of Whiteness in the structure of teacher preparation programs focused on literacy and racial justice (Haddix, 2017).
Research on coaching to date has largely taken a color-blind approach: Studies examining mentors’ and PTs’ engagement with their racial identities, considering the impact of race on their teaching and how systemic forms of racism manifest in classroom learning, are largely absent. In the subsequent sections, we analyze how coaching studies both did and did not engage with race, racism, and anti-racism.
Coaching in Practice-Based Settings
In practice-based settings, mentors are engaged in practice and have the agency to democratically exchange ideas with PTs (Payne, 2018). Coaching can focus on reflecting and decision making, so PTs can voice their own challenges and create the agendas for their learning (Bieler, 2010; Zeichner & Liston, 2013). Kim and Silver (2016) found mentors fostered meaningful reflection by using open-ended questions to begin the conference, adjusted based on body language and verbal responses, and privileged “recipient orientation,” in which the PT guided the conversation (p. 215). Similarly, Bieler (2010) argued for critical pedagogy through “problem-posing,” which allowed both individuals to engage in the challenges of teaching as co-learners. Mosley Wetzel et al. (2017) studied a reflective model of coaching, finding that while this type of coaching encouraged reflection for the PT, the mentor at times felt conflicted about whether such open dialogue would lead to the outcomes necessary to “prepare” the PT as a new teacher (p. 417), although these concerns decreased as the mentor observed the PT's growth and professional empowerment. Across these studies, a democratic, dialogic model supported PTs’ growth in learning to teach.
In some contexts, coaching can involve a triad of PT, cooperating teacher, and field supervisor. Collaborative coaching offers opportunities for mentors to align goals and expectations across the university and field-based contexts, fostering increased trust across triads and supporting continued reflection and dialogue (Mosley Wetzel et al., 2018). Dobrowolska and Balslev (2017) studied triadic conversations and found connections between professional knowledge constructed in conferences and mentors’ discursive moves in two cases. They concluded that it was “crucial” (p. 18) that the mentor fully engage in the problem of practice in order to accomplish this co-construction. Although they attended to how problems are centered in mentoring, fewer studies pay attention to race, despite its salience in teaching.
Practice-Based Coaching and Race
A small body of research attends to race in the context of literacy coaching. Sailors and Manning (2020) discussed Nina, a White literacy coach working with in-service teachers. Nina focused on “engaging in dialectic conversations with teachers, children and youth, and communities” and “shifting away from silent acceptance to courageous naming” (p. 26). When Nina's mentee, Isabella, a Latina classroom teacher, wanted to disrupt the color-blind perspective teachers expressed in the school, Nina followed Isabella's lead and drew on observational and coaching tools to “inquire and dig into big questions related to justice” (p. 29).
In another study, Land (2018) analyzed 13 critical conversations during reflective coaching sessions occurring among a cohort of predominantly White cooperating teachers and their PT mentees. Coaching moves, such as explicitly naming controversial topics and collaboratively reviewing video recordings of teaching, created opportunities to focus on critical social issues. Land's analysis revealed the initiating conversations about race did not lead to in-depth discussions or foster new understandings about race. In fact, in the one instance when a mentor brought up anti-Black stereotypes negatively impacting one of their students, the PT did not elaborate upon or engage in the discussion.
In this study, we contribute to the literature about racial literacy as a tool of analysis in literacy teacher education (Flynn et al., 2018; Mosley Wetzel, 2020). We apply a discursive framework to interpret how race discourses were named, used, and examined.
Methodology
This article is part of a larger study focused on collaborative coaching (Mosley Wetzel et al., 2019). We focus on the second-to-last post-conference at the end of PT Heather's student teaching. This post-conference was an outlier: It was the longest post-conference, the only one in which the triad was unable to reach consensus, and the most pertinent post-conference in which race and racism were explicitly addressed. We reanalyzed the entire 33-min post-conference as a case (Miles et al., 2019), examining the phenomena of how race discourses were enacted.
Context
We used the Coaching with CARE model, developed at our Southwestern public university (e.g., Mosley Wetzel et al., 2017). The model centers practice-based teaching, employing caring as a reciprocal act between PTs and their mentors (Noddings, 2001; Valenzuela, 2010). It also brings attention to power and authority within coaching by disrupting the discourses and practices limiting teachers’ decision making (Sailors & Manning, 2020). The coaching model was shared with pre- and in-service teachers as a part of their coursework experiences. While coursework across the teacher education program included critical race perspectives, the coaching model did not center race.
Our study took place at a public elementary school in an urban school district in Texas, during the 2015–2016 school year. Although the school historically served a predominantly White, upper-middle-class student population, according to the school district website, the student population had become more racially and economically diverse. The school served approximately 900 students; 15% of students qualified for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program, 30% of learners identified as students of color, and 15% of students spoke languages other than or in addition to English. The fifth-grade students in the classroom reflected the demographic characteristics of the school. Relevant to this study, 20 of the 26 students identified as White, three students identified as Latinx, two students identified as Asian American, and one student identified as Black.
Participants
Heather, Madeline (Svrcek), and Francine (Daly), the participants in this study, identified racially as White. Heather, who holds a BA in linguistics, was in her final year of a literacy-focused teacher preparation program. She completed both her fall and spring practicum requirements with Francine. Francine, a cooperating teacher with six years of teaching experience, was a graduate student finishing her master's degree in literacy at the same university. Francine positioned Heather as a co-teacher using inclusive language such as “our classroom” and inviting Heather to participate in activities such as parent–teacher conferences. Madeline, a field supervisor with 11 years of experience, was a graduate student in a literacy doctoral program. Madeline communicated requirements, conducted observations, and provided support to Heather. Madeline was also an instructor for Heather's course focused on classroom organization and community. Madeline and Francine served as Heather's mentors for one year.
Data Collection
Data collection for the larger study took place from October 2015 to April 2016, during which time six collaborative coaching cycles (pre-conference, observation, post-conference) were video-recorded. Notes were collected during Heather's teaching observations, and each participant kept a reflective log of their experiences. Semi-structured interviews with Heather, Francine, and Madeline were conducted by the primary investigator at the beginning of student teaching to collect participants’ insights on collaborative coaching, but member checking with Heather did not occur after the focal post-conference. For the purposes of this study, the video recordings from the fifth collaborative coaching cycle, a detailed transcript of the post-conference, and participants’ reflective logs served as the primary data sources.
Data Analysis
For the larger study, we transcribed every coaching cycle for emergent themes, leading to our focus on racial literacy in coaching cycle 5. Transcriptions included verbal aspects of the conversation as well as the nonverbal aspects we found important to document in the transcript, such as gaze, facial expressions, and body movements (e.g., leaning in).
Phase 1
As nonverbal and verbal transcriptions are always partial, each member of the research team reviewed the written transcript along with the video recording twice, adding additional analytic notes and paralinguistic cues to the transcript. Referring back to our reflective logs, we wrote separate memo summaries based on our research question and theoretical frameworks, to make explicit how we were making sense of the post-conference. Our analysis illuminated five topically bounded stories with a clear beginning and end, which we describe analytically as segments. We then applied our theoretical framework, studying race discourses and racial literacy.
Phase 2
Using CDA, we described race discourses within each segment and the enactment of racial literacy toward anti-racist talk and action. We narrowed our focus to three of five segments to focus on racial discourses that were enacted and disrupted. We began with Rogers and Mosley's (2006) codebook of genre (ways of interacting), discourse (ways of representing), and style (ways of being) associated with race and racial literacy to guide our analysis. We divided the segments into idea units, following Gee, as the smallest bounded units to view form and function of language and analyzed the form and function of each idea unit (Rogers, 2004). In doing so, we discovered additional genres, discourses, and styles specific to the coaching conversation, which we added to the codebook.
First, we identified genres or ways that language was held together with rules and predictable patterns of interaction. We developed a list, building on Rogers and Mosley (2006) and Fairclough (2007), of genre codes:
Interruptions Humor Metaphors Overlapping talk Changing the topic Silences Consensus Questioning for clarification Making a counterpoint Reflecting (inviting, providing, resisting) Animating students and self when telling stories about classrooms Using racial descriptors to establish racial positionings (e.g., “the only Black student”) Posing critical race wonderings Coaching (e.g., “slow down that moment”)
These codes were used to identify ways that language hangs together in the post-conference.
Next, we identified race discourses or storylines relating to race, White supremacy, racism, and anti-racism as part of our analysis (Gee, 2015):
Race evasion (denying racism exists or is present) White students identified by their assets; students of color identified by their deficits White experiences in school are normal (e.g., just getting by) Normalizing Whiteness and White supremacy Anti-Blackness (e.g., assigning adultlike qualities to Black children; less-than-human characteristics (Popkewitz, 2013); using Black students’ responses to racism as evidence of their being less smart/good/fit (Kendi, 2019)) Mistaking students’ self-preservation as self-segregation (Tatum, 2007) Black students positioned as “troublemakers” (Shalaby, 2017) Race neutrality is (im)possible Naming racism as institutional and pervasive rather than individual Acknowledgment of racial hierarchies Distancing language Politeness conventions Directness/indirectness (Tannen, 1990) Not naming race, Whiteness, anti-racism, or racism Breaking silences around race Uncertainty (marked by “I don’t know” and associated nonverbal movements) (Not) identifying racially Affective response (expressing frustration, confusion, excitement) Solidarity with collective pronouns (“we”/“our”)
Finally, we identified style as ways of being in the post-conference, to examine ways the coaches and Heather were positioning themselves in relation to race discourses. These codes included the following:
Style helped us to understand how participants “placed themselves and others within the storyline” (Bullough & Draper, 2004, p. 411) specifically when race became a topic of conversation.
Finally, we utilized our racial autobiographies (below) to reflexively consider our positions as insiders in the post-conference, as well as racialized teachers and teacher educators.
Positionality Statements
To strengthen the credibility of findings, we considered how our racial and cultural identities constrained our ability to fully understand how race discourses maintain racist institutions (Sealey-Ruiz, 2020). We drew on racial autobiographies to unpack our histories and experiential knowledge of race to consider the impact of Whiteness in our interpretations (Milner, 2007). We were emboldened by the sociopolitical context of 2020, when the world's increased attention to issues of racial injustice led us to interrogate our own roles in racist linguistic practices and compliance with White supremacy. We offer a summary of our racial autobiographies utilized throughout multiple iterations of analysis.
Mosley Wetzel is a White woman who endeavors to study race and literacy in interracial groups through research, advocacy, and activism projects. My own family members’ experiences of immigration and teaching have shaped my commitments to racial justice. I have experienced, and continued in this project to experience, tensions as a White scholar studying race and bringing PTs into working within racially diverse communities.
Daly is a White cisgender woman and was socialized to not identify racially and to understand racism as isolated acts of hatred. I learned about race, racism, and anti-racism in professional and higher education settings, primarily by colleagues and scholars of color whose unpaid labor developed my critical consciousness. I contend with my racism daily through ongoing reflection, critical dialogue with other White educators, and community activism.
LeeKeenan is the child of a Chinese American mother and Irish American father. In most contexts, I am seen as racially ambiguous. In my professional life I have been asked by students, colleagues, and professors the question: What are you?, suggesting that in a society that focuses so much on segregating, grouping, and labeling, the ambiguity of my race is disconcerting. At both home and school, I developed consciousness around the role of race in interracial relationships, which has in many ways shaped my work as a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher.
Svrcek lived in a culturally and linguistically diverse setting as a child but was socialized at home and in school to be color-blind. Working to see and understand race and racism and their influences is part of my daily life. This work is influenced by BIPOC colleagues, scholars, and friends and through professional organizations who push me to recognize my own Whiteness and its privileges.
In sum, by interrogating ourselves and our relationships to each other and Heather, including positions of power, as well as the institutions to which we belonged, we worked to address, rather than ignore, the dangers of centering Whiteness in this research (Milner, 2007).
Findings
Next, we report how racial literacy was enacted across three different segments during a post-conference. We focus on the interrupted exclusion of dialogue focused on racial inequities that had become the norm in the triad. Each section of findings includes an overview of the coaching segment, followed by our CDA.
He Seems to Be Pushing Boundaries
Overview
The first section of findings follows an invitation from Francine to Heather to share what she had been “thinking about” (line 12) since teaching her lesson on building interest around animal adaptations using articles and writing. Heather first raises the issue of student distraction. Following Heather's lead, participants focused on Jacob, a White student, who Heather notes is important because of “how much he was talking” during the lesson (line 99). Heather repeats, “I’ve been thinking about” (lines 13, 14, 17, 21, 24), demonstrating she was actively reflecting on this student since teaching her lesson.
As Heather talks about Jacob's participation, she animates both Jacob and herself using quotes, body movements and gestures, throat clearing, pausing, a sudden drop in volume, or a referential look (connecting with Francine's gaze). It is important to note Francine and Madeline were there, but perhaps not privy to the conversation she had with Jacob because of her proximity to him. She begins, “After class when we were packing up, I was telling Jacob, I was like, ‘Hey, I noticed that you, like, you seemed really interested in like [animal] adaptations, and he was like…'” (lines 34–45). She continues, reporting he said, “Kind of like, not really” (line 47). Reflecting on Jacob's participation, she provides history, perhaps for field supervisor Madeline, who is not there daily. She references the past, how he does “his own thing during class” (line 77), but in this lesson he “exclude[d] other kids” (lines 87–89). Francine, in relation to the lesson, proposes Jacob was intentionally challenging classroom norms during the lesson, stating, “My sense is (.) 1 he seems to be pushing boundaries” (lines 114–115). In this quote, and others, Heather shows she was concerned with Jacob's participation, but she used affirmative, strengths-based language by naming his interest (lines 34–45) to engage him in a discussion. Her use of such language restories Jacob's nonengagement (Worthy et al., 2012).
Together, Francine and Heather co-construct contradictions in Jacob's participation in different circumstances. Francine explains, “So he’ll engage in the activity to a certain degree, but if it's a write-up…he doesn’t take that up often” (lines 138–140). As Heather reflects on Jacob's participation, she references her own history as a student. She confesses that she did the minimum to get by in school. In lines 152 and 153, Heather admits, “I see some of myself in him. And so it kind of pushes my buttons.” She continues in lines 162 and 163, “’Cause I was kind of that kid who did exactly what I needed to do to get by, I kind of, ‘Do I really have to do this? Can I get away with not doing this?’ You know, pushing boundaries, you know?” Heather's comparisons of herself with Jacob, as well as her telling of her conversation with Jacob, show that Jacob is pushing boundaries, and Heather can relate to him.
Findings of CDA
Through affirmative statements juxtaposed to areas of concern, Heather, verbally and nonverbally, shows how she and Jacob are alike in “pushing boundaries.” It is not surprising she oscillates between normalizing his behavior and expressing frustration, as it is their alikeness that allows her to relate to him and respond. Invited by Francine to reflect, Heather draws upon a temporally structured genre, using flashbacks to evoke nostalgia for her own past. There is a silence around race as she references her childhood, drawing on a color-blind race discourse. There is a sense she was able to push boundaries without consequences, probably because she is a White female and knew enough to know what was necessary to get by, or to not be noticed for breaking the rules. When she states, “[I] did exactly what I needed to do to get by” (line 162), she evokes knowledge of systems and how they work to benefit White students. As Heather animates her childhood, she aligns her Whiteness and Jacob's, and as a result, she is able to humanize Jacob (Popkewitz, 2013) and normalize his disruption.
In the next segment, Francine employs racial literacy to contrast how Heather responded to Jacob and how she responded to students who caused another classroom disruption. She offers this contrast as a tension for Heather to reflect upon. Francine did not recall whether she planned this move as a coach, but as analysts, we understood its importance in terms of racial literacy and coaching. Francine creates a contrast in how Heather responded to Jacob, a White student, and to students who were Black and Latinx, illuminating race discourses in the post-conference.
Critical Race Wonderings
Overview
This next segment focuses on how students were disruptive during the lesson. However, the focus of this segment is a group of three students, one of whom identified as Black and two of whom identified as Latinx. Francine notes that Heather “talked very descriptively” (lines 175–176) about Jacob and asks her to do the same about “the group at table 5” (line 178), referring to a tension that Heather thought a student discussion was off-topic. Using detailed descriptions of the classroom, which includes students’ physical location and movements in relation to one another and what they are doing, Heather reconstructs what happened. Heather describes their behaviors as “feed[ing] off each other's energy” (line 185), “talk[ing]…loudly” (lines 190–191), “not [being] super nice” (line 195), and “sarcastic” (line 198). Francine adds to Heather's description, giving Madeline a little more of a backstory of the students’ ways of participating. Francine uses both appreciative language (“I think they’re figuring it out” [line 203]; “They were definitely enjoying each other's company” [line 209]), as well as racist language that adultifies the children's behaviors (“But then there's been moments of kind of cruelty to each other” [lines 205–206]). Aubrey, the student who is Black, is the only student who is referenced by name and is positioned as particularly distracted (lines 250–299).
Francine offers an invitation for Heather to elaborate on “the group holistically” (line 229) by asking her to describe what she noticed in this moment of her teaching. In response, Heather reports her direct address of Aubrey's behavior. In contrast to Jacob, Heather does not use affirmative language with areas of concern and does not identify with Aubrey as a student. Rather, she tells the story as a tense interaction.
Findings of CDA
When Heather reflects on her interaction with Jacob, she draws on their alikeness and her simultaneous frustration with his behavior. The contrast between Heather's response to a White student (Jacob) and to Aubrey and her peers (students of color) suggests race discourses were at play both in the classroom teaching event as well as in the post-conference. Structurally, the genre of this section of the transcript is held together by Francine's questions, a typical characteristic of coaching conversations, as she was in the front seat as a coach (e.g., “Could you talk more about what you’re sensing from the group at table 5” [lines 177–178]; “Can you say what you noticed…about this group dynamic, I guess?” [lines 233–237]). Perhaps she was thinking about race as a teacher, and how racism might be upheld by teachers. Her questions are open-ended but specifically ask Heather to recall what she noticed in her teaching that made her “wonder about this group dynamic” (lines 236–237). Francine's questions draw on race discourses that render race invisible while simultaneously connecting the behavior of the students of color to disruptions. It is not until Francine describes what she is doing as posing a “critical race wondering” (line 345) that the race of the students becomes explicit.
When Francine offers an invitation for Heather to elaborate on her focus on “the group holistically” (line 229), Heather is invited again to reflect. Heather reports her speech and Aubrey's: “Like, hey will you stop doing this, it distracts the people around you” (lines 253–254); “Can you not talk when Ms. (Francine) is talking? It's a distraction” (lines 286–287). Here, Heather speaks directly to Aubrey with statements rather than questions, seeking to understand what Aubrey was doing. In contrast to Jacob, Heather positions Aubrey as resistant: “She was like ‘Oh, I can multitask’” (line 288). And “I was like, ‘Oookaaay [drawing out the “O” and the “A”], but I think it would also be a distraction to the people around you, if they’re trying to hear’” (line 290). “She was kind of like, ‘Hhhhhh fine okay’” (294).
Heather evokes anti-Black discourses that assign adultlike qualities to Black girls (Aubrey is 10), whose White classmates are often constructed as childlike or needing protection (Bernstein, 2011). Heather draws on race discourses that attribute negative characteristics to Black students, reflecting the teacher's dysconscious racism (King, 1991). Aubrey's behavior is described as inherently harmful to the community, something that must be addressed for the greater good. Francine, Heather, and Madeline fail to examine anti-Black race discourse or the ways Black people are often confronted by White authority figures, disciplined, or shunned from classrooms for these behaviors. The conversation echoes the “disapproval that Black people [especially Black youth inside schools] experience all too often” (Kinloch et al., 2020, p. 389).
The contrast between Jacob and Aubrey as distracted or distracting illuminates the race discourses at work. Heather uses a deficit lens with regard to Aubrey, without the curiosity about the work Aubrey is doing that she afforded to Jacob. Aubrey's behavior is not considered as a reaction to a classroom that potentially or possibly failed to serve and engage her. Heather shows herself to be direct, and although Aubrey is presented as initially resistant, she is then “cornered” or forced to agree based on Heather's logic about the community. In this moment, Aubrey is “caught,” reminding us she has disrupted the norms of the classroom.
Race discourses can be drawn upon quite violently by teachers without interruption (Duncan, 2002). Here, Aubrey is rendered by teachers as being and doing something different than Jacob. Jacob is doing less to get by, whereas Aubrey has disturbed other students’ learning. The difference is significant because according to Heather, Jacob is only hurting himself, metaphorically, but Aubrey's actions impact other students. Throughout the post-conference, as we will see in subsequent segments, the triad draws on racist discourses that position students of color as “troublemakers” (Shalaby, 2017) or less than human (Popkewitz, 2013), until Francine breaks the silence around how race is operating.
Francine's subsequent turns illuminate contradictions in her position as Heather's mentor and a teacher cognizant of the way race influences her teaching and students’ learning (Land, 2018). First, Francine positions herself in solidarity with Heather as having similar frustrations. At line 300, Francine backs up Heather's claims (“We had a very similar moment yesterday”). Like Heather, she describes Aubrey's actions as distracted and distracting (“She was pouring glitter into her pencil box onto the putty”; line 306). Francine positions herself as well: “I asked, ‘So what are we doing with the cards,’ and nobody knew. So I asked, ‘Well can we just pause and kind of reflect on why that is…’” (lines 310–316). Francine positions herself as a teacher who asks students to reflect on distraction, which is different from how Heather describes herself in a dialogue with Aubrey. Heather's directness in cornering Aubrey is juxtaposed with Francine's question posed to the group, although Francine is drawing on an anti-Black race discourse. She reports cornering the students, who don’t know what to do with the materials. Then, Francine reports, “four or five people said” they could watch the teacher more carefully, and she reports that Aubrey “had trouble coming up with something” (line 324). We could argue that the intent of the teacher in the interaction is the same—to corner the students into changing their behaviors—but Francine presents herself as curious, whereas Heather was authoritative.
The triad begins talking more quietly, almost as if the students are in earshot. Their talk is augmented by facial expressions. Then, Francine pivots away from a private, intimate telling of the story and turns a reflective lens on herself: “Or that was my perception, and then I was like, feeling frustrated in that moment, so I kind of led her to like, ‘Could you please put that away,’ and she was like ((squinting eyes)), and I was like, and all of this, like, the camera is right there” (lines 325–332). Like Heather, Francine positions herself as a frustrated teacher. She also sounds authoritative with her use of “Could you…,” which parallels Heather's earlier report, “Can you…,” directing Aubrey to stop being distracted. The use of eye squinting, which Heather uses as well, indicates Aubrey is resistant. In contrast to Heather's logic that Aubrey's behavior is inherently harmful to the community, Francine references the camera, signaling her embarrassment with this moment or difficulty during the observed (and recorded) lesson. At this point, Francine begins to shift in how she tells the story. Her reflection does not move toward the “why”: Why the students may have chosen to sit together, why she as a teacher might struggle communicating with this group about her expectations, and why this teaching event relates to other past events. This pivot away from the actions of students of color toward herself as a raced, White teacher is important because it suggests an interruption in the ways race is operating.
Ultimately, Francine models how she reads a past event through a racial literacy lens. In lines 333 through 342, Francine breaks the silence around race: “To me (.) it feels like a critical kind of moment, and we’ve talked about Aubrey as the only African American girl in our class and the power dynamics between her and us, White (.) you know, empowered teachers.” When Francine declares this is a “critical kind of moment,” she looks directly at Heather. Francine's referential language establishes the connection between race and power. Francine positions herself as someone who brings racial literacy into her reflective work of teaching.
Francine continues, “And I think this dynamic at this table, there is a lot of critical race wonderings.” At this point, she looks to Heather, who does not nod or reciprocate. She continues, “I think because it is, I don’t know, we don’t have many students of color in our class” (lines 343–350). Francine's racial literacy propels her to name race and build connections between race, power, and identity. First, she names Aubrey using a race discourse of locating a person racially. She draws on the label “African American girl” to establish that Aubrey is Black, using a racial term to differentiate her from students who are White and Latinx. Further, she uses “girl” to reference her intersectional identities of race and gender and age. In close discursive proximity, she names Heather and herself as “White” and adds the descriptor “empowered teachers” to add meaning to the label of “White.” Finally, she establishes a link between race and power by repeating the word “power” in the phrases “power dynamics” and “empowered teachers.” She hints at what Whiteness might afford her, or Heather, as a White literacy teacher in these interactions. Thereafter, Francine further establishes her racial literacy through curiosity but also with a set of discursive moves related to “keeping race on the table.” As we will see, stops and starts within this discourse suggest silence about race is persistent in the post-conference.
Rig the System
Overview
As Heather and Francine continue to discuss table 5, Madeline asks, “How did that happen [all the students of color are sitting at table 5]? Just random?” (lines 355–356). This question opens up a new segment, in which Heather, across four turns, proposes students manipulated a teacher-created system to assign seats randomly. Across Heather's next seven turns and Madeline's nine, Heather and Madeline troubleshoot the system to figure out how it was the students manipulated it. Here, based on their shared history around classroom management, Heather and Madeline are able to maintain this discussion. Heather and Madeline gaze toward Francine, probably to check their interpretations with her. Madeline gazes toward Francine and observes, “It's bound to happen” (line 382), proposing students would sit together by chance because of the frequency with which the arrangements change.
Francine's participation in this segment suggests students are making agentic choices as she pushes back on a race discourse of racial neutrality by proposing “critical race wonderings” to enhance their reflection: There's kind of this thing about (.) power, right? [not looking at either H. or M.] Like if [looking directly between M. and H.] the three students of color (.) in Block A [are] trying to rig it to sit together (.) then I think there's something there. [low tone of voice, and she shakes her head back and forth] Madeline: Are you talking about those three kiddos? Francine: I’m just wondering about this particular moment, I guess. I guess as a critical issue that I’m wondering about, then I feel (1.5) uncomfortable, I guess, breaking up the group, so we can seem more racially diverse, when I…I don’t know, I don’t know, I just think it's like, all. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. (lines 494–525)
Findings of CDA
Participants draw on race discourses of anti-Blackness. On the one hand, the triad positions students as having agency, desirable in a community. This perspective is common in current uses of a social emotional learning (SEL) curriculum, which focuses on students’ cognitive tools to manage learning within relationships and communities. SEL has been critiqued as a program that fails to take into account the ways violence or social injustices occur in schools, maintaining the silences around race in schools (Kaler-Jones, 2020; Simmons, 2019). For example, both Francine and Heather position the students as “making a lot of choices” (line 403). Making choices, and in particular, individuals making agentic choices, is an example of a culturally valued way of being socially and emotionally proficient.
The students who are using their agency to disrupt a system of choosing seats are Black and Latinx, but this is unnamed. Rather, there is an undertone that something illicit is happening in terms of student choices. Aligning the student actions with illicit behavior is accomplished through the use of the term “rig it.” Leonardo (2009) discussed the tendency of Black people to fear White-dominated situations because harm has come to Black people at the hands of Whites. Here, the students have chosen to segregate, perhaps to avoid the burden or disruption they experience when sitting with a group of White students (Tatum, 2007). Further, Kendi (2019) emphasized that a Black perspective on choice might reference a strategic action to rearrange or disrupt racist systems in order to provide more equitable outcomes for those oppressed by the existing system. The actions of BIPOC to avoid microaggressions and violence often get turned around to further blame those who are indeed most at risk of harm. In this case, the students’ choice to sit together, perhaps as a form of self-preservation, is read as illicit.
Across Francine's last longer turns, she draws on a race discourse, the interruption of racial neutrality (“like if the three students of color in Block A [are] trying to rig it to sit together”). In doing so, she names the racial identity of the students who strategically sit together in their majority-White classroom, interrupting again the silence around race. She teeters here without conducting a fuller analysis of how race is working. Her use of the word “power,” for example, without explaining how power might be working, is evidence of this precarious work.
Francine names her own tension, a feeling she doesn’t know anything. In doing so, she references a discourse of Whiteness, the collective effort of White people to deny decades and centuries of racism and violence (Guinier, 2004; Leonardo, 2009). The discourse is upheld by first-person pronouns and language of uncertainty (“I’m just wondering…” [line 502]; “I don’t know” [line 516]) as she struggles to position herself as anti-racist. For certain, she is taking responsibility for the disruption of the race discourses at play. Also promising, she names, and admits, the complexity of racialized interactions and how she, as a White person, does not yet have the knowledge or skills to make sense of how race is operating in this particular dimension of her teaching. With her repeated “I don’t know”s, punctuated by her raising her arms and shoulders, this feeling of “I don’t know” is so uncomfortable she no longer can contain it in her poised seated form. To be anti-racist, White people have to examine the ways they enact and uphold White supremacy. Francine's language and discomfort suggests an awareness of the risk that can occur when students of color are separated from each other and made to sit with White students.
Francine poses an anti-racist action as a choice she could make as an educator (“then I feel [1.5 s pause] uncomfortable, I guess, breaking up the group, so we can seem more racially diverse”). Here, Francine is able to take an anti-racist position and examine how power is operating to potentially oppress students (although oppression is not named). She chooses not to soothe herself, or Heather, about the racial segregation visibly evident and rather to interrogate how power is operating for students who make this choice.
Madeline's next turn provides a close to the segment. With some laughter, she says, “I don’t think any of us do” (line 525), referring to the not-knowing. Whiteness can draw on its own flaws—the inability to disrupt racial discourses in ways that might also disrupt how power works to advantage Whites—to again silence critical race wonderings. Both Heather's and Madeline's brows are furrowed during this turn, and Madeline leans in while Heather leans back, indicating that although there is a verbal conclusion, the tension remains. Francine has proposed the students strategically created a community within the larger White-majority space of school. Heather's brow is furrowed and she seems concerned, signaling a disruption in the triad.
Conclusion of Findings
We selected three segments to illuminate our analysis of the post-conference. In the remaining two segments of the post-conference, Francine continues to try to engage Heather in both deconstructing classroom disruptions and enacting reconstructive discourse analysis (Rogers & Mosley Wetzel, 2014), asking Heather to reconsider her teaching and imagine new possibilities. Francine sustains the idea that students were acting, rather than reacting—what Kinloch et al. (2020) described as “resist[ing] linguistic and racial injustices” (p. 383). Very quickly, Francine is called to retrieve her students. As a few students begin to trickle into the classroom, Madeline and Heather collectively report back their progress to Francine. “We came to no conclusions” (Madeline), (overlapping) “Zero conclusions” (Heather, laughing) (lines 977–980). Heather's and Madeline's use of humor further halts any ongoing disruptions of racial violence.
Discussion
Our analysis of this coaching conversation suggests what is necessary to interrogate everyday teaching practices and how race discourses uphold White supremacy and racial violence. Race is often not acknowledged in professional conversations at large (e.g., Greene and Abt-Perkins, 2003) because in order to interrogate race, the “racial grammar” (Guinier, 2004, p. 100) of White supremacy must be confronted. Aubrey and her classmates of color regularly experienced schooling's racial hierarchies, which are complex, historical, and embedded. Without interruption, race discourses can lead White teachers and mentors to maintain practices of dysconscious racism (King, 1991). In her literacy coaching, Francine drew on her emerging racial literacy to disrupt the silence. Increasingly taking responsibility to her students of color, she loses ground as Heather's coach and struggles to use her established coaching tools.
CDA revealed how race is evaded and how racial literacy was evoked. Within Heather's story, she reflected on the tensions she was experiencing. Race discourses were present in her stories, even when race was not named. The discourses of community Heather employed from her education course focused on building classroom communities did not provide her with tools to interrogate how Whiteness is normalized in classrooms.
Francine co-constructed these race discourses with Heather, and drew racial literacy, specifically race-specific language, reading how race influenced classroom interactions, and proposing actions that could disrupt the insecurity students of color experienced. Francine resisted the racist discourses of anti-Blackness in regard to table 5. Instead, she practiced anti-racism by asking not how it was that Aubrey and her peers came to sit at table 5, but rather why they made this choice. Further, she asked the triad to consider how the focus on rigging the system upheld Whiteness and race discourses that assumed the students’ choices were illicit. Francine repositioned Heather's stories as texts to interrogate, confronting discourses of community that did not account for racism. She could have gone further in her analysis, “in relation to how Black people resist linguistic and racial injustices” (Kinloch et al., 2020, p. 383). Finally, she left racially complex teaching unfinished, knowing race discourses will continue to operate in the classroom.
In U.S. classrooms and schools that have shifting racial demographics, teaching cannot be understood without a framework of race. The Black and Latinx students in Francine and Heather's classroom supported one another when their teachers and others did not acknowledge their racialized experiences. It is possible race and harm could have been evaded completely (Leonardo, 2009), as in other post-conferences occurring throughout the year (Mosley Wetzel et al., 2019). Race was on the table in terms of the silences, upheld through discursive and semiotic tools. Throughout this post-conference, Francine directly named moments as “critical race moments” to make space for racial literacy, but those silences were so powerful that when she left the room, the lacuna was rapidly filled.
Heather and Madeline's sense-making of Heather's choices is evidence of the relative absence of racial literacy tools in post-conference. Smith and Avetisian (2011) posited that the coaching practices of a mentor may matter more than the mentor's actual teaching practices. We wonder what sense-making might have occurred had Heather been engaged in a racial literacy analysis of the teaching event, which we explore next.
Implications
To reflect on practice using racial literacy, we propose the following revisions to literacy coaching practices. PTs and coaches should have opportunities to learn about racism and anti-racism, including racial literacy. It is crucial to have opportunities to talk in low-stakes environments, such as a class or discussion group. Moving into coaching, the coach could use the pre-conference to direct attention to racial literacy and anti-racist teaching: “What are you working on as an anti-racist teacher today?” In a post-conference, a coach might ask, “What story might be told from the perspective of the student?,” drawing on the idea that counterstories often illuminate how race is operating in a context, A coach could also support White PTs’ critical reflection around interest convergence by asking how equitable practices may be more likely enacted when they advantage White students and families (see Bell, 1979; Tate, 1997). Finally, coaches will need to emphasize the unfinished nature of working toward anti-racism, extending the analysis of race to the conference itself. In doing so, White teachers will use critical race reflection to interrogate their Whiteness (Milner, 2003; Sealey-Ruiz, 2020), participate in community activism (Vlach, 2019), and engage in ongoing learning to understand the history of racism in the United States and its ramifications today (Brown, 2013; Kendi, 2019). In this present moment of energetic anti-racist work, we ask literacy researchers and teacher educators to take up this call.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We want to acknowledge the many scholars who have reviewed this manuscript and challenged us to see the difficulty and importance of this analysis. As a result of these reviews, our own racial literacy practices and understandings have grown, as well as our commitment to the struggle for racial justice. We would like to acknowledge our research partners who are and were faculty and doctoral students at the University of Texas at Austin who contributed to our understanding of coaching as a discursive practice.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
References
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