| dc.description.abstract | For years, educators have championed numerous strategies for supporting marginalized students in U.S. schools. Recently, researchers have identified racial matching—ensuring teachers of color work with students of similar racial backgrounds—to improve students’ achievement. However, calls to increase teacher diversity emphasize benefits to students without adequate consideration of minoritized teachers’ developmental needs or histories. Furthermore, while extensive literature describes the rich experiential knowledge that Black teachers bring to the teaching profession, the process of developing it into pedagogy is undertheorized—particularly in ways that will sustain them in the classroom. In this study, I focus on Black women pre-service teachers (BWPTSs) as a case of teachers of color learning to teach in U.S. schools. As with teachers from other marginalized groups, even when teacher education centers issues of equity and justice, it seldom considers their particular developmental needs. Rather than positioning BWPSTs as agentic learners, policymakers too often position them as objects to solve “diversity” issues. By uncovering Black women’s unique development as teachers, this study offers one possible design for teacher education to invest in their development as culturally responsive educators. In this social design study, I investigate four BWPSTs’ teaching ideologies by tracing their conversations in a teacher education counterspace. Using interaction analysis and comparative case study design, my research documents BWPSTs’ experiences and development as caring educators, offering an empirical basis for redesigning teacher education to decenter whiteness in an effort to better support minoritized teachers. | |
