Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892

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Teaching and Teacher Education

j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . co m / l o c a t e / t a t e

Mapping women’s knowledges of antiracist teaching in the United States: A

feminist phenomenological study of three antiracist women teacher educators

*
Esther O. Ohito
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

highlights

This pilot study explores antiracist teaching as theorized and practiced by three U.S-based women pedagogues.
Racialized knowledges vis-a-vis 1) family histories; 2) schooling experiences; and 3) embodiment shape participants' teaching. Questions for further
feminist-concerned inquiry on how, what, and why antiracist pedagogues teach are articulated.

article info abstract

Article history: This feminist phenomenological inquiry pivots from the White, Western, androcentric gaze to probe the antiracist teaching of
Received 28 August 2018 a multiracial group of women in the United States comprised of three teacher educators. I find that these teacher educators’
Received in revised form beliefs about and enactments of antiracist teaching are shaped by their knowledges of the (inter)connections among: 1)
27 July 2019
race(ism) and family histories; 2) race(ism) and schooling experiences; and 3) race(ism) and embodiment. I conclude by
Accepted 31 July 2019
considering the questions raised by this pilot study for future and further feminist-concerned research on how, what, and why
Available online xxx
antiracist teacher educators teach.
Keywords:
© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Teacher education
Race
Equity
Feminism
Phenomenology

Issues of race(ism) in teacher education confound both anti-racist and
feminist researchers in the Western world. Critical race scholars have asked
crucial questions about the effects of curricula and pedagogical experiences
on the development of students' knowledges about racism and the attendant
issues of Whiteness and White supremacy (e.g., Kinloch & Dixon, 2017;
Lensmire et al., 2013; Matias, 2016; Matias & Mackey, 2015; Pollock,
Deckman, Mira, & Shalaby, 2009; Shim, 2018a, 2018b; Ulluci, 2010). Femi-
nist scholars have decried the White, Western, male biases apparent in teacher
education curriculum. McWilliam (1994), for instance, maintains that “issues
of race … will continue to be marginalized while the teacher education
curriculum is located in Eurocentric and androcentric knowledges and
practices” (p. 61).
* Present address: School of Education, Peabody Hall, CB 3500, The University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, 27599, United States.
E-mail address: eohito@unc.edu.
The concerns of both antiracist and feminist scholars of teacher education are
the core of this study, which adopts a feminist phenomenological lens to
inquire into antiracist teaching in the United States (U.S.). Although antiracist
teaching in teacher edu-cation has been the subject of much scholarly
scrutiny, very little of that research explicitly addresses gender, and/or how
women's voices have informed the knowledge gleaned from these inquiries
(e.g., Jones & Hughes-Decatur, 2012).
This pilot study privileges the knowledges of three (self-described)
antiracist women teacher educators in an effort to better understand the
phenomenon of antiracist teaching. Essentially, I ask what attention to
women's knowledges about antiracist teaching reveals about this
phenomenon. My purpose in posing this question is three-fold: first, to probe
the phenomenon of antiracist teaching through a feminist filter; second, to
consider the affor-dances of a feminist framework for educating teacher
educators in the United States who are well prepared to dismantle racism in
teacher education curricula and pedagogies (Goodwin et al., 2014;

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.102892
0742-051X/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
2 E.O. Ohito / Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892
Kinloch, 2018); and third, to add to the oeuvre of teacher education
scholarship and educational research that intentionally veers away from the
White, Western, male gaze. I begin the subsequent sec-tions of this article by
attaching antiracist teaching to antiracism and feminism in order to establish
context. Next, I borrow from Anna Julia Cooper's work, and reflexively reveal
“when and where I enter” into antiracist teaching (2016, p. 12). I then detail
my con-ceptual and theoretical frameworks before providing a brief review of
relevant literature about antiracist teaching in teacher education. Following
this, I explain my feminist phenomenological research design, and present my
findings. I conclude with the questions raised by this pilot study and the
related methodological consid-erations for future and further feminist-
concerned research on how, what, and why antiracist teacher educators teach.
1. Antiracist teaching, antiracism, and feminism
The perniciousness of racism in U.S. schools and society is well
documented (e.g., Leonardo, 2009; Shim, 2018a). Within education, social
justice-oriented pedagogues frequently employ antiracist teaching as a tool for
enacting social change (Amico, 2016, p. ix). As such, antiracist teaching can
be considered to be a “necessary disruption” to the status quo; as Kinloch
(2018) contends, “neces-sary disruptions in teaching and teacher education
should encourage us to think about: how we teach, what we teach, why we
teach, and who we teach, especially as we work alongside students in
classrooms … and attend to ongoing racial unrest” (p. 4). My focus in this
feminist study is women teacher educators committed to antiracist teaching,
which is defined, at its most basic, as an orientation toward teaching aimed at
deepening understandings of how racial subjugation functions in schooling.
Antiracism and feminism are based upon convictions in and action toward
social change (Chisholm, 1970). Therefore, antiracist teaching is both a
political and a feminist project. Furthermore, “feminism is con-cerned with
women's lives; theories about humans; the nature of knowledge; the way in
which knowledge is generated and legiti-mated; the ‘canon’ of traditional
knowledge; and process and connection” (Sarikakis, Rush, Grubb-Swetnam,
& Lane, 2009, p. 505). Hence, as Bourne (1983) explains, antiracism and
feminism can be complementary, given “antiracism not as something outside
of the women's movement but as intrinsic to the best principles of feminism
itself” (p. 3).
2. When and where I enter into antiracist teaching
In this study, I invoke feminist phenomenology as the basis for building a
gender-specific lens for magnifying how knowledges about the phenomenon
of antiracist teaching are produced and interpreted. Feminist
phenomenologists advocate for making “the researcher visible in text”
(Sprague, 2016, p. 211). I operationalize this charge in this section, where I
place particular points of my lived experience along a narrative timeline;
these are experiences that have inspired my investment in antiracist teaching
in teacher education. The timeline functions as a thread, tying together where
I have been personally and professionally, as an antiracist (teacher) educator,
to who I am (becoming). My identity as an antiracist Black woman teacher
educator and my desire to better understanddand better practicedthe
phenomenon of antiracist teaching, are pieces of the puzzle underpinning the
qualitative research study detailed in this article.
On a sweltering day in the summer of 1999, I boarded a plane bound for
Hampton, Virginia, a city in the southern United States. My final destination
was Hampton University, a Historically Black College or University (Lovett,
2015). I was fleeing the Midwest, anguished by the ghosts of a painful high
school experience
characterized by the trauma of racial (in)visibility in a large sub-urban high
school, where for four years, my Black girl-becoming-woman's body
languished as a miniscule dot perpetually on the cusp of drowning in a vast
sea of Whiteness. Hampton's stately campus absorbed me almost immediately
upon my arrival. The Blackness that permeated the university seeped under
the skin that traps my bones and slipped into the liminal space between skin
and bone. Learning is a racialized process (Nasir, Snyder, Shah, & Ross,
2012). Therefore, as peculiar as it may seem, I needed to be lost in invisibility
in that sea of stunningly beautiful brown sugar, cafe-au-lait, caramel,
cinnamon, ebony, honey, and ochre-toned faces in order to be visible to
myself as a learning selfdthat is, in order to be found. At Hampton University,
I was comforted by the fact that my favorite professor was a Black woman
who had hair like mine which, when kissed by water, shrunk like a shy
teenager. The fact that the dark tone and soft texture of yet another cherished
Black woman professor's melanin-rich skin matched my own filled me with
joy. However, it was their recognition that encouraged me to embrace my
racial identity, not simply their phenotype; that recognition, layered atop what
and how they taught, fueled my critique and exploration of how race(ism)
influenced my way of being and moving in and beyond my own education
(Butler, 2004). I began to feel comfortable in my Black woman's skin,
increasingly cognizant of the intersection of my racialized and gendered
identity as a source of knowledge and strength, rather than as a deficit, and
confident in my ability to learn while successfully navigating the minefield of
White supremacy as it manifested in my schooling, even in a setting with
predominantly Black students.
My departure from Virginia was occasioned by my graduation from
Hampton University in the spring of 2003. That summer, I packed my
belongings into my trusted 1998 beige Mazda Protege and drove roughly 800
miles to Chicago, Illinois. It was in this hyper-segregated city (Sampson,
2013) that I embarked upon life as a public schoolteacher. Approximately
85% of children in the Chi-cago Public Schools are racially identified as
either Black or Latino (Chicago Public Schools, 2014). The racial affirmation
that I felt as I learned from my professors at Hampton University shaped how
I taught the Black children and youth who moved through my classrooms, and
who taught me that like learning, teaching, too, is a racialized process. I
modeled my teaching after my beloved college professors, and like them, I
endeavored to choose curricula and pedagogical practices that accounted for
how the racial identities of the children and youth in my classrooms were
entangled with their identities as learners (Nasir et al., 2012). Through my
curricula and pedagogical practices, I supported my students in interrogating
their own racial identities while both critiquing and exploring how race(ism)
influenced their ways of being and moving in and beyond their own
schooling.
In the summer of 2009, I exited the Chicago Public Schools system and
entered the field of teacher education. Most of my current and former teacher
education students are White, which is the norm in the field (U. S.
Department of Education, 2016). Furthermore, many of these students have
had minimal, if any, experience interrogating their own racial identities while
simul-taneously critiquing and exploring how race(ism) influences young
people's ways of being and moving in schools (Ladson-Billings, 1999; Matias
& Mackey, 2015; Sleeter, 2001, 2016). As is true for many university-based
teacher educators, this is a role for which I was ill-prepared (Goodwin et al.,
2014). Over time, I have acquired valuable knowledge about antiracist
teaching through both training and experience (e.g., Ohito, 2016),
while
also accumulating a trove of questions about this
phenomenon. For example, when embroiled in racially
charged classroom encounters, I have wondered if and how
my pedagogical decision-making is dictated by my Black
woman-ness. More generally, my experience so far supports
 E.O. Ohito / Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892
Sleeter's (2016) suggestion that teacher education is “producing too few
teachers who will consistently support their minoritized stu-dents and
persistently address racism” (p. 1065). Thus, I entered this study as an
antiracist Black woman teacher educator riddled with doubts about how well I
am guiding my students through meaningful explorations of race(ism), and if
I am, in fact, practicing antiracist teaching in ways that adequately prepare
them to (en) counter the enormous effects of racism in schooling.
3. Conceptual and theoretical frameworks
3.1. Antiracist teaching
In the 1960s, teaching in the U.S. was generally conceptualized as an
applied science (e.g., Lindley, 1970). Here, I conceptualize antiracist teaching
as a “necessary disruption” (Kinloch, 2018). As Kinloch explains,
“[c]onceptually, the idea of necessary disruptions is guided by larger
meanings of educational justice, engagement, and humanization” (p. 4).
Understanding how antiracist teaching functions as such directs us to how
those of us who identify as antiracist pedagogues teach (i.e., pedagogies,
dispositions), as well as what we teach (e.g., artifacts, texts), why we teach
(e.g., moti-vations, ideological commitments), and who we teach (Kinloch,
2018, p. 5). I apply this conceptualization to my study by illumi-nating the
four aforementioned factors and adding a fifthdwho we aredwith regard to the
participants of this study.
3.2. Feminist theory and methodology
The question of who we aredand the focus on how the I is located within
the wedis fundamental to feminist theory and research, which embrace
subjectivity, effectively challenging ob-jectivity and neutrality. At best,
positivistic claims marginalize women's contributions and knowledges, and at
worst, they render them invisible (Harding, 1991; Lather, 1991, 1992).
Feminist research methodologies, such as those applied in this study,
generally reflect a “commitment to making visible women's lived
experiences,” and “to reflexivity and the inclusion of the researcher and the
research process as researchable topics” (Lentin, 1993, p. 119).
The three “feminist concerns” that are most relevant to this study on
antiracist teaching are how “knowledge is generated and legitimated; the
‘canon’ of traditional knowledge; and process and connection” (Sarikakis et
al., 2009, p. 505). These concerns guided my research design, and in
particular, my sampling procedures and methods. I used purposive sampling
to select (self-identified) women as participants for this study, thereby
destabilizing the traditional, androcentrist canon. Moreover, I strategically
spotlighted participants' lived experiences as knowledge sources in order to
subvert “the [traditional and hegemonic] way in which knowledge is
generated and legitimated.” Lastly, I relied upon writing as a method through
which to illustrate reflexivity, and feminist interviewing as a utensil with
which to cultivate connec-tion with participants (DeVault & Gross, 2012).
3.3. Feminist phenomenology
This study is as feminist as it is phenomenological in theoretical
orientation (Fisher & Embree, 2000). Phenomenology is the study of
phenomenadthat is, of the essence of things as presented to, perceived by, and
experienced in consciousness. Phenomenology also “describes the ‘what’ and
‘how’ of individuals' experienced phenomena” (Callary, Rathwell, & Young,
2015, p. 63). This quali-tative inquiry is situated in the tradition of
hermeneutic phenom-enology (van Manen, 1990). In this study, I turn
specifically to
3
feminist phenomenology (Fisher & Embree, 2000; Shabot & Landry, 2018).
Simms and Stawarska (2013) state that, “[p]henomenology is feminist as long
as it includes questions related to gendered expe-rience” [emphasis in
original] (p. 6). Feminist phenomenology is also characterized by “the use of
phenomenological methods, re-sources, and texts for feminist projects”, such
as antiracist teaching (Al-Saji, 2013, para. 3).
Simone de Beauvoir’s (2011) The Second Sex is deemed a pio-neering
text in feminist phenomenology. In this text, women's narrative accounts of
lived experience are used as entryways to the exploration of women's social
subjugation (Kruks, 2014). Most useful to this study is the fact that feminist
phenomenology fur-thers the idea that the subjective ways that meaning-
making in and of the world happen are informed by social markers such as
gender and race, and the interplay of those identities. Feminist phenom-
enology “deals with experience through an intersectional approach, taking
into account the ways in which gender is inex-tricable from race, class, and
other axes of oppression” (Al-Saji, 2013, para. 7).
Moreover, the materiality of gender manifests through the body. As Butler
(1997) posits, “[o]ne is not simply a body, but, in some very key sense, one
does one's body and, indeed, one does one's body differently from one's
contemporaries and from one's embodied predecessors and successors as
well” (p. 404). I use a feminist phenomenological approach by focusing on
how subjec-tivity is shaped by the embodied nature of gendered experience.
In other words, for each of my participants, I ask how “one does one's
body”dindividually, and in relationship to others' bodiesdvis-a-vis antiracist
teaching. Thus, I bring to the fore these women's embodied experiences, as
well as an analysis of how those expe-riences shape their subjective
knowledges of antiracist teaching.
4. Review of research on antiracist teaching in teacher
education
The bulk of the extant research on antiracist teaching in teacher education
focuses on the preparation of heterosexual, cisgender, White women (Kahn &
Gorski, 2016; Sleeter, 2001, 2016; U. S. Department of Education, 2016) for
predominantly non-White schools and students. Statistically, this population
is largely “who we teach” (Kinloch, 2018, p. 4). Much of this research occurs
in university settings (i.e., in university-based teacher education programs)
and details pre-service teachers’ experiences in a course or in fieldwork. Few
studies spotlight antiracist teacher educators as main subjects (e.g., Lensmire
et al., 2013; Matias & Mackey, 2015; Montano~ et al., 2008; Shim, 2014,
2018b).
In my review of research, I highlighted studies that scrutinize various
aspects of antiracist teaching in teacher education, and/or that were conducted
by (and/or showcase) antiracist teacher edu-cators. I analyzed what the
literature reveals with regard to “how we teach, what we teach, [and] why we
teach” (Kinloch, 2018, p. 4). I excluded studies centered primarily on “who we
teach” since this population has been studied extensively. Some of the
included studies delve into antiracist teaching within the context of a specific
subject, such as art (Denis, 2014), literacy (Coleman-King & Groenke, 2015),
or social studies (King & Chandler, 2016), whereas others discuss the
phenomenon more broadly.
4.1. How we teach
There are a myriad of instructional methods and strategies noted in the
studies analyzed. The teacher educators in these studies most frequently: 1)
give lectures; 2) assign writing tasks aimed at prompting critical reflection
about race(ism); 3) structure discussions; and 4) design experiential (or
immersive/“hands-on”)
4 E.O. Ohito / Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892
learning opportunities. Lecture is generally used to address gaps or
misunderstandings in students' knowledge about the entangle-ment of race,
racism, and history (Aveling, 2006; Case & Hemmings, 2005; Mueller &
O'Connor, 2007; Solomon, Portelli, Daniel, & Campbell, 2005). Writing is
typically used as a teaching method for prompting critical reflection among
students. The teacher ed-ucators in these studies engage students in critical
reflection about race(ism) by assigning writing and storytelling tasks to be
completed in various formats, including digital media (e.g., Matias
& Grosland, 2016). Discussionsdin both large and small group settingsdare
also aimed as provoking critical reflection (Ohito, 2016; Ohito & Deckman,
2018; Aveling, 2006; Bell, 2002; Case & Hemmings, 2005; Jett, 2012;
Kinloch & Dixon, 2017; Nieto, 1998; Solomon et al., 2005). Experiential or
hands-on learning tasks reflect many teacher educators' attempts to build a
bridge between the (predominantly White) universities and the communities
(of Color) in which their teacher education programs are located (McIntyre,
2003; Moss, 2008; Pennington, 2007; Ulluci, 2010).
4.2. What we teach
In Ulluci's longitudinal study of how teacher education pro-grams
influence the development of racially aware White teachers, the researcher
finds that all of the texts named by participantsdsix former teacher education
studentsdas instrumental to their un-derstandings of race(ism) are either
novels or narratively rich. In fact, “[n]one of the books referenced by any of
the [participants] are methods books or texts; they did not recall a particularly
good science strategies guide or a textbook on how to teach reading” (Ulluci,
2010, p. 144). This finding is reflected in my analysis of the curricular texts
mentioned in the corpus of reviewed studies.
The curricular texts mentioned in the studies reviewed can be further
categorized as non-fiction, auto/biography, fiction, multi-modal, and
corporeal. Common non-fiction curricular texts include works such as
McIntosh’s (1988) “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and
Howard’s (1999) We Can't Teach What We Don't Know: White Teachers,
Multiracial Schools. Some teacher ed-ucators rely on auto/biographies by
Black writers like James Bald-win (Case & Hemmings, 2005; Shalaby, 2013)
to (re)present the voices of the racial other. Films and documentaries (Garrett
& Segall, 2013; Shalaby, 2013), and popular music (Jett, 2012; Solomon et
al., 2005) exemplify multimodal curricula. Bodies are also leveraged as
curricular texts. For example, several teacher educators incorporate non-
White guest speakers into their class-rooms with the intention of having their
students gain deeper understandings of racism (Aveling, 2006; Moss, 2008).
There is also evidence in the literature of students' affective responses to
curricula, which include anger and frustration. For example, in response to
reading Howard's (1999) book, a student reports feeling “more anxious, upset
and frustrated” (Picower, 2009, p. 207).
4.3. Why we teach
In the studies reviewed, antiracist teacher educators disclose various goals
for the courses that they teach, including decon-structing Whiteness (Case &
Hemmings, 2005; Matias & Mackey, 2015; Moss, 2008; Picower, 2009;
Solomon et al., 2005); fostering White students' introspection of their racial
stances (Bell, 2002); (re)positioning White students as allies to the racial
Other (Aveling, 2006); (re)framing awareness of race, socioeconomic class,
and other identities in relationship to educational opportunities affor-ded
racially marginalized children, youth, and communities (King
& Chandler, 2016; Kinloch & Dixon, 2017; Mueller & O'Connor, 2007); and
ensuring that students' developing teaching practices
are responsive to racial inequity (Jett, 2012). Milner's (2007) self-study is
notable in that it features the teacher educator expressly stating a personal
intention regarding the course goals that were undertaken in relationship to
antiracist teaching. For this peda-gogue, the aim is “not to have my students
think in any particular waydor to believe what I believe; the goal was to have
the students in the course think about issues of race in education” (Milner,
2007, p. 587).
4.4. Patterns in extant research
This review reveals relevant patterns in extant literature on antiracist
teaching. Specifically, I find that there is ample knowl-edge regarding what
and how we (i.e., antiracist teacher educators) teach. With regard to why we
teach, Shalaby (2013), for instance, states the following: “my overt and stated
curriculum is about the (de)humanizing practices and policies of schooling,
my more hid-den curriculum is aimed at … undoing [students'] own K-12
mis-education” (p. 128). The studies by Shalaby (2013) and Milner (2007) are
among the few that have teacher educators addressing the why of their
antiracist pedagogy. These studies notwith-standing, much remains unknown
about the motivations that mold antiracist teacher educators’ particular
pedagogical practices and curricular choices.
In summary, this review of research illustrates that teacher educators'
beliefs, backgrounds, inspirations, and identities are masked and shrouded in
mystery. In other words, there is limited research that reports on teacher
educators' beliefs, positionalities, and purposes. With rare exceptions, like
Shim (2018b) psychoan-alytic analysis of the researcher’s experience as an
Asian-American teacher educator in a rural mid-western university, the
literature reviewed here is opaque about who teacher educators are, and how
that informs what, how, and why we engage in antiracist teachingdas well as
the racialized challenges that we encounter (Galman, Pica-Smith, &
Rosenberger, 2010; Juarez & Hayes, 2015; Matias, 2016). This is the fertile
soil that my study seeks to till by making visible the knowledges of a group of
racially diverse women teacher educators. The theoretical and methodological
devices I employ in this effort are also shaped by my analysis of the litera-
ture. Specifically, I use feminist phenomenology to amplify the voices of
women teacher educators and to study their lived expe-riences alongside their
material embodied experiences vis-a-vis antiracist teaching. This also allows
me to methodologically move beyond self-study, which is a dominant
approach in research about antiracist teaching (Galman et al., 2010; Milner,
2007; Pennington, 2007; Picower, 2009).
5. Research design
I leveraged phenomenology as both a theoretical framework and a
methodology in this study. Specifically, I employed feminist phenomenology
to make meaning of women's knowledges about antiracist teaching.
5.1. Data collection
This pilot study was executed over 12 weeksdbetween September and
December 2014. Purposive sampling was employed to select study
participants (Table 1). Through individuals in my professional networks, I
recruited three teacher educatorsdLinda, Victoria, and Walker (these names
are pseudonyms)deach of whom: a) self-identifies as woman; b) self-identifies
as antiracist;
c) describes her teaching as antiracist; d) is an instructor-of-record in a
university-based urban teacher education program located in the northeastern
United States; and e) is established professionally,
 E.O. Ohito / Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892
Table 1
Study participants
Participant Racial/Ethnic Identifier University Context
1. Linda Cuban Large, public
2. Victoria Black Mid-sized, private
a (course syllabi), field notes, analytic memos, and entries from my researcher
3. Walker White Mid-sized, private
a Victoria and Walker are colleagues at the same institution, albeit in different teacher
education programs within the university.
as evinced by the accumulation of at least seven years of teaching experience
at the tertiary level.
5.2. Methods
I employed the following methods in this study: in-depth semi-structured
phenomenological interviews, participant observations, document analysis,
and writing.
Feminist phenomenological interviewing and participant
observation. I used in-depth semi-structured interviewing in order to solicit
participants' descriptions of their lived experiences with regard to antiracist
teaching. I conducted two interviews between with each participant; each of
these interviews was between 60 and 90 min. The interview questions were
phenomenological in design, and “directed to the participant's experiences,
feelings, beliefs and convictions” (Welman & Kruger, 1999, p. 196) about
antiracist teaching. There is a high value placed on collaboration within
feminist research (e.g., Pratt, 2010). Hence, I viewed each interview as a
chance to “produce more truly collaborative en-counters” with the participants
(DeVault & Gross, 2012, p. 180). In the first interview, I elicited the
participant's views and stories about race(ism) alongside her understandings
of how those were integrated into her antiracist teaching. In the second
interview, each participant and I worked together to (re)view preliminary
themes that emerged from the first interview and to place those alongside data
that I shared from my classroom observation. This exercise engendered the
co-interpretation of data from the first interview and the observation following
that first interview (Gadamer, 1960). In my second interview with each
participant, “data is seen to emerge out of the researcher-coresearcher rela-
tionship, and is understood to be co-created in the embodied dia-logical
encounter” (Finlay, 2009, p. 13). This, for example, occurred as Linda and I
discussed my field notes about what I read as stu-dents' bodily discomfort
with a classroom activity. As we reflected, Linda remarked:
Now, that we're talking about it, what I would probably do is, next week,
go back and talk about their different physical experi-ences because talking
with you made it more obvious … I hadn't even thought about the fact that the
escalation of discomfort had been connected to their physical bodies until you
asked me about it.
I supplemented the data culled from interviews with that which I collected
during classroom observations of each participant, each of which lasted
between two and three hours. These observations, which occurred between
the first and second interviews of each participant, exposed me to the teacher
educators’ enactments of antiracist teaching.
Phenomenological writing and document analysis. In order to remain
reflexive, I engaged writing as a method (Richardson, 2000) and maintained a
researcher journal in which I responded to reflexive writing prompts (Luttrell,
2010). In addition to locating myself within the research, phenomenological
writing (van Manen, 1990) also allowed me to practice reflexivity and identify
aspects of my past that were pressing upon the inquiry. Lastly, to make sense
of artifacts such as participants’ syllabi, I employed the method of document
analysis.
5
5.3. Data analysis
In this study, I constructed a corpus of data consisting of tran-scripts of
interviews, audio recordings of classroom sessions, par-ticipants’ documents
journal. My data analysis was a five-stage process (as demonstrated in Table
2) that drew from techniques detailed by Ajjawi and Higgs (2007), Titchen
and McIntyre (1993), and van Manen (1990). Table 2 also demon-strates how
I approached rigor, which, in hermeneutic phenome-nological research, is
determined by:
… deep immersion in the texts, repeated cycling between the parts, and
the whole to make sense of the phenomenon in relation to the texts, repeated
exploration of the horizons of participants and researcher, and depth of
dialogue between the research, par-ticipants, and texts (Paterson & Higgs,
2005, p. 353).
5.4. Credibility and validity
I addressed credibility (Beck, 1993) by ensuring congruence between my
selected research paradigm and methods and using multiple methods for data
gathering. I audio-recorded and tran-scribed interview transcripts and shared
these with participants, who then performed a “validity check” (Hycner, 1999,
p. 154). Additionally, I routinely considered my entwinement with both the
phenomenon and the participants (Finlay, 2003) by writing in my researcher
journal and drafting analytic memos. I also shared au-thority with participants
by involving them in the process of member checking data and providing
feedback on the initial report.
1 Lastly, I utilized “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) to produce a vividly
descriptivedand therefore, more transparent and credibledreport.
6. Foregrounding women's knowledges about antiracist
teaching
This study presented me with an opportunity to learn more about antiracist
teaching while and by communing and collabo-rating with three antiracist
women teacher educators. My findings show that these teacher educators’
beliefs about and enactments of antiracist teaching are shaped by the
(inter)connections between and among the following: 1) race(ism) and family
histories; 2) race(ism) and schooling experiences; and 3) race(ism) and
embodiment.
6.1. Finding 1: the salience of race(ism) in family histories
2
Shim (2014) posits that, “the critical pedagogue brings social subjectivity
to … the antiracist project, and her social subjectivity and what underscores
her subjectivity cannot preclude her forgotten infantile history of
learningdrepressed childhood memories, unresolved conflicts, and unmet
desires” (p. 7). This study corroborates Shim's assertion. Specifically, I find
that my participants' “history of learning” about antiracism and antiracist
teaching relied heavily upon their (remembrance and restorying of their)
family histories.
1 Given the highly personal nature of the data gathered, the protection of par-ticipants'
anonymity was a pronounced ethical concern. To manage this risk, I informed the participants
of the purpose of the research in speech and writing and involved all the three in reviewing the
report to ensure their comfort with the information that would be published.
2 I interchange “critical pedagogy” and “antiracist pedagogy”dor antiracist teachingdin this
article; however, I recognize that some scholars theorize these as distinctly different pedagogies
(e.g., Gore, 1993).
6 E.O. Ohito / Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892
Table 2

Stages of data analysis

Stage Tasks
1. Immersion Multiple readings (and listenings) of materials in the corpus of data
Preliminary interpretation of texts to engender coding
Development of preliminary codes based on repeated words, phrases, ideas
2. Reduction Reduction of data based on preliminary codes
Merging and organizing of data into sets of “multimodal texts” for each participant
3. Understanding and AbstractionSegmentation of each multimodal text into first and second order constructs (Titchen & McIntyre, 1993). First order constructs are participants' perceptions as
expressed in their own words; second order constructs are the researcher’s own un-derstandings and interpretations

4. Synthesis, Interpretation, and Theme Guided by van Manen’s (1990) selective reading approach:
Development Reflection on each multimodal text and identification of holistic and sub-themes
Re-reading of all multimodal texts and selective highlighting of statements or segments that illuminate themes Extraction of these
statements or segments
Development of interpretations with attention to themes
5. Illumination and Illustration ofLinking of themes identified above to extant literature
Phenomenon Writing of report cohering constructs to themes, findings, interpretations, literature, and phenomenon
Sharing of initial report and interpretations with participants
Revision of report based on participants' feedback and focus on the complexity of the phenomenon

Victoria: “The stories that follow your family help to shape
who you are.” Victoria, a Black teacher educator at a mid-sized private
university, (re)told several stories spanning the breadth of her childhood and
youth in government subsidized housing. She reflected on how the effects of
structural racism manifested inter-and intra-generationally in her family,
leaving a mark upon her Black racial identity:
Members of this community, which functioned as a family, “all knew that
being Cuban was different from being what the people in that community and
context would call American … So, the sense of that identity, that cultural
ethnic identity was very polardyou were either Cuban or an American.” The
clashing of this strong “cultural ethnic identity” with the concept of race
caused Linda to feel internal dissonance. As she noted:

It happened over time … little by little, from my father not getting a job,
my grandmother picking cotton, my uncle going into the service and then, of
course, these stories that I heard over time. You start piecing together your
own identity. Identity happens in strange ways, right? Part of it you shape, the
other is the stories that follow your family help to shape who you are. So, it
was a complex process coming to know myself.
The residue from these racialized family traumas has shaped how she has
since made sense of personal and professional expe-riences with racism.
Stated differently, the racialized burdens that Victoria carries with her into the
classroom are comprised of the sum of her personal encounters with racism
and her family's col-lective lived racial traumas. These influence why she
teaches, and inform her particular course objectives:
I want movement. I want people to struggle … I want people to admit
what the society does to them, specifically around the images of Students of
Color. I want them to go deep and see where that racism lives in them. That's
what I want. I'm asking for emotional shifts and I'm asking for shifts in lenses.
I know that it’s a tall order but that's what I most want.
Enacting antiracist teaching with these aims in mind, said Vic-toria, “can't
be a lecture. If you are trying to get somebody … to develop empathy and to
see certain things, it has to be done through art, through role-playing, through
multi-modality, through talk, through music, through different ways.” To
achieve these goals, Victoria utilizes curricular texts such as Howard's (1999)
popular book to highlight what she terms a “White perspective,” which, she
believes, is relatable to many of her mostly White stu-dents. Victoria also
invites guest speakers to talk critically about their bodily ties to the content
being taught. For example, I observed a former student of Victoria's lecture
on the subject of White privilege. This individual's (White) body became a
curricular resource for Victoria, who believed that the White woman's lived
racialized experience equipped her as an authority on White privilege.
Linda: “I grew up in a very insular immigrant community.”
Linda, a teacher educator at a large public university, spent her childhood and
youth “in a very insular immigrant community.”
With being Cuban … I grew up being socialized as if I were White … but
I don't identify as White because I don't feel that I'm White and so that was
always very confusing raciallydfor other people to construct me within my
family and within my commu-nity as if I was White, and then for me to not
experience that reality at all.
Linda's childhood experiences increased her consciousness about the
paradoxical false/real-ness of racedthat is, she learned that race is false, yet its
impact (on how others perceived and categorized her, for example) is real and
enduring. She has attained this understanding in hindsight, as she has
reviewed those expe-riences enmeshed with family histories through an ever-
enlarging critical lens and acquired a more extensive vocabulary around is-
sues of race(ism). Filtered through a critical frame, those experi-ences foster
within her dispositions of empathy, compassion, and humility. Linda
willingly acknowledges what she does not know and what she is still learning
about race(ism) because of her aforementioned experiences. She explains that
she intentionally models the vulnerability that she expects of students,
remarking that, “we, as educators should be willing to do the kinds of things
that we expect our students to do. I think discomfort and vulner-ability are
intricately connected to growth in class, in academic spaces, and in
relationships.” Linda also leverages those disposi-tions in the classroom and is
therefore able to register her students' figurative blind spots with regard to
race(ism) and discern how those may relate to their experiences of insulation.
She notes:
Many of my students are similar to me in a sense that they have been
mostly in their community. They come in contact with other people but
remain still grounded in their community … There isn't that criticality about
the role of race in their experience so we have to name it, we have to start by
naming it … in the texts that we read.
Walker: “I was actually baptized in an all-Black church.”
Unlike Linda's community, which valued ethnic separateness, Walker's
White-identifying family seemed to seek racial integra-tion. Walker,
who teaches at a mid-sized private university, spoke at length
regarding memories of her baptism in a Black church. “I was actually
baptized in an all-Black church. Yes, in [the South] …
 E.O. Ohito / Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892
We weren't even Baptists … we're Lutheran.” This event exempli-fied her
family's ethos of stretching beyond their figurative racial comfort zone in
order to gain exposure to racial and religious cul-tures outside their own. Due
to this experience, Walker habitually acknowledges and affirms students when
noticing that they are bravely entering the realm of the unfamiliar:
I make a real effort to send personal emails around specific things that
they say and do in class, and I don't do everybody every week, but it's like I'll
pick and choose a couple of people that I know are really pushing themselves.
The experience of being affiliated with and accepted by a Black church
wherein she and her family were racial minorities has also impacted Walker's
beliefs regarding how (un)learning about racism happens:
I also believe that people can learn and change. And part of it is
information and unlearning, but part of it is also connecting with people and
building relationships, for sure. Because I think that long-term kind of change
between people comes out of a rela-tionship in some way, shape, or form. I
think you can intellectualize [racism], and you can understand it, but I don't
think it really changes without relationships over time.
6.2. Finding 2: the potency of race(ism) in schooling experiences
In addition to family histories, “childhood memories” (Shim, 2014, p. 7)
served as another wellspring of participants’ knowl-edges about antiracist
teaching. Linda and Walker, for example, linked racialized childhood
memories of their schooling experi-ences to their antiracist teaching.
Linda: “I think having that experience gave me an under-standing
of race … particularly in schools and in classrooms.”
Linda explained that her politicized understanding of her racial self originated
from her interactions with Latinx peers at an Ivy League university hundreds
of miles away from the tight-knit Cuban immigrant community of her youth,
where the concept of race meant something different. She admitted that her
undergraduate experiences colored her views of “the impact of race and racial
experiences in all kinds of context, but particularly in school and in
classrooms.” As a college student, she began to develop a racialdand,
eventuallydpolitical identity in relationship to the (Latinx) racial category
imposed upon her:
I think having that experience gave me an understanding of race for sure
and also of the impact of race and racial experiences in all kinds of contexts,
but particularly in schools and in classrooms … Now I think all spaces are
raced and classed and gendered … I would not have been aware of that unless
I had gone through that experience. Now I am much more sensitive to it just
because I have that experience and that's always part of the thinking process
for medit's always part of what I'm thinking about.
These understandings drive her decision to teach about race as a social
construct that is physically worn. Race, Linda remarked, “is
embodieddphysical and embodied … When I choose my readings and when I
think about my discussions, I'm aware of that.” Linda's syllabus included texts
such as Kirkland’s (2009) “The Skin We Ink: Tattoos, Literacy, and a New
English Education,” which I observed her use to spark students' thinking
about the links between race (as both conceptual and material) and critical
literacies.
The learnings Linda left her collegiate experience with also lead her to
think about how affects flow through her classroom, and the effects they have
on what the learning space feels like for students. She said, “If it's a hostile
place or if it feels unsafe then they're not going to open up … I think students
need to have enough of a safe space that they can learn at the place where
they are.” Linda's experience of being coded as Latinx at her undergraduate
institu-tiondand the relationships that emerged as she developed a sense
7
of racial belonging with similarly marked peersdinfluence her understanding
of the entanglement of relationships, feelings, and learning:
I feel that relationships are central to learning. I do. I always tell my
students this. I think people certainly don't learn in a context where they don't
feel cared for. They pick up information, but I don't think that people really
learn to question and I don't think people go deeply in places where there isn't
that relational aspect to the learning space. They might develop responses,
and critiques, and things on their own later as they process what was there or
not there, but I just think that there's a very special connection between
learning and relationships.
Walker: “Going from private Christian school to public school.” The
experience of “going from private Christian school to public school” was
integral to Walker's development of a racial awareness of self and other(s).
The Christian school in which she was enrolled was predominantly White;
therefore, exposure to a racially diverse group of peers at the public
schooldand friend-ships formed with individuals within that groupdincreased
Walker's awareness of her racial self, as well as her knowledge of what she
had not known she did not know about race(ism). Thus, as is the case for
Linda, relationships are central to Walker's antiracist teaching. Walker
strategically establishes connectivity with her students:
I require my students to come to office hours, and I keep track of it …
And that has been so amazing … That's how I build relation-ships with them
one-on-one. That's how I get to know them as people. That gives me a pulse
on what's going on in their mind about class, what they feel comfortable with,
what they don't feel comfortable with.
Walker says, “something else I'm trying to convey” by carving out time to
connect with students as whole persons is that “we're all trying to be learners
here.”
Walker's antiracist teaching is anchored by an empathetic, compassionate,
and asset-oriented outlook toward her students. She attributes this orientation
to a childhood encounter with racism. Walker remembered that while walking
home from school one afternoon, she and a friend witnessed and then
intervened as a White peer attacked two Black siblings. She recalled that her
White peer hurled racial epithets at the Black children, “calling them all the
‘N’ names … And you see that hate of an 11-year-old or a 12-year-old … how
does that happen to people? It's just so wrong … That was a major moment
for sure. I still feel like it's so pertinent.” This incident underpins her
dedication to speaking (up) about racism and underlies her attraction to
antiracist teaching. From this encounter, Walker ascertained that seemingly
small corrective acts undertaken by individuals in the context of
commonplace in-teractions that reek of racial injustice can have significant
inter-personal impacts. This idea is reified in the anthology Everyday
Antiracism (Pollock, 2008), which Walker assigns as a required reading for
her course.
6.3. Finding 3: the corporeal interconnection of race(ism) and
embodiment
McWilliam (1996a) muses that “apart from cursory and limited treatment
of the body in relation to learning, student bodies are regarded in most
modern educational literature as important to pedagogy only indirectly” (p.
341). However, Victoria, Linda, and Walker hold a differing view. For these
pedagogues, embodiment is essential to antiracist teaching, albeit in different
ways.
Victoria: “I never forget the body I'm in.” Victoria spoke extensively of
being bodied as a Black woman and of the related stratification and
experiences with racism: “I never forget the body I'm in … I love the body I'm
in but I'm very clear about this body
8 E.O. Ohito / Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892
means in a space like this [university] and in this country.” Victoria also
spoke to how she attended to students' bodies in her antiracist teaching:
I read them. I read their bodies. I physically read their bodies in terms of
their comfort level, in terms of if they have their arms open or if they sit a
certain way all semester with their arms tight or if they're slanted in a certain
way. I literally read their bodies and I am open with them about that. I let
them know that I do read bodies … Oftentimes, I could have all White
students and no Students of Color, and here I am the Black instructor. So
there's the Black body in the front of the classroom and then there's the White
bodies that are all around. So, we talk about it.
Victoria then explained how her attention to bodies affected her
curriculum (i.e., her use of guest speakers) and instructional methods (i.e.,
discussion):
I never take up White privilege. I always have a guest speaker … I'm not
White, I don't know what it’s like as a Black body. We do an exercise about
what White privilege is … [We] define it. I can talk about how it has impacted
my life but I'm not someone that pos-sesses that. I recognize my limitations
and I invite somebody who is conscious and recognizes that they do have
White priv-ilegedbecause not every White person accepts that. I have them
come in and engage in a discussion. So yes, there's certain things that this
body can [and cannot] do. I could talk about it. I could facilitate anything. We
could talk about the readings, but I think for it to be an experience for them.
I'm trying to offer experiences and exposures and not lectures. So, I think
another [White] human being has to facilitate that for it to be memorable.
Linda: “I think that the embodiment is really important.”
Like Victoria, Linda centers bodiesdboth her own and those of studentsdin
her antiracist teaching. She brings her recognition of herself as raced in the
body into her classroom. This is why she asked a Black spoken-word poet to
serve as a guest teacher, explaining: “I am not a Black woman and so … when
I talk about race it's not going to be the same as if another person talks about
race.” Spoken word poetry is borne of Black oral traditions; there-fore, Linda
says:
I thought that [the Black poet] could do spoken word in a way that I never
could. I think that the embodiment is really important
… I think also from a racial perspective, I think it's great for [stu-dents] to be
able to experience another perspective … I think it's good to disrupt class a
little bit in that way.
I observed the class session taught by the spoken word poet and was
surprised by the extent of students’ discomfort when asked to perform a text
in spoken word form. I asked Linda about the pedagogical implications of the
palpable somatic discomfort. She referenced a White, female student in her
reply, saying:
I would argue that [the student], who was so uncomfortable sharing, did a
lot of learning … And I don't think she learned the same way as another
student who felt uncomfortable but pushed through and did it. But I think she
learned what she needed to learn. I think that's even more powerful than if she
had done it … because she faced her limitation and had to process it. If she
had just done it then we wouldn't have gotten to that level of reflexivity.
Walker: “I just touch people!” Like Victoria and Linda, Walker also
referenced bodies in connection to her antiracist teaching. She did so in
relationship to her remembering of a collaborative cur-riculum planning
experience in which she participated with a Black colleague, and as
associated with how she establishes relationships with students. In terms of
the former, Walker recalled that while strategizing with that colleague about
the pedagogical uses of The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and
Culture in the Class-room (Delpit & Dowdy, 2008):
I was like, “I'm sorry … the Black woman is not going to be the person
who is talking about The Skin That We Speak alonedI think
it's important that it comes from both of us … What's the … message if the
White womandone of the White professorsdisn't up there talking about it,
too?”
Walker also discussed bodies with respect to her approach to relationship-
building with students. “I just touch people!” she said jokingly in an interview,
causing us both to erupt in laughter. She adds:
Obviously, I don't do that the first few days … One of my stu-dents came
up to me … and she's like, “I just have to give you a very big hug.” That's how
she greeted me in class yesterday. And I was like, “Thank you.” And she was
just like, “I know you hurt your back [in a minor accident], but it meant a lot
to me that you just rubbed me.” It made me feel good.
Being attuned to students' material bodies in the classroom, Walker
explained, is “about being present. I think it's another way of …
communicating that you're there, that you're present, that you are purposeful
and you are in the space together. That doesn't necessarily require words.”
A research agenda for future feminist-concerned inquiry on
antiracist teaching By drawing on the wor(l)ds of women peda-gogues, this
inquiry has shown who antiracist teacher educators are, and how and why that
matters for their antiracist teaching. It has also accentuated the textures of
antiracist teaching as fashioned from knowledge generated by three women
pedagogues: Linda, Victoria, and Walker. Shim (2014) states that, “critical
pedagogy that does not consider the unconscious world of the critical peda-
gogue is doing critical education uncritically because the effects of what we
do not consciously know but nevertheless enact are central to the classroom”
(p. 1). This study brings visibility to di-mensions of that unconscious world
by demonstrating that how, what, and why antiracist pedagogues teach
unfolds from our ex-periences with and knowledges of: 1) the salience of
race(ism) in family histories; 2) the potency of race(ism) in schooling experi-
ences; and 3) the corporeal interconnection of race(ism) and embodiment. The
data attest to the congruity among participants, thus confirming the robustness
of my inquiry and justifying the further pursuit of the underlying questions.
As I move forward from this pilot study, I find that I am increasingly curious
about the di-vergences among my participants’dand more generally, antiracist
women teacher educators’dperspectives and experiences. Thus, in this
penultimate section, I divulge the questions raised by this pilot study and
articulate the corresponding methodological consider-ations for future and
further feminist research concerned with how, what, and why antiracist
teacher educators teach.
6.4. How we teach
The findings from this study show that antiracist pedagogues teach and
learn through the body. This insight responds to Spino-za's oft-referenced
query: “[w]hat can the body do?” (cited in Deleuze, 1990, p. 226). Yet it also
yields a narrower question: what and how can the body teach and learn in
relation to antiracist teaching? Additionally, how might research on antiracist
teaching turn toward the particular discursively and materially racialized,
gendered, classed, and otherwise marked body (Spelman, 1982)? How might
researchers inquire into how this body engages with other bodies, as well as
how it moves through the teaching and learning spaces in which it is located,
absorbing aspects of those worlds and manifesting its “ability to make things
happen, to produce effects” (Bennett, 2010, p. 5)? These questions are
prompted by my comparison between Victoria's and Walker's varied affective
tones during our dialogues about bodily knowl-edges. When Victoria states,
“I love the body I'm in, but I'm very clear about this body means in a space
like this [university] and in this country,” she is communicating a
comprehension of how
 E.O. Ohito / Teaching and Teacher Education 86 (2019) 102892
racialization and gendering complexify the experiences of Black women
professors in higher education. Victoria's comments about bodily knowledge
speak to the specific injuries that Black and other Women of Color faculty
face at the intersection of race and gender
(e.g., Griffin, 2016; Gutierrez y Muhs, Niemann, Gonzalez, & Harris, 2012;
Walkington, 2017). She explains, for instance, “I could have all White
students and no Students of Color and here I am the Black instructor. So,
there's the Black body in the front of the classroom and then there's the White
bodies that are all around.” When Walker proclaims to her Black colleague
that, “the Black woman is not going to be the person who is talking about The
Skin That We Speak alonedI think it's important that it comes from both of
us,” she is recognizing that Black women are uniquely harmed by the overlap
of racial and gender oppression in the context of tertiary education. More
broadly, however, there is lightnessdthat is, an affective airinessdin Walker's
engagement with bodily knowl-edges. For example, she laughs when
reflecting upon how she tends to students' material bodies in her efforts to
bond with them and mentions that a student's touch “made me feel good.”
Walker's cheerfulness contrasts sharply with Victoria's som-berness. This
seriousness is noticeable when Victoria voices the following declarative
statement: “I never forget the body I'm in.” I wonder what this affective
distance between Walker and Victoria suggests about how teacher educators'
gendered experiences are impacted by more than gender identity alone. Said
differently, I wonder how each teacher educator's particular bodily
knowledges materialize at the intersection of gender and additional identities
such as race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, and dis/ability. White (2011) brings
an intersectional lens to bear on this when stating that, for Black women, “our
identities and physical bodies shape students' interpretations of course
materials because of stereotypes about our race, gender, class, and sexuality
that students often believe” (p. 195). Future inquiry in this vein would be
especially apropos in the heteronormative and overwhelmingly White field of
teacher edu-cation, where the majority population is comprised of heterosex-
ual, cisgender White women. Furthermore, inquiry focused on methodology
may consider that the researcher's gendered, raced, and otherwise constructed
body is ensconced in the racialized research assemblage (Weheliye, 2014) and
is, therefore, entangled in intercorporeal relationships at the research site. In
this vein, I wonder if and how my Black woman's body welcomed a Black
woman's emotionally naked confessions and a White woman's (perhaps
cloaked performances of) comfort with and confidence about embodied
knowledges. In other words, perhaps my embodied Blackness induced
Victoria's emotional vulnerability with me as well as Walker's emotional
guardedness with me, which may have manifested as a reticence to
acknowledge to me where and how her particular approach to antiracist
teaching is ensnared in bodily knowledges that are gendered, racialized, and
otherwise marked.
6.5. What we teach
The data from my brief observations in the classrooms of Linda, Victoria,
and Walker irradiate the messy space between theory and practice. Recall, for
instance, that during my discussion with Linda about what I read as students'
bodily discomfort with a classroom activity, she stated that, “what I would
probably do is, next week, go back and talk about their different physical
experiences.” Meth-odologically, this reflective comment motions toward the
need for sustained observations of pedagogues' antiracist teaching in prac-
tice. Prolonged observations in a pedagogue's classroom would yield more
data, and analyses of these data may result in deeper learning about what is
(en)closeddand what refuses con-tainmentdin the area between the theory and
practice of antiracist
9
teaching. For instance, these observations may generate rich data about how
the use of common curricular texts such as Howard's (1999) We Can't Teach
What We Don't Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools produces
different outcomes based on tempo-rary racialized assemblages of “bodies,
utterances, texts, time and space” (McWilliam, 1996b, p. 306) that form in
each antiracist pedagogue's classroom, impressing upon “how individuals
attach, displace, forget, and disengage knowledge” (p. 31).
6.6. Why we teach
For Linda, Victoria, and Walker, this study served as an occasion for
remembrance. Over the course of the interviews, each teacher educator shared
several recollections that elucidate why she teaches. Hence, the study reveals
that memories inform teacher educators' motivations, thereby marrying
memory to motivation. It also suggests that for these pedagogues, their
memories are not only information, but also are, in fact, their very motivation
for antiracist teaching. There is research indicating that, “remem-brance of the
past [has been] crucial for creating knowledge in a wide range of personal,
social, and political projects” (“Summer School,” 2017). Yet the interplay of
memory, motivation, and the feminist (and therefore, political) project of
antiracist teaching is undertheorized and understudied. Further inquiry into
this inter-play may focus on memory and knowledge making (e.g., Rumelhart
& Ortony, 1977), and investigate, for instance, how racialized memories are
encoded, stored, and accessed (e.g., de la Torre, 2016) vis-a-vis antiracist
teaching, and how the cognitive and interpretive functions of memory affect
learning about racism, Whiteness, and White supremacy. Researchers may
ask questions like: what is the utility of memory for the aims of antiracist
teaching? What anti-racist teaching practices might enable (re)entry into
memory? Figuratively speaking, inquiries like thesedthat is, those about the
interaction of memory, motivation, and antiracist teachingdwould also require
a methodological emptying of the bag of racialized memories that the
researcher brings into a study. In this study, I found myself wrestling with the
weight of racialized memories as I gathered and analyzed data. Ergo, I am
suggesting that future in-quiries scrutinize how the researcher's racialized
memories influ-ence her collection, curation, interrogation, and interpretation
of data.
7. Becoming a disruptive antiracist teacher educator: A twenty-year
retrospective
My memories of the past are at the fore as I conclude this article. Here, I
plot an additional point on the narrative timeline that I presented in a
preceding section. I am two decades removed from the sweltering day in the
summer of 1999 when I boarded a plane bound for Hampton, Virginia. At
presentdroughly 200 miles away, in Chapel Hill, North Carolinadthe hot and
humid days of the summer of 2019 are dwindling as I advance towards a fall
semester that promises new students and new opportunities for me to
meaningfully enact antiracist teaching. As the semester's start ap-proaches,
the learnings from this study energize me to continue excavating my
racialized memories (of childhood and schooling, in particular) and exploring
strategies for engendering antiracist teaching that is disruptive. I am
optimistic that the introspective processes of reflexivity, (re)discovery, and
relationship-building will fuel my evolution into the antiracist teacher
educator that I am still aspiring and learning to be(come).
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