Playing in the Shadow of Euromodernity: English Education, Race and the Coloniality of

Being/Power/Truth/Freedom 2000 – 2021

Sian Charles-Harris

University of Connecticut
(Accnoledgement)
 Abstract
The field of English Education in the US context brings together people from racialized

backgrounds in contact zones (classrooms, schools) where the power differentials are also

racialized (white teachers/diverse students) to interact using language to understand themselves

and their relationship to others in the world. Thus the idea of race, racialization and racism are

ubiquitous in the English Education Universe of Discourse and are valid and urgent topics to be

explored in the field. Today, nearly seventy years since Brown (1954), and two decades after

NCLB (2021), two watershed moments in the history of race-conscious policy which both

specifically targeted race-based inequality in schooling, there is still little evidence of consensus

on what it means to “work effectively with” students who are labeled “diverse.” Further, there

remains a broad swath of teachers who unwittingly uphold antiblackness and white supremacy at
and
the classroom level through curriculum, pedagogies, behavior policies, procedures. While

there are many teachers who work to challenge and critically interrogate racism in their

classrooms, a majority of novice teachers report feeling unprepared and lack confidence in their

ability to work with racially heterogeneous student populations or to engage in discussions about

the idea of race, racialization or race-relations. This dissertation seeks to understand the

development of race-consciousness in English education, and the knowledge claims about race,

racialization and race relations that have been adopted into the curriculum over the past two

decades.
 i

Playing in the Shadow of Euromodernity: English Education and the Coloniality of

Being/Truth/Power/Freedom 2000 - 2021

Sian Charles-Harris

University of Connecticut, 2022

A Dissertation

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

at the

University of Connecticut

2022

Copyright by

Sian Charles-Harris
 ii

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 : Introduction Illuminating the Race Problem in English Education..............................1
The rationale for the Study..........................................................................................................1
Study Interest...............................................................................................................................4
Statement of the Problem.............................................................................................................6
Cultural, Political and Curricular Challenges in English Teacher Education.............................8
Research Questions....................................................................................................................12
Overview of Dissertation Chapters............................................................................................13
Study Significance.....................................................................................................................16
A note about terminology and capitalization.........................................................................17
Chapter 2 : Literature Review........................................................................................................20
Preparation of Teachers of English............................................................................................22
What is English?....................................................................................................................23
Why do we teach English literature?.....................................................................................24
Literature and learning about self in relation to others..........................................................26
The Canon Wars....................................................................................................................29
How do we teach literature?..................................................................................................32
Recent Developments in Race-Conscious Educational Scholarship.........................................35
Race in Teacher Education Research........................................................................................40
Chapter 3 : Theoretical Framework...............................................................................................44
Morrison, the Africanist Presence and Processes of Othering and Subjectification in White
American Literary Imagination.................................................................................................45
Subjectification of the Africanist Presence in English Education.........................................49
Pillars of Wynterian Thought for English Education................................................................51
Man and the category human.................................................................................................51
The category Human..............................................................................................................51
Man........................................................................................................................................53
Sociogeny and Black Studies Perspective.............................................................................53
Black Studies Alterity Perspective........................................................................................55
The Word of Man..................................................................................................................55
Science of the Word...............................................................................................................56
Wynterian Possibilities for English Education......................................................................57
Chapter 4 : Research Design and Methods of The Study..............................................................59
 iii

Research Design........................................................................................................................63
Data Sources..............................................................................................................................63
Data Analysis: Method in the Shadow of Euromodernity.........................................................65
Creolizing Textual Analysis..................................................................................................67
Rigor, Dependability and Confirmability..................................................................................70
Researcher Identity Memo and Subjectivity Statement.............................................................72
Conclusion.................................................................................................................................72
Chapter 5 : The Development of Race-Conscious Standards in The Field of English Education 74
Diversity Standards and the Curriculum Knowledge Debate....................................................74
English Teacher Professional Standards as Text.......................................................................75
Findings.....................................................................................................................................78
Race evasion..............................................................................................................................79
Reification -Empowering an Illusion.........................................................................................84
Affirming Race......................................................................................................................85
Agnotology............................................................................................................................89
Obfuscating Race...................................................................................................................91
Conclusion.................................................................................................................................95
Chapter 6 : Race in the Method of Teaching English – “The Methods Texts Chapter”...............97
The Methods Texts....................................................................................................................98
Findings...................................................................................................................................101
Non-authorizing Texts.............................................................................................................104
Apprehensive Approaches...................................................................................................105
Race Evasiveness.................................................................................................................107
Nullification.........................................................................................................................108
Authorizing..........................................................................................................................108
Authorizing by proxy...........................................................................................................110
Affirming and Authorizing..................................................................................................112
Incidental and Ill-informed..................................................................................................116
Sustained, Strategic and Social Justice Oriented.................................................................119
Conclusion...............................................................................................................................121
Chapter 7 : Shifting the Geography of Reading..........................................................................124
The Implications of the Shadows............................................................................................125
The Ease of Avoiding Race.................................................................................................125
The Reinforcement of Racial Hierarchies...........................................................................126
 iv

The Over-Simplification of Race: The Leap over Knowledge to Action............................127

Recommendations for Future Research and Practice in English Education............................133
References....................................................................................................................................134
 v

List of Tables

Table 5.1 Documents selected for study 78

Table 6.1 Data: 17 Dominant texts in English methods courses (2017) 101
Table 6.2 Authorizing and non-authorizing textbooks 104
 1

Chapter 1 : Introduction
Illuminating the Race Problem in English Education

“More light, more light! Open the window so that more light may come in.”

—last words of, the German poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as he lay on his deathbed

The rationale for the Study

The field of English education has attempted to address the so-called “race problem” for

several decades. These efforts have been intermittent and often displaced, since the 1990s, by

the rise of the standards and accountability movement. Challenges to expand the Eurocentric

English literary canon to include authors of diverse racial and ethnic identities have not only met

countervailing efforts to reassert the canon. They have also encountered the movement, enforced

by state and federal policy, to establish clear and measurable standards that specify the

knowledge, skills and dispositions of presumably effective English teachers. Efforts to address

the race problem in English education since at least the 1990s have thus had to contend with how

to standardize beginning teachers’ development of racial consciousness. Since the turn of the

21st century, this struggle has taken center stage and intensified as anti-racist social movements,

such as the Black Lives Matter movement, emerged in the broader society and have met yet

another round of white rage and backlash (Anderson, 2016). It is my hope that exploring how the

field of English education has attempted the address the race problem during this period will

provide insight that can help the field grapple with the complexity of competing conceptions and

end goals related to race and racism in the field.

Critical scholarship in education has yielded knowledge and theory toward challenging

racism in schools and classrooms (Perry & Delpit, 1988; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Love, 2019;
 2

Lynn & Parker, 2006). Further, there is a wealth of critical scholarship in teacher education that

has focused on what I call the race problem in teacher education, namely, the specific and

unique set of interrelated challenges faced by university-based teacher education programs

(TEPs) as they prepare a majority white, female and middle-class cadre of teachers to work

effectively with students from non-white, linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds and
“ ”
economically disadvantaged communities. Implicit within the notion of the race problem is
,
the fact that teacher educators, who are effectively the human agents of TEPs are also

overwhelmingly white, female and middle class. This makes the race problem in English

teacher education epistemologically laden. Addressing this challenge requires engaging issues of

epistemic justice, standpoint epistemology and decolonizing educational research.

TEPs and school districts across the country have taken vastly different approaches to
e race
training teachers to confront th problem, ranging from superficial investments that yield
professional development
“one off” events that are not sustained (McManimon & Casey, 2018),

to full-throated demands for teachers to center anti-racism in all instructional planning and lesson

development (NCTE Standards, 2021). Much of the research on race in English education

provides portraits of isolated pockets of effective English teaching for Black and Brown students

(NCTE Standards, 2021). Yet little is known about the knowledge ecosystem in TEPs that
might
support the development and circularization of race-conscious policies in English education.

This study seeks to understand potential solutions to the problem of race in English

teacher education from an underserved epistemological standpoint: that of a Black, female TEP-

alumnus-turned-insider who, having left the cave (matriculated from a TEP in the U.S.), now

returns to the site of ongoing contestation (novice teachers’ introduction to and engagement with

critical theories of race), bringing light to examine the archived curricular materials that make up
 3

the epistemological landscape of her training and preparation for racial diversity and her current

work as an English teacher educator. This study, Playing in the Shadows of Euromodernity,

recognizes the complex nature of the relationship between race-consciousness and diversity in

English education. Understanding such a relationship demands a sustained systematic analysis

of the knowledge claims about race and racial diversity that undergird English teacher education

performance standards and curricular texts as well as attention to the historic uses and misuses of

literature in education.

This study proceeds from an assumption that English education, as a subdiscipline,

having acknowledged the challenge posed by the problem of race, has over the first two decades

of the 21st century produced discipline-specific responses that attend to the peculiarities of race in

the context of secondary English in US public schools. These responses include belief and

position statements by professional organizations, books written by English teachers and English

teacher educators intended for use in university English methods courses, and scholarly

publications. I take the approach of seeking to identify within these documents the foundational

assumptions – knowledge claims—about what English teacher preparations for racial diversity

involve. As such, this study undertakes a qualitative textual analysis of two sets of documents

germane to preparing English teachers to work effectively with students from culturally and
p
linguistically diverse backgrounds: 1) rofessional standards for English Teacher preparation

2000 – 2021 and 2) textbooks used in university-based English methods courses during the same

period. Analyses of these data reveal the epistemological foundations of English education’s

disciplinary response to the demographic imperative occasioned by growing recognition of the

scope and complexity of the race problem in the field and adds to the scholarship on antiracist,

culturally responsive teacher education, social justice teacher education, disciplinary literacy in
 4

English teacher education, critical race studies in English education and research methods in

education.

This dissertation is intended as an applied exercise in the philosophy of English

Education and puts forth an argument for the relevance of Sylvia Wynter and Toni Morrison’s

scholarship and creative work to the tripartite English education projects of expanding and

redefining the discipline, educating racially diverse students in English classrooms and preparing

aspiring teachers for that practice. In this way, the findings from this study contribute to the

expanding knowledge base on disciplinarity in English education to include an attempt to begin

to map the intellectual contemporary history of race-consciousness in English education and to

offer research-backed, philosophically sound recommendations and related implications for

teaching English Language Arts to linguistically and culturally diverse students in US public

schools.

Study Interest

This study examines representations of race and racism in English Education documents

related to teacher preparation, including standards intended to improve English teachers’

capacity to work effectively with students from diverse backgrounds. This “diversity

competency” is meant to account for the multifaceted and complex history of how race and

racism manifest in schools, including racialized disparities in school funding (Anyon, 2014;

Ladson-Billings, 2006; Noguera, 2003), Eurocentric curriculum and standardized testing (Au,

2018; Brown & Brown, 2015; Ighodaro & Wiggan, 2010; Leonardo, 2018), the positioning of

school as a mechanism for social control (Stovall, 2016), the over-representation of White

teachers and under-representation of Teachers of Color (Goings & Bianco, 2016; NCES 2020),

the effects of this cultural mismatch between White teachers and the growing majority of racially
 5

and ethnically diverse students in the nation’s public schools (Villegas, 1988; McGrady and

Reynolds, 2013), and the fact that schooling in the U.S. occurs in the shadows of

Euromodernity’s legacies of genocide, land theft, enslavement, and various forms of colonialism

(Alim & Paris, 2017 p.1).

During the past two decades the continued prominence of the standards and

accountability movement in educational policy and broader demographic, cultural and political

developments have intensified tensions between supporters and opponents of race-conscious

policies in education. These tensions have shaped the culture of teacher preparation more broadly

and English education in the U.S. more specifically. Reporting on findings from their national

study of English methods courses, 2014, Caughlin et al. (2017) emphasize the urgency of this

current moment for English educators and English education:

In these changing times, English educators find ourselves at a crossroads of how

English education in the United States will grapple with the larger changes affecting how

English teachers are taught in the twenty-first century. The results of our study have

revealed that new areas of emphasis within ELA have expanded what we have

traditionally considered our discipline, and this alone urges us to reconsider how to best

prepare English teachers for a changing context (Caughlin et al., 2017)

In this dissertation, I take up this call by analyzing policy and pedagogical texts to

interrogate how the field of English education is grappling with the entrenched racism that marks

and mars teaching and teacher education in the U.S. Specifically, I examine how the field of

English education, as captured in standards documents and methods textbooks conceptualize

race, racism and racial justice in both the preparation of English teachers and the subject of
 6

English itself, and how this conceptualization positions English teachers in relation to Black and

Brown students.

Many personal and professional commitments weighed on my decision to focus on race

and race-relations in this changing context, which Caughlin et al. (2017) highlight. Initially I

found myself reflexively questioning: If the goal is to improve learning opportunities for all

students, why focus on race and racism? In deciding to focus on race, I am positioning my

scholarship in line with critical scholars of race in education who highlight how the problem of

Whiteness constricts our relationship to reality and truth. Matias (2016) noted that there is a

“hidden curriculum of Whiteness being taught to students of Color and White alike” (p.7) and

Delgado and Stefancic (1997, xvii) urge that researchers must “put Whiteness under the lens for

critical inquiry.” Methodologically, race is considered an important analytical lens for making

sense of the macro context of educational policy (Heilig et al., 2012) and others (Apple, 1999)

have argued that it is not possible to understand the history, the current status, and the multiple

effects of current educational policy fully without placing race at the core of one’s analysis.

Statement of the Problem

In 2001 when the No Child Left Behind act (NCLB) reauthorized the Elementary and

Secondary Education Act, it included Title I provisions applying to disadvantaged students.

NCLB was one of the most comprehensive of all educational policies to follow the Brown

decision. NCLB addressed educational access, performance, and attainment with provisions

driven by standards and accountability, to hold schools and districts accountable for teacher

quality, instructional practices and student performance (Stecher, Hamilton, & Gonzalez, 2003).

The general consensus at the time, and a tacit acknowledgment of responsibility that animated

this movement, was that public schools in the United States were not “doing a good job in
 7

preparing students, especially minority and disadvantaged students, to excel in school and to be

successful in the labor market” (Rose & Betts, 2001: v). The NCLB federal mandate was

intended to afford all students a quality education and access to post-secondary careers. Despite

this goal, studies of NCLB’s implementation have documented negative impacts on school

environment and learning opportunities for minoritized students who were intended to benefit

from the policy (Mintrop & Sunderman 2009).

The rise of the standards and accountability movement as epitomized by NCLB produced

on-going efforts to delineate the competencies teachers must possess to teach racially and

ethnically diverse students effectively. Education researchers and practitioners have, particularly

since Gloria Ladson-Billing’s landmark 1994 article, generated a wide variety of important

culture-conscious educational approaches (e.g. culturally relevant teaching, culturally relevant

pedagogy, culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogies, and other “additive” pedagogies)

designed to enable teachers to avoid reinforcing unjust schooling practices that stem from the

antiblack, anti-indigenous and monolinguistic processes of US public schooling. One goal for

this study is to contribute to this research. This goal, however, is complicated by the fact that

over the past two decades, while race is given only intermittent specific, focused attention in

English education standards and methods texts, it is mobilized consistently as one of many forms

of diversity or sources of discrimination, and as a broader marker of academic need or risk that

English teachers must be equipped to address. Parsing the relationship between race, diversity

and notions of effective teaching and effective teachers further reflects the entangled relationship

between race, culture and power always at play in efforts to delineate and standardize notions of

competent English teaching and English teacher education. I turn to the work of Sylvia Wynter

and Toni Morrison to explore this entanglement and its implications for how we think about and,
 8

ultimately, enact English education. From Wynter’s decolonial perspective, “policy” and

“standards” are ordering principles that serve as key agents of coloniality. Her notions of Man

and the Human help expose the burning question at the heart of policy and pedagogy that aim to

promote diversity, equity and multiculturalism: how do we characterize the nature of human

beings in such a way that their diversity is adequately respected and explained (Margutti, 2013)?

Morrison’s ideas on Othering and the Africanist Presence in American literature further help

reveal how English education policy and pedagogical texts both conceive of the subject of

English and position English vis-à-vis students of color, especially Black students. Taken

together, the lenses Wynter and Morrison offer reveal the complex ways that efforts to account

for how race and racism shape English teaching and learning and might represent a challenge to

racism at the same time obscuring and reifying it. Taken together, Wynter and Morrison provide

tools to re-imagine English education as a more humanizing enterprise as they confront us with

the complexities and struggles required to do so.

In the following, I first describe the challenges English education faces as it grapples with

the role race and racism plays in English education and English teaching and learning. I use

Caughlin et al. (2017) typology of cultural, political and curricular challenges to explore these

challenges. I then briefly describe the purpose and design of the study before providing an

overview of the different chapters. I conclude this chapter by highlighting the significance of the

study.

Cultural, Political and Curricular Challenges in English Teacher Education

According to Caughlan et al. (2017), one of the most pressing challenges facing English

teacher education relates to the cultural mismatch between the majority White and middle-class

English teaching force and the increasingly racially diverse student population in US public
 9

schools. As the percentage of White and middle-class teachers has remained at roughly 80%

(NCES, 2019), more students of color and children of immigrants have entered the nation’s

public-school classrooms, even in communities with relatively little demographic diversity

(Baber, 1995; Burbank et al., 2005; Nieto, 2003; Sleeter, 2001; Villegas & Lucas, 2002). Public

school enrollment statistics for the 2014–2015 academic calendar year revealed that, for the first

time in United States history, there are now more students of color enrolled in public schools

than their White counterparts (Maxwell, 2014). Due to the changing racial and ethnic

demographics, students in public schools in the United States are at present more racially,

ethnically and linguistically diverse than they have been in this country’s history. In fact, schools

have experienced more dramatic demographic shifts than any other institution in the United

States as a result of multicultural population growth (Ladson-Billings, 2011). Between fall 2000

and fall 2017, the percentage of public-school students who were white decreased from 61 to 48

percent (NCES, 2020).

In contrast to these demographic shifts among the nation’s students, the racial

composition of the field of teacher education paints an undeniable portrait of institutional

Whiteness. According to numerous studies, roughly between 80% and 85% of students enrolled

in teacher preparation and between 80% and 90% of teacher educators who train them are white

and female (AACTE, 2010; Ludwig et al., 2010; Matias & Zembylas, 2014).

In the current climate, where public schools are simultaneously the most diverse yet most

segregated that they have been since before the Civil Rights Movements (Meatto, 2019), scholars

have increasingly turned their attention to the cultural mismatch between teachers and students

and the role teacher education plays in it. Writing in 2008, Cornbleth noted the poor “track

record of teacher education in preparing teachers to deal constructively with difference and
 10

diversity (Zeichner, 1992, Zeichner & Hoeft, 1996; Ladson-Billings, 1999). The few exceptions

(Ladson-Billings, 2001) are just that” (p.#). At the same time, a growing body of educational

research has examined the disproportionate representation between a diverse student body and

their mainly White, female teachers (Bower-Phipps et al., 2013; Collins, 2011; Delano-Oriaran

& Meidl, 2012; Garcia et al., 2009; Howard, 1999; Ladson-Billings, 2001, 2011; Sleeter, 2008b).

This body of research has focused on developing curricular and pedagogical models for teaching

diverse students, on teacher education programs for social justice that seek to improve the

learning and life choices of Indigenous, Black and Brown students and communities (Cochran-

Smith et al., 2009) and on diversifying the teaching force, including recruiting more Black and

Latinx candidates into teacher education programs and, ultimately, into teaching (Villegas &

Davis, 2007). As I show in this dissertation, a similar increase in scholarly interest in

understanding how race matters has occurred during this time in English education.

In addition to the cultural challenges English education faces, it also faces political

challenges. Caughlan et al. (2017) note that the new standards established in policies like

NCLB, were accompanied by the policies at both the K-12 and university levels aimed at holding

individual schools and their teachers accountable for student performance on ostensibly objective

achievement measures to an unprecedented extent. As these policies were being enacted,

political attacks challenged the efficacy of university-based teacher education programs. These

attacks helped justify attempts to link K-12 student performance to the programs that prepared

their teachers (U.S. Department of Education, 2014; Zeichner, 2010). These efforts have often

been used to discredit university-based teacher education and to promote alternative routes into

teaching that shorten or even eliminate teacher education field- and coursework. More recent

political challenges have attempted to restrict the kind of literature and topics that can be taught
 11

in public schools and in university, including in teacher preparation programs These efforts

have sought, often successfully, to censor the teaching of race and to ban books that deal with

race and racism from school curricula and libraries.

As the cultural and political challenges took hold in English teacher education, curricular

challenges also arose. As Caughlan et al. (2017) note, as states developed P-12 standards and

assessments, they expected teachers to align local curriculum to both. The Common Core State

Standards, for example, with its focus on “college readiness” (CCSSI, 2010), have prompted

English teachers to prioritize nonfiction texts, to teach reading strategies and to require students

to write arguments in responses to prompts found on essay exams. Such standards did not

consider the salience of race and Eurocentricity in the English or English education curriculum.

However, driven by the cultural and political shifts described above, English educators have

directed more attention to these issues. The challenge for English educators, then, became how

to meet the press to delineate standards for English teaching and teacher preparation that could

recognize and redress the racism and Euro-centricity ingrained within the English and English

education curricula.

In this dissertation, I build on Caughlin et al. (2017) three-part framing of the cultural,

political and curricular challenges confronting the field of English education to offer a

conception of the problem of race in English education reframed in ontological and

epistemological terms as Playing in the Shadows of Euromodernity. This framework

conceptualizes the problem of race in English education as uniquely suited for Wynterian and

Morrisonian intervention and presents the problem of race in English Teacher education as not

merely cultural, political or curricular, but as a crisis of ontological and epistemological urgency

with high stakes for the future of English in secondary schools and race relations beyond school
 12

walls. To hold a given characteristic to be ontological distinguishes it from other traits that are

historical, sociological or cultural. It conceives of the challenges confronting English education

as rooted in the vexing, fluid, immensely powerful concept of race not as biological or even

socially constructed, but as ontological, which is to say that the so-called problem of race is a

matter of being, becoming and reality, and asks questions such as, “Can race exist without

racism? Is the concept of race ontologically independent, or does it require other entities to exist?

If yes, what are those entities on which it depends?

Further, I hold that race is rooted in and part of the ontological crisis of the category

“human.” As such, I call on English teachers and English teacher educators, to consider more

centrally, critically and with intellectual openness, the widely unquestioned notion of our “shared

humanity” and to include within their methods, attention to the intellectual history of the idea of

race, how this idea has been imposed through violent colonial conquest and to engage

philosophically with the claim that this history of categorization, alongside sustained epistemic

and material violence effectively forced ontological change. This is to say, the imposition of

race altered what was and is still held to be immutable characteristics of the human.

Research Questions

The purpose of this study is to examine how race and racialized (Black and Brown)

students are re/presented in English Teacher Education curricular texts to better understand how

the relationship between race/racism/race-relations and the teaching and learning of English in

secondary schools is treated in the field of English Language Arts Teacher Education.

Addressing this question is critical to ensuring that efforts to construct a racially just vision of

English teaching and learning and of English education can help nurture the minds and enrich the
 13

inner and material lives of Black and Brown students. More specifically, the study addresses the

following research questions:

1. RQ1: How does the field of Initial English Teacher Education conceptualize notions of

race, racism and racial justice in the preparation of English teachers?

2. RQ2: How does this conceptualization inform how English teachers are prepared to teach

literature in US middle and secondary schools?

3. RQ3: How does the conceptualization position English teachers in relation to Black 1 and

Brown students?

I draw on a hybrid framework grounded in the critiques put forth by Sylvia Wynter and

Toni Morrison, to address these questions. Wynter’s notions of Man, Human and Euromodernity

and Morrison’s ideas about Othering and the Africanist Presence in fiction, help decipher the

nuanced and subtle ways that race and racism and Black and Brown students are represented in

these texts and considers how these representations construct English as a subject and the

English teacher in relation to race and racism. By bringing together Wynter and Morrison I

grapple directly with the complex entanglements of race, culture, power and knowledge that lie

at the heart of efforts to construct a vision of racially just English education and English teaching

and learning.

Overview of Dissertation Chapters

In the following chapter, Chapter 2, I provide a brief genealogy of the English education field

that illuminates the shifting definitions and goals of English teaching and English teacher
1
Following Etienne (2022). “While race as a tool for human categorization is a social construction that too often
essentializes and oversimplifies, racial categorizations are employed with tangible effect in the United States to
exploit, suppress, and dehumanize subordinated populations. See Michael Omi & Howard Winant, Racial Formation
in the United States (3d ed. 2014). Thus, I use the racial term “Black” to describe individuals of African American
identification and members of other African diaspora cultures. I also often use the term “minoritized” rather than
“minority” to describe how some cultural groups are pushed to the margins of society based upon racial, cultural or
other social categorizations, such as Hispanic Americans, certain immigrant and religious groups.”
 14

education. The shadows of these definitions and goals remain in the field, echoing in its efforts to

engage the race problem at the turn of the 21st century. I then review existing literature that

addresses race and racism in English teacher education to assess the state of knowledge about

race and racism in English teacher education, including the gaps and inconsistencies that exist. ,

I argue that notwithstanding some noteworthy efforts in this area, decolonial thought that goes

beyond multicultural or ethnic studies approaches to the teaching of secondary English has been

largely absent from the discourse about English education, both in theory and practice. To

address this gap, this dissertation study takes a step back from the study of classroom practice to

decipher the state of knowledge in English teacher education on the subject of race and racism in

the teaching of English and the preparation of English teachers.

Chapter 3 delineates the theoretical framework I employ in the study. Drawing on the

works of Sylvia Wynter and Toni Morrison, I conceive the problem of race in English teacher

education as an ontological and epistemological problem and offer a conception of the problem

of race in English education reframed in ontological and epistemological terms as Playing in the

Shadows of Euromodernity. Chapter 4 describes the methods and methodology of this

dissertation. Given the entanglements of race, culture, power and knowledge that I examine, I

employ a creolized analytic approach to interrogating English education standards and methods

texts. Using content analysis methods borrowed from Skerrett (2011) study of English teachers’

enactment of racial literacy, I focus, in particular, on texts produced between 2000 and 2021, a

period during which the field of English education has grappled with the cultural, political and

curricular challenges outlined above.

Chapters 5 and 6 present the findings from my analyses of English education standards

and English methods textbooks, respectively. Chapter 5 examines the representations of the
 15

rhetoric of modernity2 and the logic of coloniality in the English education standards documents

as evidenced by the treatment of race in relation to the subject English, English teacher education

and Black and Brown students. In particular, I highlight how the processes of race evasion,

affirmation, agnotology and obfuscation work together to construct a flimsy epistemological

basis for the field’s understanding of race and racism.

In Chapter 6, I examine texts widely used in English education methods courses at the

turn of the 21st century. I ask, what do these books reveal about the principles and rules of

knowing about and through notions of race in English Education? Using the concept of racial

literacy and building on Skerrett (2011) work on racial literacy among English teachers, I

examine how the documents reflect the following approaches to engaging the race problem in

English education methods texts: 1) apprehensive and non-authorizing; 2) incidental and ill-

informed and 3) sustained, strategic and social-justice oriented. While I found the same

processes of race evasion, affirmation, agnotology and obfuscation at play in the standards-texts,

there was evidence of a growing attention to race and an alignment with explicit social justice

approaches to English teaching.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I synthesize the findings and present recommendations for the field

of English education to move forward by deepening its understanding of race and methods of

engaging with race. In particular, I offer the notion of racial aporia as tool for moving beyond

binaristic notions of racism/anti-racism and Human/Other that reinforce racial hierarchies rather

than freeing us from them.

2
The colonial matrix of power is characterized by the combination of a rhetoric of modernity with a logic of
coloniality. The rhetoric of modernity is made explicit by means of ideas such as progress, development, and
growth, whereas the logic of coloniality is silenced or named as a set of problems to be solved under the headings of
poverty, inequality, injustice, corruption, mercantilization and dispensability of human life (Mignolo 2011 p. xvii).
In his perspective, coloniality is constitutive of modernity.
 16

Study Significance

In 2012, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) first dedicated a unique

standard to social justice in its standards for initial preparation of English teachers. Since then,

the standards for the preparation and education of teachers of English in secondary schools have

included some discussions about race and racism, typically alongside discussions of social

justice, diversity and inclusion.

There is a rich history of critical scholarship in the field of education and curriculum

theorizing that has focused on how educational structures impact les damnés de la terre (the

wretched of the earth) and has pushed for policy to require changes that attend to the needs and

assets of ethnically and linguistically diverse students. The rapid growth and ideological

expansion of critical race theory (CRT) in education (Lynn & Dixson, 2013), and critical

Whiteness studies (CWS) (Leonardo, 2009; Matias, 2016) in teacher education (Jupp et al.,

2016) has led to increased focus on examining issues of racism. In the field of English teacher

education, there have been fewer published scholarly attempts 3 to categorize and decipher the

epistemological and ontological assumptions that underlie multicultural and diversity approaches

when they become formalized in education curriculum policy such as in textbooks, standards and

position statements.4
3
There are some noteworthy examples of this deciphering approach applied to research in teacher education. In a
study of “Diaspora Literacy and Consciousness in the Struggle Against Miseducation in the Black Community,”
King (2006) drawing on Wynter’s (1992) textbook analysis, scrutinized the content of California’s controversial
history-social studies textbook adoption, from a Diaspora Literacy heritage knowledge approach to teacher
education. Moses and Chang (2006) examined the legal history of using the diversity rationale to justify affirmative
action and the philosophical foundation of the ideal of diversity. De Rowan et al. (2021) conducted a systematic
review of literature relating to both “teacher education” and “diverse learners,” to identify knowledge claims
regarding the way the challenge of working with diverse learners and its possible solutions should be framed. Fewer
yet have proposed transdisciplinary solutions and reframed the debates.
4
King, J.E. (2008). “Appendix B-2: Race and our biocentric belief system: An interview with Sylvia Wynter.” In
J.E. King (Ed). Black education: A transformative research & action agenda for a new century, pp. 361-366.
Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publisher.
King, J.E. (1997). “Thank you for opening our minds”: On praxis, transmutation, and black studies in teacher
development.” In J.E. King, E.R. Hollins, W.C. Hayman (Eds.). Preparing teachers for cultural diversity, pp. 156-
174. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
 17

In this dissertation, I offer an account of the development of race-consciousness in

English teacher education and how it is articulated in English teacher education standards and

curriculum from 2000 to present. By placing the entanglement of race, culture, power and

knowledge at the center of this study, I hope to make visible the ways that the field of English

education has variously confronted, elided and reified racism in English teaching and learning.

Doing so offers new, more nuanced ways of conceptualizing the work of English education.

A note about terminology and capitalization

Throughout this dissertation, I choose to use the term “race-conscious” approaches to

English education rather than “diversity” or “multicultural” or “social justice education” for three

reasons. First, this framing builds on critical pedagogy (Paulo Freire) and Africana philosophy

(W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison) which conceptualizes learning about race and its effects as a

non-linear and subjective process of gaining consciousness. Second, focusing on race

specifically challenges the tendency in U.S. teacher preparation for diversity curricula to

overgeneralize dimensions of difference and to skirt issues of race, which hold a particularly

charged position in U.S. public dialogue (Milner, 2017; Sleeter, 2017). There are also well-

respected theories in teacher education that are race-mute or at best take an agnostic approach to

race. Take, for example, the model of teacher agency as understood by Biesta et al. (2015). The

authors argue that the achievement of agency is dependent on three different factors, namely,

international factors (life histories or biographies and one’s professional experiences), projective

factors (future perspectives and aspirations), and practical-evaluative factors that are influenced

by the first and second factors. Thirdly, “diversity” usually encompasses a wide range of social

King, J.E. (1991). Dysconscious racism: Ideology, identity, and the miseducation of teachers. The Journal of Negro
Education, 60(1), pp. 133-146.
 18

issues and identity groups and often includes only cursory explorations of race, ethnicity and

culture (Sleeter, 2017).

I use the term “Black” as an inclusive term (Wynter, 1992) to mean people of African

descent, the Afro-descendent diaspora and dark-skinned, non-White non-European peoples who

were either oppressed through being colonized, conquered or ferociously attacked yet resisted

successfully, as in the case of the Japanese. I use the term “white” to refer to people of European

ancestry who have historically benefitted from the privileges associated with light skin. When

citing others, I maintain the author’s choice to capitalize or not capitalize Black/black.

Following Kimberlé Crenshaw, I capitalize “Black” because “Blacks, like Asians,

Latinos, and other ‘minorities,’ constitute a specific cultural group and, as such, require

denotation as a proper noun” (Crenshaw, 1982). By the same token, I do not capitalize “white,”

throughout the dissertation because my conception of “white” is that it is not a proper noun,

since whites do not constitute a specific cultural group. For the same reason I do not capitalize

“women of color,” “people of color” or “students of color.” “Black” refers to and represents

counterhegemonic acts of self-definition, and the capitalization denotes respect, while “white”

does not.

Following Cornbleth (2008), I use “difference” to refer to student-teacher difference,

especially race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, first or home language, religion and academic

ability/motivation. By “student diversity,” I refer to schools and classes with students who are

different from one another with respect to race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, home language,

religion or academic ability/motivation. In this view, a single student cannot be diverse. This

project explores the construction of the figure of “the diverse student,” a term which is itself a

misnomer. A person can be of mixed ancestry but is not diverse in the sense used here. Teachers
 19

sometimes refer to multicultural or diverse authors when they mean an African American or

Hispanic author. I take issue with such usage and critically examine it in the selected documents.

Similarly, a class of African American (or Hispanic or any other racialized or ethnic group) is

not diverse; it is African American or Hispanic. Thus, it seems that the language of diversity is

used to evade and obfuscate how the concept of race is linked to achievement, intelligence and a

host of social problems. Finally, following Beverly Tatum (2007), I often refer to Black and

Brown children together because there are many similarities in their struggle for access to

educational equity and in the subjectivities compelled of them by schooling structures.

.
 20

Chapter 2 : Literature Review

In this chapter, I present a brief genealogy5 of the subject, English, and its sub-specialty,

English literature, in US secondary schools with attention to definitional and teleological shifts in

the 20th and 21st centuries. Understanding these shifts is critical to understanding both the nature

and the potential consequences of the efforts in the field of English education to address the

“race problem” through preparing race-conscious English teachers. In the following sections, I

explore enduring questions at the heart of English Education, “What is English?” and “Why do

we teach literature?” The subsequent section, “The Canon Wars,” provides a discursive overview

of the conflicts regarding what literature merits being taught in US secondary schools and

identifies the persistence and contestation of a Eurocentric canon as critical to the emergence of

social justice as an important concept in the field of English education. In the section, “How do

we teach literature?” I consider how literature is taught in US secondary schools.

Following this overview, I then briefly review the scholarship published since the turn of

the twenty-first century that presents key developments associated with race-consciousness

(racism, racial formation, race relations) and their ramifications for education. Efforts to address

race and racism in English education are informed by these developments, especially those in

culturally responsive pedagogies and multicultural education.

A Brief Genealogy of English Education

What is English Education?

Given that English education is the focus of this dissertation, in this section I define and

delimit the field of English education and its discursive space. The definition of English

5
By using the term ‘genealogy,’ I acknowledge a debt to the work of Michel Foucault, a French cultural analyst
who called the philosophical-historical investigations he undertook ‘genealogies.’
 21

education depends on the perspective of those defining it and variously refers to English classes

taught in US K-12 or UK primary or secondary schools, linguistic, creative writing or literature

courses taught at the college level and English as a second language instruction. For the purposes

of this study, I understand English education as the field of practice concerned with preparing

teachers who will teach the school subject “English,” which includes literature and composition,

in US secondary schools.

The English education discursive universe encompasses the conversations about teaching

and learning English Language Arts in U.S. secondary schools which occur across multiple

registers and sources, including, but not limited to: academic and practitioner journal articles,

social media posts and dialogues, English methods texts and edited series, conference

presentations and publications produced by committees within professional organizations such as

NCTE and the International Reaching Association (IRA). The field of English Education in the

US context brings together people from racialized backgrounds in contact zones (classrooms,

schools) where the power differentials among them are also racialized (white teachers/diverse

students) and where they use language to understand themselves and their relationship to others

in the world. Thus, the idea of race, racialization and racism are ubiquitous in the English

Education Universe are valid and urgent topics to be explored in the field. However, unlike the

fields of English rhetoric and composition studies (Lockett et al., 2020), TESOL (Kubota & Lin,

2006), and sociology of Education (Fox, 2021), the field of English Education has devoted little

scholarly attention to the idea of race and related concepts at the disciplinary level. This

dissertation is an early attempt to fill the gap.

 22

Preparation of Teachers of English

The relationship between the way English has been defined as a school subject, on the

one hand, and the way English teachers have been prepared, on the other, is a mutually

constitutive one, with each side prompting and reflecting changes in the other. Changes in

English teacher education are at once a reaction to and an engagement with the current state of

language in our world. Changes in the discipline and the definition of “literacy” itself have

expanded the scope and responsibilities of preparing English teachers. Demographic and political

shifts in the fabric of the United States over the past century and, in particular, during the six

decades since Brown v. Board of Education, have changed the context for teaching English

Language Arts (ELA). This changing context and related political, social, economic and

institutional considerations drive changes to the content and curriculum of ELA and changes to

the ways teacher education programs prepare future teachers.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the field of English Education has sought to

define its scope. In 2005 in response to the question “What is English Education?” the NCTE

CEE set forth that the field of English education encompasses three dimensions: (1) the teaching

and learning of English, broadly and inclusively defined, (2) the preparation and continuing

professional support of teachers of English at all levels of education; and (3) systematic inquiry

into the teaching and learning of English (CEE, 2008: para 1). The field of English Language

Arts Teacher Education, also called English Education, encompasses “interdisciplinary inquiry”

into the teaching and learning of English, as well as preparation and support of teachers who

“prepare learners to be creative, literate individuals; contributors to the cultural, social and

economic health of their communities; and fully participating and critically aware citizens of our

democracy in a complex, diverse and increasingly globalized world” (Alsup et al., 2007).
 23

Cultural and demographic shifts have changed the composition of learners in English classrooms

and their needs as students of English.

What is English?

The subject which we now interchangeably termed English, English studies and English

Language Arts has been defined and constituted in several ways. According to Applebee’s

(1974) history of English in United States schools, English emerged as a viable school subject

when it joined together previously distinct areas of study, including rhetoric, oratory, spelling,

grammar, literary history and reading. By the latter half of the 20 th century in the United States,

English - the school subject - was divided among three strands – ethical, classical and non-

academic (Applebee. 1974). The ethical tradition emphasized moral and cultural development,

the classical tradition focused on intellectual discipline and close textual study and the non-

academic tradition centered on enjoyment and appreciation. The ethical and classical themes

continue to dominate the curriculum and instruction of English in school settings, with a shared

emphasis on studying classic texts as defining pillars of US culture (Macaluso & Macaluso,

2018) and on English instruction as contributing to a student’s “personal growth” (Dixon, 1967).

At the university level, English - the discipline - has been conceptualized in multiple

distinct ways throughout its history. Over the course of 100 years, English has undergone a

number of name changes - criticism, literary criticism, then English, English Literature and

Language and finally literary studies, textual studies, culture and criticism and English studies

(Peel, 2005). The failure of the field to define itself and to distinguish between the teaching of

general literacy, on the one hand, and the teaching of content of English, contested as it is, on the

other, has added to the complexity of the question. Some have noted that English is a subject

unlike others, and it has been said that English is “a subject without content” (Medway, 1980).
 24

Pasternak et al. (2018) define the discipline of English somewhat narrowly as “the academic

field involving the study of literature and other texts, writing and other forms of composition,

and the study and use of language conventions,” but others (Patterson, 2002) have endorsed a

broader conceptualization of English, noting that English is concerned with more than facts or

content and is, as such, essentially unaccountable, and even ultimately mysterious. Peel (2005)

supports the notion that English is unique among the disciplines in that English particularly

encourages that practice of asking questions of the self, offering that, when it comes to English,

in its late 20th century manifestations in particular, “the questions are the answers.”

Why do we teach English literature?

The purpose of teaching English in US secondary schools, like its nomenclature and

content, has also seen many shifts. English emerged —after some inter-disciplinary rivalry

among Classics, Science, Geography, History, Civics and Morals during the nineteenth century

— as the curricular site where students were to draw upon available techniques for self-

formation, self-reflection, and self-problematization. Through guided engagement with these

discipline-specific set of practices, it was imagined that each student would develop into a

sensitive, empathetic and tolerant citizen, capable of self-regulation.

Over the 200-year history of English teaching in what is now the United States, the act of

teaching English has served a wide range of distinct goals, ranging from religious and moral

instruction to preparing students for college and career, to developing the intellect, to preparing

civic and democratic citizens (Applebee, 1974; Brass, 2015; Common Core State Standards,

2010; Gere et al., 1992). The models of secondary English language arts curriculum discussed at

the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar – the skills model, the cultural heritage model, and the personal

experience or process model - remain extant, though increasingly contested (Squire, 2003). In
 25

his History of the Teaching of English, Applebee (1974) understands the processes of English

study as understanding, expression and appreciation and the subject of English study as good

literature. For Applebee, the Report of the Committee of Ten (1894) provided the unifying

framework that organized English curriculum and pedagogy around two objectives: (1) to enable

the pupil to understand the expressed thoughts of others and to give expression of thoughts of his

own; and (2) to cultivate a taste for reading, to give the pupil some acquaintance with good

literature and to furnish him with the means of extending that acquaintance (Applebee, 1974).

Smagorinsky and Smith (1992) observe that the English classroom in the secondary

school context is today commonly understood to be the place where students learn literacy skills

that they then apply in other classes and settings. Dixon (2003), however, argues that rather than

focusing on trying to arrive at a shared definition of English, which he asserts often becomes

mired in an emphasis on skills, proficiencies, canonical texts and heritage, the subject should

instead be devoted toward a definitional process which describes the activities we engage in

through language. This notion of the use of language as a uniquely human activity with particular

import in the process of socialization is a point of agreement even among groups who differ in

their opinions of what should be taught and to what ends. Matthew Arnold, the most influential

spokesperson for the “tradition,” held a strong conviction that literature (namely, the classics)

had the effect of “spiritualizing life, letting light into the mind, inspiring and feeding the higher

forces of human nature” (Applebee, 1974). Hunter (1988) challenges this view of English as an

apolitical force, one which ostensibly stands outside of ideologies and allows students to

question them and revise these views. He instead engages a Foucauldian conception of English

and the teaching of English that considers issues of power and complicity.
 26

Literature and learning about self in relation to others

Patterson (2002) offers that secondary English was not designed to be about learning

literature in the same way as learning science, or learning mathematics, but rather it was (and is)

a subject where students learn to relate to themselves, to others and to the world in particular

ways, with literature being the accidental vehicle for that learning. In a similar vein, considering

the teaching of literature as an arena for exploring human relationality, the introduction to Doll

(2000) Like Letters in Running Water: A Mythopoetics of Curriculum serves as a defense of the

study of the humanities, particularly the works she calls “fiction,” or written texts united by their

use and exploration of the imagination. Doll insists that adventures in language are not “mere

exercises,” indeed, she posits that “the engagement with fiction (prose, drama, poetry, myth,

fairy tale, dream) can be a learning experience of the first order.” First and foremost, she asserts

that one of the most valuable characteristics of fiction is its potential to “revivify” our ailing

imaginations, keeping us from completely falling prey to an increasingly literal, glaringly

available world. In addition, as our imaginations are stirred by exposure to fiction, so are our

societies and consciences shaken by it. Doll (2000) asserts, we are poked, and prodded, and

disturbed by fiction until we must reconsider and possibly reform our views of the world around

us and the people with which we must share it; as she says, “when stories are told, one sees

differently.” Doll finds that fiction helps us know ourselves better, tapping “that which courses

through the inner person,” and helping us to “grasp more coherently the world within as well as

without.” Fiction, paradoxically, is the “lie that pedagogy needs in order to uncover the truths

that make us human.”

Discussions about the pedagogical and sociological value of studying literature

necessarily engage highly contested questions of literary merit. Mortimer Adler and Robert

Maynard Hutchins at the University of Chicago were both staunch defenders of the canon. In
 27

1952 they introduced the “Great Books,” a collection of the seminal works of the Western

tradition, which would allow readers entry into the “Great Conversation,” the tradition that

passed knowledge from one thinker to another. Adler and Hutchins critiqued progressive

education’s neglect of this tradition of “the deep resemblances between human beings, calling for

a fixed program of learning which no child may evade, and the importance of the past”

(Applebee, 1974). Hirsch (1987) held that knowledge of a common core of classical literature

(and philosophy) is necessary for the creation of common culture and to enable citizens to

communicate and engage with each other in literate discourse. Bloom (1987) believed the

establishment of a canon related to the Great Conversation was necessary for people to learn

from the tradition of the great thinkers of the past who projected a prescription for the present

and a vision for the future.

This notion of teaching literature as bearing a prescriptive political function, however

predated the publication of Hutchins and Adler (1952) influential anthology. According to Brass

(2013), English teaching at the cusp of the 20 th century was already implicit in the project of U.S.

nation-building and in the promulgation of certain constructions of “American” identity. Brass

(2013) explains that the first influential guides for English teaching published in the United

States were designed to weaken youths’ ties to more immediate people and places and to reorient

their sense of self, others, and the world, around imagined communities that differentiated

America/Americans from uncivilized, irrational and illiterate “others.” Brass (2011) exposes the

distinct pastoral, scientific and bureaucratic constructions that undergirded the emergence of

English as a subject in what is now the United States. Since the turn of the 20 th century,

however, the subject English has also played a central, though often overlooked role in nation-

building and upholding the state. In English classes in the United States ‘practices of modern
 28

governance’ (Brass, 2010) are engaged to foster youths’ self-disciplinary capacities and attune

them to norms of individual and national identity (Donald, 1992; Green & Cormack, 2008, 2011;

Green & Reid, 2002; Hunter, 1988; Morgan, 1990, 1995; Peel et al., 2000). Histories published

by the NCTE have characterized the rise of English teaching as a progressive movement driven

by commitments to cultural inclusion; however, from the 1890s to 1910s, as English became

central to schooling, the subject was assigned a major role in the nation-building project and

consequently deployed epistemologically violent hierarchical constructions of difference that

divided the world by race, gender and nation (Brass, 2010; Wynter, 2003).

While the lineage of ‘modern’ literary education in the United States, since its

emergence, has been implicated in practices of pastoral power, discipline, punishment, biopower

and governmentality and national mythmaking, (Brass, 2010), and despite the emergence of

notions of social justice in the nineteenth century (Nussbaum, 2006; Rawls, 1971), it is only

since the end of the 20th century and early 21st century that issues of educational equity and social

justice have emerged as salient in the English education academic discourse (Alsup and Miller,

2014; Apple, 2006; Ayers, 1998; Bender-Slack, 2010; Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019;

Charest et al., 2011; Cochran-Smith, 1999 & 2004; Groenke, 2010; Miller et al., 2008; Macaluso

& Macaluso, 2018; Miller & Kirkland, 2010; Morrell, 2005; Nieto, 2000; Winn, 2013). While

most English teacher educators would agree that to be successful, preservice teachers must be

prepared for the diversity of students they will encounter and be comfortable modeling and

encouraging fairness, equity and respect in their classrooms, the preparation of teachers of

English continues to be challenged from within the field of English education. According to

Alsup and Miller (2014), the field has become, “increasingly vulnerable to losing social justice

as a critical tenet to those who believe that the teaching of academic skills and knowledge alone,
 29

when aligned with standards, should ostensibly provide youth with the tools they need to bring

about a more just society.” This internecine contestation and denial of the political nature of

teaching English is most visible in debates around what literature should be taught and to what

ends, commonly termed ‘The Canon Wars.’

The Canon Wars

Proponents of the canon (Adler &Hutchins, 1952; Bloom, 1987; Bloom, 1995) argue that

there should be a core to literary studies which would consist of the books which are

indispensable for any literate or well-educated person. Gere, Fairbanks, Howes, Roop, and

Schaafsma (1992) argue that the debate over the literary canon has taken on great importance

because it embodies most of the key educational issues of our time: the knowledge that is most

worth teaching, the teacher’s role in fostering independent thinking and the extent to which

schools will reproduce the social order or create a new equitable order. This view of literature as

a cultural marker and the study of literature as an apprenticeship into cultured society that

imbues one with knowledge and judgment about the future of humanity, is quintessentially

Euromodern and therefore, at its core, a race-related issue. A decolonial lens applied to the

Canon Wars illuminates how the legacy of colonialism and coloniality operate through the power

dynamics that dictate the curriculum. Adler and Hutchins’ selection criteria for the “Great

Books” drawn from Western Civilization were threefold: the book must have been relevant to

contemporary matters, and not only important in its historical context; it must be rewarding to re-

read repeatedly with respect to liberal education; and it must be a part of “the great conversation

about the great ideas,” relevant to at least twenty-five of the 102 “Great Ideas” as identified by

the editor of the series’ comprehensive index, which they dubbed the “Syntopicon,” to which

they belonged. The books were not chosen on the basis of ethnic and cultural inclusiveness,
 30

rather, historical influence was seen as sufficient for inclusion (Adler, 1990). A second edition

was published in 1990 and included some updated translations, some removal of works and

significant additions from the 20th century.

Applebee (1993) survey of 488 U.S. high schools produced a comprehensive picture of

the content and approaches to the teaching of literature in the late 1980s. Findings from

Stallworth, Gibbons and Fauber (2006) similar study nearly two decades later demonstrates the

fixed nature of the high school canon: six of the seven titles that were prominent in 1988

reappeared on Stallworth et al. (2006) list. Indeed, the persistence of this canon can be attributed,

at least in part, to curricular mandates, budgetary restrictions and teachers’ personal experiences

with reading these classics of U.S. literature, however, understanding the permanence and

progression of ‘the canon’ of secondary school literature as an aspect of Euromodernity helps to

contextualize the problem in the framing of this study. Teachers of English ‘inherit’ book lists

which are often mandated by school districts and many teachers of English express a lack of

agency in determining which texts they teach and read with students in English classes in US

middle and high schools (Macaluso & Macaluso, 2019).

Three ideological realities converge in the canon wars that are worth noting. First, there is

a pervasive set of texts, that while undefined, populate the syllabi and bookshelves of classrooms

across the United States (Applebee, 1993; Stotsky, 2010). Second, there is a tradition that

dictates how these texts are read and taught within the realm of English education, aptly

conceptualized in the assertion that “they’ve canonized our minds” (Macaluso & Macaluso,

2019). The discourse surrounding the canon wars, however, rarely acknowledges a third, rather

insidious reality, which is that the dominance of texts deemed canonical alongside the dominant

methods and standards by which these texts are taught, promulgate what Kirkland (2011) calls a
 31

“status quo master narrative,” which includes notions of Whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality,

ability, culture, literary merit and even methods of reading, teaching and learning (Macaluso &

Macaluso, 2019).

Today, it is generally agreed among canon conservatives that the “multiculturalists” won

the canon wars. Indeed, middle and high school reading lists have broadened to include more

works by women and minoritized writers, and most scholars consider that a positive

development. Still, most people in the English Education universe understand the canon wars

remain unsettled. As the canon wars rage on, there seems to be a more complicated sense on

both sides of the costs and benefits of the curricular transformations that have taken place over

the past twenty years. The Canon Wars today, more than in previous eruptions, revolve around

‘crises in education’ that connect to the racial and demographic shifts enumerated in the

introduction of this proposal. There is an ongoing and hotly contested scrimmage around the

question of what students deserve, need and want to read, and what the shared experience of

reading literature in schools should achieve. Canon conservatives decry the loss of a shared

‘body of knowledge and cultural references’ which they believe are integral to the formation of a

shared national identity and its related values. They bemoan the negative impact on the character

and literary appreciation of a generation of students who they believe will suffer for being denied

access to the best literature and society (Douthat, 2007).

Canon disruptors, on the other hand, challenge the traditional canon by advocating for a

more inclusive, representative and equitable language arts curriculum, arguing convincingly that

the canon must be reimagined to be more inclusive and relevant to the lives of today’s students.

Social media has transformed how writers and educators promote their work, interact with

readers and critics and how readers respond to these texts (Thomas, 2019). Tricia Ebarvia, co-
 32

founder of #disrupttexts, a crowdsourced, grassroots effort by teachers for teachers, explains

their position as a belief “that education, and literacy in particular, can be transformative.

Through a more equitable curriculum and antiracist pedagogy, we believe that we can affect a

more just world. All students deserve an education that is inclusive of the rich diversity of the

human experience. They deserve one that introduces them to and affirms the voices both inside

and outside their individual lives” (Ebarvia, 2021).

The canon wars today are waged not exclusively in ivory towers, but also on social media

and increasing in the editorial and feature pages of well-regarded newsmagazines and

newspapers. This democratization of the means of communication and public discourse has not

only shifted the conversation, but it has also opened the debate to persons who might have, in

another epoch, not had occasion to be openly critical of canonical texts nor the ways in which

they are taught. It has also expanded the range of theoretical approaches to literary criticism. As

the turf of the Canon Wars has expanded, the lines are drawn and re-drawn between those who

defend the idea of a distinct body of knowledge and texts that students should ‘master’ and those

who focus more on increasing the diversity of texts and textual modalities as well as the modes

of inquiry and interpretation (literacies) applied to a diversity of literatures.

How do we teach literature?

Challenges to a canonical approach to literature and challenges to traditional methods of

teaching literature are concomitant. At the turn of the twenty-first century, studies confirmed the

continued overreliance on lecture, recitation and seatwork in English classrooms (Nystrand et al.,

1997; Applebee et al., 2003), while changing student demographics in US schools prompted

some (Boyd et al., 2006; Kirkland, 2008) to call for a “new” English teacher education; one that,

in part, acknowledges the multiple languages and literacies that students bring to the classroom.
 33

The adoption in 2009 of the Common Core Standards for Reading Literature

(http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RL/11-12/) provide useful context that helps garner

a general idea of how literature is taught in US secondary schools, if we accept that English

teachers’ instructional decisions are guided by adherence to standards. The CCCS mandates a

focus on four general areas for literature: analysis of key ideas and details; analysis of craft and

structure; integration of knowledge and ideas; and range of reading and level of text complexity.

In the decade since the establishment of CCCS, and bolstered, in part, by the adoption of

the NCTE/NCATE social justice standard, critical visions for teaching literature in secondary

schools have proliferated and now include critical literature pedagogy (Borsheim-Black et al.,

2014), critical inquiry (Beach et al., 2016), critical literacy (Morrell, 2015), critical media

studies, and restorative justice. These critical approaches aim to ensure that students engage with

texts in ways that acknowledge their full humanity and result in social action, justice and love.

They directly and indirectly challenge the Eurocentric canon. Other approaches, such as

deconstructionism and reader response, also challenge the canon.

Based on an analysis of nearly one hundred syllabi from 300 university-based methods

courses, Smagorinsky and Whiting (1995) found that the largest number of syllabi took a survey

approach to teaching methods, covering many issues and topics in a single semester. In response

to continued changes in the sociopolitical landscape that are reflected in the English classroom,

Pasternak et al. (2014) conducted a comprehensive review of the research in English teacher

education to determine how the field of English teacher education is adapting to the demands of

educating English teachers in the twenty-first century. As part of the larger study, they

developed a questionnaire aimed at capturing how the day-to-day practices and pedagogies of
 34

English teacher educators changed in the two decades since Smagorinsky and Whiting (1995)

study.

Pasternak et al. (2014) also conducted a literature review to ascertain the current state of

scholarship related to teaching ELA methods with the aim of synthesizing research in English

education, English teacher education, and English methods courses. Their findings identify the

following issues as critical for twenty-first century teaching: teaching literacy strategies,

integrating fieldwork with coursework, addressing content standards in planning and teaching,

meeting the needs of English language learners and teaching with and about technology. The

expansiveness and subjectivity of the work involved in preparing teachers of English, while

presenting a major challenge to the field as far as defining itself, nonetheless also invites

innovation and responsiveness to our changing world.

Swenson et al., (2006) point to the impact of new technologies on every aspect of the

teaching and learning of English which demands that English teacher educators reconsider taken-

for-granted knowledge in the field, such as what counts as ‘text.’ Kirkland’s New English

Education model (2008, 2010) is committed to diversity, technology and hybridity. English

teacher education researchers (Goodwyn et al., 2014; Hawthorne et al., 2012) identified five

major competencies for English teachers to learn during their teacher preparation experience: 1)

to be prepared for students who are more racially, culturally and linguistically diverse than the

majority of teacher candidates; (2) to address how new technologies and new literacies are

changing communication practices; (3) to understand literacy practices at the middle and

secondary levels; (4) to understand K-12 content standards, their associated assessments, and

their impact on teaching practices; and (5) to engage in field experiences that align with methods

courses. Hallman (2017) calls on teacher educators to ‘educate teachers to grapple with
 35

unsettling ideas, as describe by Kirkland (2010), “in which authority is de-centered, notions of

truth are questioned and questionable, grand narratives are deconstructed, knowledge is

functional, and Englishes are plural.”

Literacy is now more broadly defined as a set of sociocultural, situated understandings

(Gee, 1996; Street, 2003) and English teachers in secondary schools have had to assume the

responsibility of continuing literacy instruction in the upper grades (Wilson, 2011). In response

English Education has added some focus on teaching literacy (how to read and write English) as

opposed to the content of English (literature, composition, grammar, etc.). Winn (2013) calls for

Restorative English Education—that is, a pedagogy of possibilities that employs literature and

writing to seek justice and restore and, in some cases, create peace that reaches beyond the

classroom walls. A Restorative English Education requires English Language Arts teachers to

resist zero-tolerance policies that sort, label and eventually isolate particular youth, and to

embrace a restorative discourse in which all young people have an opportunity to experience

“radical healing” by engaging in deliberate, literate acts that illuminate pathways of resilience.

It is evident from the review of literature to this point that teacher educators and

educational researchers have produced knowledge that shapes how the field is defined. In the

following section, I review recent developments in race-conscious scholarship in education

literature, including literature which offer critiques the role of teacher education and profession

development programs in race-consciousness.

Recent Developments in Race-Conscious Educational Scholarship

There are two irreconcilables yet co-eval conceptions of race in the United States.

Scholars have agreed for many years that the concept of race is a social construction, rather than

a biological fact. That race is not biological and has no genetic meaning was confirmed by the
 36

Human Genome Project (2003), yet views which present race as an inherited set of

characteristics that sort human beings into distinct and immutable groups persist and permeate

our societal structures (Gill, 2020; Kittrell, 2011). Over time, culturally-oriented explanations of

difference have supplanted biological ones. Both, however, serve the same purpose; they support

the use of race as a proxy and a marker to explain and/or justify the exclusion and/or

marginalization of people of color from occupational, educational and other benefits. Race

“exists,” then, as an idea or set of discursive practices which societies have used over time to

separate people into hierarchically organized groups (Hall, 1996b; Darder &Torres, 2004).

Since the turn of the 21 st century, several educational scholars and areas of study within

education have engaged in theoretically and empirically rich conversations about racial

dynamics. Critical scholars of race, having deconstructed race as a concept which ascribes to

individuals/groups innate and immutable genetic or cultural characteristics, also show the power

of race as a discursive practice or ideological tool which confers material advantages to those on

the top of racialized hierarchies and punishments and deprivations to those at the bottom

(Dumas, 2016a, 2016b; Gadsden & Dixon-Román, 2016; Gilborn, 2005, 2015; Ladson-Billings,

2006, 2009; Leonardo, 2009, 2013; Martin, 2009; O’Connor, 1999; O’Connor, Hill, & Robinson,

2009; O’Connor et al., 2011; Warikoo, 2016). Intellectual leaders in the fields of multicultural

education, such as James Banks (2006) or Christine Sleeter and Carl Grant (1987), have taken

racial dynamics in schools seriously for decades. There is also an abundance of work and long

tradition of research on race in the history of education (e.g., Anderson, 2004) and in critical race

theory (CRT) in education (e.g., Bell, 1980; Cabrera, 2018; Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Ladson-

Billings & Tate, 1995; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Stovall, 2006). This more recent tradition of

CRT has gained extensive visibility in the last decade and represents some of the most critical
 37

engagement with the history, context and consequences of racialization in educational

institutions (Lewis et al., 2019).

A considerable number of studies have attempted to address the sociocultural

implications of demographic changes in student population, however most studies that combine

race and education approach the race problem from a sociological lens, employing theories such

as intergroup threat and contact theories to theorize the implications of what has been called “the

Browning of American public schools (Bryant et al., 2017). Additionally, many studies in this

area examine the relationship between race and student (academic) outcomes ( Aldana &

Wynter, 2015).

Besides operating as a marker of educational inequality, as taken up by these studies, race

also operates as a means of subjectification, whereby young people are socialized to inhabit

certain positionalities toward themselves and in relation to others. Schools are a critical site for

this subjectification. As Epstein and Gist (2013) explain, just as ideological constructions of

hierarchically organized racial groups are used to divide and distract, the concept of racial

identity exists as a ‘discursive process of representation’ (Hall, 1996a; Yon 2002), used both to

sustain solidarity and maintain power relations.

One recent development in the study of race in education that gets at this discursive

nature of race is the concept of school racial-ethnic socialization (Hughes et al., 2017), which

describes explicit and implicit ways schools teach about race and culture, encompassing the

“behaviors, practices, and social regularities that communicate information and worldviews

about race and ethnicity to children.” Studies have examined how students are socialized into

particular racialized positionalities through explicit messaging (Bryd & Hope, 2020), implicit or

hidden norms and values (Banks, 2007; Bar-Tal, 1997; Perry, 2001; Priest et al., 2014), policies
 38

and pedagogies, including more or less critical forms of multicultural education (Wynter, 1992)

and the absence of any multicultural content or pedagogies altogether (Wills et al., 2004).

Sociological and psychological studies on intergroup contact and prejudice reduction

(Paluck & Green, 2009; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) and racial discrimination (Seaton et al., 2011)

in school, as well as research on multicultural education (Bennett, 2001; Sleeter & Grant, 2011),

and culturally relevant teaching (Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2004) have all provided evidence of

how school practices around race and culture can shape youths’ ethnic-racial identities, racial

biases, cultural competence and adjustment from a sociological lens.

Byrd and Hope (2020), for example, attempted to understand school ethnic-racial

socialization as a psychological process using a framework of school racial socialization to

explore six predominantly Black public charter schools in an urban area, finding a high

frequency but limited scope in cultural socialization and promotion of cultural competence

messages. Using more sociological lenses, Fergus (2009) illustrated how students and teachers’

perceptions and use of phenotype variations mediated Latino adolescents’ identities in school.

The study illustrates how, although people situate themselves within particular racialized

categories based on family ancestry and/or sociocultural affinities and to claim solidarity with

others, they also are situated into racialized positions by others according to ascribed somatic and

cultural categories, or what Wynter calls ‘chaos roles’ (Epstein & Gist, 2015; Wynter, 2003).

The field of multicultural education has also provided theoretical perspectives on how

schools can promote different racial ideologies through the curriculum. For example, Sleeter and

Grant (2011) describe five approaches to educating about difference, from an approach that

regards culturally different students as lacking the skills, values, and knowledge to succeed in
 39

mainstream classrooms to an approach that prepares youth to restructure society to eliminate

inequities based on race, gender, social class and other social identities.

Culture-focused approaches to education have provided many of the key theoretical

developments in race-consciousness in education. Aldana and Byrd (2015) identify five

dimensions of ethnic-racial socialization in schools focused on culture: promotion of cultural

competence; cultural socialization; mainstream socialization; colorblind socialization; and

critical consciousness socialization. The first, promotion of cultural competence, refers to

learning about the histories and traditions of other groups. It aligns with simplistic notions of

multiculturalism or support for diversity. The second, cultural socialization, is the process

through which youth learn about their own racial and cultural background. Aspects of culturally

relevant or responsive teaching, which uses students’ cultural backgrounds to promote their

academic achievement and identity development (Aronson & Laughter, 2015; Gay, 2002;

Howard, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Young, 2010), and Afrocentric education, which aims to

socialize children into an African worldview (Asante, 1991; Chow-Hoy, 2001; Clarkson &

Johnstone, 2011; King & Schwartz, 2018) fall under cultural socialization. In contrast,

mainstream socialization refers to learning about mainstream, Eurocentric, white U.S. norms,

values and traditions and explores dimensions of egalitarianism or individualism (Hughes et al.,

2006). Fourth, colorblind socialization refers to messages that encourage youth to ignore the

importance of race in society and their personal lives. Colorblind ideologies are associated with

higher racial prejudice and have been theorized to be harmful for the academic motivation and

success of minority youth (Atwater, 2008; Schofield, 2006).

Finally, as opposed to colorblind socialization, critical consciousness

socialization teaches youth to recognize and address differences between racial groups in power
 40

and privilege. This dimension is referred to as “preparation for bias” (Hughes et al., 2006).

However, Byrd & Hope use the term critical consciousness in this case to underscore the fact

that youth can be prepared for privilege and to be the perpetrators of bias. Furthermore, all youth

can be taught about structural forms of racism that exist beyond and inform individual

interactions.

Since 2000, a growing literature on race and schooling has focused on the term “racial

literacy.” The term was first conceptualized by legal scholar Guinier (2003) as a diagnostic and

analytic tool that involves “the ability to read race in conjunction with institutional and

democratic structures” and that defines racism as a “structural problem rather than a purely

individual one” (Guinier, 2003: 120). Racial literacy as a framework is distinctive for its

attention to the deciphering the ‘durable racial grammar’ that structures our society and its

attention to the subjective and psychological impact of race on racialized individuals. Racial

literacy reads race as ‘epiphenomenal,’ paying attention to the ways in which race plays itself out

psychologically and interpersonally (Guinier, 2004). Researchers have used racial literacy

scholarship as a basis for developing definitions and measuring the extent of enactment of racial

literacy practices by teachers or teacher candidates—both racially minoritized and white,

depending on the study (Epstein & Schieble, 2019; Colomer, 2019; Blaisdell, 2018; Solic &

Riley, 2019; Pabon & Basile, 2019).

Race in Teacher Education Research

Efforts in the field of English education have drawn, additionally, from teacher education

literature more broadly. Given the cultural mismatch between the predominately white US

teaching force and the racial, cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity of the US K-12 school

population (Brown, 2014; Evans-Winters & Hoff, 2011; National Center for Education Statistic,
 41

2013; Sleeter, 2017), this literature overwhelmingly focuses on white teacher identity and

reflections on culturally relevant practice. Hambacher and Ginn (2021) systematic review of

teacher educators’ race-visible efforts in preservice teacher (PST) education and in-service

teacher (IST) education between 2002 and 2018 found that across the 39 articles that addressed

anti-racist efforts in teacher education, twenty-eight were empirical, eight were

reflective/descriptive, and three were conceptual in nature. More than 70% of the articles focused

on educating PSTs to work in racially diverse settings, and the remaining articles examined the

learning of ISTs, administrators and guidance counselors. Course assignments, such as reflection

papers, online discussions and culminating projects, were the most commonly collected data

source. The second most common data collection method involved interviewing participants.

Surveys and questionnaires were the least common data source. Across the empirical

publications, researchers mostly examined a specific teacher education course or experience.

Centering Whiteness notwithstanding, there have been important interventions in this

area. Jupp and colleagues (2016) have articulated a field of inquiry, white teacher identity

studies, which focuses on a need to prepare and “conscientize” an as-yet predominantly white

teaching force “for teaching across understandings of race, class, culture, language, and other

identity differences in increasingly diverse public schools” (Jupp et al., 2016: 1152). In their

review of white teacher identity scholarship, they identify race-evasion by white teachers as a

dominant theme of an earlier “first wave” of studies in this area. While this theme persists in

scholarship of a current “second wave,” Jupp et al. (2016) note the emergence of white PSTs and

ISTs who recognize and wrestle with race and Whiteness in their students and themselves.

Hammacher and Ginn (2021) note that these race-visible white teacher identity studies differ

from studies characterizing the first wave by relying on purposive samples of white educators
 42

who demonstrate varying degrees of race-visible conscientization. The themes within the field’s

second wave include, among others, the limitations of white identity development stage models,

the development of cultural competence and a willingness to learn and programmatic changes to

curriculum and pedagogies that engender changes in educators’ professional identity

development.

Along with this literature, a growing body of scholarship in the field of English

Education also seeks to respond to the shifting zeitgeist in response to the shifting demographics

in schools. Literacy scholars have used Gunier’s concept of racial literacy (2003, 2004 to

analyze high school English teachers’ approaches to teaching about race and racism (Skerrett,

2011). Current literature in English education also brings together theory, research and practice

to challenge literary Whiteness in the instruction of white students (Borsheim-Black &

Sargianides, 2019; Macaluso et al., 2016), white linguistic supremacy (Lysicott, 2019 ) and to

dismantle anti-Black linguistic racism (Baker-Bell, 2020). Winn (2013, 2018) calls for teacher

educators and teachers of English to (re)imagine ELA education as a tool that repairs centuries-

long harm emerging from and perpetuated by English education onto racially and linguistically

minoritized US communities. Similarly, Johnson (2021) posits an original framework, Critical

Race English Education, that calls for the transformation of English education to embrace rather

than reject Blackness.

Despite such efforts, Yolanda and Price (2021) find that conversations about race in

English teacher education happen “infrequently and with great trepidation” (p. 1). Vigorous

equity debate among researchers and practitioners consistently falls short of critically examining

the unspoken ways that English teachers are inducted into the political aspect of their role and
 43

the predominance of critical theories and sociological lenses on race and race relations in

education research has meant that other aspects of the race problem have been neglected.

This review took stock of important longstanding contributions and new developments in

race-consciousness in English education, while also demonstrating that there is much more to be

done. There is very little scholarship produced in English education that focuses on the

preparation of English teachers who are not white. The concept of race and the teaching of

literature and composition in US secondary schools; the racial identity development of Black and

Brown students and their perceptions of race-visible efforts in the context of the teaching of

literature and composition in US secondary schools (Haddix, 2012; Martinez, 2017; Tatum,

1997) or the development of knowledge about race as an area of pedagogical content knowledge

for English education. Critical race theories or theories that are critical of the role of the idea of

race in teaching and learning are almost entirely absent, though there are a few extant works that

combine cultural and critical theories (Epstein & Gist, 2013) in what appear to be initial attempts

toward a theory of race in English education.

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Chapter 3 : Theoretical Framework

This study seeks to contribute to our understanding of how English education may

contribute to animating or exhausting the project of modernity. The line of inquiry I pursue

concerns the institutional role of US university-based English teacher education in the project of

modernity, by considering how documents in the field reify dominant constructions of race,

class, nationhood, gender, patriotism, belonging and value, and contribute to problematic

othering constructions of students, their families and communities. This decolonial lens departs

from much existing research that tends to examine the subject of race in English teacher

preparation by focusing on teacher and teacher educator practice, often from the viewpoint of

phenomenological or ethnographic inquiries (observations and interviews centered around

classroom practice) into how teachers develop and enact race-conscious or critical pedagogies

(Hammacher & Ginn, 2021).

While some education scholars have taken up a decolonial lens to examine the teaching

of English, much of this theorization concerns the role of English education of bilingual students

in the struggle to maintain their linguistic and cultural traditions in the face of racism and

monolingualism (Valdez, 1997; Motha, 2006, 2014; Phillipson, 1992; Macedo, 2019) with much

less attention paid to understanding how colonial power dynamics operate through the teaching

of English within the US context, to racially, culturally and linguistically diverse students

specifically through the standardization of teacher competencies related to race-conscious

pedagogy and practice.

Notwithstanding these noteworthy efforts, decolonial thought that goes beyond

multicultural or ethnic studies approaches to the teaching of secondary English has been largely
 45

absent from the discourse in both theory and practice. Further, English education has yet to

adequately contextualize processes for beginning English teachers to build their race-

consciousness as it pertains to understanding race-related challenges and issues in the teaching of

English in a decolonial framework. Much work in English teacher education has focused on

strategies to develop teacher candidates’ dispositions and skills to serve racially, ethnically and

linguistically diverse children and to select literature that is engaging and culturally relevant.

Also, few traditional studies of English education in the US have acknowledged the critical role

that the study of literature in secondary school plays in the construction of the Other as part of

the larger nation-building project of compulsory public education.

The previous section points to how various approaches to race, especially those that

employ a cultural lens, have been taken up in education and teacher education more broadly and,

more specifically, in English teacher education framework. In the following, I draw on Walter

Mignolo’s conceptual triad, Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality and the work of Sylvia Wynter

and Toni Morrison to examine how race and race-consciousness operates in and through English

education texts. Taken together, Morrison and Wynter narrate a robust hermeneutic for

deciphering complicated questions concerning the function of English education in the

subjectification of racialized young people and how the role of English teacher has become

increasingly charged with this process.

Morrison, the Africanist Presence and Processes of Othering and Subjectification in White

American Literary Imagination.

“I want to draw a map, so to speak, or a critical geography and use that map to open as much

space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of

the New World - without the mandate for conquest” (Morrison 1992 p.3).
 46

Morrison’s stated objective In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary

Imagination, (1992) is to expand the study of American literature into “a wider landscape” by

outlining “an attractive, fruitful, and productive critical project, unencumbered by dreams of

subversion or rallying gestures at fortress walls (p.3).” Morrison draws this distinction to

establish her project in contrast to other projects, literary and otherwise, that are steeped in the

logic of modernity and its colonial logics of conquest. Playing in the Dark yields a critical

perspective that is at once uniquely African American, deeply philosophical and, I argue,

decolonial.

Playing in the Dark offers a novel method of reading American literature/writers and a

new language for literary criticism of the U.S. literary tradition that focuses on what she calls the

“Africanist presence,” a concept that captures “the denotative and connotative blackness that

African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings

and misreading that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people.” (p.7) Engaging the

Africanist Presence as a tool for analysis unsettles the knowledge claims that maintain that

canonical American literature developed unimpacted by the presence of Africans and African-

Americans in the United States. Further, through the Africanist Presence Morrison theorizes how

this ubiquitous but marginalized presence was integral to the development of these American

writers’ sense of Americanness (p.6).

The Africanist Presence operates on several levels. On the level of literary criticism, it

describes the development of Black characters in U.S. literature. As cultural critique, The

Africanist Presence creates conceptual space for exploring these black (sic) characters and how

they are simultaneously misread and overlooked, both in the sense of their importance to the
 47

literary texts themselves and to the larger traditions of U.S. literature. As a work of intellectual

history, Morrison’s inquiry considers the presence of Black characters, both named and

anonymous, in the fiction of white U.S. writers, distinguishes American literature as a coherent

entity (p.6) looking at elements of author’s craft such as narrative strategies, and their uses of

idiom.

For example, Morrison reads beyond the narrative, to illuminate the centrality and utility

of the Black women characters to the moral conflict and meaning in Henry James’ What Maisie

Knew, Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives and Willa Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl,

and questions the scholarly indifference surrounding these characters (p.14). These Black women

characters, read through an American Africanist presence lens, function metaphorically, to reveal

aspects of early racial formation of in the US, or, in Morrison’s words, “the invention and effect

of Africanism in the United States (p.15).” Morrison reads Hemingway and deciphers the racial

subtext of Hemingway’s sexualization of Black men in his novels through textual strategies such

as fetishization, stereotyping, condensation, displacement, and allegory. Morrison’s Africanist

Presence lens applied to Willa Cather’s Sapphira and the Slave Girl deciphers how race impacts

theme and plot in that novel; reading Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force

that figures so significantly in the literature of early U.S. or “to contemplate how Africanist

personae, narrative, and idiom moved and enriched the text…to consider what the engagement

meant for the work of the writer’s imagination” (p.16). Morrison contends that, no matter how

minor such Black characters might seem to the main plot, their very presence signifies a deep

abiding set of moral and ethical conflicts that trouble European and Euro-U.S. authors as artists

in a deeply racialized landscape.

 48

Morrison traces the social construction of race in America as occurring by means of the

formation of this Africanist presence in American literature, which began with establishing

hierarchical difference, progressed to surrogation of the Africanist presence for musings on the

nature of white social identity in the Romantic era and the final state, the making visible of the

Africanist presence. Morrison challenges the epistemological assumptions made by literary

historians and critics about the genealogy of American literature hold that traditional, canonical

American literature developed completely independent and uninfluenced by the 400-year-old

presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States (p. 4). She shows,

instead, that the construction of white American identity as illustrated in American literary

classics, and in American cultural history as such is in fact dependent on and tied to an unfree,

Black, slave or Africanist presence.

When Morrison explains how white American authors ascribed African racial identity

with symbolic meanings and connotations, her theorizing illuminates what has become the

cornerstone of the social construction of race in America—that is, the racialization of non-

European peoples and the maintenance of innocence, ignorance and race-free status among

people of European descent. The Africanist presence that Morrison makes visible is essential to

the processes of Othering that she sees as operating through American national literature as part

of a “shared process of exclusion” among Europeans and the Europeanized “—of assigning

designation and value—[which] has led to the popular and academic notion that racism is a

“natural,” if irritating, phenomenon.” (p.7). Morrison’s theory of the Africanist presence

provides a conceptualization of how white American subjectivity became coherent through a

process of “distancing Africanism” which creates a contrasting image of those who are not
 49

white. This process, Morrison argues, became the operative mode of a new cultural hegemony.

(p.8)

Morrison’s work here contributes to an ongoing critical argument that brings out the

contradictions of white normative human science and literature.

Subjectification of the Africanist Presence in English Education

In its role as the non-American “Other,” the Africanist presence is, at once, subjugated

and rendered less than human, and powerful in its capacity to define the white American identity

and to threaten to expose the truth of the violence and inhumanity at the heart of white American

identity. Drawing on this hypothesis, where Morrison considers what the Africanist presence in

literature might reveal about white American identity, I explore how the “racially and culturally

diverse student” is constructed in English education texts in a comparable manner to Morrison’s

account of the construction and usage of the Africanist presence in early American literature.

What might the development of, and subsequent subjectification of the “diverse student” in

English teacher education tell us about white American English teacher identity? The theoretical

framework for this study borrows this interrogatory and hermeneutic frame which Morrison

applied to the art of literary criticism to the study of English teacher education. It provides a

multifaceted lens to this study. The subjectification of Africanness occurs and is central in the

literary texts that make up much of the secondary English American Literature canon and in

American literary criticism. This is important to examining English teacher education because

literacy criticism is foundational to the construction of the discipline of English and its parallel as

a school subject in the secondary curriculum. This is the subjectification of Africanness at the

instructional level.
 50

Importantly, as this study will reveal, the subjectification of Africanness is not a practice

confined to the literature page, but in fact mirrors similar processes occurring in schools with

non-fictional, fully human, living Black characters. Epistemologically, the subjectification of

Africanness operates through the sociogenic principle applied to explain and account for the

challenges of teaching “diverse students.” It can be seen in the emaciated account of Black life

and livingness that has become curricularized and offered to students and to future and current

teachers as knowledge. It is in the many flawed assumptions about what Black and Brown

students need and deserve out of their schooling and, of particular interest to me, their English

teachers.

Reading with Morrison, in this study I focus on the discursive construction of the Other,

looking, for example, at the presumed notion of Americanness and Otherness across many

aspects of English teacher education, such as how teachers and students of ELA are discursively

constructed and deconstructing how the problem of power inequality is (re)entrenched by the

ways in which we define, curate, teach and standardize teaching “diverse students” in English

education, specifically looking at the ways in which the concept of race and racism has been

taken up in the field.

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Pillars of Wynterian Thought for English Education

I draw on Sylvia Wynter’s work to develop further a decolonial perspective on race-

consciousness in the English education field. For the purposes of this dissertation study, I focus

on three key tenets of Wynterian thought as theoretical pillars. Each tenet represents Wynter’s

named conceptualization of a problem, along with a Wynterian solution to that problem. They

include Man and the category human; sociogeny and Black Studies alterity perspective; and the

Word of Man and Science of the Word. I outline these tenets and then briefly discuss how they

collectively apply to questions that preoccupy our disciplinary imagination in English Education.

Man and the category human

Wynter, born in 1928, is a Jamaican novelist, dramatist, critic, philosopher, professor and

essayist. She was the first Black Jamaican woman to publish a novel, The Hills of Hebron

(1962). In this novel, Wynter weaves a narrative through which fictional characters grapple with

life-choices that are mediated by culture and the circumstances of being colonial subjects. As in

the novel, two questions are central to Wynter’s scholarship: What does it mean to be human?

and its corollary: How do we reimagine the human person beyond the confines of Man.6 Here,

Wynter uses the term “Man” to denote the over-represented, Western, bourgeois ethno-class

human figure.

The category Human

For Wynter, the common-sense, taken-for-granted notion of the human is, in fact, an

epistemological product of the colonial project, and, at the same time an arena that holds the

potential for social transformation through the realization of different ways of being. The very
6
In Wynter’s own framing: “How can we, the non-West, the always native Other to the true human of their Man, set
out to transform, in our turn, a world in which we must all remain always somewhat Other to the ‘true’ human in
their terms?” (Scott, D. (2000). The re-enchantment of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small
Axe, 8(120), 173-211.)
 52

ubiquity of the term “human” in modern popular and academic discourse is evidence of the

hegemony of this particular organizing feature of the Euromodern-colonial world-system.

Wynter’s work complicates Foucault’s critique of Man in that she centers the Colombian

encounter of 1492 as vital to the formulation of European representations of the Human,

representations that would epistemologically foreclose other ways of being Human.

According to Wynter (1992), the category human emerged in the aftermath of the

Colombian encounter. It became ‘Word’ in the context of sixteenth-century moral debates

between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda concerning the question of the

treatment of Indigenous peoples which Sepúlveda argued was tantamount to a difference

between “monkeys and men,” or in Wynter’s words, between “homunculi and true humans.”

Wynter (1995) writes:

“Race” was therefore to be, in effect, the non- supernatural but no less extrahuman

ground (in the reoccupied place of the traditional ancestors/gods, God, ground) of the

answer that the secularizing West would now give to the Heideggerian question as to the

who, and the what we are. (1995)

The category human established and imposed a hierarchy among people across the globe

according to their proximity to standards set by white, male, Christian elites. Wynter prophesies

the coming of a “Third Event” that will rupture the Western Episteme to such an extent as to

allow for us to move toward a humanism that is “made to the measure of the world.” This move,

according to Wynter, requires humans to recognize that we are not merely biological, political or

theological, but are, in fact, storytelling beings, homo narrans, who construct our world through

narratives. If Wynter is correct, we have the potential, through many different modes and
 53

registers, to create new worlds and new understandings of what it means to be human. Wynter

writes,

Human beings are magical. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and

desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities. ‘It is man who

brings society into being.’ And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in

undared forms. (1995)

Man

Closely related to the category human is the category “Man.” In Wynter’s scholarship, Man

refers to the overrepresentation of the white, middle-class, heterosexual cis-gender male subject

as if they were the human, to the exclusion of Others. This hegemonic “descriptive statement of

the human” is “rhetorically over-represented as if it were isomorphic with the being of being

human, and thereby necessarily definable as the human-as-a-species itself” (1984: p.44). Wynter

sees the central struggle of our millennium as a zero-sum question of either securing the well-

being of Man or of the Human (2003). Wynter traces the genealogy of Man beginning with Man

1, a theocentric Christian descriptive statement of the human as Man (Middle Ages) to the

invention of Man as political subject (fifteenth through eighteenth centuries) and then, beginning

in the eighteenth century, Man 3 was invented, based on Darwinian biological sciences and

racializing discourses.

Sociogeny and Black Studies Perspective

Wynter’s Black Studies Perspective bears allegiance to Carter G. Woodson’s

miseducation theory, which itself draws on Franz Fanon’s sociogenic principle, which draws on

W.E.B. Du Bois’s conception of “double consciousness” as a state of conflict experienced by the

negro in Western civilization. The sociogenic principle, as developed by Fanon, articulates

 54

ontogenic and phylogenic explanations fail to account for their contradictions when they fail to

include socially produced phenomena, such as colonialism, racism or sexism. For Fanon, and

Wynter, the conflation of sociogeny and ontogeny, that is, the conflation of sociogenetic

phenomena with an ontogenetic or “natural” tendency, plays an important role in the social

construction of race, notably when, for example, poverty and crime are linked to certain

population groups as if those groups were biologically, or ontogenetically, predisposed toward

these phenomena. In Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, The Puzzle of Conscious

Experience, of “Identity” and What it’s Like to be “Black” (1999) Wynter proposes the

following:

That Fanon’s explanatory concept of sociogeny put forward as a third person response to

his own first-person questioning, serves, when linked to the insights of Thomas Nagel's

1974 essay “What it is like to be a bat” (Epigraph,year? 2), to verify Chalmers’ postulate

with respect to the empirical functioning of psychophysical laws, as these laws function

at the level of human experience. That, further, such laws are not only redefinable at this

level as sociogenetic or nature-culture laws, but also as ones whose processes of

functioning, while inseparable from the physical (i.e. neurobiological) processes which

implement them, would at the same time, be non-reducible, as the indispensable

condition of what it is like to be human to these processes alone; and, therefore, to the

laws of nature by which those processes are governed. (Wynter, 1999)

The concept of sociogenic is a particularly apt principle to consider in any analysis of

race, and it is especially germane to an analysis of race in the context of English education—a

conceptual arena that is preoccupied with sociogenically infused themes and analytic frames

such as “The American Dream” and “What does it mean to be a hero?,” with accompanying
 55

disciplinary methods that aim to standardize and universalize what are in fact highly contested,

uniquely subjective sociogenic themes and phenomena such as “inter-subjective understanding,”

“universal human experience” “literacy” and “adolescent development” which are concerned

with the puzzle of conscious experience, identity and how myths and storytelling are

indispensable to both.

Black Studies Alterity Perspective

Wynter offers a robust theoretical tool for intellectuals taking up the Science of the Word

imperative. Wynter’s Black Studies theoretical perspective centers the experiences of African-

descendent people in the context of modernity/coloniality, a state that she calls “liminal.” In

contrast to white perspectivity (Gordon, 1995; Suarez-Krabbe, 2019), which restricts knowledge

about race as part of modernity/coloniality, the Black studies alterity perspective seeks to explain

the functionality of the culture-systemic ideology of race and Othering. This practice of

deciphering the social role of colonial institutions is a component of race-conscious frameworks

such as racial literacy and critical pedagogy, however Joyce E. King describes the Wynterian

Black Studies Alterity Perspective as not merely a critical theory, that illuminates inequality and

imbalances of power, but is more importantly a tool which offers an alternative way of

‘constructing’ reality that entails deciphering our contemporary social reality (King, 2006).

The Word of Man

‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Wynter argues that this statement from the book of John in the

New Testament, with its bold declaration of what in fact came first, asserts the primacy of myth,

narrative and discourse in human cultural systems and in so doing is closer to truth than our

present system of knowledge. Applying an Afro-Caribbean sensibility to questions of coloniality

and a focus on the cultural construction of knowledge distinguishes Wynter’s critique among her
 56

peers as a poetics that limns white perspectivity (Gordon, 2009; Suarez-Krabbe, 2019) as

completely devoid of self-awareness yet presenting itself in academia as a self-justified scientific

practice. Indeed, one of the most significant contributions Wynter’s expansive oeuvre makes to

the decolonial project is by way of her articulation of an insurgent and unrelenting critique of the

West’s self-invention and monopolization of knowledge. Wynter’s critical and theoretical work

builds on Latin-American liberation theology and decolonial theories (most notably, Quijano,

Mignolo and Lugones) and employs diverse rhetorical and philosophical tools to decipher and

disrupt the conceptual categories and epistemological and cognitive models that constitute the

Western Euromodern episteme. These categories, models and discourses are together constitutive

of an apparatus of legitimation, otherwise referred to by Wynter (1992) as the “descriptive

statement” and “master code,” the organizing principle or ontological operating system that has

legitimized five centuries of Western global hegemony. Wynter theorizes this hegemonic

structure as the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom (2003). The coloniality of being is

the use of power to create certain kinds of human subjects. Coloniality of knowledge constricts

the definition of knowledge and decides what knowledge is valued.

Science of the Word

The Wynterian imperative to “take back the Word” by creating a “science of the Word”

enlists those who have been relegated to the margins, in particular African-descent people, across

disciplines to engage in the intellectual work of imagining, creating and uncovering alternative

social worlds conducive to Human life. In the literary and educational realms where my work

intersects, creating a “Science of the Word” involves first excavating the ontological and

teleological ordering principles that animate policy and curriculum of English Education. This

excavation clears the site for staging a transformative epistemic rupture to be repaired through
 57

the creolization of theory and thought (Gordon, 2018) and the reconceptualization of English

Education as an arena for articulating and becoming the storytelling genre of the human

(Alagraa, 2019).

Wynterian Possibilities for English Education

Wynter, theorizing across vast expanses of disciplinary bodies and texts, posits that

European thought traditions are centrally informed by, guided and loyal to the “Word of Man”

with its self-serving notions of the Man-Other binary which positions non-European peoples

outside the boundaries of the human and the geography of reason. Before we can change the

system, subvert, or abolish the system, we must excavate it and behold its monstrous entirety.

Excavating the “Word of Man” from disciplinary texts and discourses within the project of

English teacher education requires that the discipline of English education explore its own power

and privilege in the always already ongoing processes of subject formation through white

perspectivity (Gordon, 1995 2022; Butler, 1995; Morrison, 1992) so critical to the continuing

project of colonialism and modernity. It would require an acknowledgment of the

overrepresentation of Man in education writ large and in English education specifically. In The

Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism (1984), Wynter explains the role of literature in the

project of modernity/coloniality/decoloniality:

It was to be an utterly new way of feeling, of imagining Self and World, and a mode of

imagination that would no longer find its referential figurative auctoritas in the great

religious schemas and symbols, but rather in a new referential figurative auctoritas, that of

the fictional poetic/dramatic schemas of the phenomenon we call "literature." Literature in

its new role/ordering function, and the Studia were, therefore, to be twin forms of each
 58

other, forms through whose internal mediation, the human, who had hitherto imagined its

mode of being through mythic/theological figurative schemas, would now come to

imagine itself-and to act upon the world in the mode of that imagination-through the great

poetic schemas which refigured and configured the first form of the secularly chartered

human being: the world of its order of things. For it is not, as Marx thought, the Earthly

Family that holds the secret of the projection of the Holy Family. It is, rather, the reverse.

This dissertation is situated within the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality project and

seeks to further the work of Black studies and decolonial scholars who have developed

decolonial methodologies that are centered around the education of Black and Brown students in

the areas of English Language Arts and literacy. This study interrogates the ways in which the

field of English Education, during a moment in which the discipline is explicitly taking up

notions of racial and social justice, takes up the task of educating English teachers about race,

racism, and racial formation in the United States writ large. While there is a robust tradition of

research that takes a critical approach to issues of teacher education, curriculum development

and instructional approaches germane to race, and racism and racial formation in the United

States. However, my aim in this dissertation is to understand at a foundational and radical level

what English Education teaches English teachers about race and racism beyond its

manifestations as problems, issues and deficiencies at the curricular and classroom level.

In what follows, I draw from Wynter and Morrison’s work to analyze these efforts as

they have been taken up in the field of English education over the past twenty years. In doing so,

I aim to answer Joyce E. King’s (2006) call for education researchers to first recognize and then

attend to the lack of research or discussion in teacher education that addresses theory and

methods of teaching and learning about the culture-systemic process of racial formation, even
 59

amidst swirling controversy around multicultural curriculum, critical race theory and racial

literacy in schools.
 60

Chapter 4 : Research Design and Methods of The Study

Taking as method of Gordon (2014) for creolizing criteria, 7 there are a few theoretical

premises underlying the methodology for this study. First, being rooted in a decolonial attitude 8

the analysis in this dissertation is interpretive and phenomenological in nature (as distinct from

critical). It is teleologically oriented toward both better understanding how English education

standards and methods texts represent “effective teaching” of racially diverse students in the

shadow of Euromodernity9 by deciphering the subtleties of theories of action underlying the

rhetoric of diversity, multiculturalism and most recently, anti-racism ensconced within these

texts.10

To do this, I engage Gordon’s (2014) methodology of creolizing political theory to

construct a hybrid Wynter- Morrison analytic framework which combines a decolonial attitude

and teleological suspension of disciplinarity and undergirds in-depth textual analysis. In

Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon (2014), Jane Anna Gordon

models a creolizing methodological approach to politics and to the engagement and construction

of political ideas, which, as she demonstrates, can yield models for how we might envision
7
Gordon (2014, 13) lays out four components for creolizing political theory which I engage in this project: First, it
involves an orientation where due attention is paid to the geographies within which we situate subjects; second, it
involves conceptualizing the task of theorizing to create conversations among thinkers and ideas that may seem
anachronistic or otherwise impossible; third is a rejection of Eurocentric cosmopolitanism and an orientation toward
the concept of the knowing subject; finally, the implications of creolization extend beyond the discipline in which it
occurs.
8
Maldonado-Torres N. (2006). Césaire’s gift and the decolonial turn. Radical Philosophy Review, 9, 111–137.
9
English/ELA, the project of public schooling, the purpose of Higher education and institutional responses to
‘diversity’ are each rooted in highly racialized colonial histories and situated within systems of global white
dominance (Kolthari 2006). English education in the shadow of Euromodernity encapsulates the phenomenon that
brings together the intellectual histories, ideological leanings and philosophy of each of these curricular containers
in the arena of the K-12 classroom where the most likely demographic configuration is a white, female middle class
teacher and her predominantly Black and Brown, racially segregated students.
10
Heilig, Brown & Brown’s (2012) analysis of Texas social studies standards, The Illusion of Inclusion has as its
main research question: What are the nuanced and subtle ways in which race and racism are represented in the social
studies standards in Texas?
 61

enriched political structures, discourses, forms of identification and thinking. In this work

Gordon also goes to lengths to articulate distinctions between creolization and multiculturalism.

These insights, when put in conversation with Wynter’s and Morrison’s work, enliven my

exploration and analysis of how the field of English education grapples with the “race problem”

at the turn of the twenty-first century. I draw on the creolizing imperative to “theoriz[e] in such

a way that we create conversations among thinkers and ideas that may at first appear incapable of

having actually taken place, that confound at least one conception of the dictates of rigorous

scholarship” (J.A. Gordon, 2014: 14).

Reading Morrison through J.A. Gordon in this vein, Morrison’s (199X) theorization of

the Africanist Presence creolizes methodology in its aim to “explain forms of mixture that were

not supposed to occur” and in its incisive attention to “the dread and curiosity” that these

mixtures inspired” (Gordon, 2014, p. 11). Like Gordon, she prompts readers to look for “traces

of people rendered only in marks of their evasion” and then to reimagine what it means for

understanding the conditions that fostered the growth of ideas and theory that order our world.

Gordon acknowledges the violent displacement, interruption and loss that created the conditions

for creolization in the Caribbean, and the rationales she provides in support of creolizing as a

theoretical approach, despite its tainted provenance, are especially apt in considering Morrison’s

inspiration for theorizing the Africanist presence, her methodological process in tracing the

presence in early American literature and the impact of this theorizing on the discipline of

literary criticism, among others. Gordon (2014) writes:

The explorations that went on under the name of creolization aimed to explain forms of

mixture that were not supposed to occur. In the dread and curiosity that they thereby

inspired, they also drew attention to the seeming anomalies that proved, if in more rapid
 62

and intense terms, in fact to be prototypes for understanding what transpires more

generally as stratified, displaced peoples converge. Capturing the closure and openness,

sedimentation and fluidity, identification and non-identification that efforts to illuminate

the workings of culture consistently overemphasize in one direction or the other,

creolization therefore offers a better account of the nature of the reality in which political

life and theorizing proceed. We would therefore do well to have it inform our methods of

inquiry because, however unwittingly, frameworks for understanding symbolic life

overdetermine how it is that we conceive of the disciplines themselves. (p. 11).

Morrison’s extensive oeuvre enacts a creolizing methodology, bringing together

knowledge from many disciplines and engaging in teleological suspension of disciplinarity (L.R.

Gordon, 2014) to create a new theories and insights with implications which, as this dissertation

confirms, ultimately extend beyond literary theory to K-16 literacy-literature and English

education more generally.

Additionally, Wynter guides my attempt to decipher, as ideological forms, both the

representations of the rhetoric of modernity11 and the logic of coloniality in representations of

race and racism in these policy documents and interpret how this colonial matrix of power is

operationalized in TEPs.12 Morrison guides my intertextual reading of these standards as

11
The colonial matrix of power is characterized by the combination of a rhetoric of modernity with a logic of
coloniality. The rhetoric of modernity is made explicity by means of ideas such as progress, development, and
growth, whereas the logic of coloniality is silenced or named as a set of problems to be solved under the headings of
poverty, inequality, injustice, corruption, mercantilization and dispensability of human life (p. xvii). In his
perspective, coloniality is constitutive of modernity
12
Joyce E King (1992) My intention herein is to decipher, as ideological forms, both the re-presentations of
"modern" historical scholarship in California's textbooks and the ways in which this scholarship has been justified as
accurate and valid knowledge. I am writing about these matters not as a historian or a learning or reading specialist
but as a sociologist interested in the sociology of knowledge that functions as ideology. My use of the term
"ideology" follows Giddens's (1979) explication and critical analysis of ideology as understood by Marx,
Mannheim, and Habermas; and as it concerns "what counts as a valid claim to knowledge" (p. 173) and "the critique
of domination" (p. 187). Related to this is a concern about the "social domination of ideas" (p. 170) and
consciousness as well as the role of the intellectual in "partisan struggles of political life" (p. 174).
 63

phenomenological text13 and as deconstructed text14 (Pinar, 1992) to extract samples of the

author’s mental model (Morrison, 1992; Carley, 1994). Authorial mental models provide insight

into the relationship between cognition and culture, as both cognition and culture evolve through

and are concurrent with the evolution of language (Wynter, 1992; Morrison, 1992; Carley,

1994).

Crucially, in line with Wynter’s cultural framework model, the curriculum as

phenomenological text (Pinar, 1992) analytic approach redefines the content area English teacher

education as narrative discourse (Eudell, 2006-2015) or as text in the Foucauldian sense

(Graham, 2011).15 It includes attention to the production of knowledge, qualities and dynamics

set in play by and around representations of the colonial matrices of powers. Equally

illuminative, and in line with Morrison’s Africanist Presence, to deconstruct in the Derridean

sense is to lay bare the construction of discourse. Deconstruction, Pinar explains, shows how a

discursive system functions, including what it excludes or denies (1992). Curriculum as

deconstructed text (Pinar & Reynolds, 2015) approach to analysis is one of close readings or

discursive analyses of attributions and conceptualizations of the “reality” and meditations on

race-related social ills. In this sense, reading for the Africanist Presence is an exercise in

deconstruction—it is a political activity that exposes the ideological function and content of

discursive systems.

13
Phenomenological curriculum studies seeks to name those elements of experience that are unquantifiable and
immeasurable - spaces left by quantitative social science studies. (Pinar 1992 p.1)
14
Deconstruction is the term first proposed by Derrida, to denote the inextricable relation between experience and
language. Derrida insists that it is not to be understood in any negative or destructive sense; rather, deconstruction
means to circumscribe. To deconstruct in the Derridean sense is to lay bare the construction of discourse.
Deconstruction shows how a discursive system functions, including what it excludes or denies. (Pinar 1992) In this
sense deconstruction is a political activity that exposes the ideological function and content of discursive systems
(Descombes, 1980)
15
Graham, L. J. (2011). The product of text and ‘other’ statements: Discourse analysis and the critical use of
Foucault. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 43(6), 663-674.
 64

Research Design

This study considers the role of English Education within the

modernity/coloniality/decoloniality project 2000-2021. In it, I apply a Wynterian-Morrisonian

hermeneutic-interpretative approach along with hybrid textual analysis methodology to engage in

an analysis of texts produced by/for English teacher educators and English teachers. Since my

goal in this study is not to study individual human cognition, but rather to examine a cultural

framework (that, then directly impacts human cognition), I apply hybrid textual analysis to code

English education policy and methods texts.

Data Sources

The data sources for this dissertation are: 1) English education standards and related texts

and 2) English education methods texts published and/or in use between 2000 to the present.

Specifically, I examine 15 documents produced by the National Council for the Teaching of

English (NCTE) from 2000 to 2021 that delineate standards for preparing English teachers as

well as statements produce by the NCTE and its Committee on English Education (CEE) that

address issues of race and racism. I also examine 17 texts identified by Pasternak et al (2016) as

the most commonly used texts in English education methods courses during the time period.

These texts, being “the products of individual activity, social organization, technology, and

cultural patterns” (Reinharz, 1992), are significant socio-cultural artifacts. They possess a

naturalistic, ‘found’ quality; they were not created for the purpose of the study. Additionally,

they are noninteractive, and do not require asking questions of respondents of observing people’s

behavior (Reinharz, 1992).

The documents address, to varying extents, five dimensions of teacher preparation for

racially diverse teaching in English:1) the institutional dimension, which considers the
 65

organization of schools, school policies, procedures and funds; 2)the personal dimension, which

focuses on the process of teacher learning to be culturally responsive or race-conscious; 3)the

instructional dimension, or how race-consciousness is to be implemented in the classroom; 4) the

epistemological dimension, which deals with knowledge claims and underlying prescriptive

rules, and 5) the ethical dimension, looking into explicit rules and judgments about right and

wrong ways to act in society with others.

My reasons for choosing the period of 2000 to the present are two-fold. First, during this

timeframe, the field of English education grappled explicitly with how to develop beginning

English teachers’ race-consciousness as part of the construction of the ostensibly competent

English teacher. The timeframe is also personal. In 2000, I migrated to the US and began my

undergraduate studies in English, Philosophy and Spanish. These studies would lead me to a

career as an English teacher in New York City, one of the country’s largest, most diverse and

most segregated school systems. Between 2007 and 2015, I both taught and learned to teach

English simultaneously, in an alternative certification program. Looking retrospectively at my

development as a teacher, and in particular my process of learning to teach “in NYC’s most

high-need schools” has involved sense-making and critical reflection.

From 2015 to the present, I have, as a teacher educator in a traditional university-based

preparation program found myself consistently drawing comparisons among the practices of

learning to teach, teaching and teacher education and how these worlds of knowledge and

practice interface or evade interfacing one with the other across spatial and temporal axes. The

documents selected for this study represent, in my experience, guiding principles that, albeit

unknown to me at the time, shaped my learning experience around questions of race, racism and

racial justice in the teaching of English. They also lend themselves to the Aristotelian conception
 66

of a practical philosophy, which takes seriously the role of education in the reproduction and

transformation of the good society and grasps on to the language of praxis.

Data Analysis: Method in the Shadow of Euromodernity

Methodologically, this dissertation’s focus on hermeneutic interpretation is based on an

understanding that modern educational research is only the latest episode in a tradition of inquiry

which now, as always, is in a state of evolution and change Carr (1997) understands qualitative

data analysis to be a key process in the exercise of power, deciding about the possibility or

impossibility of connecting ideas (Ramazanoglu & Holland, 2002). This perspective necessitates

a qualitative approach that would allow me to examine how actors at various levels of the system

understand and interpret race and racism or modify policy. Qualitative analysis, according to

Patton (2002) “transforms data into findings.” This transformation depends heavily on the

research questions, disciplinary affiliation, creativity, reflexivity and skill of the researcher.

With Seidman’s (2006) counsel that, in qualitative research it may be difficult to draw

clear distinctions between the data collection and analysis stages of research, I engaged in a

multi-layered and iterative analytic approach. I first analyzed the data using analytic induction, a

process in which initial coding categories are identified from patterns within the texts (Bogdan &

Biklen, 2003). The process of coding the data yielded the discursive themes that later became

“the results.” For example, I noticed during my analysis of English education methods texts that

the same small cadre of African American authors and a similar (even smaller) cadre of Hispanic

authors were consistently mentioned or recommended. This later emerged as the theme of “the

peripheralization of Blackness in the construction of the English education curriculum.” I

develop this theme, leaning heavily on Wynter and Morrison, to offer a decolonial critique of the
 67

field, and its implications for the lives of Black and Brown students and the discipline of

teaching literature in secondary schools’ writ large.

At heart, my analytic method draws on Wynter’s notion of cultural models. In my

current level of understanding, these models serve as rule-producing and prescribing belief

frameworks that socially construct our social imaginations and the stories which order the ways

we imagine, feel and act upon the world. Wynterian cultural models are the scripts that produce

the shadows through which we normatively know the world. Drawing on Wynter’s Black

Studies, I examine the English education texts by asking: What are the prescriptive rules that

govern the inclusion and exclusion of content and how do these rules erase or misrepresent

Blackness and Black and Brown students? How are the terms of “race,” “social justice,” and

“multiculturalism,” taken up in current thinking about what constitutes the teaching of English

and “well-prepared” English teachers?

Morrison’s Africanist presence provides grounding for my data analyses. Morrison

considers three related aspects of the American novels she submits to scrutiny: the presence of

black (sic) characters, both named and anonymous, the story that is told about or by way of black

character (plot and author’s craft in narrative strategies), and language use, analyzing in the

fiction of white American writers’ uses of idiom. Adapted and applied to the analysis of English

education standards relating to race, an Africanist reading of these documents considers

presence, story and language in similar ways. First, I look for the presence of black characters;

when are Black teachers, students, teacher educators, authors included or not included; named

and not named? Second, how are they characterized? How are these Black characters positioned

both in the sense of their importance to the people and practice of English Language Arts

specifically and to traditions of education writ large? What is the plot of the story that is told
 68

about Black people’s presence and what role do Black people play in this narrative? And thirdly,

author’s craft: What rhetorical devices are mobilized in the construction of this narrative?

This inquiry is further grounded in Prunty’s critical policy analysis approach (1984)

which orients research around: 1) exposing the sources of domination, repression and

exploitation that are entrenched in, and legitimated by educational policy; 2) analyzing of policy

in terms of curriculum (what counts as knowledge), pedagogy (what counts as valid transmission

of knowledge), and evaluation (what counts as valid realization of knowledge) requires close

scrutiny to the process of validation and to the principles of inclusion and exclusion in deciding

“what counts,”; 3) an analysis of the attempts (or lack thereof) by disenfranchised groups to

influence the workings of the school; and 4) a commitment to praxis - the unity of thought and

action, theory and practice.

Creolizing Textual Analysis

Creolizing the content analysis mental model extraction method proposed by Carley

(1993) and Carley and Palmquist (1992), I analyzed the standards and English education

methods texts using a qualitative content analysis (QCA) approach (Schreier, 2012) with critical

attention to the language of the texts, especially the terms, idioms, metaphors, and logics, to

illuminate the conceptualizations of notions of diversity, race and racism as it relates to English

teacher educators, teachers of English, adolescent students as readers and the subject of English

itself. Rather than focusing on the manifest content of a document and presenting the findings in

quantitative terms as traditional content analysis tends to do, QCA is well-suited to studying

latent content to be found in “rich data that requires interpretation” and is thus well-suited to the

critical and decolonial analyses attempted in this study. Schreier’s research model for QCA

(2012) outlines the following steps: determining a research question, selecting material, building
 69

a coding frame, segmenting the material into units of coding, piloting the coding frame,

modifying the coding frame (including merging codes into themes and patterns) and then

analyzing and interpreting the findings of the coding process.

Following QCA, I analyzed the standards and standards-related documents through an

iterative process. With these documents, I began with four overarching categories for analysis

that aligned with my research questions: 1) conceptual presence of race, racism and racial

justice; 2) conception of teaching English to diverse students; 3) the figure of the prospective

English teacher; and 4) the figure of the diverse student. My first round of coding used in-vivo

coding. It was inductive and exploratory, rooted in the verbatim language of the standards

document. This allowed for themes, categories and discursive forms to emerge and not be

impacted by my biases and preconceptions. In the second round, I created a new set of codes to

capture the patterns, trends, contradictions and shifts in the document’s language use. I then

created a data matrix organized around these codes which included all excerpts from the

documents that I coded. The third round of coding was deductive, I used key concepts and

themes from the Wynterian/Morrisonian theoretical frame to code the excerpts. After this

inductive/deductive approach, I then attended closely to the repeated terms, idioms, metaphors

and logics that appeared across the standards excerpts to identify the discursive forms associated

with issues of race and racism in the standards documents. I identified two dominant discursive

forms: race evasion and race reification. The latter further operated through race affirmation,

agnotology and obfuscation.

For the English methods texts, I followed a similar iterative coding process. In the first

round of coding, for each text, I first looked at the Index and Table of Contents for race-

conscious terms such as “race,” “racism,” “African-American,” “diversity,” “Latino,” and

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“Hispanic.” I then combed through each text for in-text references to the same terms and

concepts. These references sometimes included race-related discussions that were not tagged as

such in the Index.

After this round of coding, I created a table that included information on the terms used

in the text, where they were used and the actual in-text references. I coded the in-text references

with the coding scheme that I developed in my analysis of the standards documents. I also used

Skerrett (2011) typology of racial literacy approaches in English teaching. Skerrett (2011)

analysis of English teachers’ approaches to teaching about race identified three approaches to

racial literacy: apprehensive and authorized; incidental and ill-informed; and sustained and

strategic. I found strong parallels to these approaches across the methods texts.

As I coded the methods texts, I further extended Skerrett (2011) typology to group the

texts into two categories: non-authorizing or authorizing texts. Non-authorizing texts did not

engage race or did so only perfunctorily. To be coded as authorizing, the text needed to meet the

following four criteria: 1) significant engagement with race or racism, i.e., more than two pages

of text dedicated to issues of race or racism; 2) race or racism referenced across two or more

chapters; 3) included ideas from scholars whose work focuses on Black and Brown students; and

4) recommended works by Black and Brown authors in more than two chapters. Additionally, I

coded textbooks either “low” or “high” as in terms of their level of engagement with race and/or

racism. Those coded “low” barely met the threshold for “authorized.”

For both types of texts, throughout the process of coding, I created a series of analytic

and theoretical memos. I appropriated this memo-writing protocol directly from Skerrett (2011)

research methods. These analytic memos helped me identify significant patterns and tentative

findings. It also allowed for reflection and discussion with other researchers on “whether
 71

recurring themes were adequately substantiated by the data,” how they addressed my research

questions and “how they related to the findings of pertinent existing research.” The process of

writing theoretical memos was dialectical in a way that allowed for “in-depth explorations of

whether tentative findings held strong theoretical and evidentiary warrants.” I found that the

dialectical process of theoretical memo-writing advanced my analysis because they either

yielded support for emergent findings or revealed a lack of theoretical purchase for tentative

findings, which would be discarded.

Rigor, Dependability and Confirmability

Rigor of an inquiry like this textual analysis may be operationalized using the criteria of

credibility, dependability, confirmability and transferability (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). Following

Lincoln and Guba (1985), I include theoretical triangulation by drawing on Wynter, Morrison

and the notion of creolization drawn from decolonial scholarship. Dependability and

confirmability were ensured by means of an educational audit, which Lincoln and Guba (1985)

recommend for assessing the process of inquiry for its reliability and absence of bias in such a

way that all of the aspects of how the inquiry is conducted (the process) and reported (the

product) can by publicly examined as suggested by Cronbach and Suppes (1969).

I recognize the clash between this approach and the explicitly critical lens I am bringing

to this study. Given the latter, my goal is not to eliminate bias, so much as to ensure that my

analyses are grounded by sufficient textual evidence to support the claims I am making about the

texts and the cultural models they reflect and engender. Taking this into account, during the

study, I established an ‘audit trail’ (Guba, 1981) through which I documented the processes of

data collection, data analysis and interpretation. Throughout the study, I worked with the chair of

my dissertation committee to share memos through which I presented on-going analysis. This
 72

assisted me in checking the strength of my textual interpretations, looking specifically for the

seams in my analysis which might expose blindspots and contradictions. This is comparable to

attending to “disconfirming evidence.”

While constructing the audit trail I followed these archival processes and maintained the

following:

 Records of searches and bibliographic records for each;

 A log of all research-related activities;

 A log of all methodological decisions made which influenced the final emergent design

of the inquiry;

 A log of all data analysis activity.

To trace and make explicit my own biases and how they shape my research, I maintained the

following:

 A reflexive diary which recorded my own perceptions, changing insights,

affective responses, the “experiences, ideas, fears, mistakes, confusions, break-throughs

and problems that arise during the fieldwork” (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992; Maxwell, 1996,

2005; Spradley, 1979). Here I logged my evolving perceptions, day-to-day procedures,

methodological decision points, day-to-day personal introspections and developing

insights and hypotheses (Guba, 1981);

 A log of professional contacts that may have influenced my interpretations and research

decisions, for example, debriefing sessions with non-involved professional peers;

 A subjectivity statement, see below, that identifies how my own identities, life

experiences and viewpoints inform the research.

 73

Finally, in terms of both reliability and transferability, as I present my analyses, I include

quotes from the texts analyzed to support my interpretations. This enables readers to assess

whether and how the research study provides methods and insights useful to the study of other

phenomena, such as other disciplinary standards, methods texts, etc.

Researcher Identity Memo and Subjectivity Statement

Experience and education inspire my research interests. As an Afro-Caribbean woman,

transnational scholar and former high school English teacher, my curriculum voice articulates a

decolonial critique of education. I claim this critique as both inheritance and responsibility,

integral to my identity as a Black feminist educator, activist and scholar. I re-consider notions of

what knowledge is most worth knowing, what truths are inalienable, what ways of being are life-

giving and who wields power, especially in the context of the lives of students and teachers

socially identified as “other.”

My trajectory in the field began twenty years ago when I migrated to the US and has

placed me in many roles within the realm of English education - first as transnational

undergraduate English major, then secondary English education graduate student, middle school

humanities teacher, high school English teacher and ESL specialist and most recently doctoral

student and teacher educator. This schooling and practice, alongside my lived experiences

outside of the field, have imbued me with a unique perspective - one that is at once critical,

Othered and ‘from below.’ This is the Black Alterity perspective that Wynter invokes in her

“cultural model framework” and an intellectual heritage I claim and intend to build upon by

applying it to the field of English Education.

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Conclusion

This study enacts a creolizing methodology to explicate the dominant narrative or

cultural-systemic framework at work in and across the field of English education to understand

the complexity of the relationships among race, racial capitalism, settler-colonialism and English

education in the U.S. context. I am interested in deciphering how the preparation of English

teachers reflects and reacts to/with the persistent overrepresentation of the idea of Man, the

process of Othering non-Christian and non-European human beings and, in particular,

“presupposition of black particularity versus white universality” (Gordon, 2012, p.96). A

deciphering of the existing set of relationships and power dynamics across multiple texts in

English Education is critical to our understanding of how we are to meet the imperative to

develop English teachers capable of and committed to enacting culturally relevant, anti-racist

and social-justice oriented English curriculum and instruction that affirms and sustains Black and

Brown students, as well as their white peers.

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Chapter 5 : The Development of Race-Conscious Standards in The

Field of English Education
This chapter examines documents related to the preparation of teachers of English in the

United States from 2000 to 2021. The conceptual and critical analysis focuses on provisions in

standards geared toward the outcome of “creating literacy classrooms that meet the needs of

linguistically and culturally diverse learners” (Boyd et al., 2006). The in-depth examination of

standards and standards-related texts—thematically, chronologically and theoretically—yields

important insights into how the field of English education has conceived of race and racism and

the significance of race in the teaching and learning of English in US secondary schools over the

past two decades. Findings highlight that race-consciousness, though occurring concomitantly

alongside broader “diversity” approaches, and presented as adjacent to other forms of diversity,

has its own narrative arc.

Diversity Standards and the Curriculum Knowledge Debate

Though Sleeter (2001) seminal 2001 literature review found that very little research in

teacher education actually examined the instructional practices that prepare educators for

culturally diverse schools, since the turn of the twenty-first century there has been a significant

increase in attention to preparing teachers for “diversity” and “diverse learners.” Analyzing 209

peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2009 and 2019, Rowan et al. (2021) conducted

a systematic review of the literature relating to both “teacher education” and “diverse learners.”

The authors’ analysis reveals a literature broad in focus—referencing many groups—but shallow

in depth. The most frequently discussed terms associated with diversity were cultural diversity,

linguistic diversity, inclusive education, special education, disability and socioeconomic status.

The authors noted a limited engagement with specialist literature relating to concepts such as
 76

gender or race and little attention to teacher educators’ own knowledge. The majority of the

research reviewed describe strategies for teaching about or catering to diversity with only few

considering teaching for diversity.

The increased attention to issues of diversity has also occurred in efforts across the

educational field to establish standards for teaching and learning. Critical scholars of education

have highlighted different aspects of the racial power structures and ideology related to

standards. Heilig et al. (2012) argue for the importance of looking closely at the racial politics

and ideologies embedded in modern standards, while acknowledging the challenge of

deciphering and illuminating how inclusion and exclusion occur in the context of educational

standards through discursive mechanisms. Apple (2000), for instance, highlighted how some

reformist movements appropriate the discourse of equity, making policies not in the interest of

groups of color appear to make “good sense” in addressing their needs. Sleeter’s (2002) analysis

of social studies standards, similarly, contends that while claiming to offer a multicultural story,

the standards, instead, attempt to build students’ allegiance to the existing social order.

English Teacher Professional Standards as Text

Though curriculum theorists have long recognized standards as political (Apple, 1992)

and ideological (Sleeter, 2002, 2003; Sleeter & Stillman, 2005), studies that have addressed

diversity standards in teacher education tend to do so with more focus on quantitative analyses

and implementation at the programmatic level (Beyer, 2002; Akiba et al., 2010). Few studies

have focused on standards related to teacher preparation (Rowan et al., 2021) and fewer still

have used race as a lens to look at how such standards represent and construct certain types of

individuals and groups according to race or inquired into the subjective dimensions of race and

racism.
 77

The analysis of standards documents I present in this chapter considers the implicit

understandings that are both called upon and constructed during the transactions between future

English teachers (the teacher-learner), their future students, especially Black and Brown students,

and the demographic imperative to ensure that all students learn. It explores how these implicit

understandings might be related to dominant cultural models (Wynter, 1992b; Zemblayas, 2021).

Examining these data sources as discrete data sets 16 or discursive worlds and then taken together

(as perhaps a galaxy within the ever-expanding universe) illuminate how the English education

curriculum functions discursively within the processes of being defined, articulated, contested

and ultimately translated into English teaching.

The standards texts analyzed in this chapter include sixteen English education standards

published between 2000 and 2021 (Table 1). The standards and accountability movement in US

education, which began in the late 1980s and 1990s with the adoption of state-level standards

and accountability policies, intensified with the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind act

in 2001. By 2000, then, the struggle to control education processes through standardizing

outcomes while the population of students attending the nation’s public schools was becoming

more racially, culturally and linguistically diverse was well underway. The proliferation of

standards, including those in English education, can be read as responses to tensions between the

diversity ideal and curricular knowledge.

The selected documents17 are professional standards established jointly by the National

Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education programs (NCATE), which evolved into the

Council for Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) in 2016, and the National Council for

Teachers of English (NCTE). I also include documents that directly addressed the standards

16
Chapters 4, 5 and 6—complete citation.
17
See Table 5.1
 78

produced by the Council on English Education (CEE). These are position statements the contents

of which subsequently became embedded in the NCTE/NCATE standards texts. Further, this

research proceeds from the assumption that teacher certification standards, as intended, do, in

fact influence the perceptions and understanding of race, racism and racial justice among teacher

education program directors or coordinators, who hold positions of power to interpret these

standards and shape the content and implementation of diversity requirements for tens of

thousands of teacher candidates every year

Table 5.1 lists the selected documents in chronological order. Documents highlighted in

yellow are belief and position statements related to English teacher preparation standards

development.

Table 5.1
Documents selected for study

No
Year Document Org18
.

2000 1 NCATE Standards 2000 NCATE

NCATE’s Standards, Procedures and policies for the accreditation of

2002 2 NCATE
professional educational units

NCTE/NCATE Program Standards for the Initial Preparation of NCTE

2003 3
Teachers of Secondary English Language Arts (SPAs) NCATE

CEE Position Statement on Supporting Linguistically and Culturally

2005 4 CEE
Diverse Learners in English Education

2006 5 Guidelines for Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts NCTE

18
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher
Education Council on English Education (CEE) after 2018, English Language Arts Teacher Educators (ELATE),
 79

2006 6 NCATE (revised) Standard 4 - the “all students learn” standard NCATE

2007 7 NCATE and Social Justice - A Call to Action NCATE

NCATE Professional Standards for the Accreditation of Teacher

2008 8 NCATE
Preparation Institutions

2009 9 CEE Beliefs Statement about Social Justice in English Education CEE-SJ

CEE-SJ/
2010 10 Resolution on Social Justice in Literacy Education
NCTE

NCTE/NCATE Standards for Initial Preparation of Teachers of NCTE CEE-

2012 11 Secondary English Language Arts, Grades 7-12 (Includes the new SA

Standard VI - the “social justice standard”) NCATE

CEE (Revised) Position Statement: What Is English Language Arts

2017 12 CEE
Teacher Education?

NCTE Standards for the Initial Preparation of Teachers of English

2021 13 NCTE EC
Language Arts 7-12

2018 14 Statement on Anti-Racism to Support Teaching and Learning19 NCATE

NCTE Standards for the Initial Preparation of Teachers of English

2021 15 NCTE
Language Arts 7-12

Findings

The standard documents that comprised the focus of this analysis, taken collectively,

represent one dominant, albeit implicit knowledge claim in response to which the diversity

standards were designed. This foundational premise can be articulated as: A recognition of the

19
Originally developed by the National Council of Teachers of English Committee on Racism and Bias in the
Teaching of English, February 2007, revised July 2018.
 80

existence of race and racism in U.S. history and contemporary society, a recognition of

increasing racial diversity in the U.S. and among the school population and the belief that racial

diversity makes new, increased and/or challenging demands on today’s (still largely white and

female) teaching population, which therefore requires particular or further competencies.

Despite this recognition, I found that the conception of race and racism in the standards

were, on the whole, epistemologically unsound. They were largely structured around a flimsy

knowledge base that conflates race, ethnicity and culture while sidestepping the link between

race and racism. The standards were race-evasive while simultaneously reifying race through the

processes of affirmation (racial categories and racialization), agnotology (miseducation,

epistemological ignorance and white ignorance) and obfuscation (sociogenic ideology, lack of

clarity about how race is connected to racism). Notably, over the twenty-one-year period

examined, the standards constructed English teachers, whose Whiteness separated them from

“diverse” students depicted as racial/racialized objects, as both race-ignorant and intervening

agents in the problem of race.

Race evasion

If consciousness is associated with spirit or the light, then the prospects for

blackness are at best dim.

—Lewis R. Gordon, Fear of Black Consciousness

Race evasion refers to the tendency to avoid direct or explicit engagement with the

concept of race and is associated with ideologies that purport a racially color-blind approach

(Mueller, 2017; Burke, 2018), implicitly asserting that race does not matter. Relative to the

frequency of usage of the terms “culture” and “cultural,” the standards show limited use of the

term “race” and racial categories Black/African-American(s), Native American(s), Latino/a(s),

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Asian American(s), with a few noteworthy exceptions. Prior to the 2005 CEE document, the

2000 and 2002 NCATE standards and the 2003 NCTE/NCATE standards documents mentioned

“race,” “ethnicity’ and other identity groupings, such as gender and language. They did not

name any specific racial groupings when referring to students. Instead, these earlier documents

repeat the phrase “all students.” Of the fifteen documents surveyed, a mere three (CEE2005 20,

200921 and 201022), all of them CEE statements, identify racial categories by name. These

include the following references: “white female English educators (CEE, 2005),” “the

stereotypical demographic teacher population of the white, middle-class female (CEE 2005),”

“teachers in the classrooms are predominantly white, middle class, and monolingual (CEE

2009, 2010),” “teacher educators are predominantly white (CEE, 2009),” “over 40% of public

school students are African-American, Latino, Asian and Native American (CEE, 2009),”

“white students from low socioeconomic backgrounds (2010).” The 2009 and 2010 documents

also use the term “non-white” and the 2010 document uses the lexicon “students of color.”

Notably, the first use of a race specific term was applied to white English educators and white

English teachers.

In the 2010 CEE Resolution on Social Justice and Literacy Education, there was the

language of white and non-white applied to teachers and students. The terms “urban” and

“students of color” were applied to students for the first time:

Fewer than 10% of teachers are non-white, while the National Center for Education

Statistics reports that 42% of public-school students are non-white and the diversity of

student languages, ethnicities, religions, and racial and cultural make-up continues to

20
CEE Position Statement on Supporting Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners in English Education
(2005)
21
CEE Beliefs Statement about Social Justice in English Education (2009)
22
CEE-SJ/NCTE Resolution on Social Justice in Literacy Education
 82

grow (Banks, 2004). Yet, teachers in the classrooms are predominantly white, middle

class, and monolingual (Futrell, 2000; Kailin, 1999) and lack the knowledge, skills, and

dispositions to work within schools that have a predominantly urban population.

The use of the terms “white” and “non-white” both recognizes race and evades it. The

use of these terms simultaneously reinforces a racial hierarchy that situates white teachers as the

standard against both teachers and students of different racial identities which are submerged and

subordinated through the term “non-white.” Further, white teachers are constructed as race-

ignorant. While their ignorance is depicted as a deficit and “lack,” students of color and teachers

of color appear as mere specters; like the Africanist presence in American literature, their

presence is noted but no agency is attributed to them.

The term “race” is explicitly deployed in nine of the fifteen standards texts. It is worth

noting, however, that in every instance “race” is listed in a series of other modes of difference:

“respect for differences of ethnicity, race, language, culture, gender and ability, (2003),”

“shaped by membership in groups based on ethnicity, race, socioeconomic status….(2006), “an

unacceptable achievement gap based on race, ethnicity, disability/exceptionality and

socioeconomic status (2007),” “injustice and discrimination with regard to differences in: race,

ethnicity, gender…(2009 n=3),” “differences in race, ethnicity, culture…(2010),” “plan

instruction responsive to students’ local, national and international histories, individual

identities (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender expression…) (2012),” “texts by and about individuals

representing diverse groups in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, culture…(2017), ”intersectional

identities involving e.g. race, ethnicity, class, gender…(2018). In 2021, “race” is mentioned

antepenultimately in a lengthy list of modes through which people construct social and cultural

identities: “ability, age, appearance, class, culture, ethnicity, exceptionality, gender expression,
 83

health, immigration status, language/dialects, national origin, race, sexual orientation and

spiritual beliefs (2021).” The descriptor “racial” similarly appears in lists with other types of

social identities (e.g. students who represent diverse ethnic, racial, gender, language, religious,

socioeconomic, and regional/geographic origins, 2002) in 2002 (n=2), 2005 (n=2), 2006 (n=3)

and 2009 (n=2). Race gets evaded here as it becomes subsumed under the broader “diversity”

umbrella and the processes of Othering.

I also found that when students’ race was noted, it was often implied. For example, the

2006 standards contain the following statement which I coded as “race” although it avoids

evoking race explicitly and does not isolate racial difference as a unit of focus:

America’s classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse; more than one-third of the

students in P–12 classrooms are from minority groups. The families of an increasing

number of students are immigrants, many with native languages other than English and

from diverse religious backgrounds. Growing numbers of students are classified as

having disabilities. At the same time, minority teachers are less than 15 percent of the

teaching force. As a result, most students do not have the opportunity to benefit from a

diverse teaching force.

In the 2007 standards race is evoked by allusion to the civil rights era landmark

desgregation case, though the promise is applied to “all students” and not Black students or even

students of color specifically.

At least since Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, our Nation has struggled to provide

equal educational opportunity to all children. Now federal law requires that no child be

left behind. (2007)

It was also interesting that while students are assigned multiple expressions of diversity
 84

including immigration status, native language, religion and ability, “minority” teachers were

subject to a totalizing racialization that reduced them to racialized forms that make up a

“diverse” force. While the standards generally afford students multiple modes of diversity, where

teachers are mostly subject to racialization (and gendering), racially diverse students are lumped

together racially under a “students of color” banner and then additionally subsumed under “all

students.” Similarly, racial diversity is rarely attended to as a consideration in itself without

similar consideration being given to other, some may say intersecting forms of diversity. For

example, race in the standards is often listed alongside socioeconomic status or linguistic

diversity to allow for class and culture to be used to account for the reality that race fails to

explain.

Notably, the language of “racism” and “anti-racism” holds a prominent place in the 2021

NCTE Standards for the Initial Preparation of Teachers of English Language Arts 7-12. Four of

the five standards delineated in that document include references to “antiracist/antibias” English

theory, content knowledge and instruction. In those standards, competent English teachers are

depicted as possessing the knowledge of and skill in applying “antiracist/antibias” English

Language Arts (ELA) instruction and assessment. For example, Standard 4 states: “Candidates

implement planned coherent, relevant standards-aligned, differentiated antiracist/antibias ELA

instruction and assessment to motivate and engage all learners.”

The 2021 text further references the 2018 NCTE Statement on Anti-Racism to Support

Teaching and Learning, which, itself referred to a 2007 statement released by the NCTE

Committee on Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English. The 2018 Statement defines racism

as consisting of “two principal components: difference and power. It is mindset that sees a

“them” that is different from an “us.” It further locates racism in America, “Racism in America
 85

is the systematic mistreatment and disenfranchisement of people of color who currently and

historically possess less power and privilege than white Americans” (p. 4). This definition is

embedded in the 2021 glossary of key terms for the term “Antiracist/antibias instruction.”

Notably, within the 2021 standards and the 2018 Statement, references to teachers’ race

are no longer prominent. Further, the term “all students” rather than references to specific racial

identities permeate the 2021 standards. “All students” functions in this document to encompass

a range of social identities in an even more extensive list than in previous documents.

Referencing the 2018 Statement, the 2021 standards call for preparing teachers who will:

Advocate for legislative reform that will lead to policies that provide sanctions against

discrimination in education based on race, ethnicity, gender, religious affiliation, sexual

orientation, class, mental and physical abilities, nationality, migrant, immigrant, and

refugee status (p. 5).

In these documents, then, race is clearly connected to racism; the competent and effective

English teachers possess and enact knowledge of the nature of racism and the theory and

practices of anti-racist English teaching. The term “race” and “anti-racism” heighten the

visibility and increase the urgency of addressing the race problem in English teaching at the

same time constructing English teachers and their students as raceless.

Reification -Empowering an Illusion

Reification is the process by which a social construction and its impacts comes to be

interpreted as a real thing. In The Social Construction of Reality (1966), Berger and Luckmann

describe reification as “the apprehension of human phenomena as if they were things” and “the

apprehension of the products of human phenomena as if they were something else than human

products—such as facts of nature, results of cosmic laws, or manifestations of divine will”

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(p.88). The process of reification does not necessarily require individual intent (Kittrell 2011), as

processes of reification operate on the systemic level. 23 The standards reify race and project a

hegemonic understanding of race and racism rooted in racial social constructionism through

multiple discursive, prescriptive and ontological processes of reification. I identified three modes

through which the standards documents reify the concept of race: affirmation, agnotology and

obfuscation.

Affirming Race

Racial affirmation refers to the intent to reinforce either (a) racial ideology that espouses

essentialist notions of race and racial identity or (b) racial identity as defined within categories

that are seen as fixed and real. Affirming racial ideology occurs, for instance, through the

systematic assigning of racial categories and using race to categorize students (and teachers).

This assigning always occurs as part of processes of racialization. The implicit

validation/legitimation of the traditional racial category of “white” functions normatively as a

substantive account of race that does not account for the great ethnic diversity of “white” people

in the US, persons whose ancestries may extend from Sicily to South Africa or who may live in

abject poverty or be among the 1%. This amounts to a diversity omission (Kittrell, 2011).

Reifying the racial category “white” is to accept a form of categorization that ignores the actual

ancestral, historical and class diversity of those assigned to that category as well as the ways in

which people assigned to that category defy the boundaries or essentialism of that category.

Racial affirmation is also an interpersonal process where teachers reinforce racial

identity in keeping with essentialist notions of race and racial identity that accept these categories

23
Kittrel (2011) discusses how institutions can operate as agents of reification. Mason (2022) concurs that there are
systemic ways of reifying race, such as the persistence in collecting data based on the belief in race, however well
intended which is part of the machinery of race(ism).
 87

as fixed and real, such as references to “Black culture,” “Asian values” or the more subtle

“crossing cultural boundaries” as the CEE Position Statement on Supporting Linguistically and

Culturally Diverse Learners in English Education (2005) prescribed for English teachers “in

pursuit of social justice and equity:”

As part of their teacher education, [white teachers] will need to acknowledge the limits

of their personal knowledge as well as experience the privileges afforded them by virtue

of their race and class. Part of the curriculum for English educators will involve

crossing personal boundaries in order to study, embrace and build understanding of

the “other.” The purpose of boundary crossing is not to simply have an experience with

the “other,” but to use that experience to advocate for the advancement for all.

The standards advocate an approach to teaching English that deputizes English teachers

to help sustain the race concept by deploying subtle forms of racial affirmation, 24 for example,

teaching and developing curriculum designed to assist and strengthen racialized students’ racial

and cultural identity development at the same time as it provides white teachers opportunities for

encounters with the Other.

This racializing in service of reification occurs in two interrelated ways. First, the

standards reify race by racializing the teacher in contrast to diverse students. Taken together, the

documents, despite putatively attending to diversity, reify the conception of race that deems

“Black/African American,” “Native American,” “Latino” and especially “white” to be fixed,

discrete racial groups, and places white as monolithic and in contrast to “non-white” or

“diverse.”25 Within the standards themselves (though not the CEE statements) I noted a tendency
24
It might be important to note that I use subtle here is a descriptor for how these processes are perceived (or not)
and in using the word subtle I do not make any claims about the impact of such forms of racial affirmation when
compared to more overt (CRT, Afrocentrism, ) forms of racial affirmation.
25
In the exposition of agnotology below I present some spheres of ignorance related to the concept of race,
including false beliefs about race as natural or biological and the ontological construction of white in opposition to
non-white.
 88

to avoid naming specific racial categories. Despite this evident race evasiveness, the reification

of race was nonetheless deployed in subtle ways. In place of racial monikers, the 2000 to 2010

standards variously employ a number of rhetorical evasions such as “diverse,” “urban,”

“nonwhite,” “minority” and “students of color.”

Thus emerges the construction of the “well prepared teacher of all students,” put forward

as an ideal agent of social justice. The 2007 and 2009 texts include the following statements:

When the education profession, the public, and policymakers demand that all children be

taught by well prepared teachers, then no child will be left behind and social justice will

be advanced. (2007)

This definition of social justice is, therefore, bound to the K-12 Language Arts and English

teacher education classroom contexts.

We believe that a disposition committed to enacting social justice enables teachers to

teach all students more fairly and equitably. For social justice to exist in our schools

means that each student in our classrooms is entitled to the same opportunities for

academic achievement regardless of background or acquired privilege. (2009).

“White” is often taken as normative particularly in discussions of diversity and so it

shows a critical consciousness that white is the first named racial identity and furthermore that

teachers’ racial identity and not their students is the focus of the racial denotation. This is

remarkable because prior versions of the standards (2000, 2002, 2003) managed to discuss

diversity without ever naming any racial categories (See below). The (only) race that is

mentioned in this document (CEE 2009) is “white,” and so while the relationship to be

understood as existing between race, socioeconomic background and culture in the perpetuation

of inequities/disparities in schools is only implied, the overall implication is that white and
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English teacher lies on one end and non-white/student, poor, diverse are on the other. In keeping

with the social constructionst view of race that is being reified in this 2005 document, it names

“white” as a racial category and this assignment of race is attached to English educators in the

context of teaching linguistically and culturally diverse students, bringing with it its assorted

baggage of assigned traits, assets, deficiencies and benefits or challenges. Concurrently, having a

“disposition committed to enacting social justice” enables teachers to teach all students more

fairly and equitably, thus constructing a particular version of the English teacher.

A second mode of racialization or racial affirmation notable in the standards is normatively

practicing racial categorization in such a way that teachers and students are assigned traits,

weaknesses, and needs based on that particular racial categorization. For example, in the 2010

CEE Resolution on Social Justice in Literacy Education (CEE, 2010), students of color and poor

white students are as depicted as imperiled by poor educational prospects: “Students of color

and white students from low socioeconomic backgrounds experience lower standardized test

scores, teacher expectations, and access to resources (2010).” Though constructed across many

of the standards documents as “the stereotypical demographic teacher population of the white,

middle-class, female” (CEE 2005, Belief 7), the English teacher is expected to affirm students’

racial identities. The 2003 NCTE/NCATE standards, for example, frames the English teacher’s

role (vis a vis racialized students) as requiring the teacher to affirm such students’ racial and

cultural identity through a multicultural pluralism approach. Teachers extensively and creatively

help their students become more familiar with their own and others’ cultures and to become self-

aware by learning to monitor their own language use and behavior in terms of demonstrating

respect for individual differences of ethnicity, race, language, gender, and ability (2003). This

approach positions teachers as responsible for imparting to students knowledge about their own
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and other students’ cultures, a concept which is, notably, later conflated with both race and

ethnicity.

Agnotology

The process of ignorance-making has been theorized as agnotology and traces its

intellectual roots to Carter G. Woodson’s work in The Miseducation of the Negro. Agnotology is

the study of miseducation - the social construction of ignorance. There has been a small but

epistemologically significant body of research into myths produced in educational settings and

texts about specific populations in educational contexts. Angulo (2016) identifies Carter G.

Woodson as the first person to engage in a rigorous inquiry into patterns and processes of

ignorance-making in educational institutions and posits that (mis)education and ignorance-

making have been central to some of the most important developments in the United States and

around the world. Agnotology of race keeps us playing in the shadows rather than inching

toward the light.26

Across the standards document, when “race “is explicitly named in the language of the

standards, the rhetorical manner in which it is presented accepts into English education

curriculum false knowledge that race is an objectively established fact of contemporary life in

the US and one which is intrinsic to identity. The 2009 CEE Beliefs Statement about Social

Justice in English Education states:

Fewer than 10% of teachers are non-white while over 40% of public school students are

African-American, Latino, Asian, and Native American and the diversity of student

languages, ethnicities, religions, and racial and cultural make-up continues to grow.

26
Elsewhere I lay out the Conceptual Framework of Playing in the Shadow of Euromodernity where I present a
decolonial metaphoric reading of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave as a treatise on the objective and subjective elements
of racial knowledge in English education.
 91

Such statements give the impression that race is incontrovertible. When race is deployed,

it is not treated as the contested, fragmented concept that it is (Omi and Winant, 2006). Instead,

the majority of standards texts gesture toward some overly simplistic, reductive and vague notion

of race that is neither defined nor presented as a topic worthy of inquiry.

It is, however, widely accepted that students, and in particular students of color have, by

adolescence, developed complex understandings of race that can be challenged, affirmed or

ignored by their schooling experiences. Gist (2015) examines how three culturally relevant

teachers in New York City public schools challenged the concepts of race and racism which low-

income adolescents of color brought to the study of history and contemporary society. Framed by

concepts of culturally relevant teaching and racial literacy, the study illustrated how the teachers

used sustained and strategic instruction about race (Skerrett, 2011) to complicate and challenge

students’ ideas of race and racism and the implications for teaching racial literacy in humanities

classrooms with low-income students of color. They also explore how the teachers’ “alternate

models of pedagogy” (Ladson-Billings, 1995) build upon and extends the theory of culturally

relevant pedagogy as it is commonly conceptualized.

The standards texts, however, do not model nor prescribe sustained and strategic inquiry

or instruction about race (i.e. the history and philosophy of the ideas of race). The effect of these

omissions is the curricular creation of ignorance. The standards do not espouse (explicitly nor

otherwise) this contested, dynamic notion of race, but instead present race as a settled, sound

concept that orders our being and our being with others. The normalized usage of “race” as an

identifier in discussions about public education, public school students and their teachers is

evidence of the very entrenchedness and acceptedness of race in our society as a reasonable,

useful and apt way of categorizing people. Critical knowledge about race - the intellectual
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history of race, its construction and reconstruction and its socio-scientific beginnings— is largely

relegated to the null curriculum. This is a glaring omission in the race conscious curriculum of

English teacher education that, I contend, prevents scholars and practitioners from making more

astute identifications and analyses of racism. Ignorance-making in English education is neither

passive nor benign, however it has moral and pedagogical implications, because it is under the

cover of these shadows that race becomes ever more entangled with racism.

There are a good number of enthusiastically argued epistemological arguments that

challenge what Maria Kromidas (2016) calls commonsense fictions about race. My reading of the

standards did not yield any evidence that the authors of the standards were aware of extra-

disciplinary debates about the nature of race nor, ergo, that they considered the content of these

debates - or the very existence of these debates- to be valuable knowledge for English teachers

who work with racialized subjects. These omitted critical theories of race offer cogent, diverse

and creative approaches to understanding race - a wealth of knowledge that exists in the

atmosphere just beyond the English ed universe of discourse.

Obfuscating Race

Etymologically, the word obfuscation derives from the Latin obfuscatio, from obfuscāre

(to darken). Obfuscation is the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making

the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language. The

obfuscation might be either unintentional or intentional (although intention usually is connoted),

and is accomplished with circumlocution (talking around the subject), the use of jargon

(technical language of a profession), and the use of an argot (in-group language) of limited

communicative value to outsiders. The standards obfuscate race mainly through circumlocution
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—talking around the subject of race but not about race— in ways that make the concept difficult

to understand.

Reading the standards for discursive obfuscation identifies how the standards make race

and racism less comprehensible in two ways. The first mode of obfuscation uncovered in the

standards was a generalized, pervasive conflation of race with ethnicity and culture (as well as

with diversity generally) throughout the standards. This is evident not only in the explicit textual

placement of race, ethnicity and culture as co-subjects in the same sentence, but also on the

discursive level as a lack of clarity about how these concepts differ and their differing

implications for the practice of English education.

The second mode of obfuscation is the sociogenic correlation-causation mode of

obfuscation whereby socially produced phenomena, such as poverty and academic achievement,

are linked to Black and Brown students as if those particular students are biologically, or

ontogenetically predisposed toward those phenomena. In this mode specific statements in the

standards blend causation and correlation in discussing race, often using race-evasive and

ambiguous terminology (e.g., minority, urban, students of color) to refer to diverse students

collectively. The end result of obfuscating correlation and causation is that sociological essences

become assigned to racialized students.

The “diverse student” finds themself at the center of almost any discussion about the

crisis of US public education. It is widely accepted that students of color—especially those

identifying as African American, Latino, and Native American—are more likely to dropout

(Christle et al., 2007), earn lower standardized test scores (Jencks and Phillips, 2011), attend

under-resourced schools (Darling-Hammond, 2004) and to have less qualified teachers (Darling-

Hammond, 2004; Lankford et al., 2002; Peske & Haycock, 2006) than white peers. Although
 94

numerous factors, from structural—inequitable resourcing of schools explains poor academic

performance in diverse students (Vaught and Castagno, 2008) to cultural —these students need

more grit, perseverance, and passion for long-term goals (Duckworth et al., 2007), have been

proffered as the cause(s) of student failure in schools, students of color are consistently viewed

as academically inferior to white peers. The near constant association of “cultural and linguistic

diversity” with negative educational realities has ossified public perception about “the diverse

student” and his community and stifled the curricular imagination of educators and education

policy makers. This process of ascription and association (of diversity with need, poverty, failure

and being left behind) is not static, in fact this linking of race with educational outcomes must be

continuously remade and reinscribed. As Gillborn (2008) notes, educational policy, likes

standards-related policies, are not designed to eliminate race inequality but to sustain it at

manageable levels. They do so, by locating within racially minoritized students.

I identified a number of instances where the standards, when attempting to address race,

obfuscated the relationship between race and educational achievement, raising and leaving

unanswered the question of whether race causes lower educational outcomes, or is merely

correlated. Between 2006 and 2010, when race of students is mentioned, it is often in the context

of material or market-based measures of educational equality, e.g., “achievement gap,” “left

behind” that get tied to “students of color.” For example, the 2007 NCATE and Social Justice –

A Call to Action (NCATE, 2007) states:

We recognize the existence of an unacceptable achievement gap based on race, ethnicity,

disability/exceptionality and socioeconomic status. The gap is exacerbated by some

children being assigned well prepared teachers and other children being assigned

unprepared and under-prepared teachers. Closing the achievement gap requires that all
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children be educated by teachers and other professional personnel who meet rigorous

professional standards. We renew our commitment to social justice in schooling for all

children by demanding well prepared educators for all children. (2007)

Students of color and white students from low socioeconomic backgrounds experience

lower standardized test scores, teacher expectations, and access to resources (2007).

For students of color (and others) the real manifestations of the racial badge, as presented

in the standards, are overwhelmingly negative and connected to poor educational outcomes, and

discrimination. The first explicit mention of a person’s race as an identity and/or specific racial

identities in the selected documents occurs in the CEE Position Statement on Supporting

Linguistically and Culturally diverse Learners in English Education (2005) which put forth that

“racial backgrounds” and “racial inequities” are not only inescapable facts of contemporary

school life, but that they are also an ineluctable part of both teacher and student identity as well

as a lens for how teachers should think about students and schooling:

Teachers and teacher educators must be willing to cross traditional, personal and

professional boundaries in pursuit of social justice and equity. While there are

discussions about whether “we” can or cannot teach “others,” the fact remains that

English educators do just that every day. There is and will continue to be a disparity

between the racial, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds of English educators and

their students. Whereas the percentage of white female English educators—estimated at

about 85-90 per cent—in U.S. schools has remained constant (Snyder & Hoffman, 2002),

the students with whom they work have and will continue to become increasingly

diverse. Teacher candidates will need to understand and acknowledge racial and

socioeconomic inequities that exist and that schools perpetuate.

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The standards espouse an ideology of race that holds that race exists as a social

construction that is real inasmuch as it is assigned to every person, bringing with it real traits,

consequences, deficits and benefits that attach to the person, for example inequities.

Conclusion

In Home, Morrison (1998) writes about the struggle to grasp the complexity of race and

racism through language. “It became increasingly clear how language both liberated and

imprisoned me. Whatever the forays of my imagination, the keeper, whose keys tinkled always

within earshot, was race” (p.1). My analysis of the English education standards texts reveals

how the field of English education has, like Morrison, struggled to grasp the complexity of the

race problem. While I examined the processes of race evasiveness, agnotology and obfuscation

separately, these processes are entangled; they operate in, on and through each other. The

manner in which the standards simultaneously avoid race, uphold race, and obfuscate race has

the effect of reifying race by reproducing dominant race ideology and its corresponding language

and logics. I argue that the epistemological outcome of these intersecting processes is an

architecture, in Morrison’s words, of unclear, distorted, and shadowy understanding of the

relationship between race and racism. The standards reify race and as a corollary can be also

seen as reifying racism by centering a particular standpoint on racism that determines what

racism is, how it works and how it should be challenged while foreclosing and effectively

silencing many others. Morrison urges a shift toward epistemic openness around race and

cautions us to “rethink the subtle yet persuasive attachments we may have to the architecture of

race.” It is worth quoting her at length here:

We need to think about what it means and what it takes to live in a redesigned racial

house and evasively and erroneously--call it diversity or multiculturalism as a way of

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calling it home. We need to think about how invested some of the best theoretical work

may be in clinging to the house's redesign as simulacrum. We need to think about what

new dangers present themselves when escape or self-exile from the house of racial

construction is announced or achieved. I risk here, perhaps, charges of encouraging futile

attempts to transcend race or pernicious efforts to trivialize it. It would worry me a great

deal if my remarks--or my narratives--were to be so completely misunderstood. What I

am determined to do is to take what is articulated as an elusive race-free paradise and

domesticate it. I am determined to concretize a literary discourse that (outside of science

fiction) resonates exclusively in the register of permanently unrealizable dream. It is a

discourse that (unwittingly) allows racism an intellectual weight to which it has

absolutely no claim. My confrontation is piecemeal and very slow. Unlike the successful

advancement of an argument, narration requires the active complicity of a reader willing

to step outside established boundaries of the racial imaginary. And, unlike visual media,

narrative has no pictures to ease the difficulty of that step. (Home, p4—complete citation)

Within the terrain of schooling as a site of racial subjectification, the English classroom

stands out as a site of profound racial learning (Kromidas, 2016, p. 151), or else the possibility of

such learning. Such a shift requires a full recognition of the ubiquity and complexity of the race

concept to avoid unintentionally sustaining the problematic, unscientific, delegitimized and

deconstructed race concept that is at the root of race-related problems which are the focus of

inquiry and analysis. Until such a shift happens, these processes of ascription and identification

in English teacher education continue create an ever more tangled mobius strip of epistemic

injustice.27

27
(See The racial badge (du bois in appiah p.81) and American racialism and the mobius strip of “ascription and
identification”(as discussed in Taylor 2000).
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Chapter 6 : Race in the Method of Teaching English – “The

Methods Texts Chapter”

This chapter examines race discourse in English methods textbooks. I present my

analysis of seventeen pedagogical texts; the majority of which Pasternak et al. (2017) have

identified as among the most used in English education methods courses in the US in the early

twenty-first century. To understand how race-consciousness is evident in these methods texts,

the analysis in this chapter blends a Wynterian-Morrisonian framework that grows out of Walter

Mignolo’s notions of the colonial matrix of power,28 to decipher the rhetoric of modernity and

logic of coloniality that animate how race figures into English education in and through English

methods texts. Skerrett framework helps further illuminate the entanglement of race, language,

culture and power as it shapes English education specifically.

Skerrett (2011) work on racial literacy explored how secondary English teachers in two

racially diverse schools – one in Massachusetts, US, the other in Ontario, Canada – described

their knowledge of and practices for teaching about race and racism. Skerrett (2011) analysis

identified three approaches to racial literacy variously employed by the teachers: apprehensive

and authorized; incidental and ill-informed; and sustained and strategic. According to Skerrett

(2011), apprehensive teachers feared or hesitated to talk about race and racism in their teaching

or to discuss racialized conditions at their school. These teachers enacted racial literacy

instruction when it was authorized by texts, identified in the official curriculum, that contained a

racial focus or by administrative policy. Incidental references to racial literacy include

28
The colonial matrix of power is characterized by the combination of a rhetoric of modernity with a logic of
coloniality. The rhetoric of modernity is made explicit by means of ideas such as progress, development, and
growth, whereas the logic of coloniality is silenced or named as a set of problems to be solved under the headings of
poverty, inequality, injustice, corruption, mercantilization and dispensability of human life (Mignolo 2011 p. xvii).
In his perspective, coloniality is constitutive of modernity.
 99

instruction that occurred at sporadic moments in teachers’ practices, for instance, when they, or

their students, initiated conversations about racialized events that occurred in the

community. These teachers, however, were, often ill-informed, and taught about race based on

inadequate or problematic knowledge. Finally, teachers who enacted a sustained and strategic

approach enacted educational philosophies and curriculum and instructional practices anchored

in an anti-racist stance.

Skerrett (2011) typology of racial literacy approaches helps reveal how the selected

methods texts variously provide knowledge or foster ignorance of and practices for teaching

about race and racism. Similar to the ways in which Skerret’s (2011) analysis revealed rich

complexities and contradictions in teachers’ racial literacy knowledge and instructional practices,

my analysis of textbooks reveals contradictions and inconsistencies. For example, an author may

have, in a single book expressed a commitment to the principles of democratic pluralism,

including addressing issues of race, yet in the same book uncritically presented a problematic

activity that erased certain identities or critical perspectives, especially those related to race.

Often these contradictions and complexities reveal themselves through what is left unspoken,

what is left out of the curriculum and the limited canon of themes and big ideas that are recycled

and re-presented across these texts.

My analysis also extends Skerrett….

The Methods Texts

I examined the content of seventeen texts for preparing English teacher candidates that

Pasternak et al.’s (2017) national survey found to be the most commonly assigned textbooks

required in university-based English education methods courses in the US during the time period
 100

of this study. (See Pasternak et al 2017 for extensive description of the methods used to produce

this list). Table 6.1 lists these texts, their authors and dates of publication.
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Table 6.2
Data: 17 Dominant texts in English methods courses (2017)

1. Anderson, J (2004). Mechanically Inclined

2. Atwell, N. (1998). In the Middle: New Understandings about Writing, Reading and

Learning, 2nd edn.

3. Beers, K. (2003). When Kids can’t Read what Teachers can do: A Guide for Teachers

6-12

4. Burke,J. (2007) The English Teacher’s Companion: A Complete Guide to Classroom,

Curriculum, and the Profession, 3rd edn.

5. Burke, J. (2012). What’s the Big Idea? Question-Driven Units to Motivate Reading,

Writing and Thinking. 1st edn.

6. Christenbury, L. (2006). Making the Journey: Being and Becoming a Teacher of

English Language Arts, 3rd edn.

7. Christensen, L. (2000). Reading, Writing and Rising Up: Teaching about Social Justice

and the Power of the Written Word.

8. Christensen, L. (2009). Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-imagining the Language Arts

Classroom.

9. Gallagher, K. (2005). Teaching Adolescent Writers.

10. Kirby, D.L. and Covitz, D. (2013) Inside Out: Strategies for Teaching Writing, 4th edn.

11. Maxwell, R. and Meiser, M. (2004). Teaching English in Middle and Secondary

Schools, 4th edn.

12. Milner, J.O., Milner, L.M. and Mitchel, J.F. (2012). Bridging English, 5th Edn.

13. Romano, T. (2000). Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers.

14. Smagorinsky, P. (2008) Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry out
 102

Instructional Units.

15. Smagorinsky, P., Johannesson, l.R., Kahn, E.A. and McCann, T.M. (2010). The

Dynamics of Writing Instruction: A Structured Process for Approach for Middle and High

School.

16. Tovani, C (2000). I Read It but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for

Adolescent Readers.

17. Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. (2006). Understanding by Design, 2nd edn.

Findings

My analysis of the English methods texts was guided by the following question: What are

the approaches to racial literacy used and (re)produced by English methods text authors to

construct the notion of race and racism in the subject domain of English Education? I found

multiple ways that race manifests in English methods textbooks as a discursively reproduced yet

largely unexamined phenomenon. As noted in chapter four, Drawing on Skerrett (2011), I

categorized each textbook’s approach to race as either authorizing or non-authorizing. Non-

authorizing texts did not engage race or did so only perfunctorily. To be coded as authorizing,

the text needed to meet the following four criteria: 1) significant engagement with race or racism,

i.e., more than two pages of text dedicated to issues of race or racism; 2) race or racism

referenced across two or more chapters; 3) included ideas from scholars whose work focuses on

Black and Brown students; and 4) recommended works by Black and Brown authors in more

than two chapters. Additionally, textbooks were designated either “low” or “high” as a descriptor
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of their level of engagement with race and/or racism. Those coded “low” barely met the

threshold for “authorized.”

In total, I categorized eleven textbooks as authorizing and six as non-authorizing. Table

6.2 lists the books in each category.

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Table 6.3
Authorizing and non-authorizing textbooks.

Authorizing texts and agents Non-authorizing texts and agents

Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing In the Middle - N. Atwell (1998)

Multigenre Papers - T. Romano (2000) (low)

Reading, Writing and Rising Up: Teaching I Read it but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension

about Social Justice and the Power of the Strategies for Adolescent Readers. - C.

Written Word - L. Christensen (2000) (high) Tovani (2000)

Mechanically Inclined - J. Anderson (2000) When Kids Can’t Read, what Teachers can

(low) do: A Guide for Teachers 6-12 (2003)

Teaching English in Middle and Secondary Teaching Adolescent Writers - K. Gallagher

Schools, 4th edn. - Maxwell, R. and Meiser, (2005)

M. (2004) (high)

Making the Journey: Being and Becoming a Understanding by Design - Wiggins, G. and

Teacher of English Language Arts 3rd edn - McTighe, J. (2006)

L. Christenbury (2006) (high)

The English Teachers’s Companion: A The Dynamics of Writing Instruction: A

Complete Guide to Classroom, Curriculum, Structured Process Approach for Middle and

and the Profession, 3rd edn. - J. Burke (2007) High School - P. Smagorinsky et al. (2010)

(high)
 105

Teaching English by Design: How to Create

and Carry out Instructional Units - P.

Smagorinsky (2008) (high)

Teaching for Joy and Justice: Re-imagining

the Language Arts Classroom - L. Christensen

(2009) (high)

What’s the Big Idea? Question-Driven Units

to Motivate Reading, Writing and Thinking.

1st ed (2012) (high)

Inside Out: Strategies for Teaching Writing,

4th edn - D.L. Kirby and D. Crovitz (2012)

(high)

Bridging English, 5th edn. - J.O. Milner, L.M.

and Mitchel, J.F. (2012) (high)

Non-authorizing Texts

The six non-authorizing texts rarely addressed race and when they did, they did so in

largely perfunctory ways. These texts deployed apprehensive, evasive and nullifying approaches

to race.
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Apprehensive Approaches

Racial literacy instruction requires the use of curricular texts in which race and racism are

the focus (Rogers & Mosley, 2006; Sutherland, 2008; Troyna & Carrington, 1990). Skerrett

(2011) noted that teachers’ apprehensiveness around race emphasizes the need for anti-racist

texts in the official school curriculum and professional support on how to teach them. For

example, Skerrett (2011) documented how Sharon, a teacher who experienced tension between

her desire to engage in racial literacy instruction, on the one hand, and her fear of professional

damage to herself and emotional pain for her students, on the other hand, sought congruence

with authorized texts. Sharon selected more benign discourses about “prejudice” and “abuse”

rather than “racism” or “racial discrimination.” She employed the discourse of ‘multifaceted’ and

‘multicultural’ to describe her student population rather than “race.”

In my analysis, I found that some methods texts reflected a similar hesitancy to deal with

race and racism. The authors deployed race evasion, as illustrated in the analyses of English

education standards texts presented in the previous chapter of this dissertation. For example, in

the methods text, I Read it but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers,

Tovani (2000) employs euphemistic language to describe the unique challenges one student,

Jerome presented to her as an English teacher:

The next day, Jerome volunteers to go first. He is by far the toughest kid I have ever

taught. No one crosses Jerome. (As I write this, he is serving a life sentence for proving

his gang allegiance by committing a drive-by shooting in which someone ended up dead.)

When he asks to go first, I am nervous to say the least. Will he make a mockery of the

assignment? He hides his book behind his back and swaggers to the front of the room.

Everyone waits breathlessly. I am dying to see what book he has. Slowly, he pulls it
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from behind his back…The Pokey Little Puppy. As he passes me, I notice a faint smile

on his face. We have seen a side of Jerome that few have ever seen.

Apprehension is evident in Tovani’s anecdote meant to humanize students that might be

intimidating or feel unreachable. Tovani’s narrative constructs Jerome as an Africanist presence;

his “swagger” and menace evoke fear and apprehension in Tovani who feels intimidated by him.

This problematic is quickly solved when the Jerome shares with the class that his favorite book

was a children’s book that his grandmother used to read to him. Tovani interprets this incident as

a socio-political imperative: “I see the faces of my new students and know I must cross

boundaries of race, religion, gender and social status. I know this can be done only by sharing

our experiences as readers because, after all, who can be intimidated by someone whose favorite

book is The Pokey Little Puppy?” (p.#).

Tovani’s (2000) apprehensive approach names race only so that it can be dismissed, its

singularity evaded by the endorsement of an overly simplistic and trite notion that, “Books will

be the great equalizer” (p. 12). It is important to ask here, what is being “equalized.” Jerome

holds outsized weight in Tovani’s mind, an Africanist spectre that threatens her authority in the

classroom. Books, rather than empowering Jerome, infantilize him. His embrace of a children’s

book reduces him to a simpleton, an object that can now be readily dealt with by Tovani. Books,

rather than equalizing Tovani and Jerome, restore Tovani’s power over him. Further, what are

we to make of the fact of Jerome’s later incarceration. While Tovani uses the reference to

Jerome’s criminality and incarceration to heighten the threat his poses to her, it suggests, further,

that books – and literacy - have not, in fact, worked to equalize his life chances.
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Race Evasiveness

The six textbooks (See Table 5.1) coded non-authorizing also displayed race-evasive

discourses. In the Middle (1998), notable for its almost complete avoidance of race, contained no

explicit race-related content save for the mention of Richard Wright’s Black Boy as an example

of a book-length memoir from which English teachers might select excerpts to teach. There

seemed to be a concerted authorial effort to not discuss race as there are instances where this

evasion is blatant. Atwell (1998), for example, in discussing national measures of student

reading proficiency and independent reading habits does not discuss racial differences but

engages the common “all students” trope. Atwell proclaims, “My students—all of them—want

the same sense, satisfaction, and meaning that adult readers of stories seek. Worthwhile,

interesting, appropriate books have the power to sustain every student’s interest” (p. 23). The

term “all students,” like “multicultural,” is a type of euphemism which teachers are more

comfortable using than “race,” illustrating the need for professional development in racial

literacy that addresses the psychological and interpersonal dimensions of race (Guinier, 2004;

Rogers and Mosley, 2006). Wynter (1992) saw terms such as “cultural pluralism” and “ethnic

diversity” as code words which mask social hierarchy and repression.

Beers, author of When Kids Can’t Read (2003), includes a section titled, “Celebrate the

Diversity in Your Class,” which avoids any mention of race or specific nuances of celebrating

diversity. “It’s hard,” she states, “for adolescents to embrace differences. Teenagers want to be

treated as individuals at the same time that they want to look like, dress like, sound like, and act

like those in their crowd...In short, look for the diversity that sits in your classroom and help

students see it and celebrate it” (citation).

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Nullification

After scouring all 370-pages of the foundational and highly regarded curriculum design

text, Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2006), I was not able to find a single

reference to race. This sobering finding indicates that there is a level of apprehensiveness among

textbook authors that rises to the level of complete evasion, an effective erasure or nullification

of the concept of race.

Nullification is also evident in how certain themes or critical perspectives are rarely, if

ever, proposed in exemplary lessons presented in these non-authorizing texts. For example, the

lack of attention to Black characters and Africanist presence in these texts can be interpreted as

evidence of literary Whiteness and nullification of literary Blackness. In The Dynamics of

Writing Instruction (2010), Smagorinsky endorses a Discrimination unit (p.191) that contains no

mention of or prompts for thinking about race or racism.

Authorizing

Ambivalent and Alienating

Other texts, rather than nullifying race by omission, display a notable ambivalence

around race and consequent misunderstanding of Black and Brown students. Smagorinsky’s

(2008) conceptual unit on Discrimination in Teaching English by Design (coded

authorizing/high) contains only passing mention of race, a decision for which he offers the

following defense:

Because discrimination is subject to so many permutations, I provide an element

of choice by allowing each student to pick a particular kind of discrimination

based on age, gender discrimination, discrimination based on physical or mental

conditions, or whatever topic interests them (p. 150).

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Despite this proclamation of centering student choice, the unit’s major assigned text is

Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy. By way of justifying the other materials selected for

this unit, Smagorinsky assures us, “In making these selections I’ve tried to seek a balance of men

and women, old and new, U.S. and international, and this race and that, and I’ve made other

efforts to include multiple perspectives on this complex topic” (p.#). Though Smagorinsky

acknowledges the complexities of discrimination, his language relegates issues of race and

racism to a marginal category through the use of highly ambivalent words such as “whatever”

and phrases such as “(this) and that.” His references to “multiple perspectives on this complex

topic” echo the race evasiveness of “multiculturalism” which Wynter (1992) highlights in her

analysis of social studies textbooks.

Racial ambivalence further shows up in the way authors construct diverse students. In a

section titled, “Students At Risk,” in their book Teaching English in Middle and Secondary

Schools, 4th edition, Meiser and Maxwell (2004) cite Lloyd Tindall’s 1988 report that identifies

six factors that contribute to At-Riskness: family trauma such as divorce or abuse, low parental

expectations and apathy, alcohol and drug abuse, poverty, minority status and lack of basic

academic skills. Meiser and Maxwell contend that, “Being a minority student, even if one has

been born in the United States, can cause some students to feel alienated. Immigrant students

may face even more prejudice, especially if economic times are hard and communities believe

that immigrants are taking away jobs” (p.#). These at-risk, minority students experience

alienation because “they may be outside of the mainstream culture” and “sometimes find little in

the curriculum that is familiar and consequently give up” (p.#). Though Maxwell and Meiser

(2004) highlight the role a Eurocentric curriculum plays in alienating “minority” students, they

also attribute the students’ alienation to their “minority” identity: “Being a minority student…can
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cause some students to feel alienated.” As I found in the English education standards, this

statement obfuscates the relationship between race and educational achievement, raising and

leaving unanswered the question of whether race causes lower educational outcomes, or is

merely correlated with it.

Authorizing by proxy

Skerrett analysis (2011) of teachers’ racial literacy revealed that the tension teachers feel

between wanting to teach about race yet fearing professional repercussions lies at the root of

their ambivalence toward race. One teacher, Sharon resolved this tension by selecting

departmentally-approved texts that centered safe discourses. Skerrett analysis found that teachers

sought authorization from administrators, who would select and sanction certain texts that

compelled teachers, even when they may not have had the predisposition to do so, to engage in

racial literacy instruction. Among the eleven texts I coded as authorizing texts, I observed a

tendency by authors to authorize by proxy, though these authorizations were still marred by

ambivalence around race. These authors often delegated the work of authorization to scholars of

color, in a similar manner to the way in which April, one of Skerrett teacher participants enlisted

the assistance of a Black female student to help her teach about the subject of race. April

recounted how this student was of great help “when we had to talk about it (race)” (author’s

emphasis). April, by her own admission, was “learning from the kids” about issues of race and

culture. She described her contribution as “walking around the classroom” and facilitating the

discussion of race while encouraging the Black student to be a co-teacher.

For ambivalent, authorizing authors of English education methods texts, those with little

or only superficial attention to race, a book’s legitimacy was derived from it being authored by

people of color. These texts directly cited scholars of color to speak to issues of race in teaching
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English to students in a particular racial group in a similar manner to how April leaned on the

Black student to be a co-teacher. In discussing issues of power in the English classroom in The

English Teacher’s Companion, Burke (2008) cites Lisa Delpit, a distinguished African American

educational scholar, to give, “an important perspective to the idea of negotiation, for it seems to

be a culturally bound notion. Not all students see the classroom as an appropriate bargaining

table where power is shared” (p.#). This glimpse into the psyche of the African American

student associates African American racial identify with a status of disempowerment and cultural

distance from the norms of English. It is authorized by citing extensively from one of Delpit’s

interview subjects (2006). Burke continues, suggesting that African American students expect

less power-sharing in their relationship with teachers, “Delpit (2006) quotes one man talking

about the expectations African American students bring to their relationship with teachers:

We had fun in her class, but she was mean. I can remember she used to say, ‘Tell me

what’s in the story, Wayne.’ She pushed, she used to get on me and push me to know.

She made us learn. We had to get in the books. There was this tall guy and he tried to

take her on, but she was in charge of that class and she didn’t let anyone run her. I still

have that book we used in her class. It has a bunch of stories in it. I just read one on

Coca-Cola again the other day. (citation)

Aside from the fact that this is one excerpt from one African American student, Burke’s

analysis omits any consideration of how the teacher’s race impacts the power dynamic and

student expectations. Later, Burke begins Chapter 18, Thoughts About Culture, Race, and

Language (pp. 400-408), with a discussion and overview of the 1997 public debate about

“‘ebonics’ or black English,” and the proposal later that year to revise the San Francisco required

reading list to reflect the cultural diversity of its student population. Rather than weigh in on the
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“predictable resistance from those who argued that to change the canon amounted to lowering

standards,” Burke again defers to an African American scholar to opine on this racialized

politicized question in his stead, “As Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1992, xv), writes, ‘to speak of

curriculum untouched by political concerns is to imagine—as no one does—that education could

take place in a vacuum… the teaching of literature is the teaching of values.’” Burke concludes,

“In other words, what is not taught is not—nor, the omission implies, should it be—valued,

respected, honored” (citation).

In a later discussion of the rapid growth of the “Hispanic, black [sic] and Asian and

Pacific Islander communities between 1980 and 1990” in California’s Orange County, Burke

declares: “Instead of wasting time lamenting or resisting what is, we must clearly work to ensure

that all students learn what they need to gain access to the ‘keys’ James Baldwin refers to”

(citation). In this chapter Burke again cites Delpit, Baldwin, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., and also

Cornel West (1994). Citing yet another Black scholar, Keith Gilyard, author of Voices of the

Self (1991), Burke shares the following quote: “Black students affirming, through Black English,

their sense of self in the face of a school system and society that deny the same,” to propose the

problematic assertion that “what has been interpreted as the failure of so many African American

students should be viewed as a deliberate act of defiance or resistance” (Burke, 2008, p. 402).

Reading African American students’ use of Black English only as defiance or resistant reinforces

the positioning of Whiteness and white supremacy as defining Blackness rather than

understanding Black language as reflective of the fullness and complexity of Black cultures and

lives.
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Affirming and Authorizing

In Blending Genre, Altering Style: Writing Multigenre Papers (2000), Romano presents

an anecdotal interaction between an English teacher and her students which focuses on the

influence of culture on writer’s voice. This dialogue shows how Black students are placed in

positions of subjectification in literary discussions in English classrooms:

Tuesday Morning, Fourth Period—Poetry Discussion focuses on the influence of culture

on writer’s voice. Teacher prompts students with the question, “What else does the voice

in the poem sound like?” to which Jason replies “When I read it, it sounded like a rap, so

I guess Langston Hughes could be black.”

Latrice: Ya, that’s the way black folks talk—not any more. I’d get laughed at if I talked

like that—but I can tell a brother wrote this poem.

Ms. Morgen: Very good, Jason and Latrice. Latrice you identified with this poem

because it's a part of your culture. Do you think other students could enjoy and

identify with this poem even if they aren’t black? (p. 80)

In this exchange, the teachers deploys a type of racial affirmation, presented by the

author, Romano, as a peer-approved method for teaching English to racially and culturally

diverse students. Romano’s normative position appears to be that teachers ought to assist in

strengthening students’ racial identity with racially fixed notions of culture as affirmations of

their assigned racial categorization.

Notably, I also found more humanistic ways of affirming students’ racial or racialized

identities that avoid reification of them. Christensen’s Reading, Writing and Rising Up (2000)

offers such an approach to affirmation, writing, “As teachers, we have daily opportunities to

affirm that our students’ lives and language are unique and important. We do that in the
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selections of literature we read, in the history we choose to teach, and we do it by giving

legitimacy to our students’ lives as a content worthy of study” (Christensen 2000).

In Teaching English in Middle and Secondary Schools, 4th edition, Maxwell and Meiser

(2014) present a more critically race-conscious approach to the question of language diversity,

emphasizing:

Our goal should be to increase communicative competence—the student’s ability to use

language effectively in a variety of settings for many purposes and diverse audiences.

Our job, then is not to change a student’s language, but to expand the potential. We also

need to recognize that the label itself, “black English,” is misleading. It equates ethnic

identification with a genetic characteristic, being black. Many African Americans never

speak this dialect, whereas people of other ethnic groups do (Maxwell and Meiser 2014).

Here, Maxwell and Meisner acknowledge diversity in Black languages. They construct

Black identity as dynamic and complex as opposed to fixed and monolithic. This, in turn,

(re)constructs English as polyglot and not locked within an Eurocentric architecture.

The “Only Black Writer” Trope

In The English Teacher’s Companion, Burke (2008) discusses some of the challenges

teachers face when teaching diverse texts and acknowledges how teaching these texts can be

awkward and upsetting for teachers who are “just teaching what the curriculum requires” and

who then, for fear of boring or harming students yearn to “get back to some good ol’ grammar or

vocabulary where things are neutral, safe, familiar” (Burke 2008). Here Burke would appear to

be tapping into the subjectivities of white teachers specifically:

You have your class read Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street or Maya Angelou’s I

Know Why the Caged Bird Sings only to hear some of the Latino students say Mango
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Street is the most boring book they’ve ever read or an African American colleague balk

that she will never teach “that book” (Caged Bird) because she thinks it demeans blacks.

At the same time, Burke (2008) is deserving of the same well-deserved criticism he

highlights, noting that in one unit “the one text chosen [to represent a cultural perspective] (e.g.

Joy Luck Club or I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings) is not representative of the complex

realities of, for example, Asian Americans” (Burke 2008). In fact, Burke is not alone in this

shortcoming, even among authorizing/high texts, I found the process of authorization was often

delegated to a single or a few Black scholars, and discussions of diverse literature centered

around (at most) five or six canonical Black and Brown writers. In the section “Hispanic

Literature,” Maxwell and Meiser (2004) note that Hispanic literature is poorly represented in

anthologies, more so than other “minority” literature. Their suggestion for Hispanic selections

are: “novels and poetry by Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, and poetry

by Pat Mora, Carlos Cortez, Lorna Dee Corvantes and Rudlfo Anaya’s My Land Sings: Stories

from the Rio Grande” (citation). This echoes the persistence of the “Only Black Writer” trope

first named by novelist John A. Williams in 1963, who declared ironically that somehow, there

was “only” one Black writer (James Baldwin) praised in 1963.

This critique—of elevating only the minimum number of Black writers at the expense of all

others -- is evident in the textbooks analyzed for this study. Most of the books included

references to or recommended texts written by Black writers. While this might seem to be

evidence of progress, it is tempered by a startling fact - only a select few Black writers—all born

before 1950—appeared consistently and repeatedly across the English education methods texts.

These “outstanding African American authors” are Alice Walker, Chinua Achebe, Frederick

Douglass, Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright,
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Toni Morrison, Virginia Hamilton, Walter Dean Myers and Zora Neale Hurston Lorraine

Hansberry. The selection of Hispanic or Latino writers was even narrower. It included only

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Pablo Neruda, Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros.

Incidental and Ill-informed

In the context of English teaching, Skerrett (2011) study shows that incidental practices

of racial literacy instruction involved sporadic conversations about racism and racial

discrimination that may have been initiated by students or teachers. These conversations were

often sparked by current events discussed in the media or incidents that had occurred in the

school or local community.

The nature of writing a textbook precludes the element of incidental attention to race.

Yet, I still found examples of the incidental nature of race in many of the English education

methods texts. The surveyed textbooks gave incidental textual attention to race in three ways: 1)

ad-hoc references to race often combined with other concepts rather than given focused and deep

attention on its own; 2) race, when discussed, was seen as peripheral to the literary text discussed

or recommended for example, in a text like To Kill a Mockingbird, or; 3) race was treated in

isolation, in a bounded section or chapter dedicated to issues of race, language and/or culture, for

example Burke’s (2007) Chapter 18 “Thoughts about Culture, Race and Language” in The

English Teacher’s Companion and Romano’s (2000) Chapter 22 “Identity, Race and Classical

Literature” in Blending Genre, Altering Style. Skerrett (2011) cautions that when issues of race

are discussed in infrequent extra-curricular episodes or in bounded units apart from the core

curriculum, students receive a hidden curricular message that race and racism are illegitimate or
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inconsequential educational topics. Incidental or isolated references to race in English methods

texts suggests the same to beginning English teachers.

The English methods texts also exhibited an ill-informed approach to racial literacy. One

way this was exhibited was in a consistent pairing of “race” and “ethnicity.” There were also

several instances where the terms were used interchangeably. For example, the reflection prompt

at the end of Burke’s (2008), “Thoughts about Culture, Race and Language” chapter, conflates

culture, race and language under the umbrella term “ethnicity” without explanation. The words

race, culture and language are not part of the following reflection:

Reflection: Describe the ethnic community of your school and/or class. In this profile,

discuss how people work with each other. What are the most pressing issues you see in

your school and its community with regard to ethnicity? What can you do in your class to

help address these issues? If possible, ask your administration for the latest data analysis

that includes student performance and ethnicity (p. 407)

The subsequent activity does not use the term race, but names three racial (not ethnic) groups:

Activity: Take out your gradebook and examine your students’ performance in the light

of their identity. What are the implications for you as a teacher? In other words, if there is

no pattern, if your Native American, black [sic], and Latino students are all performing as

well as the other students, what are you doing to achieve this? (Burke 2008).

Burke does not provide the answers to these questions. Rather, he urges teachers to seek out help

if they need it. Suggested instructional activities like this reflect inadequate or faulty knowledge

about race.

Maxwell and Meiser (2004) contend, in a section titled, “Multicultural Literature,” that,

“The population of the United States is shifting from a predominantly white culture to one with
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an increasing number of people of color” ((Maxwell and Meiser 2004). They go on to provide

statistics of population growth and state: “America remains a land of immigrants” (Maxwell and

Meiser 2004). The authors then cite Roseann Duenas Gonzalez whose work discusses the

problems teachers have in teaching “minority” literature. In Do Not Call Us Negroes, Wynter

(1992) notes that the California textbooks attempted to portray the U.S. as a “land of

immigrants,” a narrative that she points out, erases the violent kidnapping, trafficking and

enslavement of Africans in the Americas who were decidedly not voluntary immigrants.

Maxwell and Meiser cite Gonzales here to legitimize this ill-informed narrative.

Tovani’s (2000) anecdotal modeling of the think aloud strategy using Gary Paulsen’s

Nightjohn, also exemplifies the ill-informed approaches to racial literacy found in many of the

texts. Ruminating on a section that describes the brutal punishment of enslaved people, Tovani

(2000) muses,

I bet the master wants the slave left on the tree to serve as a warning to other runaways.

No wonder some blacks hate whites. I think some African Americans blame whites

today for what happened years ago. On the other hand, I’m not responsible for slavery. I

didn’t do anything. I am sickened when I read about the cruelties of slavery, and it

makes me angry when people judge me because I am white. Some people assume I am

racist because I am white. That to me is prejudice (Tovani 2000)

Tovani’s think aloud deploys the trope of white innocence. Rejecting the historic

legacies of white supremacy and racial violence and injustice, Tovani deploys the notion of

reverse racism, positioning herself, as a white person, as the victim of racial prejudice. The

episode deploys a type of agnotology; it is an act of mis-education both of students in Tovani’s

classroom and of the students in the English education classroom who are becoming future
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English teachers, many of whom are white females, like Tovani. It also shows that Tovani

herself has been mis-educated.

Notably, Christensen, in a chapter titled, “Reading, Writing, And Righteous Anger:

Teaching about Language and Society” (p. 105), in her book, Reading, Writing and Rising Up,

published in the same year as Tovani’s book, speaks directly to this tendency among English

teachers to ignore the racism and sexism that Christensen says “run like a sewer” through U.S.

novels.

Sustained, Strategic and Social Justice Oriented

The sustained and strategic approach, as conceptualized by Skerrett (2011) is one in

which there is a deeply informed commitment to teaching about race and in which attending to

issues of race guides teachers’ curriculum and instructional philosophies and practices. There

were no books in the data set that exemplified this approach with a singular focus on race,

though Christensen’s Reading, Writing and Rising Up (2000) and Teaching for Joy and Justice

(2009) exemplify a sustained and strategic approach centered around the concept of social

justice. Both also include explicit discussions of race, though race is not always the central focus

of her approach. Through a sustained and strategic engagement with the social and historical

context of language, literacy and literature, Christensen’s books stand in stark contrast to the

evasive, agnostic, apprehensive, ad hoc and ambivalent approaches to race displayed by the other

books in the data set.

For Christensen, like sustained and strategic teacher Michael in Skerrett (2011) study,

“racial and cultural diversity formed ‘the substance’ of teaching and learning” in her classroom.

Christensen’s texts—being part autobiography, part curriculum guide and part critique of

standardized mandates— present a sustained engagement with this precept by paying special
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attention to constructing social relationships with her students where race (as well as gender,

immigration status, nation of origin and social class) was center stage. She engages students in

discussions of how their identities and development of academic knowledge were influenced by

their racial identities (Christensen, 2009), by including multiple non-canonical works by writers

of color throughout both books, and by positioning herself as both teacher and learner in

community with her students. Dialogue and sharing of personal stories are consistent facets of

the approach she presents as well.

Christensen’s books exemplify a sustained and strategic approach to social justice

literacy instruction, though she does not explicitly express a commitment to teaching about race

or being anti-racist. Christensen stresses the embeddedness of racism in US history that has

resulted in persistent social class inequity. To do so, she extends the discussion of a classic

Eurocentric text, Olive Burns’ novel, Cold Sassy Tree (1984) to incorporate conversation about

the relationship between social class and race (p. 105).

Christensen (2009, p. 81), in a section entitled, “Acting For Justice,” moves even further

toward enacting the kind of sustained and strategic racial literacy approach suggested by Skerrett

that invites students to participate in anti-racist activism or social action, more generally.

Christensen explains:

It is not enough to uncover or reduce biases in our classrooms; we must act to stop them

in the broader society. I developed this “Acting for Justice” unit for students to

“practice” behaving as allies. In this lesson, students learn how to disrupt actions or

words that stereotype or mistreat others as well as to become more aware of their own

stereotypes. This lesson deals with small-scale injustice where an ally can stop the abuse

of an individual, but larger structures of exploitation and domination remain. Allies also
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need to work on bigger, society-wide change. Students must understand the need to

struggle on both the personal and the societal levels (Christensen, 2009).

In Christensen’s final chapter in Reading, Writing and Rising Up (2000), “Untracking

English: Creating Quality Education for all Students,” she positions teachers as having agency in

the process of untracking schools and provides teachers with knowledge about the injustice of

tracking and its ill effects on students’ experiences. The chapter then guides teachers with

pedagogical and activist strategies to promote untracking by changing the curriculum and

changing reading strategies. Skerrett (2011) overall critique of teachers who implemented a

sustained anti-racist approach is that while they educated their students in anti-racism, they did

not advocate for, or contribute to, broader department or school-wide professional learning in

this regard. Here, Christensen exemplifies the type of advocacy Skerrett calls for as a key

component of a sustained and strategic approach to racial literacy.

Conclusion

Skerrett (2011) argues that teachers who employ apprehensive, ill-informed approaches

to engaging issues of race and racism may offer students problematic perspectives from which to

think about and act on racialized issues. My analysis of texts widely used in English education

methods courses suggests that many of these texts might also be offering beginning English

teachers similarly problematic perspectives. The methods texts deployed numerous approaches

to race and racism, including nullification, apprehensiveness, race evasion, and incidental and ill-

informed approaches, that offered, at best, a thin notion of race and racism, and, at worse, an

understanding of race and racism that reinforced racial hierarchies and white supremacy.

Notably, many noteworthy texts written for English teachers more recently have taken a

sustained and strategic approach to teaching about race in the context of English Language Arts.
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For example, Letting Go of Literary Whiteness, written by two white women English teacher

educators (Borsheim-Black & Sarigianides, 2019), and Linguistic Justice written by a Black

woman English teacher educator (Baker-Bell, 2020), employ what I call a Sustained, Explicit

Anti-racist Stance. This stance combines critical engagement with theories of race and racism

with literary studies and critical education, a combination absents in the seventeen other English

education methods books surveyed.

Borsheim-Black and Sarigianides’ (2019) Letting Go of Literary Whiteness: Antiracist

Literature Instruction for White Students focuses on “white contexts,” and offers a framework

for teaching literature in ways that disrupt the harm of Eurocentric curriculum and pedagogical

practices. In a 2019 interview about the book on New England Public Radio, Sarigianides

explains, “We wrote this book out of an urgency to figure out how to address race and racism in

our predominantly white college classrooms of students who often return to predominantly white

districts to teach literature” (citation).

They add, “Though we knew how to address race and racism in majority-minority

teaching contexts, we wanted to develop strategies for white-dominant contexts, believing and

knowing that so much racial harm stems from white actions and inactions” (citation). The

chapters include: 1. Teaching About Racism Through Literature in White Schools, 2. Designing

Racial Literacy Objectives and Assessments for Literature-Based Units, 3. Introducing a

Racialized Reader Response, 4. Unearthing Whiteness in Canonical Texts About Racism, 5.

Applying Critical Race Theory Lens to Literary Analysis, 6. Planning for and Responding to

Race Talk, and 7. Designing Assignments to Build Racial Literacy.

Baker-Bell’s (2020) Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and

Pedagogy focuses on the educational needs of Black students, and centers Black Language,
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specifically, as a site where white linguistic supremacy has heretofore wielded unchecked power.

The chapters include: 1. “Black Language is Good on Any MLK Boulevard,” 2. “What’s Anti-

Blackness Got To Do Wit It?” 3. “Killing Them Softly,” 4. “Scoff No More,” 5. “Black

Linguistic Consciousness,” 6. “THUG LIFE”; Bonus Chapter: Five Years After Leadership

Academy.

These books mark a radical departure from the English education methods texts I

analyzed here and that have been widely used across the field. Both books directly and in a

sustained manner confront the race problem. Both have received high-profile awards in the

English education field. The reception these books have received is a testament to the urgency

of more complex understandings of race and racism and of racial literacy in English education.
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Chapter 7 : Shifting the Geography of Reading

This study examined how the field of English education in the US sought to address the

“race problem” in the early part of the twenty-first century. This journey has been at times

lurching; engines have sputtered and there have been sharp turns over these two decades.

Reading the English education standards and methods textbooks produced and widely used over

the twenty-one year period from 2000 to 2021, with the works of Sylvia Wynter and Toni

Morrison as guides, reveals a field grappling with the challenge and possibility of our collective

inherited racial baggage and all its semiotics.

Even while, over the course of the twenty-one year period examined here, the field of

English education moved to recognize the “race problem” more explicitly and to adopt an anti-

racist stance in response to it, the English education standards and standards-related text

documents deploy a number of discursive forms that sublimate and suppress critical analyses of

the origins and meanings of race in literature, in English classrooms, in schools, and in the

broader US society. These include race evasiveness, racial affirmations, agnotology and

obfuscation. Additionally, I found that the methods texts were marked by an apprehensiveness

and a tendency to address issues of race in an incidental and often ill-informed manner. Some

methods texts did address race in a more sustained way. This, however, was under the larger

umbrella of “social justice,” again, acknowledging race while not directly engaging all its

complexities.

On the whole, my analysis points to the underdeveloped, shadowy nature of the

epistemological underpinnings of the English education field’s conceptions of race. In this

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concluding chapter, I explore the implications of this flimsy knowledge base. I then propose

how this might be addressed through leveraging what I call racial aporia.

The Implications of the Shadows

Wynter (1992, 2003) argues that the centuries-long Euromodern colonial project of

global exploitation has both legitimated and reproduced itself through an Order of Knowledge

that structures how we think about “being,” “power,” “truth” and “freedom.” This Order of

Knowledge is a self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating and, ultimately, self-imprisoning mechanism

that constrains our ability to engage or imagine ways of being and thinking outside of the

dominant myths and stories of domination of Man over all Other beings. In Walter Mignolo’s

(2011) telling in The Darker Side of Western Modernity, Christianity and Western Europe have

historically been constructed as the location from whence reason and civilization emanated to

the rest of the world. Coloniality is the name Mignolo gives to this Order of Knowledge, which

is the logic underlying the foundation and development of Western Civilization from the

Renaissance to the present day.

While the English education field, over the past twenty-one years, has tried to confront

this Order of Knowledge in ways that would better prepare English teachers to support the

learning of racially minoritized students, it remains largely trapped in this Order. This results in

three problems illuminated in this dissertation. It makes it easy for English teachers and English

teacher educators to avoid grappling with race. When English teachers/educators do engage

race, it leads them ultimately to reinforce racial hierarchies. Finally, even current efforts that

directly confront race through promoting anti-racist English teaching rest on a simplistic

understanding of race that does not fully capture the breadth of racial harm.
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The Ease of Avoiding Race

The analyses presented above document how racial evasion permeates the English education

standards and methods texts, making it easy for English teachers/educators to avoid substantively

engaging race in its complexities. One of the ways that race was made easy to avoid was through

the repeated listing in the English education standards of race with other social identities and

factors that contribute to individual differences such as age, ethnicity, gender, language

proficiency and socioeconomic status. The case is rarely made for why attention to race

specifically and on its own is necessary for a curriculum of teaching English to racialized

students. It is, rather, presented as one among many, similarly operating facets of identity or

options for engagement. Race evasiveness also appeared through the English methods texts.

This was epitomized by a model final assessment of a unit on The Adventures of Huckleberry

Finn (Kirby & Crovitz, 2013), a novel the central plot of which revolves around race. That

assessment tasks students with providing an analysis of Huck’s moral development throughout

the novel with no mention of race. Without a full understanding of race, the apprehensiveness

also documented in the field will lead English educators and English teachers to avoid

acknowledging and grappling with race in meaningful ways even when authorized by the

standards to do so.

The Reinforcement of Racial Hierarchies

Another problem with the limited knowledge base is the reinforcement of racial

hierarchies. Abundant examples of this appeared in the standards and methods texts. For

example, my analysis details how the standards consistently constructed “diverse” students as

racial objects/racialized subjects. Their racial identities were then depicted as the cause of

educational needs and failure. Linking race to educational outcomes perpetuates the dominant
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conceptions of race or race ideology. It provides an account of race which accepts as truth the

premise that “human beings are naturally born, for better or worse, into separate and distinct

categories or “races” (Mason, 2022) and uses this truism as the basis for making causal and

correlational scientific and empirical claims about students’ race and their educational

experiences, outcomes and needs. The discursive linkage thus endorses an essentialized and

overly deterministic notion of race.

The problematics of using race to explain human difference play out in education,

including in English education, to produce distorted reasoning about race and racism. It

reinforces racial hierarchies in which educational failure inheres in Black and Brown students’

racialized identities while, by implication, education success is naturalized as white. This

obscures the mythic and material conditions through which opportunity and resources are

defined, distributed and deployed. Mason (2022) reminds us that racism is not everywhere and

is not the cause for every “racial” disparity or negative interaction, though the very belief in race

would have us see and feel race(ism) at every turn, including in the many instances of racism that

are better explained by class, ethnicity and cultural inclinations.

The Over-Simplification of Race: The Leap over Knowledge to Action

Over the past two decades, the English education field, as represented in both the

standards and the methods course textbooks, has moved toward an explicit anti-racist stance.

This move to anti-racist English is, in many ways, to be welcomed as it represents the field’s

willingness to take a bold stand toward racial justice. At the same time, the 2021 standards,

which require English teachers to engage in explicit antiracist instruction, like their predecessors,

is based on a somewhat limited definition of racism as consisting of two components: difference

and power.
 129

A Wynterian reading of the standards and texts would hold that anti-racism is “the map

not the territory.” Good faith efforts by university-based English teacher education to address

historic and systemic injustice, though well-intentioned, do so under a penumbra of their failure-

refusal to see and interrogate disciplinary operating principles at the level of the ontological and

teleological - dealing with questions of reality/truth and purpose. This tendency is described by

Wynter (2006) as operating at the level of ‘the map’ rather than the level of “the territory” where

the issues being targeted are only a function (map) of the “enacted institutionalization of our

present genre of the human, Man and its governing sociogenic code (the territory)” (Wynter

2006).

Despite its attention to cultural diversity, textual diversity, teacher diversity and student

diversity, the field of English education continues to be guided by the map of race rather than by

a deeper understanding of the territory. This has occurred, in part, because the field has

maintained a lack of theoretical diversity. When it comes to the issue of “race relations” the field

of English education has effectively maintained epistemic border security, insulating the field

from the knowledge, theoretical grapplings and insights from scholars of race working in

disciplines like Africana and Latino studies, history, literature, philosophy and political science.

Meanwhile, a number of distinct paradigms have emerged, influenced in particular by changing

research agendas across these multiple disciplines and by demographic shifts and political

transformations. There is a bustling marketplace of ideas about race and racism but, as suggested

by the simplistic definition of race embedded in the 2021 standards, English education maintains

fidelity to a particular paradigm of race relations that grew out of Civil Rights era Brown v

Board of Education activism and the legalistic lens on the problem of the color line that drove

the successes of that era. The representations of race and racism in the standards suggest that the
 130

field of English Education has not engaged with paradigms about race relations that emerged

from other disciplines. If there has been consideration given to other theories of race and racism,

much of it has been excluded from the race-conscious curriculum of English teacher education.

In either event, due to its practical goals and application for the educational setting, race

theory in race-conscious English Education standards has, in Kittrell’s (2011) assessment, not

facilitated the type of “surgical” discourse necessary to explore race fully at a depth adequate

enough to understand both its causes and its effects. Kittrell is worth quoting at length here:

This is further complicated, if not hampered, by the fact that under-theorized suppositions

of difference sometimes act as necessary components to the various social and political

agendas pushed in some of the theory. There is an abundance of theory that speaks on

racial and ethnic identity within the hegemonic paradigm, but very little work on how

racial identities are dispensed, the ontological content and status that accompanies racial

designations, or how those constructed identities find their grounding, ontological

support, and reaffirmation in the classroom advertently or inadvertently by well-

intentioned teachers. This omission represents a “race gap” in education theory (Kittrell,

2011).

Chávez-Moreno (2022) similarly offers a critique of this “race gap” manifested in the

narrow construing of racial literacy as strictly antiracist. Maintaining this narrow view obscures

how making meaning of race can be done through hegemonic ideologies and, thus, stymies

useful analyses of the hegemonic ideologies that predominate in U.S. society and schools.

Chavez-Moreno (2022) presents a continuum of racial literacies to differentiate between

hegemonic and counterhegemonic racial literacies. 29 The continuum’s exposure of hegemonic

29
(Chavez-Moreno p.5) The continuum of racial literacies framework allows the analyst to conceive of all literate
practices as conveyors of racial literacies, whether from a race-evasive or an antiracist orientation, and it encourages
specificity by differentiating between racial literacies. This differentiation helps highlight racial ideas in literacy
 131

racial literacies encourages scholars to capture the hidden ideologies in literacy practices that

may not exhibit an explicit racial focus but nevertheless perpetuate racism.

Making “the Great Leap,” Confronting Racial Aporia

Clearly, the field of English education has struggled with the questions of how English

teachers should engage the complexities of race, whether in relation to their students, the

curriculum, the broader society, and, ultimately, to their own selves. We must now face the

terrifying future of moving beyond our current systems or, in Fanonian terms, of making the

“great leap.” To capture the fluid and dynamic entanglements of race in English education, we

must confront what I deem to be a cavern of racial aporia and distorted reason in which we find

ourselves enmeshed and which, once disentangled, will enable us to imagine together another

mode for the English Language Arts, one which will enable the fulfilment of race freedom and

Black consciousness.

Paulo Margutti (2012) highlights the contradictions in the shine and shadow of

Euromodernity:

But we know that Western civilization experienced an astonishing growth from the

Renaissance to our days and that, as a result, we live presently in a globalized world

which is deeply marked by Western science, technology, economy and culture. But we

also know very well that Western growth goes in tandem with Western colonialism, of

which the inheritance involves a great amount of suffering, humiliation, inequality, and

practices, even though the normalization of race-evasiveness may obscure the racial dynamics in a particular
practice. By positioning racial literacies in a continuum with distinctions between hegemonic and counterhegemonic
racial literacies an analyst can uncover nuances among various racial-literacy practices (e.g., multicultural vs.
antiracist). As a continuum suggests, the extremes are very distinct, but the adjacent racial literacies (e.g., racist vs.
anti-Black) may be similar to each other, thus the continuum explicitly opposes binary uses of racial literacy.
 132

exploitation, as far as non-Western peoples are concerned. This conflicting picture

requires an explanation and philosophy plays an important role in the task of giving an

adequate account of the differences among human beings (Mangutti, 2012).

On the one hand, Margutti notes, Euromodernity argues that it has resulted in significant

progress in Human lives through science, technology and culture. On the other hand, this

progress has depended upon enacting extreme levels of suffering and exploitation of non-

Western peoples.

I quote Margutti here to locate the emergence of racial aporia within the contradictions at

the heart of Euromodernity’s discovery of difference. I believe that understanding the notion of

racial aporia is a critical step for the field of English education to take to more adequately

address the issue of race.

The term aporia comes from the Greek. It captures the uncertainty that arises from

ontological questions, such as was the fruit named after the color or was the color named after

the fruit. In the case of race, the existential question is which came first, race or racism.

According to Plato and Socrates, aporia can prompt vigorous debate and lead to dialectical

reasoning. Both used this type of reasoning to start debates and to inspire deep dialectical

exercises. The key was to raise a doubt or to launch a rhetorical question. In that way, they could

spark a transition between the ambiguity of the world, life’s contradictions and the intricate

reasoning that does and does not have meaning all at the same time. Margutti’s (2012)

description, in the quote above, of the conflicting picture of modernity’s shine and shadow points

to the notion that the reality that surrounds us is full of insufferable aporias. For example, as a

condition of Euromodernity, many of us live in an incredibly individualistic globalized society.

We believe ourselves, as humans, to be freer now than at any other time in recorded history.
 133

However, at the same time, we are victims of a thousand conditions, of infinite mechanisms that

mold and standardize us, limiting our possibilities.

The notion of racial aporia helps us understand how we are all subjects of a racial order

of knowledge - a sociologically defined, politically motivated racialist ontology— and its

epistemo-ontological dimension, or “racial baggage” (Kromidas, 2016). I use the term “racial

aporia” to refer to the feelings of doubt, dissonance, ignorance and entrapment that human beings

experience as thinking, feeling beings living in a racialized society. Racial aporia attempts to

name a phenomenon that has heretofore not been defined, but which names a meaningful aspect

of our shared human experience – it is universal. Racial aporia is both an effect and a way to

move beyond our racial common sense that rests on faulty racial logics and distorted reason. I

appreciate how the term aporia is able to hold in it both literary and philosophical dimensions,

the mythos and the logos of distorted reason, and the way it conjures something, a state of being

at once affective, subjective, psychosomatic and temporary.

My own architecture of racial aporia is situated where my quest for home in race, my

loyalties to the race that claims me and my epistemic openness for alternative futures collide.

Morrison, too, struggled with her own racial aporia. In Home (1997) she mused:

Could I redecorate, redesign, even reconceive the racial house without forfeiting a home

of my own? Would life in this renovated house mean eternal homelessness? Would it

condemn me to intense bouts of nostalgia for the race-free home I have never had and

would never know? Or would it require intolerable circumspection, a self-censoring bond

to the locus of racial architecture? (page #)

I posit that a richer understanding of race that can get us beyond the shadows of

Euromodernity begins with understanding racial aporia. The pivot to anti-racism skips the step
 134

toward this understanding. In the years 2014 to 2021, the NCTE took a giant leap, landing on

anti-racist instruction. By embracing the anti-racist/racist binary, however, this leap short-

circuited all the work that still needs to be done to develop English teachers’ and English teacher

educators’ deep understanding of race. Such an understanding is critical before teachers can be

said to be prepared to engage in anti-racist instruction and anti-racist action.

Moving toward this deeper understanding involves, in part, viewing the racial

apprehensiveness, documented here and by Skerrett (2011), as an outward manifestation of racial

aporia. English educators and English teachers, at once, recognize the importance of engaging

issues of race and of being authorized to do so by the standards and the methods texts. At the

same time, they experience doubts and uncertainty about their ability to respond adequately to

issues of race when they are raised. As we’ve seen, they respond by deploying racial evasion and

obfuscation. What is required, then, by the field is to develop ways to notice these moments and

to utilize them to assist English teachers and educators to grapple with the subjective realities of

race that are ignored by the focus on sociological notions of discrimination and binaristic notions

of racism and anti-racism.

Recommendations for Future Research and Practice in English Education

Blah blah blah

I have aimed, in this dissertation, to offering a reading of the field of English education

and to provide a set of conceptual tools that will assist the field in grappling with these realities

to move toward a deeper understanding and praxis of race-consciousness.

 135

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