Teacher Racial Noticing Amid Contemporary U.S. Racial Injustices and COVID-19
By Justin A. Coles and Niral Shah
Since the publication of our article, Preparing Teachers to Notice Race in Classrooms: Contextualizing the Competencies of Preservice Teachers With Antiracist Inclinations, we have witnessed the structural and ideological dangers that occur when the capacity to notice and acknowledge the racialized experiences of minoritized populations is overlooked. In the United States, we have seen Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people dying from COVID-19 at disproportionately higher rates than white people. In the midst of this global pandemic, we have also witnessed possibly the largest movement in U.S. history against police brutality, especially against Black people, catalyzed by the death of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and many others murdered at the hands of law enforcement.
What all of this shows is that racialized groups in the U.S. experience the benefits of privilege and the ills of disenfranchisement in dramatically different ways. We acknowledge insights from critical race theory that assert racism as an endemic and permanent feature of the U.S. nation-state (Delgado, 1995), as well as Beverly Tatum’s (1997) description of racist messages and images claiming white superiority and the inferiority of people of color as smog that saturates our culture. However, as people who breathe in the smog daily, we all struggle to see racism in our everyday lives. This includes what happens in schools and classrooms.
In this article we asked: what forms of racism do teachers need to recognize in the daily work of teaching, and how as teacher educators can we support them in recognizing racism and attenuating its impact on students? We believe that anti-racism in education becomes possible when racism and anti-racism are made concrete. This is especially important because modern forms of racism can be subtle and implicit. To support that effort, we developed a tool for teachers and teacher educators called the racial noticing framework. “Racial noticing” involves three processes: 1) teachers identifying an instance of racism (e.g., racist talk between students; anti-Black curriculum); 2) making sense of the racial harm that was caused and to which racialized groups; and 3) responding through their teaching in anti-racist ways. Our framework builds on previous work in teacher education aimed at helping teachers recognize the complexities and value of student thinking (Sherin, Jacobs, & Philipp, 2011).
By working with elementary pre-service teachers on racial noticing in a teaching methods course, we have learned two things. First, new teachers can learn the skills of racial noticing. In the article we follow three pre-service teachers—two white and one Black—and show how they learned to identify, make sense of, and respond to racism in the classroom context. They were also able to see forms of racism even when they were subtle and implicit. For example, during her field placement, Denise observed that her mentor teacher publicly posted students’ scores on a speed-based math activity and that most of the top scorers were white. Denise saw this as an instance of possible racism because students might interpret this as signaling false and racist narratives about who can and can’t be good at math.
A second thing we learned, though, is that what pre-service teachers show they can do in a teacher education program doesn’t always translate when they start working as lead teachers in real classrooms. Despite showing relatively strong racial noticing skills during the methods course, all three of the pre-service teachers showed much less evidence of strong racial noticing as student teachers. One key difference was that even after months as student teachers, they all struggled to even identify instances of racism—something they did readily in the methods course. When we analyzed why this might be happening, we realized that context matters. For example, both white pre-service teachers were teaching at racially diverse schools that they said “celebrated” cultural difference. We believe that this may have led them to minimize (and not see) how racism might still have been playing out in their racially diverse classrooms. In the article, we discuss how teacher educators can use these findings to shape their efforts to prepare anti-racist teachers.
As the field continues to take up the work of anti-racist teacher education in meaningful ways, we offer racial noticing as one way forward. Racial noticing should be understood as a commitment to understanding how race and racism structure the daily realities of U.S. social and educational life, whether readily visible or obscured. As gathered from our study, there may be moments where we become complicit in our realities in ways that cause us to lose sight of or misrecognize racial injustices, particularly as they become commonplace. As society continues to struggle through a legacy of racial injustices and a global pandemic, we urge teacher educators to orient teachers toward anti-racist pedagogies and ways of being that attune them to all potential modalities and educational contexts in which racism may operationalize.
Article Details
Preparing Teachers to Notice Race in Classrooms: Contextualizing the Competencies of Preservice Teachers With Antiracist Inclinations
Niral Shah, Justin A. Coles
First Published January 2020 Research Article
DOI: 10.1177/0022487119900204
Journal of Teacher Education
About the Authors
