Dr. Bree Picower Wrote Piece on What It Takes to Build an Anti-Racist Classroom for Literary Hub
Posted in: College News and Events
Dr. Bree Picower, Associate Professor in the Teaching and Learning Department, recently wrote “What It Takes to Build an Anti-Racist Classroom: Disrupting the Power of Whiteness in Education” for Literary Hub.
She notes, “Disrupting Whiteness in teacher education requires an explicit, shared commitment among all stakeholders to center race and address racism. By Whiteness, I am not referring to white people per se—I am talking about ways of wielding power and privilege that maintain white supremacy. In teacher education, it can show up from faculty who are opposed to addressing race, mentor teachers in the field who actively enact racism, or administrators who create institutional barriers to advancing racial justice. When Whiteness arises from students in class, it might be in the form of discrediting the existence of racism or asking why they have to keep talking about race. It might be a defensive denial of white people’s culpability in a system of racism, or it might be a direct challenge to experiences of racism named by students of color in class.
As a way to disrupt Whiteness and advance racial justice in teacher education, justice-oriented administrators and faculty at some universities have found ways to create smaller, mission-driven programs that I refer to as racial justice programs (RJPs). Through external grants, pilot programs, smaller initiatives, or changes in leadership, RJPs tend to operate slightly autonomously from their more traditional teacher education programs. Instead of ignoring race, relegating it to one course, treating it as an afterthought, or giving it one week on a syllabus, these RJPs are spaces that advance racial justice by centering race, disrupting Whiteness, reframing preservice teachers’ understandings of race, and preparing and sustaining candidates for anti-racist action.”
Dr. Bree Picower is an Associate Professor at Montclair State University in the College of Education and Human Development. She was awarded the Scholar Activist of 2013 by the Critical Educators for Social Justice SIG of the American Educational Research Association. Her latest co-edited book Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Counternarratives of Critical Practice examines patterns of institutional racism by amplifying the voices of non-dominant teacher educators. Her previous book, a co-edited collection of essays called What’s Race Got To Do With It? How current school reform maintains racial and economic inequality is available from Peter Lang Publishers. She is also the author of Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets explores a developmental continuum toward teacher activism. She has taught in public elementary schools in Oakland, California and New York City.