This dissertation study explores how white, award-winning history teachers narrate the role of race, racism, whiteness, and antiracism in their identity formation, in their understandings of society, and in their teaching of history. Drawing from a nationwide sample and utilizing surveys and semi-structured interviews, this project explores teachers’ racial ideologies, antiracist pedagogies, and their navigation of their state and local contexts, especially those affected by anti- “CRT” legislation or policies. The dissertation provides an overview of teachers’ narrations of race and related concepts, homing in on places of consistency and discordances in ideological articulation. This analysis leads to a focus on certain teachers’ ‘ideologies in pieces’ (Philip, 2011), whose articulations of race and teaching commitments appear to conflict, contradict, or operate in tension, which tend to be spaces ripe for learning and transformation. The study follows with an overview of teachers’ navigations of anti- “CRT” movements, highlighting factors that contributed to their feelings of constraint and/or resolve, seeking to understand how these conceptualizations collide or coalesce with teachers’ contextual factors such as student demographic population, community type, school type, school politics and more. Finally, the study reports on teachers’ various acts of creative insubordination (Gutierrez, 2015), in service of teaching from critical and equity-oriented frameworks, highlighting the specific practice of history-specific disciplinary practices, whereby teachers drew upon disciplinary history and historical thinking practices to continue to teach critical history with fidelity to their mission despite external threats, legislative and otherwise. Most broadly this work seeks to understand the circulations of racial ideologies via history teaching.

Several visitors to the Alta California missions during the early years of the 19th century commented on their colorful interiors and “illuminated walls,” but most of these original wall paintings, produced c. 1810-1825 by Native artisans under the direction of Spanish priests or Mexican-trained artists, were whitewashed in the late 19th century. From 1936-1942, the Federal Art Project’s Index of American Design was involved in the study and restoration of several of these mural programs. Index artists visited the Southern California missions and produced hundreds of photographs, drawings and watercolors of the extant mural programs, as well as of designs they discovered under layers of plaster. In their aim of identifying a “usable past” the Index transformed these mural fragments from regional designs into national motifs. Through case studies of the wall paintings at Southern California missions visited and documented by the Index, I explain how this transformation was attempted through their processes of selection, appropriation, media translation, re-creation, restoration and national promotion. This dissertation, based on research conducted at selected missions, the Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library, the Archives of American Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., will answer the question of how the Index-created archive and federally-sponsored documentation and “restorations” have influenced our contemporary understandings of California mission design as well as the art historical and national value of the California missions themselves.

Experiences preservice teachers (PTs) have in their preparation programs can directly impact their use of effective and just pedagogy in the classroom (Darling-Hammond, 2000; Tolbert, 2015; Stoddart, Pinal, Latzke, and Canaday, 2002; Bravo, Mosqueda, Solis and Stoddart, 2014). However, researchers in the field of Education have struggled to make sense of the impact that teacher preparation programs have on teachers and their practice, particularly with respect to issues of diversity, equity, and justice in instructional theory and practice (Cochran-Smith et. al, 2015; Tolbert, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 1999; Waghorn and Stevens, 1996). This dissertation addresses the field’s need for new analytics that can be used to gauge the actual, in-the-moment impact that equity-oriented teacher preparation activities have on preservice teachers’ orientations with respect to students and equitable science instructional practices. This study employs a longitudinal case study design and Critical Cultural Discourse Analysis to investigate in depth how hegemonic power is enacted, resisted, challenged, and transformed in an equity-oriented science teacher preparation program (Creswell, 2014; Moje and Lewis, 2007; Gee, 2015; Fairclough, 1992). The analysis is guided by a critical sociocultural framework. My purpose was to add to our growing understanding of how systemic, structural, historical, and ongoing harm is sustained in and through equity-oriented science teacher preparation. Findings from this study reveal some of the ways in which hegemonic power acts in and through science teacher preparation. Through my analysis of two classroom discussions, I highlight Discourses of power that were enacted in/through the activity system. The first discussion, presented as Vignette I, concerned learning theories and their applications in science classrooms, and my analysis highlights the competing ideological and ontoepistemic assumptions embedded in the learning theories and Discourses. The second discussion, presented as Vignette II, centered on two preservice science teachers’ reading of two articles on equitable science instruction. The PSTs’differing disciplinary discourse enactments engender a subtle tension, and the disciplinary literacy practices of western natural sciences enacted by one PST become an obstacle to sensemaking for the small group involved. My hope is that through building understanding of these issues, this study may generate new possibilities for reparation, care, and more just ways of being and learning in and beyond secondary science classrooms.