UC Santa Cruz

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.